by Gee, Maurice
I found that Wadesville, old Wadesville, lived a kind of ghetto life inside the new. I surprised it in corners, in old streets, old buildings, old faces. I bought fruit at roadside stalls and wine from a Dalmatian up the valley. The Presbyterian church stood on the hill, the old primary school on its asphalt yard in a litter of new prefabricated classrooms. I bought my clothes from one of Charlie’s competitors, but we nodded when we met in the street. Once we chatted for five minutes in a queue at the bank. He took my settling in Wadesville as a compliment—the town seemed to live for him the way the orchard and creek had for me. I felt no hostility towards him: our last bout, I thought, had jerked me out of an adolescence chronically prolonged. With no malice, I asked after Joyce’s health. She wrote to me, excusing Ralph from homework. Dear Paul…Joyce Inverarity. From time to time I saw her in the street, sometimes with her pigtailed daughter. My feeling about her preserving that afternoon in the orchard was a mixture of conceit and pity. Life must be dry with Charlie.
When I had been two years at Wadesville College Celia Inverarity appeared in my third form English class. She drifted through the year in eighteenth place out of thirty-five. On her report I wrote the lazy remark: Must try harder. It embarrassed me that I had once, if only for a moment, thought of myself as begetter of this child.
“What’s the new Inverarity like?” someone asked in the staffroom.
“Stodgy,” I replied.
She seemed to be in a kind of puberal sleep from which she could wake only to days of complaint and stubbornness. She passed out of my class, and for the next year I was aware of her only when my notice was jogged.
“She’s got a nasty tongue, that girl.”
“Intelligence is no excuse.”
Intelligence? I couldn’t really believe it. But at the end of the year she won prizes for English and French. Joyce and Charlie came to the prize-giving. Watching Joyce’s satisfied smile and the black glitter of Charlie’s eyes, I remembered for the first time in two years that I had means to hurt them.
We met outside the hall after the ceremony. They thanked me for helping Ralph, who had been in my lower sixth history class.
“He’s had a good year,” I said. “Any idea what you’re going to be yet Ralph?”
“A lawyer,” he said flatly, and looked away over my head.
“Celia’s done well.” It was the first time I had spoken her name to Joyce. She was too happy to let herself be embarrassed.
“We were so worried about her last year. We didn’t know whether she was clever or not.”
“She’s clever, all right,” Charlie said. He put his arm round Celia’s waist. I saw the girl glance at her parents with pity. She moved in a kind of pirouette out of her father’s arm and walked across the road to a group of friends.
Joyce smiled. “Especially your comments on the report. Celia was rather scathing about that.”
“I’ll bet she was.”
Charlie was eyeing the fur on my bachelor’s hood. “She seems to think she’ll be having you for English next year.”
“That’s right.”
“Previous.” He laughed.
“What?”
“Previous Prior. That’s her nickname for you.” He laughed again. “I thought you’d like to know. Kids are pretty sharp these days.”
The malice in his voice shocked me. There was threat too, of a vague sort. Joyce was looking angry. “We’d better go now, Charlie.” I heard her voice scolding him as they walked away.
I told myself I wasn’t going to be drawn into another contest. That sort of thing was behind me. I seemed on the point of finding in myself a desire to be liked. Even by Charlie. Even by his clever daughter. Previous, I thought. The little bitch. I drove home and listened to some music—a wind quartet by Danzi—but it put me on edge: all that restraint, all that formal neatness. I’d thought I had these qualities in my life, and here I was wanting to be liked by a clown like Charlie. Really, I thought, if open war’s the only other course you’d better take it. But I had a second whisky and got myself in order. Detachment, self-sufficiency. Den-living. I put another record on the player and let myself be soothed. The Inveraritys were midges on some scummy private pond. I was here. The walls closed warmly in. I stroked my sideburns, sipped my whisky; listened.
In the next year I kept myself remote from Celia. It did not matter that she was the best pupil in my fifth form English class, I treated her simply as one of thirty-five and excused myself on the grounds of egalitarianism. I played the teacher even when she came to me to talk about books she was reading, even when I loaned her books, which I began to do in the middle of the year. Her sleep was over. A hunger for knowledge had woken in her. Scarcely a lesson went by but her voice interrupted with some cunning question. There was in her such an excitement, such a quick recogni-tion of falseness, that I found myself building my answers with extraordinary care. But still I held her at arms length. On occasions I found her looking at me with amusement. In the hall one day a trick of acoustics brought me her voice across half the assembled school. “Poor old Previous, he always looks as if he’s got constipation.” It was after this that she began to be rebellious. She argued with me about my classroom rules—few enough—and refused at last to obey the ones she believed unreasonable. Books in the course that failed to interest her she left unread. One of her reviews said simply: “As I found this ‘classic’ too boring to read I am not able to write about it.” This would have delighted me if the blow had been aimed at Charlotte Brontë alone. I asked other teachers if she was giving trouble. She was not. The truth is Celia was hurt. We liked the same things. We liked each other. Why then did I treat her as a child? Why did I keep on pretending to be teacher? She did not have her mother’s ability to turn herself into a stony little fortress. She had to bristle; she had to fight. By the end of the second term I was feeling bruised.
Shortly after the holiday started Charlie paid me a visit. I tried to keep him on the veranda but he smiled with a diffidence strange in him and asked if we could go inside. I showed him into the den, turned on the ceiling light and turned off my reading lamp—converting the place to a sitting-room. Charlie blinked. His eyes went quickly over the books.
“I see you still read.”
I invited him to sit down and offered him a drink.
“Thanks. Whisky if you run to it.” He was more himself now, his diffidence tipping over into aggression. As I poured drinks his eyes kept up their probing.
“Hey, I remember that. Your old man had it.” He nodded at Henry Bear. I handed him a glass of whisky. He got up and walked across to the mantelpiece. The carving seemed to fascinate him just as it had twenty-five years before. He took it down in one hand. “Clean through the middle of the chest. Where’d he get it?”
“In a second-hand shop—it reminded him of himself.” I regretted saying this, but here in my own territory I needed to establish ascendancy over Charlie. I went on in a flippant tone, “He was a kind of bear too. The spear’s his wife and kids. There he was minding his own business and suddenly he’s got this spear rammed through his guts.”
Charlie looked at me suspiciously, not quite sure of the challenge. He put the carving back in its place. “That’s the trouble with you arty blokes, you’ve always got to see something that isn’t there.” He crossed the room and sat down. “It’s a bloody bear with a spear in it.”
I grinned at him. “If you say so.” I said nothing more, but watched him as he set his eyes darting about the room again. The vase of flowers on the mantelpiece made him pause. I saw him wondering if it meant a woman. But finally he said, “Jesus, Paul, do you really live like this?”
“How?”
“In a room full of books?”
“They’re good company. You’d be surprised.”
“Sure—but what about a wife? This is no way to spend your life.” He waved at the shelves.
“Oh,” I said, “I have women. No shortage. But they don’t fit up there. I keep them
in the bedroom.”
He grinned—a masculine reflex. “That’s okay. What about kids though? Books’ll never make up for that.”
I took a swallow of whisky and kept myself under control. “They last longer.”
He grunted with a contempt completely genuine, and decided I wasn’t worth arguing with. His eyes took on a distant look. “Anyway, that’s not what I came to talk about. I want you to stop lending books to Celia. She’s getting all sorts of crappy ideas in her head.”
“Like what?”
“Like staying at school, and going to university. She’ll get School Certificate. That’s enough for a girl.”
“You want her to sit in that office of yours and add up your profits?”
“It’s my business what I want her to do. What I’m telling you is, stop putting phony ideas in her head. This sort of muck”—he waved his hand at the room—“never got anyone anywhere.”
“Ralph’s different, of course. He can be a lawyer.”
“Ralph’s a boy.”
“I was right, wasn’t I? You really want her in the shop. You think you can keep her marking time there until some neat little prick with the right sort of job and the right sort of habits comes along and asks if he can marry her.”
“Listen—”
“You listen, Charlie. You haven’t got a chance. That girl’s going to be someone, whether you want it or not. She’s worth a dozen Ralphs. Ralph’s off the assembly line. You give me some scissors and paste and I’ll make you a platoon of him in ten minutes. But there’s only one of Celia. Go down to the school and ask any teacher. She could no more work in your shop than she could in a brothel.”
He was sitting on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward as if looking for an opening. We seemed to be circling each other again, as we had in the playground thirty years before. But I had already landed blows. Then I would have felt satisfaction, not regret. I leaned back and crossed my legs. “That’s it, Charlie. You can’t win this one. She’ll be too tough for you.”
"I’m her father.” He was trembling. “I say what she does.”
I shook my head. “You can’t put a girl like Celia in a cage.”
He jumped to his feet. “You shut up about her. Don’t you use her name.” The violence in him frightened me. Charlie wasn’t properly tamed any more than his daughter. I sat forward in my chair.
“Let me put it this way, Charlie—”
“I’m talking now. She’s leaving school. I’m not letting bastards like you mess my family up any more. You think I’m going to have her end up as bloody screwloose as you—stuck in some pansy outfit like this?” Again the wave at the room. “I know what you were doing to Joyce—filling her head with shit. Poetry! Well, I’m telling you mate, you’re not going to do the same thing with my daughter.” He emphasized the final words with a finger that prodded inches from my face.
“Go home, Charlie,” I said.
He stepped back. He flung a challenging look round the room. “I’ll give you warning, Prior, if you try to interfere with my family again I’ll come up here and take a bloody axe to you. Don’t think I don’t mean it.”
“I believe you. Now go home.” I was sickened by the scene—my part in it as much as his. It seemed to have no connection with Celia, whom I remembered now in her desk with a hand raised to the level of her throat as she prepared a question. Charlie looked for a place to put his glass. He pushed it roughly on to the record player. Whisky slopped over the side.
We’re a couple of bloody fools, Charlie, I thought. Old men. Don’t let’s spoil her chance.
He went out without looking at me again. I heard his car take off like a Grand Prix racer. I’ll have to get out of this town, I thought, otherwise something’s going to happen.
I got a cloth and wiped up Charlie’s whisky, then poured myself some more. I sat in my chair thinking, I’ll have to get out of this town.
The next day I drove south. I stayed two nights in Rotorua and three in Wairakei. I admired geysers and boiling mud and soaked myself in mineral pools. By the time I came back to Wadesville Charlie was a midge again.
But my five-day cure went for nothing. On the Sunday before school started Joyce Inverarity phoned. Her voice gave me a tiny sexual shock—it had a breathless sound, it echoed along a shaft sunk into my past.
“Paul,” she said, “I hope you’ll forgive me ringing. I thought you might tell me what Charlie said when he came to see you.”
I told her, leaving out what he’d said about her. She thought for a moment. I heard a clicking sound and wondered if tapping that dead tooth had become another habit of hers.
“Thank you, Paul.” She was hesitating. “I’m sorry we troubled you. I’ll try to see he doesn’t come again.”
“What’s happening, Joyce? Is Celia coming back?”
“Oh yes. For School Certificate. Charlie’s got it fixed in his head even girls should have that.”
“What about next year?”
“I don’t know yet. I want her to.” She paused. “It’s been a dreadful week here. They’ve been at each other like cat and dog. He won’t let her go out. She’s been locked in the house all week-end.”
“Look,” I said, “go and see Price—”
“He hit her, Paul. She’s got a cut on the inside of her mouth. I don’t know what it is he wants from her—he’s trying to turn her into some sort of ideal woman—some sort of Virgin Mary. He thinks more went on between you and me than actually did. He’s always accusing me. And Celia’s got to make up for it somehow.”
“Does he know how she got her name?”
“I knew you remembered that. I’d never tell him. He’d go mad.”
If I’d still been in competition with Charlie these revelations would have set me drumming on my chest. But I simply felt alarmed. “Look Joyce, go and see Price. Tell him Charlie wants the girl to leave. Price will get on to him. He’s a solid citizen. Just the sort to impress Charlie.”
“Paul—”
I knew I was failing her. It made me angry with both of us. “I can’t help. Anything I say, Charlie’ll do the opposite. You know that. Price is the only one who can help. He’s not going to let a pupil who might win a scholarship get away from him. Make him tell Charlie she’ll win some money—and get her name in the paper.”
Joyce said nothing for a moment. “All right, Paul. I’m sorry we’ve given you so much trouble.” Her voice was withdrawn and tired. She was apologizing for more than just the last week.
“That’s all right. It’s part of my job as a teacher.”
Celia came back to school with a swollen mouth. Price sent for her from my class. Later he asked for special reports on her work. Price, with his bland whisky face, is a combination public relations man and hanging judge. But Charlie wasn’t easy. He put Price in a temper and we (teachers and pupils) suffered a discipline drive for the rest of the week.
I let myself move a little closer to Celia. I relaxed with her; but still I was cautious, remembering Charlie, and my new ease was more of feeling than of behaviour. Her response seemed modelled on this. She worked hard at her schoolwork. There was a kind of fatigue in her emotions. She was careful to do nothing that might call them into action again. In the meantime her life was Maths, Science, English, History, French.
Mine, out of school, was given to bringing a painless end to an affair I’d been having with a woman called Marlene Wainwright. Painless for her, I mean. My emotions were not involved. Marlene was a speech therapist. (A part of our trouble was that I could never take this title seriously.) She wrote poetry that I thought rather good of its kind: earth-motherish. It was an increasing density in the poems, a kind of urgent obliqueness, that made me suspect she was trying to get pregnant. I saw there was no painless end for her. Marlene was a gin-drinker. One Saturday I made her drunk; firmly, gently—it was like preparing a patient for operation. I sat her in my armchair in the den. I told her exactly where I stood: marriage was out for me, children were out. Hadn
’t I made this plain right from the start? Yes, she admitted, starting to cry. Well then, I said, if we carried on it would have to be under my rules. Rule one: Take the pill. In a kind of hysteria then she told me time was getting short for her, she was thirty-seven. If she didn’t have a child soon she would never have one. “Help me,” she said, “give me a child. I’ll go away. You’ll never see me again.” I said no, and she called me a bloody murderer. I remembered my mother with John, remembered Joyce, and my father’s words on his death-bed. Like him I might know, but would never understand. I had nothing to offer Marlene but another glass of gin.
She ran weeping to the bedroom and threw herself face downwards on the bed. After trying to comfort her for a while I went out and closed the door. I sat in my den and tried to think how else I might have behaved. A retroactive repair job, that was what I needed—some circuit-tinkering in the time of Mother, and of Joyce. I withdrew from examining this in laziness more than fear. I began to approve my handling of the present: I kept my rules, and let other people know what they were. How could I be more fair? I had got rid of my sense of justice. Why couldn’t they?
I went out to the veranda and sat in the sun. While the woman cried in the bedroom I enjoyed feelings of well-being and virtue. Her sound coming thinly through the wall was counterpoint to the discipline of my way.
As I sat there Andrew drove up and parked at the gate. He walked up the path, bringing Jonathan with him.
“Whose is that?” he asked, pointing at Marlene’s Volkswagen.
“A friend of mine’s.”
Jonathan grinned at me. He sat on the edge of the veranda. “I can hear someone crying,” he said.
“Yes. It’s her. She sat on a bee.”
“Honest?”
I nodded. “I had to put blue-bag on it.” Andrew’s presence brought out a weak facetiousness in me. Often it drew material from our childhood. Our mother had used blue-bag on our bee-stings. I guessed from Jonathan’s puzzled look that the stuff probably wasn’t made any longer.
Andrew said, “Can we go inside?” He wanted to get his son away from Marlene’s noises. It surprised me that he didn’t simply take him back to the car and drive away.
