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.
Andrew is eighteen months younger than me. Later in our lives he seemed ten years older. But when we were children, away from the house, I treated him as if he were a baby. I “carried” him. I would come across him at school in the lunch hour sitting on a seat by himself. He wanted to play games but didn’t know how to join in.
“Come on,” I would say, “we’re going to play Prisoners’ Base.” He would join my side, and be the first one caught, and end up sitting in the sun by himself again. At football he would pick up the ball and move a few steps looking for someone to throw it to but always the pack arrived to flatten him before he could get rid of it. He would pick himself up and stare with astonishment at a try being scored in a corner fifty yards away (by me as often as not—I was good). He took injuries in a stoical way but when he was really hurt he cried frankly, without pride. I saved him as often as I could from the bullies attracted by this behaviour. I was in a dozen fights on his account. One day he picked up a flower from the footpath and carried it down the road to drop in the creek. Saving flowers from death on hot pavements was something even I did at times. Mother had taught us plants could feel. But I was always careful not to be seen. Bad luck for the flower if people were about. Andrew had picked up his in front of a bunch of Seddon Tech. boys just off the school train. When I arrived he was howling. They had stuffed the flower down the front of his pants and were lazily whacking his bum with the peaks of their caps. “Pansy Prior,” they sang. They were fourteen-year-olds and I was scared. I yelled at Andrew to come on home. I knew though there could be no escape, I was going to get beaten up. I was even calm about it. The Seddon boys didn’t want to fight me. I had given them cigarettes at Cascade Park. But they weren’t ready to let Andrew go. They kept on beating him and he kept on crying and turning slowly as he looked for a way out of the circle. “Looks like you’ve got two loony brothers, Prior,” they yelled at me.
I hoed in. Their fists came at my face and cracked my teeth. At first I fought with a feeling of elation: this was the way things were, this was what I had to do. But in the end I was blubbing like my brother. The Seddon boys let us go and we went home together, a mess of blood and tears. Andrew still had the flower stuck in his pants.
Outside our house he said, “Don’t let Mum see.”
“Let’s go down the shed,” I said. He wanted to avoid upsetting her. She was often sick in these days. I wanted to avoid her blame—I knew it would settle on me, not Andrew. We cleaned ourselves at the tap beside the shed. I had my own key to the “den”, hidden between two bricks, but I didn’t consider taking him in. I thought of how to get rid of him so I could go in by myself. The window was boarded over and made a good mirror. I wanted to see how badly my teeth were broken. Andrew looked at them and told me two of the front ones had chips broken off.
“Don’t let Mum see,” he said again.
“How can I stop her?” She looked at our teeth each night before bed.
“She’ll be upset.”
“It wasn’t my fault. What did you have to get in a fight for?” I had a great sense of the injustice of things. I had saved my brother, I had broken teeth and a bruised face, and now I was going to be blamed. I felt like punching him. All he had was a flower in his pants.
“What are you going to do with that?”
He took it out: a sad-looking purple aster. “I’ll give it to Mum.”
She was sick that night. The flower pleased her. Andrew had his dinner in her bedroom, sitting without complaint on his wounded behind and lifting her spirits with serious opinions. I listened through the door, marvelling at his talent. My father looked at my teeth. Echoing Andrew, he said, “We mustn’t let your mother see.” When she called me in he answered, “He’s doing a job for me, Edith.” So I escaped, and the next day my father took me to Auckland, where a dentist ground down the broken edges of my teeth. My mother never found out.
If Andrew was lost at school, about the house he was quick, inventive, jealous. During the winter my father worked around Wadesville as a labour-only carpenter. After John’s birth he had built a new room on the house. My mother slept there with John. There was a bed for Andrew too. Often in the middle of the night we were wakened by my father’s voice in the new room. There was a regular order of events on these nights. My mother would wake, sick or frightened, and pad bare-footed into Father’s room to bring him back to talk with her. He did his duty, yawning, sitting in the hard chair by her bed. It was Andrew she wanted but she never woke him. She knew Father’s voice would do that. It woke us both. Andrew would jump out of bed and hurry to the new room. “I’ll stay with her, Dad.” My father, protesting only a little, would make his way back to bed. Andrew then asked if she would like a cup of tea. He was quick and quiet in the kitchen, and rinsed the cups at the end like a well-trained maid. He put out the light and got into the second bed, but their voices kept on murmuring as I drifted back to sleep. How long they kept it up I don’t know. They must have slept some of the time but the first thing I heard when I woke in the morning was the sound of their voices going on and the sound of John in his cot.
It suited me. Everything was being looked after.
Charlie Inverarity said once that he wouldn’t mind having “that bear”. It was the only time he mentioned our afternoon in my father’s den. The afternoon was a kind of watershed in our friendship. I went down into one valley, he into another. At the beginning of the next year we started secondary school. Charlie went to Seddon Tech., I to Mt. Albert Grammar, and though we met in the week-ends, on the train we had to be enemies. Every afternoon after school I went to the den to read or do my homework. My father had bought me The Last of the Mohicans. I had not been able to hide from him that I couldn’t read it. I think he must have taken advice after that because he bought me books by Rider Haggard and Rafael Sabatini, and Conan Doyle’s historical romances. My other reading was handed on to me by Charlie —sixpenny masturbation sheets bought from a Seddon Tech. fifth former called, appropriately, Sticky Leaper. I read about the sporting Mr. Kock who bowled a maiden over, and heroes less restrained. At the same time I was in love with a line of saintly heroines, who came to perfection at last in Agnes Wickfield. In the winter of 1942 I took Dickens at a gulp. The scene itself is Dickensian. The howling wind, the creaking shed, the boy in the lighted room straining his eyes over old books and drinking cups of sweet tea. Outside, the bare grey trees of the orchard, the wet grass and cackling fowl-shed, the quiet house that held Andrew and John and my mother. I became a cave-dweller. My life has changed very little. The outside was there, I lived in it as before: summer, my family, Charlie, school. But I moved back to the den and Father with a feeling of coming home—nothing more was going to be asked of me. I began to read poetry. I was a kind of termite of the printed word working my way through Father’s Victorians. Browning, his favourite, became mine too. And his discoveries—once a week he went to the city and visited the second-hand bookshops—also became mine. I read—it astonishes me—The Light of the World and The Light of Asia, succumbing to a highly-charged religiosity that vanished the moment I stepped outside the den. In the summer of 1944 I read The Ring and the Book. I was sick with grief at the murder of Pompilia and would have burned Count Guido at the stake. Outside the den I was having my first real affair with a girl of fifteen called Melva Butler. Charlie said she was the town bike (he was sour at missing his turn) but she had her own sort of morality: she believed in affection, she took on only one boy at a time. She was bucktoothed and I had my father’s lumpy nose and coarse pores. Politeness seemed to demand a declaration from me, but after that we didn’t pretend to be in love. I learned about menstruation, the dreadful power of semen, how to use French letters (supplied by American servicemen attracted to Wadesville by Dalmation wine). When she tired of me and moved on, I no longer had any use for Sticky Leaper’s masturbation sheets. (My nose turned up at them now.) I looked around for another girl.
Andrew was not so lucky. To guide him he had only Mother’s lesson that children began in a union of souls. We slept in the same room. One night his voice came out of the dark.
“I think I’m sick.”
“What?” I was nearly asleep.
He began to whimper. “There’s something coming out of me.”
I didn’t have to be told what. I threw my handkerchief over. “Don’t let it get on your pyjamas.” This was all the help I could give. I tried to explain what was happening—tried it blunt and tried it euphemistic—but he answered, “Shut up, shut up,” to everything, in a voice that didn’t seem to be his. In the end I turned on the light and saw him sitting up in bed with his face mottled pink and white and his eyes closed.
“I’ve been thinking dirt,” he said not to me. “I promise I won’t do it again.”
I flipped off the light. A faint whispering started. Listening to the sound of his prayers, I felt a sudden short-lived grief for him. “Andrew, everyone does it.” He was beyond reach of advice.
“I promise, God, I promise. I’ll never do it again.”
He held out for two weeks, then for shorter intervals. I would wake and hear him crying into his pillow.
“For God’s sake Andrew, everyone does it. I do it.”
“Shut up, shut up.”
He tried not to let our mother touch him. He made dawn trips to the creek to get rid of the bits of rag he used. He washed his hands again and again. Sometimes those nights were the ones when he had to make tea for her and sleep in the second bed.
I don’t think things became easier for him until she died. She died six months after John, when I was seventeen and Andrew fifteen. John’s death comes first. I have put off writing of him—reluctant now to face him as ever. It would be too simple to say that John was conceived as a replacement for me. But some thought like this must have driven my mother. She had married for children, and had seen one of those children move steadily out of the circle of redemption. She had no energy to draw me back, some instinct must have told her the struggle would be hopeless, but she had strength to bring another soul before God. I work in a dim light. As I moved away I understood her less, and if I loved her more deeply, more fiercely, I loved her less often. John was born. My father made some mutterings about God’s will, but this was habit. Anger and pain tripped a switch in his mind. He set off along a track already prepared. God for him became an impersonal force, and if His creation was often less than perfect this could be seen as a kind of local accident in the Vast Process of Ongoing. The light is dim for me here too. I followed him only a very short way. His new belief was not evangelistic.
For my mother John’s mongolism was more than God’s will, it was God’s judgement which must not be questioned. I had this from Andrew.
‘Why should John be judged?’ I asked, ‘what had he done?’ I was twelve. We were watching our brother in his cot. I too was angry with God. What right had he to do this? To John? To me? Since the Rationalist picnic and the death of the Flynns’ cow I had known that people could argue about God and not believe in Him, and that He could make mistakes. I saw that John could be a mistake. He was either that or a punishment. And that meant God was either a fool or wicked—wicked as the devil. For a moment He was more real to me than He had been for years. I hated Him. I told Him to come and strike me now or leave me alone for ever. Nothing happened. Slowly I realized I could hate without fear. He hadn’t been able to touch me. And if I could hate Him I could do anything to Him, anything I chose. With a great feeling of power I shrank God down to a dried homunculus. I picked Him up in my fingers and dropped Him out of my life. It was like catching a flea. And that simple expulsion had the power to last. I toyed with my victim for years— God in the grass or in the pile of a carpet, shouting in a tinny voice, “Paul, help me. Help,” terrorized by insects. Having Him in this position I forgot Him—no, him—less quickly than I otherwise would have.
I never had a steady feeling about John. I never knew when I saw him moving slackly in his play pen, or became aware of his eyes or mouth or fingers, or heard when I came in at night the snorting adenoidal sounds he made, whether I was going to be overcome with revulsion or fierce protective pity. It made me furious to see Andrew playing with him as though he were a normal child. “For God’s sake,” I would say, “don’t you know he’s a loony? Look at his face. Look at the way he slobbers.” Andrew would set his face in a look of superiority (both of virtue and understanding) and carry on with the game. My mother’s feeling seemed more natural, though I never knew exactly what it was. It was private. She asked no one to share John with her. Andrew chose to and this was both pain and pleasure to her, but at a deeper level it was irrelevant. John was hers, an exchange in the dialogue between her and God. He was what she had been given. Criticism of him was criticism of God. Along with the maternal feelings that made up my mother’s love for John went a new painful religious ardour.
But to me (rakehelly, popular, randy Paul) he was a public shame. Sometimes as a kind of test of herself my mother would take him into Wadesville. Even at six years of age he had to be taken in his push-chair. One afternoon they were in the street when the school train arrived at the station. I climbed down to the platform with Andrew but when I saw them I went back into the carriage. Andrew crossed the road, kissed our mother, and put his school-bag on the front of the push-chair. “Where’s Paul?” I saw her ask. They looked across the road and saw me sitting in the carriage. Andrew’s face went red with rage at what I was doing to her. My mother’s expression was one of pity. For the first time in years she seemed to be seeing me. Even John had his slanting eyes on my face. I stared back, sick, accusing, until my mother spoke to Andrew and they went down the street towards home. The train pulled out and I went on to the next station. Sitting in the little orange shed in the the middle of vineyards I made wild plans. I would wait for the train to come back, go to the wharves, work my passage to South America. I would enlist and fight the Japanese. I was sixteen, I could do it. I saw how my death would punish them. Then, calming down, I thought I would simply go into Auckland, get a job and a room, and vanish. But when the train came back I let it go past. I walked along the railway lines to Wadesville and sneaked through the orchard to my father’s den. I sat there waiting for him to come and rescue me. After a while I turned on the light and started to do my homework. My father came down after dark. I knew from the noise of his boots in the packing shed that he was angry with me. I wanted to run again. Even the den wasn’t safe.
“You’ve got no consideration, Paul. Your brother is ill, your mother’s frantic. And on top of this you don’t come home. It’s very thoughtless of you.”
I asked what was wrong.
“Your brother’s having convulsions. They think he’s dying.”
“Andrew?” I said, stupified.
“John.”
I remember thinking, Good. Good that he was dying, good that it wasn’t Andrew. Then I started to cry. My father put his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s all right, Paul. We’ve always expected it, haven’t we?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you want to come up now?”
“I’ll stay here.”
My father went back to the house. Later he brought me some bread and a cold chop. I sat in the den eating, drinking tea. I began to feel safe, I began to feel happy. It became a kind of picnic.
At about ten o’clock my father came down again to tell me John was dead.
My mother’s death, by far the more important event for me then, seems now only a coda. She died of a kidney disease that had begun to trouble her shortly after John was born. In the last months of her life she could not leave her bed. My father hired a woman to nurse her and do the housework. This woman, Mrs. Philips, cooked small delicate meals for my mother (“What we’ve got to do is tempt the poor lamb”) and mountains of greens and potatoes for us. The only instruction mother gave was, “Make sure they get enough to eat.” Out of duty she made this foray into the world, and did not know how out of character she sounded. I’ve never found out where she was the rest of the time. Andrew probably knows.
She went into a coma on the day the Pacific war ended. Church bells were ringing and the fire siren sounding when the ambulance arrived to take her to hospital. She died the next day.
My father started going to the Unitarian Church. Andrew stayed a Presbyterian. Liking words more than meanings, I called myself an agnostic.