Between My Father and the King (10 page)

‘Goodbye, Greg,' the boss said, unsmiling. He was estranged. His wife was estranged. Soon he would retire. And what did they know as they grew older about their daughter and her arty friends?

‘Goodbye, Greg.'

‘You must remember to come to our Pammy's exhibition, Mr Firman.'

‘Yes, of course. And now my taxi's waiting. The china is really beautiful. Thank you. Goodbye.'

Goodbye, the boss, and his office and roster, goodbye his wife, a small unruffled woman living an enclosed life, as if fearful of being blown away, as if her life were snuggled in a hairnet.

There was nothing to say to Pat, the taxi-man, who resembled the traditional crook in pictures, whose conversation always centred on weather, whether it were trotting or non-trotting weather or galloping or non-galloping weather, and who would win the double and the big race. Who do you think? Pat would say and then talk on without expecting an answer, and when finally the taxi stopped and Pat leapt out to open the door and assist his passenger with the heavy box, Greg wondered about the muffled dark man and his greyhounds with their ribs showing.

‘What's in the box?'

‘Dinner service. Retirement.'

‘They always give you a dinner service, don't they, or a silver cigarette lighter or a pair of fire tongs?'

All of course to emphasise your domesticity now that you were an old buffer with time to spend in an armchair and qualifications for entering the old buffers' race at the railway picnic.

Pat carried the box to the gate and curled his hand for the fare. With a keep-the-change gesture Gregory offered a ten-shilling note. ‘I got a bonus coming to me.' Now he was nearer home he could abandon the fancy phrases and say done instead of did, and youse folk instead of you people. Not I have a bonus coming to me, but I got, I got a bonus, and no Norma to correct.

The front door of Firman's home opened and Lillian came down the path. ‘I heard Pat. Oh Greg, isn't it strange, you've retired, and no more putting on your bicycle clips for work and taking your work bag for coal, and none of that.'

‘And a jolly good riddance too. I'm a free man. And look, a thirty-nine-piece dinner service, modern art.'

Lil cleared away the supper dishes and the dirty teatowel, and arranged the dinner service on the table.

‘Let's count the pieces, Greg, just to make sure.'

Oh why is there always this terrible need to make sure? Have I retired, am I quite sure? They asked me to go down of a morning for smoko. There'll be no hanging around for me like a cast-off for I'm done and can't fit myself or pretend I'm new clothes on the railway.

‘Greg.'

‘What?'

‘They've only given you thirty-two. My. You want to take it back, they're rooks.'

Rooked. And then they burst out laughing, they don't know why, maybe it should have been tears. Rooked. By a drab hall and streamers, and a frightened man called the boss, and a cocky cleaner and them all, and by Pat Cullen who could have been death driving through the dark. Just plain rooked by living. So they laugh, and Gregory, resentful of the gravy boat, points out the vessel to Lil.

‘We can put it on the mantelpiece and keep old buttons and pins and needles and things in it, like we did the willow-patterned one.'

‘It's new china isn't it, Greg, with those squiggles? It's usually roses or leaves or a bird with a yellow beak or plain blue with ordinary rims. They say there's a story in willow-patterned china.' Lil sighs, moving her heavy body towards the sofa. ‘It would have been nice willow. What was the farewell like? Was Mrs Sanders there?'

‘No.' And without saying anything, they know that they both don't care whether Mrs Sanders was there or down the sink or anywhere, it was just something to ask.

‘I'll put the service, thirty-two pieces mind you, on the middle shelf and move the preserves to the top.' Lil stands swaying above the china as a snake sways, though who has ever seen a snake in this land, yet with none of the delicacy nor secrecy of a reptile she sways. She is large, like a whale. ‘Yes, on the middle shelf, though I read that preserves are better low, the warm air rises.'

‘And the reaching will be bad for your heart.'

‘Yes, so it will.'

They are silent. They feel cheated by themselves and the world, they are stricken with the reality of heart and liver and chest, it seems you are made always to be struggling against yourself or somebody else and you go camouflaging yourself with bright streamers when you find your building old and ready to be pulled down. For sale, for removal, cheap.

My liver, thinks Gregory. And Lil's heart. Me with my little pills and my bowl to spit in at night and Lil with her tablets after every meal, if this is age, if this is forty faithful years on the railway and the meaning of retirement, then I'd rather be dead. I hate the whole system of living and the government and the war and that gravy boat with the squiggles. I had an aunt once, a woman with a face like a spoon sideways, and always it was Pass the gravy boat and I being a child thought it was a real boat, I was all excited to see it for we weren't flash enough for things like that, and I lay in bed imagining myself sailing away and away from Aunty's on a red and gold and brown sea that I had magicked for myself, and my arm tucked for steering in the handle of the gravy boat. And now there's no sea and I hate and damn the cocky new cleaners and firemen who act as if they were supermen, just having to say Up Up and Away, and the engine is ready, but they don't know the real secrets of engines, they don't know nothing, and if Norma were here and heard me thinking she'd say, ‘Don't know anything, Dad, grammar's awfully important.' No, they don't know nothing.

Lil, sacrificing her heart for the dinner service, has moved the preserves — plum, mostly — to the top shelf of the cupboard. Her eyes are baggy. She seems balanced on enormous fins as, swaying back and forth, she sighs again.

What's the sigh for, Gregory is going to ask, and then he doesn't ask because he knows what the sigh's for and he hates the sigh and he hates himself and he wishes he hadn't been so generous with Pat to give him ten shillings. Ten shillings and the rising cost of living.

‘Let's go to bed.'

Lil goes in first, puts a square of camphor in the bed to keep away Gregory's cramp, undresses, switches off the light and sinks heavily into the sheets, clean on Sunday, as a whale sinks beneath the waves. She is relaxed now, and resigned. Charlie, their son, will be home tomorrow. He is modern like the china. He uses a safety razor and Greg still clings to the old one and the strop. And Charlie's hair oil gets on the pillowcases, more washing, and washing is bad for the heart, it's the bending and hanging on the line. Greg and Charlie will argue, something will go wrong in the house, something unstuck and needing a nail or a screwdriver and Charlie will rush forward and Greg will say Here let me get at that, and then they'll argue again, You nail it here, you unscrew it there, watch out you clumsy nincompoop. And Greg'll say, I've had more experience with this kind of thing, and Charlie will retort, You're getting too old for this, Dad. And then they'll argue again.

But now it is dark outside, layer of dark folded in the way you fold pastry. You can hear the quick scratch and rustle of the possums in the fir tree, and the moreporks calling and the tomcats on the prowl. Greg has probably taken a candle and gone up to the dumpy. The wax will be spilling over the stick and the flame spluttering for it's a new candle and has to be whittled away first. Ah, there's the door, I hope he remembers to lock it. Lil is nearly asleep, her breathing rhythmical except when her heart flutters
as a sort of deadly reminder that all is not well, you cannot cheat yourself even with sleep.

And then, in the darkness, there is the crash of something breaking. Lil is immediately awake.

‘Greg!'

‘It's all right. I had another look at the china, you know it's not bad really, better than a canteen of cutlery, and I liked the farewell, it was good speaking and I sat in a velvet chair, you'd think I was being crowned, but I wasn't, it was the other way. And Lil . . .'

‘What?' Not, I beg your pardon, which is manners, but What. Norma isn't here to correct anyway.

‘Lil, that crash you heard was the gravy boat breaking. I don't know why it broke, or what exactly happened, but I couldn't help holding it and thinking what a fool I was ever to imagine that people, even little boys, could get inside boats like that and sail on red and gold seas. The boat's broken now, anyway.'

‘Never mind, we'd most likely have used it for pins and needles and buttons. I put your camphor in, but I didn't bother with our stone hottie. You can hear the possum in the fir tree.'

And soon Greg is in bed, in the dark. He sleeps on red and gold and green seas with his arm tucked for steering in the handle of something, perhaps a gravy boat, and an enormous aunt with buttons and pins and needles sticking out of her long black hair cries, ‘Pass the gravy boat, pass the gravy boat,' and all the time on the voyaging, a whale follows, a plain black whale with dead eyes; and there are railway lines laid in the sea, and Greg sails along the lines and the boat whistles a warning in the face of almost overwhelming waves made of sparks and being shovelled into fire by a cocky young man in a new cap imprinted New Zealand Railways. And then there's a storm. ‘Youse people help me,' cries Greg. ‘Youse people help.' There is calm. The black whale speaks in a rumble, You people, not youse people. The storm begins, the gravy boat is smashed at a level crossing where a greyhound
guards the signals, and then Greg is on land and whoopee he punches the signalman and the boss and every cocky new cleaner, especially one called Charlie.

It seems he fights for years and years and spits in a basin and coughs and buries the black whale with a railway shovel. And then in the end he dies. They always die.

The new tennis court lay dazzled in the sunlight, the fat white lines trafficked neatly across the asphalt; the net, carefully measured for height, stretched across the centre, in readiness; and a new tennis racquet lay at each end of the court, with two furred tennis balls resting upon the nylon strings of the racquet nearest the superintendent.

The patients looked at the racquet and at the superintendent, and cried out in anticipation, ‘Hurrah, hurrah.'

The superintendent, who was sitting in a blue velvet chair in the new pavilion, stood up to give a speech. He shaded his face from the sun.

‘Ladies and gentlemen . . .'

Everybody clapped. The patients, at a discreet distance, clapped hardest of all, and cheered, waiting for afternoon tea time, and the leftovers. Seven trays of cream cakes had been carried down from the bakehouse — roughly twelve dozen on each tray;
enough surely, for everybody, even for the not-so-polite people who would start grabbing.

‘Hurrah, hurrah.'

The patients cheered like children at a cowboy film.

‘Ladies and gentlemen . . .'

The superintendent inclined his head towards the macrocarpa hedge and the lawn and the pavilion, and the other places where seats had been put for the visitors.

‘On this auspicious occasion, I should like to offer a vote of thanks . . .'

And there they were, being thanked, the members of the committee: those who had worked so hard to raise funds, with concerts and dances and guessing competitions and raffles. They all gazed at the new tennis court, and they all looked so happy and proud.

Everybody clapped once more, and the superintendent raised his hand for silence.

‘. . . selflessly, for the good of all . . . a common benefit . . . shoulders to the wheel . . . monetary reward . . . You know, I have a little story that may interest you — it concerns . . .'

The story was long and uninteresting.

‘. . . And now I propose to desecrate the court by treading in the wrong shoes . . .'

He stared down, accusingly and playfully, at his brown suede shoes.

‘. . . and play the first ball of the season . . .'

Everyone watched eagerly while the superintendent stepped carefully onto the court, took the racquet nearest him and, smiling self-consciously, tossed the ball into the air. He meant it to travel across the net, and then he would have made some remark about his wife taking the other racquet; but the ball bounced, with a muffled sound, high into the air, and fell like a tight wad of white flannelette at the superintendent's feet. He picked it up and placed
it once more upon the nylon strings of the racquet.

‘. . . I officially declare the tennis court open to all.'

He smiled and, with pretended guilt, glancing down at his shoes, he sneaked from the court. There was a further burst of clapping and cheering, and those in charge of refreshments took advantage of the applause to hurry away into the clubrooms at the end of the pavilion and turn on the boiler for tea, place the cups and arrange the cakes for the official party. Talking and laughing like a general or a king or an actor at a première, the superintendent moved with his wife and the official party towards the clubrooms. As soon as they had disappeared, the remainder of the crowd began to wander restlessly about, some gaping at the new tennis court as if they were reading it, like a face or a newspaper or a teacup or a crystal; others feeling hungry and thirsty and rebellious, aware that there wasn't enough room for them in the clubrooms, and that cakes and sandwiches were being eaten, and cups of tea drunk, and more provision should have been made for the common audience. In their seats by the macrocarpa hedge the patients talked among themselves and thought, dismayed, that nothing would be left over, not even scones or sandwiches; or if there were sandwiches they would be fish paste and pickle ones, with the tomato and ham eaten. Some of the children from the village began to race round and round the outside of the court, while the bolder ones walked near the edge, and the boldest ones of all played tig on
the court itself
. But they were stopped smartly.