In My Father's Den

by Gee, Maurice

  “She liked Breughel and Spencer. She thought Bosch was a joke.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “He’s interesting.”

  “What do you feel about lending this sort of stuff to a seventeen-year-old?”

  “It’s in the school library. We’ve got a good art teacher.”

  “What else did she borrow?”

  “Anything she liked. There were no restrictions.”

  He smiled at the tone of my voice. “Name something.”

  “Lawrence. She took a lot of Lawrence once.”

  “Lady Chatterley’s Lover?”

  “Amongst others.”

  “You really are something, Mr. Prior.”

  “I’m good at my job, that’s all.”

  We sparred for a while. I made myself ridiculous in a way I hadn’t since student days. My talk of Philistines, “the precious life blood”, book-burning and the jackboot, was a kind of defence against the trap that was closing. Noises came from the garage and later from the kitchen and bedroom. Menzies had a quiet voice that scared me.

  At half-past ten Farnon and Glover had a talk in the hall. Farnon came back. “You can go to bed, Mr. Prior.”

  I had been so sure they’d arrest me that I sat and gaped at him.

  “I’m going to leave a man here—just to keep a check on things. It’s irregular but I don’t think you’ll mind.”

  “I thought you were going to arrest me.”

  Farnon gave his faint wise-child smile. “Get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Can I have a bath?”

  He shrugged. “You’re a free man. Don’t go anywhere though. We’ll want to talk to you in the morning.”

  So Farnon and Glover left and a constable called Fernie sat in my den for the rest of the night. I boiled an egg and ran a bath. The soap more than anything made me think of Celia.

  By midnight I was in bed. The day swelled like a bladder. It was stuffed with forms Bosch might have drawn. It pulsed at me like a jellyfish. I thought it was going to suck me in. Then I remembered that in the morning Farnon was coming back to arrest me. That gave me something to hold on to.

  Shortly after lying down I went to sleep.

  1938–1945

  The business area of Wadesville lies between two bridges. The shopkeepers call it the “Golden Mile”. Among the older ones conversation often turns to the fortunes that could have been made, and the few that were, in property deals. This talk takes place in an atmosphere almost religious—the familiar elements are there: virtue and vice (courage and timidity in this case), reward and punishment. But it seems to me that one would have had to be extremely clever or extremely stupid to want land in Wadesville in 1938. The town had hardly changed since the war. On the Great North Road between the bridges we had a butcher’s shop, a baker’s shop and bakehouse, a grocer’s, a blacksmith’s shed on its last legs, and a boarding-house that had been a pub before the area went dry. The main part of the town was on Railway Street opposite the station: a dozen shops and a concrete town hall that also served as a picture theatre.

  My father’s orchard lay between the town and one of the creeks. To reach school Andrew and I crossed a swing-bridge and went along a clay road at the side of a Dalmatian vineyard. The school was on a hillside sloping towards Wadesville. The Presbyterian Church stood across the valley on the road leading out.

  Wadesville, my Wadesville of school, shopping centre, park, creek, came to know me well. I became a rough, tough character. I might have a loony brother but I showed my schoolmates there was nothing wrong with me. Charlie Inverarity was the other tough boy in my class. He was Earl McCready, I was Lofty Blomfield. We wrestled each other through a hot lunch-hour and lay at the end of it knotted so tightly together a teacher had to undo us. We circled each other warily after that and became friends because there was no other satisfactory ending. Charlie’s idea was to run wild. He wanted to pillage, burn, and put to the sword. I held him back. Charlie had never been in a church in his life. My Presbyterian upbringing inclined me to tactics. I made sure we didn’t hit the same orchard too often. I made sure that one of us kept watch while the other looked through the nail holes into the girls’ changing shed at Cascade Park. I chose vineyards where the Dalmatians didn’t use shotguns. We never got caught. I think this was a disappointment to Charlie.

  One orchard we never raided was my father’s. Charlie couldn’t understand. Didn’t he steal cigarettes from his old man? Didn’t I help him smoke them? He salvaged something by helping me guard the orchard against other gangs. I was my father’s now. My mother had folded herself in on John. There was a door to that world Andrew could open but I did not have the key. Nor did I often want to go in. My father was enough for me. He helped me build a hut in a tree, and later an underground one. He made me shanghais and bows and arrows. Mid-summer: I was in the creek or by it more often than at home. Father taught me how to make an eel trap. He gave Charlie and me sheets of corrugated iron and told us how to build canoes. We hammered out the corrugations, nailed in prow and stern posts, and sealed the cracks with boiling pitch. Early one Saturday we launched our canoes on the creek and set off on a voyage of discovery.

  Today the creek is a sour ditch, scummy with factory waste. In those days it was green, mysterious, frightening, magic. I can travel down it in my mind, remembering each pool and mossy rock and fallen tree the way other people re- member kind or cruel actions, women they have had or tries they have scored. Charlie and I struck out with our wooden paddles. We went under the swing-bridge and down a long stretch of Amazonian water. Once we saw a Dalmatian face grinning at us from the top of the bank, but we put down our heads, dug in our paddles, and wobbled on. We wanted to put faces behind us, we wanted crocodiles, boa constrictors. In the middle of the morning we found a drowned pig, with eels trailing from its underside like black streamers. We wondered what we would do if we found a body. We passed under the bridge that carried the Great North Road into Wadesville. It looked as if it had grown there. It had velvety red and green moss on its pillars and black fungus on its underside. We sat awed in our canoes and listened to cars rushing over it. We had cut ourselves off, there was no safety now, the world was in another place. We paddled on, quiet and hardy. When we had to speak we kept our voices low.

  Near midday we sat on a mat of red willow-hair and ate our jam and Marmite sandwiches. The shouting of children came to us from Cascade Park. “Let’s go fast,” Charlie said. We paddled hard, made a portage round the waterfalls, and set off across the swimming pool, out of the reach of older boys who swam after us and threw stones. Now we were on the tidal part of the creek, on brown fish-smelling water. We paddled seawards through the afternoon, through farms and orchards, until the creek widened to an estuary and we had broad banks of mud and mangrove swamps on either side. Launches and yachts were moored in side-creeks, at wooden jetties at the foot of paddocks. Seagulls turned lazily overhead. At last we saw the sea. It was wide and silver, running into the mud. At the other side was the North Shore. On cliffs red with late afternoon sunlight stood pink and white houses whose windows burned like fires. We felt as if we had discovered a new civilization.

  This was the happiest day of my life. I keep it safe by formalizing it: launching, fear, comradeship, discovery. Even the end was perfect. It was too late to go back. We tried to hide our canoes in the mangroves but could not pull them over the banks of mud. We sank in to our hips. So we left them there, side by side, half-way between the water and the land. The next tide must have floated them away. We ran home through the twilight like a pair of steeplechasers, wearing leggings of mud, and parted at the corner with cries of tomorrow’s meeting and a shrill duet of whistles growing further apart.

  My mother did not like Charlie Inverarity. I was careful not to bring him home too often. My father said, “Try not to bring your friends here, Paul. Your mother’s not well and noise upsets her.” He did not mention names. Charlie was tough, bony, cheeky. He had an ugly nasal voice
that offended Mother’s ear: her children had been taught to speak well. But worst of all he was the son of the local bookmaker. Mr. Inverarity had a draper’s shop by the station. Charlie explained to me one day as we sat on bolts of material reading comics that the people who came in and handed slips of paper across the counter were making bets. He said his mother took bets by telephone at home. I called on Charlie the next Saturday, hoping to see this performance, and watched Mrs. Inverarity in dressing-gown and hair curlers write £ win, £1 win 10/-pl. Red Monarch in an exercise book. She had a glass of beer on the edge of the book and a cigarette in her mouth. It wobbled up and down as she spoke. I thought of my own mother with her cropped hair, white face, far-away voice, moving about John’s bassinet and my father escaping to the packing shed or orchard. The name Red Monarch floating up out of that time still brings me a thrill of freedom and—not danger, “peril”.

  One wet winter Saturday the police raided the Inverarity house. Mrs. Inverarity pushed Charlie out the back door with an armful of exercise books. “Run Charlie,” she said. He went down the backyard and escaped through the hedge just as a constable ran round the corner of the house and started to hammer on the back door. He didn’t know where to go from there so he ran down the hill towards school, down the clay road by the vineyard and over the swing-bridge. He arrived on our doorstep soaking wet with an armful of sodden exercise books just as we were finishing lunch. My father answered the door. “Paul,” he called. I went to the door. “Take your friend down to the packing shed. I’ll be down in a minute.” I put on my oilskin and took Charlie down through the orchard. He was sniffing, gulping, shivering. Some of the water on his face was tears. We went into the packing shed. Charlie threw the books on to a pile of apple-boxes. “Bloody fucking things,” he said. For the first time I saw that he had problems too. It made me like him less. The shed was like the inside of a refrigerator. The wind came up through the floor and ran up our legs like water. I offered Charlie my coat. “Keep it,” he said, and he wrapped himself in a coal-sack he found in a corner.

  A few minutes later my father arrived, wearing his oilskin and carrying a Gladstone bag. He handed me the bag, took a key from his pocket, and opened the door of the lean-to where he kept the insect and weed-killers. Andrew and I called it the poison-shed. We were not allowed inside. My father turned on a light. He stood in the doorway taking from the bag which I held open to him a towel, a pair of my trousers, a shirt and a jersey. “All right,” he said, “come in.”

  Charlie and I went into the poison-shed. It was like a magic cave. Sure enough there were insecticides in a corner, neatly stacked. But there was a mat on the floor, a picture on the wall, a table, a cup, a packet of tea, a kettle with an electric plunger in it, an electric heater which my father turned on, a wooden carving of a wounded bear. Most amazing of all, there was a wall full of books. I had never seen so many books, not even in the Wadesville lending library.

  Charlie stripped off and dried himself in front of the heater while I looked around. My father seemed shy. “Do you like it, Paul?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s—it’s marvellous.” My father went red with pleasure. He got very busy. “Right, my boy,” he said to Charlie, “put these clothes on. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  He closed the door and the poison-shed started to warm up. Charlie got into my clothes and drank a cup of tea with huge spoonfuls of sugar in it. My father sat in the chair watching us as we knelt in front of the heater. Charlie was interested in the bear and my father handed it down to him. It was rearing on its hind legs. The broken shaft of a spear was fixed in its chest. I see now why my father liked it but it puzzled me then. I knew he hated hurting things. So I handled the carving for a while, then gave it back to Charlie. I stared at the picture on the wall. A pre-dentist or pre-punishment feeling ran through me: the expectation of pain in which excitement plays a part. As I looked at the picture I felt that something more was on the point of being shown. I saw a woman in a white robe sitting on a globe meant to be the world. She was blind-folded and her hands were resting on an instrument, a harp I thought, with all the strings broken except one.

  My father watched me.

  “Is it supposed to be an angel?”

  He shook his head. “Hope, Paul. It’s a great work of art.”

  I didn’t ask any more questions because even this explanation made the picture less mysterious. I looked at it from time to time as I went along the rows of books. The globe of the world was golden, with a misty sky behind it. The woman sat gracefully, with her head bent to listen. Her hand was poised to pluck the string. Would the last string break? All through the afternoon the question kept me tense. What would happen if it broke? My father read. Charlie played at spearing the bear. He brought in his mother’s exercise books and tried to dry them in front of the heater. For a while he nosed about the poison but my father called him away. I read the titles of the books and was pleased they were too hard for me. In spite of Charlie and things like the tea and sugar the shed was still a magic cave. The titles added to the mystery. I spelled them out with care. Man the Unknown. Cosmic Con-ściousness. Varieties of Religious Experience. They were mostly old books. Some, when I took them down, had poetry in them. In the margins my father had written Good! True! Rubbish! Sometimes whole pages were underlined. I was proud of him. I kept smiling at his back. As if to reward me he underlined something in the book he was reading, and wrote in the margin. I sidled close. But see p. 67. The message haunts me still. For a long while I knew that p. 67 would tell me if the last string was going to break.

  It stopped raining and Charlie went home. I asked my father if I could stay with him in the shed.

  “I don’t know if there’s anything here you can read,” he said. “Would you like to make me a cup of tea?”

  I rinsed Charlie’s cup and filled the kettle at the tap outside the shed. I made my father a cup of tea.

  “Just a minute,” he said. He went out to the packing shed and I saw him empty some rusty nails out of an old jam jar. He washed the jar and brought it back sparkling clean. “We’ll give you one too.”

  So we drank tea, he from the cup, I from the jam jar, and later I ran up to the house to tell my mother we would be busy in the shed for the rest of the afternoon. As usual she was sitting in her chair watching John who was crawling about the floor. Andrew was busy with his Sunday School books. “I’m helping Dad in the shed,” I sang out. I don’t think she knew where the voice came from. “All right,” she said, turning her head in a puzzled way. I ran back through the wet grass and bare trees to my father’s “den”. As I crossed the packing shed I had a moment’s doubt that he would be there behind the door with his treasures. Then I saw the light under the door and heard him clear his throat. I knocked and went in.

  “Well Paul,” he said, “we’ll have to put a chair in here for you.”

  “How long have you had all this?”

  “A long time.” It was all he would tell me. He seemed to feel that in having this room to escape to and books to read he was somehow betraying Mother. I think it eased his mind to have me share the place with him. When he spoke his voice was gruff with affection. I knew without being told that I mustn’t tell my mother about the “den”. (It was years before I dropped the inverted commas.) As for Andrew—the poison-shed would stay the poison-shed. I had no intention of sharing.

  I spent the afternoon reading the titles of my father’s books and hunting in them for notes he had written. Were they messages to me? After an hour my mind was fuddled. I looked at him and looked at Hope. Like Charlie I nosed around the poison. But always I came back to the books. Good! True! Alas! Bravo! And bold mysterious exclamation marks beside lines of poetry like Oh lyric love, part angel and part bird….

  “Is there nothing there you can read, Paul?” my father asked kindly.

  “I’m looking at the parts you’ve put lines under.”

  “Would you like me to get you some books?”
>
  I said yes out of a wish to share with him rather than out of a desire to read. My fare until then had been religious stories and the forbidden comics.

  “What would you like?”

  I could not think.

  “Indians?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I let you use this place will you promise not to go near the corner?” He pointed at the poison.

  “Yes.”

  “And will you be careful with the heater? Always have it in the middle of the floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right then. I’ll get a key made for you.”

  The thought that I was to have my own key, specially made, kept me in a state of almost passionate contentment for the rest of the afternoon. At half-past four when my father told me to see if my mother wanted any jobs done I ran up to the house whistling. I knew I was special, I knew I was important. I did my mother’s jobs from a great height—as a kind of charity. I even picked up my brother John and handed him to her when I saw her begin to get up from her chair. I remember this as the first time I touched him.

  On Monday Charlie told me his mother had given him a hiding when he got home. The exercise books were still wet and she could not read some of the bets. To make up for it she had let him go to a Tarzan picture that night. I was unimpressed. I had my father’s “den”.

  I must say something about Andrew. Who is he? Who was he? The things I don’t know about him frighten me almost as much as the things I do. He was a large slow-moving child with reddish hair that came from Mother’s side of the family. I think of him as being placid, a bit “dim”. This can’t be right. At school I protected Andrew and came to have the same view of him as the people who wanted to bully him. He wasn’t placid, he wasn’t “dim”. He was closed-in, private. He seemed to be living with his senses dulled. His intelligence was a cut-down adult one. From an early age his responses were ones he had learned. He was a “good” boy. He pleased my mother very much.