In My Father's Den Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  IN MY FATHER’S DEN

  Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s best-known writers, for both adults and children. He has won a number of literary awards, including the Wattie Award, the Montana Award, and the New Zealand Fiction Award. He has also won the New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year Award, the New Zealand Icon Award and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.

  Maurice Gee’s novels include the three books in the Plumb trilogy, Going West, Prowlers, Live Bodies, and Blindsight. He has also written a number of bestselling children’s novels, the most recent being Salt and Gool.

  Maurice lives in Nelson with his wife Margareta, and has a son and two daughters.

  ALSO BY MAURICE GEE

  NOVELS

  The Big Season

  A Special Flower

  Games of Choice

  Plumb

  Meg

  Sole Survivor

  Prowlers

  The Burning Boy

  Going West

  Crime Story

  Loving Ways

  Live Bodies

  Ellie and the Shadow Man

  The Scornful Moon

  Blindsight

  STORIES

  A Glorious Morning, Comrade

  Collected Stories

  FOR CHILDREN

  Under the Mountain

  The World Around the Corner

  The Halfmen of O

  The Priests of Ferris

  Motherstone

  The Fireraiser

  The Champion

  Orchard Street

  The Fat Man

  Hostel Girl

  Salt

  Gool

  IN MY FATHER’S DEN

  Maurice Gee

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For Margaretha

  Contents

  Prologue

  1928–1937

  May 12, 1969

  1938–1945

  May 13–16, 1969

  1945–1949

  1949–1967

  1968–1969

  May 16, 1969

  May 17, 1969

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Auckland Express, May 13, 1969

  WADESVILLE GIRL STRANGLED

  Children’s Grim Discovery

  The strangled body of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl was found hidden in a patch of scrub at Wadesville’s Cascade Park late yesterday afternoon. The discovery was made by three young boys who were returning home from a Boys Brigade meeting. Police investigations began immediately.

  The girl was identified as Celia Joan Inverarity, a pupil of Wadesville College. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. C. B. Inverarity, live at 24 White Horse Road, Wadesville. They are well known in local business circles.

  In charge of inquiries is Detective Inspector P. G. Farnon of Auckland C.I.B. Late last night he told our reporter that no clue to the identity of the murderer had been discovered. Police and dogs have been called in from Auckland and Hamilton and this morning a massive search will be conducted in the Cascade Park area. During the night inquiries were made among the residents of houses overlooking the park. Inspector Farnon is seeking information about the dead girl’s movements in the period before 5 p.m. yesterday afternoon. He is also anxious to interview the driver of a blue or green Morris or Austin Mini seen in the vicinity of Cascade Park during the afternoon.

  Celia was last seen alive by Mr. P. E. Prior, a master at Wadesville College. According to Mr. Prior she called on him at 3 p.m. at his home in Farm Road about a mile and a half from Cascade Park in order to return some books he had lent her. She left Mr. Prior’s home at 4.15 p.m. and was not seen again until 5.15 when three nine-year-old boys discovered her body pushed into scrub at the edge of a clearing about fifty yards from the main track to the tidal pool at Cascade Park.

  Inspector Farnon believes that Celia was probably knocked unconscious before she was strangled. Her face and body were heavily bruised. No further information about the nature of the attack is likely until a pathologist’s report has been made. However, it appears that the murderer made a hasty attempt to hide the body. It was lying face up with its limbs neatly arranged. Several small trees had been bent forward to conceal it. But for the chance of the boys using the path it might have remained undiscovered for days or even weeks.

  STRANGLED GIRL WAS BRILLIANT SCHOLAR

  Teachers at Wadesville College where murder victim Celia Inverarity was a pupil agree that the dead girl was the most promising scholar to attend the school in its seventeen year history. In 1967 Celia gained her School Certificate with the third highest marks of any pupil in the Auckland area. Last year she was accredited with her University Entrance examination and this year would have been a candidate for a University Scholarship.

  Interviewed last night the headmaster of the college, Mr. E. Price, said Celia was a quiet unassuming girl with a ready sense of humour. Although she took little part in sport she belonged to several clubs in the school and had a lively interest in botany and music. There could be no doubt she had had a brilliant scholastic future.

  Mr. Paul Prior, the dead girl’s English teacher, said he had been asked by the police not to discuss his interview with Celia yesterday afternoon. She had called on him to return books he had lent her. He expressed shock and horror at the manner of Celia’s death and agreed that she had been a brilliant scholar. Asked to name the books the girl had returned to him Mr. Prior declined to name the titles. They were connected with her English course, he said.

  Neighbours of the Inverarity family were last night stunned and horrified at the news of Celia’s murder. “She was a lovely girl, a lady,” said one.

  Another neighbour, who asked that his name be withheld, expressed anger that the Wadesville Borough Council had not cleared the area of scrub where Celia’s body was found. “It’s a menace to the community,” he said, “and something should be done about it.” In 1962 a young woman was criminally assaulted there by an attacker who was never identified. In 1966 it was the scene of a gang rape that resulted in five young men being sent to prison. And as recently as Christmas 1968 the clearing where Celia was apparently murdered became the headquarters of an Auckland motor-cycle gang that terrorized Wadesville for three days. “Now perhaps something will be done,” said the neighbour, “but a girl’s life is a high price to pay.”

  Last night as news of the crime became known a mood of grief and anger spread through the normally quiet little suburb of Wadesville. Groups of residents met in streets and in private homes. There was talk of forming a vigilante committee. Celia was one of their own. Her death is mourned, and if the people of Wadesville have any say in the matter it will not go unavenged.

  1928–1937

  I was born at the end of a gay decade in a small town called Wadesville, later to be a “quiet” suburb of Auckland. My father was fifty-three when I was born. He worked the apple and pear orchard he had planted after the First War. Father was a failed lawyer, a Presbyterian for the sake of household peace, a leaner towards free thought. (At his funeral a Unitarian friend of his described him to me as a Rationalist manqué and, less accurately, a scholar-hermit.) His years of manhood were a struggle for privacy—no less desperate for being secret—first from his housekeeper sister Jane, then from my mother. Mother was a plain, prim, thoughtful woman whose Sunday acquaintance with Jane had ripened, on her part at least, into friendship. She grieved for sour Jane when she died (“a wasting disease”) and imagined Father helpless and lonely. They were married in 1927. In the wedding photograph my father looks sheepish and my mother determined. I was born in 1928, when she was nearly forty.

  I was christened Paul Emerson Prior. Emerson was mother’s maiden name, which Father was pleased to
have me bear for a reason he thought it wise not to mention to her. It gave me the initials P.E.P. and doomed me as a teacher to the nickname Pepsi.

  Mother I have said was plain. This is hindsight. I found her beautiful. She had a broad face that seemed to owe little to her Scottish ancestry. The bone structure has been made familiar by the Dalmatians who brought vineyards to the Wadesville valley early in the century. One of my brother Andrew’s jokes, a fond joke, was to call her Mrs. Priorich. Her hair was brown and wavy and no amount of tying could make it severe. Half a dozen times a day she would pull it back from her face and ears in a way that to me seemed cruel, murmuring angrily all the time, and knot it tightly on her neck, but somehow it always escaped again. I believe she was secretly proud of it. It was only after John’s birth that she cut it short.

  My mother’s vice was spirituality. Father used to say to us boys that she had a great soul. (His was the last generation that could make statements of that sort without irony.) My mother did not agree with his estimate. She knew her soul was of the common grey. Her life was a struggle to scrub it clean. One of the dim understandings of my childhood was that mother was less kind than good. It seems to me now that her struggle to improve her soul spoiled her kindness.

  Her Presbyterianism was grim and fundamental. My religious education caused me little but confusion. I did not have Andrew’s literal mind. Our moral training though had something of the quality of poetry. Mother put everything to use: insects, birds, plants, people, weather. At three or four, in neat grey home-sewn trousers, I knelt on a wet lawn after a thunderstorm watching a thin pink worm brought up by the rain, wondering whether he was Right or Wrong. And was the fly in the web being punished? What had the spider done to deserve him? What was the busy ant’s reward? And the tree’s on the bank for hanging on so tightly? If I owe my figurative habit of mind to this training I also owe a kind of moral hesitation—compounded now in my middle age by simple laziness. I yawn and turn away. If I am moved to seek an excuse for myself I find it easily enough (lazily) in Mother’s none too gentle bullying. “There is only one right way. One way. Paul,” she would say to Andrew, “has a lazy soul. We must help him make it work. God only loves souls that work.”

  One day I found threepence and brought it home to show my parents. After asking me where I had found it my father told me I could put it in my money-box. But Mother had already slipped into what I later came to call High Gear. Her shoulder blades were sharpened as she stood at the stove, her neck was stiff, and her ears had turned a girlish pink. She faced me, without movement of her feet it seemed, as though a disk had rotated in the floor, and my hand with the threepence on it was drawn by a force like magnetism up to the level of her eyes.

  “Did you try to find the owner, Paul?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then it could belong to anyone in the street?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think you should do?”

  She often questioned us like this—a kind of testing of the moral circuits. Her disappointment when we were grossly wrong threw a greyness over the house that lasted till bedtime prayers, when all would be explained.

  I thought desperately. “Put it in the plate next Sunday?” This was surely right, but I spoke with bitterness. I had never had threepence before.

  “No,” she said gently.

  “Take it round the houses,” my brother Andrew said. Although he was only five he had a skill in understanding her that seemed to me the result of cheating—I could not see how he did it.

  “That’s right Andrew,” my mother said. “Paul must take it round the houses until he finds the owner.”

  I went out. I took the threepence round the houses. But I knocked on only one door. The man said, “Threepence? Put it in your money-box, Paul.” I looked at several other doors and could not make myself knock on them. My six-year-old mind had grasped that the business was ridiculous. So I dropped the threepence in a gutter and ran home fast to tell my mother I had dropped it in a gutter. She was angry but not suspicious. I bent my mind so strenuously to belief in that partial truth that I uttered it as a whole truth. Later I suffered from guilt. Every day I looked at the threepence lying in the gutter. Beside it was an empty cigarette packet with a cloaked top-hatted man on it whom I took for a wicked angel sent to gloat over me. The coin stared up like an eye that never blinked—a magic eye, invisible to everyone but me. I suffered dreadfully and I prayed to God to make it go away. It stayed in the gutter until Sunday. Then a shower of rain washed it away. God had taken pity on me. I was delighted with Him and in a matter of seconds forgave my mother.

  After this I began to enjoy guilt the way one can enjoy a toothache. I began to steal; then added cruelty to my sins. The orgy of pleasure and remorse I enjoyed one afternoon after school remains unequalled in my life for depth of emotion. I had stolen a packet of five dozen pink and blue cake papers from the grocery store. (I had taken them for Mother of course, but would never give them to her. It was a kind of spiritual gift.) I carried them in my shirt to the first of the three small waterfalls from which Cascade Park takes its name. There I launched them one by one and sailed them over the fall. A sort of continuous creation took place —I began to think of doomed sailors. So through the afternoon I launched them: pink and blue ships manned by spiders, caterpillars, beetles and small ti-tree jacks. All bound for a watery grave. My pleasure was intense. I imagined insect shrieks, families bereaved; I held down punishing monsters, black and toothed, that tried to crawl from the water. That night I confessed—I had not doubted I would confess. Mother, stern and loving, wiped the tears from my face with her handkerchief and spoke of the smudge that must be washed from my soul. “Smudge” seemed inadequate to my sin. I continued to weep and concealed my disappointment. It was the only time her teaching failed through gentleness.

  At other times she bore down so heavily upon me that I hated her. Once I transferred my love to my teacher. Miss Weaver had blonde fluffy hair and a face that hid all its bones. The older pupils said she looked like Claudette Colbert. Miss Weaver played favourites. She was, I realize now, a very bad teacher. Her favourites queued up at the end of each day to kiss her plump powdered cheek. My mother had burned my comic books. To underline my hatred of her I joined Miss Weaver’s queue. Mother smelled of carbolic soap. Miss Weaver smelled of a perfume that made me think of angels. I licked my lips, tasted her powder, and fell in love with her.

  The next morning before school someone sneaked into the classroom and bit Miss Weaver’s shiny red apple. Was it me? To this day I don’t know. It might have been. Perhaps I meant to express my love in this way. She took it as a kind of rape. The bite was crooked. Miss Weaver inspected teeth. My teeth were crooked. In tears I swore that I had not bitten her apple. I had hundreds at home, I said, thousands. I had my own apple in my bag. But Miss Weaver needed revenge. She held my mouth open for the class to see. See? Crooked teeth. Who else in the class had crooked teeth? Paul Prior must be taught not to tell lies. He must be taught not to bite other people’s property. Miss Weaver strapped me. Then she took from her purse a tiny pearl-handled knife and publicly cut the crooked bite off the apple. She dropped it in the rubbish tin. The class hissed softly with pleasure. My tears stopped and my love was replaced by a deep implacable hatred. That night I could not eat my tea. Mother thought I was sick. She was kind to me but I was in an unforgiving mood. It was Father I told the story to, leaving out only the love bits.

  The next day Mother came to the school. I saw her walk across the playground—Sunday hat, gloves, shiny purse—and I became an ostrich. I buried my head in my exercise book and tried to blot out the world. Darkness. The sound of Mother’s knuckles rapping the door fell like the strokes of a cane. Miss Weaver strode across the room with her blackboard pointer couched on her arm like a lance. If she had run Mother through I would not have minded.

  “I don’t think you understand our problems, Mrs. Prior.”

  Mother replied, “I t
hink I do, Miss Weaver. I taught at this school for sixteen years.”

  I had heard about angry fathers punching teachers on the jaw. It came to me suddenly that Mother was punching Miss Weaver on the jaw—in a kindly way, a Christian way. “I wonder if you’ve forgotten that in British countries a person is innocent until he’s proven guilty.”

  Miss Weaver who had been so pretty became fat and ugly. “But the teeth marks were crooked,” she managed to say.

  “Surely that’s circumstantial. There must be other children in the school with crooked teeth.”

  My mother did not ask Miss Weaver to say she was sorry. But Miss Weaver said it, facing me, reciting the words like a lesson. “I’m sorry Paul Prior. Perhaps I was a little bit hasty.” Mother said, “Thank you,” and went away. She had not looked at me once.

  “That was my Mum,” I said to the boy behind me.

  Miss Weaver trembled for the rest of the lesson. I felt sorry for her but did not rejoin the kissing queue. I loved my mother again.

  Father was of a coarser grain. He was more intelligent than Mother. The rules of conduct that governed her life were moral though she believed them religious. My father’s conduct was tried less against a puritan conscience, though he too suffered from this, than a heretical belief, kept secret from his wife, that man is perfectable. He was unlucky to be born a Presbyterian. His mind was eclectic by nature and was crippled by a closed system. When he broke free late in his life he was able to travel no further than across town to the Unitarians. Nevertheless, for a man with his beginnings it was a brave journey.

  It was not my father’s spiritual backslidings that upset Mother. She did not learn how serious they were until her last years. His physical grossness was her greatest trial. She did not wish to know about ugly things and had developed turning away to a mode of conduct. But she could not turn away from my father. There was dirt ingrained in his hands. His shirts stank from sweaty days in the orchard. Hair sprouted from his nose and ears. While he sat in his chair waiting for dinner his stomach rumbled like a railway bridge. And his bathroom hawking and spitting—Mother had a way of turning the radio up to full volume even when all she could get was jazz. There was a kind of desperation in the way she would say to Andrew and me, “Your father is a good man.” It was not enough. When she caught me hiding in the hedge by the dunny where he was trumpeting away like a Salvation Army band she slapped my face. She pressed her hands over my ears and rushed me down the path to the safety of her kitchen. I was crying in a corner when my father came in a few minutes later.