In My Father's Den Read online

  “Hallo Paul, have you been in the wars?” He came to stroke my hair.

  “Henry, wash your hands,” my mother said.

  He patted me and went to the bathroom, and the top of my head where his hand had touched began to itch like a boil. My mother said, “Remember Paul, your father is a good man.”

  They were united in public; an ideal if old-fashioned couple. At home they were friendly. My father loved my mother though he seemed to have few ways of showing it. But the demon of godliness would not let her rest. She tried to keep her torment from us but always it broke out, destroying Father’s peace and my enjoyments. “Edith,” he would say, “your God has become a consuming fire.” She moved towards stricter observances as he moved away. The prayers and kitchen parables and readings from the Bible that had always been a part of our lives became more and more of a trial to him. His mind was ranging widely, in a cautious way. Several times he tried to draw Mother with him but she withdrew from the edge of his discovered countries as though from a red light district. Once he came to her in the kitchen and said, “Have you seen my book, Edith?” Without a word she pointed to the stove. My father’s face went lumpy. He fought with himself for a moment while Mother watched, righteous and cold. Then he smiled and said, “A consuming fire,” and left the room. He told me years later it was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass she had burned.

  I remember a happy afternoon. Our parents had taken us to play on the swings at Cascade Park. We ate sandwiches off a red-and-white cloth and drank orangeade. Father swung Andrew and me until our bodies lay flat on the air but Mother did no more than call to him to be careful. Danger to our limbs worried her less than danger to our souls. We ran into the bush and crept back like Indians. “Walla, walla, walla. Heap white squaw.”

  “Go away boys. You’re tangling my hair.”

  We ran off towards the other end of the park. And this was the freedom I had been working towards. Buses had drawn up there, an organized picnic was under way. It was a tricky business not to alert Mother but my cunning held and from less than fifty yards away we watched the tug-of-war and the nail-driving competition. A man (was he fat and jolly?) called out to us, “Come on you two. You can join in.” He threw great handfuls of lollies into the air, where they hung for a moment like stars.

  Andrew said, “We’d better not.” A lolly fell at his feet.

  “That one’s yours,” I said.

  We scrambled politely, with success. I had won four lollies, Andrew two, before we heard our mother calling us. Sucking hard, we went back to the red-and-white cloth.

  “What are you eating?” she said.

  “Lollies.”

  “We won them in the lolly scramble.”

  “They said we could.”

  “Just this once, Edith,” my father smiled.

  “I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem right….”

  “We saw the tug-of-war,” I cunningly said.

  My father came to my help. “Whose picnic is it, Paul?”

  I had read the name on a banner. Proud of the word, I said, “The Rationalists.”

  “Spit them out.” Her hands were squeezing our cheeks. “Spit them out.”

  “Edith,” my father said, “there can be no harm in the lollies.”

  “Spit them out.”

  We spat them out. She uncurled our fingers and marched the length of Cascade Park and flung our lollies into the pack of still-scrambling Rationalist children.

  “Pack up, boys,” my father said.

  Crying, I asked, “What are Rationalists, Dad?”

  “People who don’t believe in God.”

  I was impressed. I stopped crying. “What do they believe in?”

  “Lolly scrambles,” he sighed.

  “No really, Dad?”

  He had a nervous eye on Mother, marching back towards us. “Thinking about things. Making up their own minds. Some people call them free-thinkers.”

  “Do they think about God?”

  “Yes. But they don’t believe in Him. Help me with this table-cloth, Paul.”

  God must be biding His time, I thought. Or else it was all going on behind His back. But one day He’d turn round and see. Then they’d better look out. I was nervous until we were safely out of Cascade Park. But after that there was a little eddy of admiration in my mind when I thought of the Rationalists. The risk they were taking excited me.

  It was in the next spring that my father came up from the orchard, smiling mysteriously, and said, “Come with me, boys.” We followed him through the apple and pear trees to the fence that separated our property from the wild Catholic Flynns. There in a paddock the Flynns’ cow Maggie was giving birth to a calf. (The Flynns were poor and dirty. During the depression Father had kept them supplied with bags of fruit. My mother approved but made sure our commerce with them went no further. Their dirt and “popery” were too much for her. The Flynn girls wore no shoes and, I think, no pants. Andrew and I believed they had fleas. Mr. Flynn drank. We had seen him fall off his bike. And in their house, or tumble-down shack, I had seen on my one apple-delivering visit a statue of Jesus with real thorns and drops of blood on His forehead. My mother went pale when I told her and said the Flynns were superstitious peasants.)

  Now we stared at their cow giving birth. She was in a small hollow near the orchard fence. We stood on one side and three Flynn girls on the other. I remember being more interested in them at first than in the cow which was standing still doing nothing. It was a cold day and they stood in their washed-out dresses, without shoes or jerseys (or pants), wiping their wet noses on their arms and staring impassively at Maggie. One of them had her feet in a cow pat.

  “Look at her, Dad,” I said.

  He thought I meant the cow. “Watch. It’s one of God’s miracles.”

  I thought it was a long time coming. Maggie heaved but nothing happened. After a while she began to bellow. She went down on her knees and rolled on her side. Father saw something was wrong but he did not know what to do.

  “It’s one of God’s miracles,” he said again.

  The cow’s bellowing suddenly rose and quickened. It seemed like a sound that might come from a machine. The oldest Flynn girl started to run across the paddock. As she disappeared my mother arrived.

  Her face was terrible. “Are you mad, Henry? Have you gone out of your mind?” she cried.

  “It’s the miracle of birth,” he said. There was a lameness in his voice. He had not expected complications.

  “Come with me Andrew. Paul,” my mother said. She tried to pull us away from Father. We were only half aware of this. Maggie’s tail was pointed towards us and something began to appear.

  “Look,” Andrew shrieked. He hid his face in my mother’s dress. She pulled him towards the orchard. “Paul,” she cried. Father had gripped my arm.

  “I think he’s old enough, Edith.”

  “Paul.” My mother’s voice seemed to call me from some terrible danger and I would have followed her, but Father’s hand had gone right round my arm and he said, “I want him to see.”

  Mother took Andrew away. In a few minutes the Flynn girl and her mother ran out of their house and across the paddock. The girl fell behind—she was carrying a bucket and a bar of soap. Mrs. Flynn took one look at Maggie and said to Father, “Are you useless, man?” She pushed up the sleeves of her jersey, ran to meet the girl, wet the bar of soap in the bucket and rubbed it on her arms. Then she came back to Maggie. She went down on her knees and pushed back into the cow whatever part of the calf it was that had been coming out. She wormed her arm deep into the cow’s uterus. The calf’s head came out then and the rest of it followed slowly. Mrs. Flynn pulled hideous faces. Once she made a cry of pain and changed her arm. The one she drew out was streaked with red. Then, as she kept on working, blood ran down her arm and dripped off her elbow. Suddenly it started to gush, as though from a tap. It splashed across the front of her dress and spread over the grass about her knees. “Lord save us,” she cried. />
  Father told me Maggie had had a haemorrhage. There was nothing we could do—she would bleed to death. I watched her blood smoking lightly in the air, slipping like oil off the calf and seeping into the ground.

  “Will the calf live, Dad?”

  “It looks a bit crushed to me.”

  Mrs. Flynn picked it up and walked across the paddock to her house. One of her daughters started to cry. A moment later the mother came back, her wet dress clinging to her knees. She emptied the bucket of water and knelt by Maggie to see if she could get some milk for the calf. “What are we going to do now?” she said to my father.

  We went up slowly through the orchard. The apple and pear blossoms were out and the air was heavy with the sound of bees.

  “Did God make a mistake?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “But you said it was one of His miracles. And the cow died.”

  “I don’t know, Paul. I think He only looks after the big things and the little things look after themselves.”

  “But what about the sparrows, and the hairs of our head?”

  He changed the subject. He told me the Flynn girl had put her feet in the cow pat to keep them warm. This was interesting enough to take my mind off theology. I agreed that we should be kind to the Flynns. Every night after that my father or I met the oldest girl at the back fence and gave her a billy of milk from our own cow. The calf had died, Mary Flynn said. Her mother was making a mat from its skin. They had eaten the meat because it was “extra tender”.

  Very quickly it seems I became my father’s child. Andrew remained my mother’s. When I was nine years old my brother John was born. He was a mongoloid idiot. Mother brought him home from the hospital and put him down to sleep in the bassinet that had been first mine, then Andrew’s. While my father watched she cut off her hair.

  May 12, 1969

  I watched Celia walk away down Farm Road. Her sandals made a clacking sound on the tar-seal. To please her parents she had worn a dress suitable for Sunday walking—a grey Quakerish thing with long sleeves and a buttoned collar. Her hair fell down her back to the level of her shoulder-blades. It was brown and straight and newly washed. There had been a faint piney smell about her that was neither perfume nor soap. I thought of the struggles she had had with poor Miss Selwyn. Unbecoming: Silly’s favourite word. She was always at Celia to cut her hair, tie it, torture it somehow. Becoming was the word I thought of as I watched her walk down the road. Sunlight slanted across the valley and shone on the calves of her legs. Her gleaming hair was like a Crusader’s hauberk of chain mail.

  At the corner she turned and waved. She went into the scurfy patch of ti-tree and stunted pine the road winds through before it climbs the hill towards the Great North Road.

  She had kissed me lightly on the cheek. I thought with a grave fondness that the danger she was so careless of was mine rather than hers; reminding myself that she was a child, not a woman. I went inside. In my den the shivery grass she had brought me stood in a vase on one of the bookshelves. She was not a flowery girl and liked to pick things at the roadside or in the bush. She had also brought a handful of prickly dull-green leaves—a herb, she thought. We had spent part of her visit trying to identify them in a botanical encyclopaedia. I sat down and picked up my book. I was reading The First Circle and as I read of the sufferings of Nerzhin and Rubin I nibbled the leaves. They had a faintly eucalyptic taste. I could not believe they were poisonous: about plants I had never known Celia wrong.

  I was still reading at half-past six when Jim Beavis telephoned me. “Paul? Have you heard the news about Celia Inverarity?” Jim Beavis teaches science at Wadesville College. I thought at once of triumphs for Celia: scholarships, prizes—at least some brilliant paper she had turned in.

  “She’s been murdered. Strangled. They found her body at Cascade Park. It’s a madhouse down there, boy. The place is swarming with police.”

  I don’t remember what I did. There was a moment of primitive consciousness: I floated in my murky room like some creature in the sea, aware only of a chair and a book in a globe of light from the reading lamp.

  I said, “Who did it?”

  “They don’t know. They haven’t caught anyone yet. Some kids saw a car by the scrub. That’s where they found her, in the scrub that motor-bike gang used at Christmas.”

  “Whose car?”

  “Whoever strangled her, I suppose. The police will find out, no doubt about that. You should see the organization they’ve got down there. Fantastic.”

  “She was strangled?”

  “That’s what they think. Knocked around pretty badly too. You know, punched and kicked. He must have been a maniac, eh? A real bloody monster—pervert.”

  “Was she raped?”

  “Don’t know. It’s my guess she was. What else would anyone do it for?” He laughed; a high squeaking sound. I saw how excited he was and I put down the phone. But at once I grabbed it again. “Jim, Jim.” I wanted to ask were they sure, were they absolutely sure it was her. The connection had been broken. I put the phone back again and went to my chair.

  I was still holding some leaves of the herb Celia had brought me. I emptied them on my open book. Two or three had stuck to my palm and I brushed them off with the tips of my fingers. I put the book on the coffee table and sat in my chair. These were deliberate acts. Then there was nothing left to do. My mind went wild with fictions: it was not Celia, some other girl; she fought her attacker off, ran through the scrub…. But my body knew the truth. I sweated. The sweat had a goatish smell it had never had before.

  When I heard a car draw up outside the house I ran to the lavatory. In the tiny room, with the white pan and black seat, I managed to exclude the world. I crouched down and pressed the palms of my hands on the ice-cold porcelain. I tried to take the coldness into my mind as the fact of Celia’s death. Isolation was a state I had made natural to myself, and the private shaping of emotions was, I had believed, my special skill; but now, like Volodin in his cell, I found an official eye looking in: my own. I saw myself posturing, and I stood up, making an exclamation of anger. Self-disgust I had long since given up, but I felt a kind of rage at my trickiness. Celia was dead!

  Footsteps sounded on the veranda and a thick unhurried knocking on the door.

  “Hang on,” I called.

  I washed my hands in the bathroom and found myself wondering at the act. It seemed impossible that everything was not now standing still. How could we go on? I go on? I wanted to shout these questions down the hall to whoever it was standing on the porch.

  The knocking came a second time. I called that I was coming. My voice had a shrill tone of complaint. I went down the hall and opened the door.

  “Mr. Prior?” said the man on the veranda.

  “Yes.” He was tall, narrow-faced, with a nose like a parrot’s beak and a mouth childishly pursed. His eyes were sharp and watery, like those of an old lady peering at fancy work.

  “I’m Farnon. Detective-Inspector.” He inclined his head at the man standing beside him. “This is Detective-Constable Glover.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re inquiring into the death of one of the pupils at your school.”

  “Celia Inverarity,” I said.

  “Ah, you know.”

  “I had a telephone call.”

  I showed them into the den and told them to sit down. Farnon’s body behaves like Jacques Tati’s, but there was something frightening in clumsiness at this moment, something too human. He made no move towards a chair. Glover stood in a head-boy way at his side.

  “Do you usually have it this dark?”

  I turned on the light and turned off the reading lamp. They watched me closely. “You don’t think I did it?” I said.

  “We have to make inquiries, Mr. Prior. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course.”

  “Would you tell me who rang you?”

  “Jim Beavis. He teaches at the school.”

/>   Glover had a flip-pad out. He started to write and at this I thought wildly, Christ, Jim Beavis did it. I was overcome by a hatred that must have shown on my face. Farnon said, “What is it?”

  “I was wondering how he knew. But of course, he lives by Cascade Park.” The name was a trigger (it still is). “How did it happen? How did she get there?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out, Mr. Prior.”

  “Is it true whoever did it kicked her?” I was thinking of pointed shoes but found them replaced as I spoke by the heavy round-toed ones of a middle-aged man—like the pair Farnon was wearing. I saw him glance at my feet as I looked at his and he gave a dry smile. I was wearing slippers.

  “We have to wait for a report.”

  “From the pathologist?”

  “That’s right. Now, about this fellow Beavis?”

  I told him what Jim had said. “Rape?” said Farnon, sliding his eyebrows back into the hollow of his forehead.

  “He said he couldn’t imagine any other reason.”

  Glover wrote.

  “Was she raped?”

  “We don’t know. What would you guess?”

  “Robbery? But she had nothing.”

  “No purse? No bracelets or rings?”

  “Nothing. Her parents must have told you.” I thought about Charlie and Joyce then. And I looked at Farnon with awe. He must have come from talking with them. “How are they taking it?”