Between My Father and the King (9 page)

‘With love to all the Little Folk and your own dear self'.

I knew, in my heart, that I loved neither all the Little Folk nor Dot. Tradition won, however, and each week at the close of my letter I stated my love.

At the beginning of the page each week Dot herself would write a letter beginning, ‘Dear Little Folk,' in which she would remind us to be helpful and loving, to do our best for old people and blind people, and to look both ways before crossing the road. She also reminded us that some of our letters were not as interesting as
they might be. It was a bad habit, Dot said, to use too many ‘I's in our letters, to write about what interested us exclusively and forget that others might be bored by it. Her concluding remark would be Love.

You see, she loved us.

I did not believe she loved us. How could she? She had never met us.

Now, once a year the Little Folk, who were all under twenty-one, and the Old Writers from the past held a picnic or a party where the butterflies and the blossoms and the fairies and the sergeants and colonels and explorers met one another for the first time. These activities were reported in the current Dot's Page, which also at that time of year (the summer holidays) printed two issues of letters from Old Writers. At that time of year there was always a number of new Little Folk, full of the prospects of the picnic, and after Christmas the supply of Dot's Little Folk badges was very low. It was unwise to start writing to Dot after Christmas. You had to wait so long for your badge.

We never attended any of the festivals connected with the page. They were held in another town. We merely read of them. Time after time we read, ‘Dot was forced to be absent because of a heavy cold.' ‘Dot was unable to be present, but sent good wishes to all.'

Dot was a powerful part of our lives. Who was she, who was she really, what was she like to look at, what colour hair did she have, what colour eyes? Week after week I sent my guilty love to her, for I knew that I still did not love all the Little Folk and her own dear self.

Once I sent her a poem. It was about a flower dreaming of the
love of a golden moon. Dot answered curtly in the three-line reply which she made to all the letters (‘I am glad you had a pleasant holiday. You must tell me more about your fishing.' ‘How nice to have a new baby sister. What is her name?' ‘You seem to be doing very well at your new school.' ‘Yes, Charles Dickens, mountains are indeed fascinating to study.') In her answer to my poem Dot wrote, ‘I like your poem very much, but I wonder if flowers, even poetically, ever dream of moons?'

I was extremely hurt. I knew that flowers did dream of moons. I could not understand why Dot had even raised the question.

For so many years we all confided in Dot. She remained a mystery, a kindly, motherly, auntly person who yet never took shape in our minds. She knew of changes of schooling, of passes and failure at school, of new brothers and sisters, of hobbies, expeditions, dreams of thousands of children, and each week she never failed to find a suitable reply, or to give in her letter her advice on our moral obligations.

The nature of our confidences changed as the years passed. We grew more secretive. Our words passed through a stage of being long and ponderous. We talked of the world as ‘one': ‘One does this and that.' We wrote of the ‘wickedness of people today', while Dot commended us for our ‘thoughtfulness'.

The war came. As the confidences of children are not essential to national economy, Dot's page ceased for a time, and was printed once a year only. The picnics and parties continued, although Dot never appeared at them.

Sometimes I thought, with horror, What if one day I come face to face with Dot? What should I say? Surely I would tremble and dissolve into shyness! After all those poems I had sent in, and all those dishonest references to ‘Love to all the Little Folk and your own dear self'!

All that was long ago.

‘But this set down. Set down, This.'

I read a paragraph in a local newspaper recently.

‘At the Dunedin Central Court Mr Harolde Clarke, former subeditor of the
Daily Times
, and known to his colleagues as ‘Dot' of ‘Dot's Little Folk', was today remanded, bail refused, pending an investigation into the alleged rape of an eleven-year-old girl, daughter of Charles Dickens and Sugar Plum Fairy.'

‘A tragic case,' the judge commented a few weeks later when Mr Harolde Clarke was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. I saw his picture in the paper.

Dot was tall, thin, with grey hair. He was well dressed. He was standing between two policemen, being hustled through a crowd of women who surged to get at him, crying, No child is safe while he is at large, hanging is too good for him, he needs horsewhipping . . .

Dear Dot.

Dear Dot, bewildered and frightened, being hustled into the police car while Dancing Fairies, Pear Blossoms, April Showers, Baden Powells, struggle to tear you to pieces.

Love to all the Little Folk and your own dear self.

Gregory Firman is dead now. Do you remember the night he retired from the railway? The thirty-nine-piece dinner service: ‘For you and your wife with best wishes for a happy retirement.' The thank you and the muffled remarks and the dither of the man who housed his personality on one track, who shunted his life back and forth over rusty rails by sleepers overgrown with dock and dandelion, past cattlestops and flag stations and the red blistered houses with the women waving from the clothesline and the children throwing stones?

You say you don't know the cause of Gregory's death? You would laugh if I told you the cause was a gravy boat.

At 9 p.m. five weeks ago, Gregory retired. He received his dinner service, coughed his smoker's cough, and would have liked to spit except that it wasn't form, and sank deeper into the luxurious plush chair reserved for the guest of honour; sank as a snail would sink into a new shell that offered protection yet no
patterned and worn familiarity. Mrs Firman hadn't come. Her heart. And her ankles swelled at night. Poor Lil, and here was a dinner service of thirty-nine pieces, dazzling china printed with the new artistic wiggles and squiggles that were part of ‘design', so the chairman had said, for his wife painted mountain scenes and Queenstown, and his daughter who had been married with her name in
The Free Lance
also belonged to an art society and herself drew wiggles and squiggles that were, it was said, ‘promising and revealing'. Gregory horned his eyes from the depths of his red house to stare once more at the service. He felt wavery and bewildered, trying to make his gaze reveal understanding and security in the face of thirty-nine pieces of art and modern at that — and then he saw the gravy boat, which immediately held fascination though he didn't believe in gravy boats. Not really. It was best from the old jug with the crack in the top, or already on, poured unseen in Lil's world of kitchen, magical rich fluid seeping into the warmth of the Sunday roast, perhaps forming a tiny creek through the cauli, or snowing brown snow only homemade and warm on the blind potato hills.

‘For he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good fellow. Three hearty cheers for the man who has stuck to the railway through thick and thin.'

The guest bowed, looked embarrassed, thought how silly what do they mean through thick and thin. I stuck to the railway because there was nothing else to stick to, and sometimes it was like being a fly on a flypaper, sweet and arsenic, I don't suppose I'll find out which till I retire, but I am retired. They say your vitality fails when you retire, the
Reader's Digest
has an article on it, and only the other day I saw in the paper about retired people dying suddenly but I won't die, I'll garden and help Charlie with that building he's pulling down, how cheap it was, a bargain. For sale, building for removal. Most buildings go cheap when they have to be pulled down, they're like us retired people, dinner service and
all. And look at Larry Parks, how wizened he's become, he and his dinner service too. He was a signalman. He used to lean his face like a flag out of the signal box, and even when I met him in the street something in his expression said Go or Stop or Danger and other signals that are strange to the railway. Yet now his face is blank, and it's queer, as if the very night they gave him his farewell, and his wife in black velvet like a bird, and he stepped out the door into the dark, something came, without any signal, age or fear or an ambassador of death saying, ‘Wait a minute Larry, here's my gift,' and there and then on the steps of the railway hall his face and brow were carved in deeper lines, his hair whitened and made thinner on top, the kind of thinness that no radio may offer remedy for . . .

But they're staring at me. I'm dreaming. ‘It's a fine service, my wife will love it. And thank you. I'll miss the loco very much. On behalf of Mrs Firman and myself . . .' Why, public speaking was fun, everybody listening respectfully no matter what you said. I'll take it more slowly as befits a retired person, there's no need to be in a cold sweat over retiring, I'll open my mouth more, the way they told us at school. Here's power.

Gregory wasn't a snail any more, he was a bird ready to pounce, with no need of a red velvet house.

I am powerful.

Ah, but look at the drab hall, the paint peeling off the walls and they've tried to camouflage it with frilled streamers gaudy and crisscross dug from the Christmas decoration box. Camouflage of glory. But I am powerful: there's my son Charlie, I can control him. None of my folk are going to carry on like runaway engines hauling carriages they never dreamed were there to disaster. Norma dragged our name in the dust with her appearance in court that time, it's a wonder I can bear to think of it, but it's in my mind with all the decorations and the china and the thought of Lil at home with her feet up and the thought of the taxi I'll get;
Pat Cullen who keeps greyhounds so thin you can see their ribs; and then the thought of Norma again with her education and dead languages. One day when she came home from school she looked new, unfolded. She rubbed her finger along the side of the door, pressing it hard, if it had been a paper door her finger would have poked through. She half sang, ‘Dad.'

‘Well.' I was busy with my sheets at the moment and didn't want to be interrupted in the adding up. I prided myself, I always have, on my timesheets.

‘Well?'

‘What are you? I mean what are you to put down on paper?'

‘Well of all the . . .'

‘Nancy Smith's father's an insurance agent, Noni's is a doctor and she goes riding with riding boots on. Tomorrow I've got to fill in a form to say what my father is. Joan's is a baker. What will I put for you?'

Well here I am at a farewell and my mind's running a different way as if I were on two tracks at once and only one train travelling. I stopped doing my sheets, and staring at Norma staring at me, I didn't say, ‘Say engine driver, I'm an engine driver.' I thought, be blowed riding boots and baches at the bay, but I said as if I were announcing royalty, ‘Locomotive engineer.' Flash. Very flash the way words can disguise and cheat and yet be truthful. Norma smiled, happily, ‘Gosh, Dad, I'm proud of you.' But I knew it wasn't me she was proud of, it was the words locomotive engineer, the way they sounded. If I had said engine driver she would have shrivelled, being a schoolgirl and not understanding things or maybe beginning to understand things, how doctors' daughters have ponies and weekend baches and bakers' daughters fresh puffy butterfly cakes in their lunch. And the daughter of a locomotive engineer? In spite of the words, a shabby uniform too small at the top and no dancing class with the high-school boys on Saturdays, and a mother and father who think that Shelley was the
founder of the penny postage though it's twopence now and going up soon to threepence whether Shelley was a poet or a postman.

But again they're staring. I scarcely know what I'm thinking and saying, but I've said thank you, my wife is indisposed.

Thank you for everything.

Now the taxi.

Before Greg went down the steps of the hall to Pat Cullen, Pat on time as always, though he did charge sixpence more than the Blue Band, the boss and his wife approached him, and Greg, his mind in a confusion of railway lines and cocky young cleaners and cotton waste soggy soggy with oil, saw what seemed like the whole world in china and gravy boats and railway lines, and people's lives in a railway, stopping at the right or wrong station, and some stopping in the sidings with no one there to welcome, and some stopping in the big postered places and being lost in a maze of people. And he saw the boss and his wife on different tracks, and felt sudden sympathy for the boss, and unhappiness at not being able to switch the points or manoeuvre the turntable of living. He saw the boss's wife at her daughter's exhibition, and the boss himself wandering around with his catalogue and remembering or trying hard to remember that you don't stare at pictures close-up, you stand back with your head on one side and a slight understanding smile on your face and you murmur something about form, line, colour, and only when you seem to have discovered the secret of the picture do you approach it, peer at the detail of form, colour or line, and return with a eureka expression on your face to the sleek young men in waving wine ties, and the smooth secretive women.