Between My Father and the King (20 page)

So the next morning he went to town to the electrical store and asked to see their ‘electric blankets please'.

The salesman gushed, ‘Double, single, thermostat, one heat, two heat, three heat, we have three brands.'

‘Tell me about them,' said Peter.

And the salesman told him and Peter left the shop, carrying under his arm a large deep cardboard box containing an electric blanket. He held it tightly as if within it lay the power to generate and preserve all the warmth in the world, to imitate sun and fire and hot day, all warmth, to dispel ice floes and mounds of snow buried deep in mind and body and land, to kill the shock of stone in the shade, or marble tombed beneath the sea, of frost black and bitter on the pansies and the dahlias furred once crimson in the sun, to alienate forever the gold globular icicle of moon.

Meva was happy to have the blanket. With Peter, its care became a ritual. It's guaranteed, he would say to himself, stroking the soft square of magic. Always, before, Meva had made the bed because she liked a little hollow, a den on her side, and he liked his side straight and hard, and only Meva seemed ever to know the correct juggle to produce the plain and valley. But now, with the blanket, Peter would say, leave the bed, I'll fix it, and every night
at six or seven o'clock after assiduously cleaning and straightening the mattress he would spread the blanket under the sheet, connect it to the plug, switch it on, and feel for himself the conjured warmth sliding through the thick pad of cotton. And by the time Meva came to bed the blanket had even warmed the room and lay as a challenge to lurking frost or moon.

Or death.

Meva is safe, Peter thought. Or am I mad? What have I made myself believe in? I have made her warm. It is not true what they say about death cold as the grave. Meva is warm, I too am warm.

It was halfway through winter that Meva died on a night that was moonless and blackened by the worst frost, the invisible dark that grips the beanflower and the skin-pale baby cherries. Peter woke and knew that Meva had grown colder than stone or marble. The blanket has failed, he thought, and wrenched the cord from its socket. I will trust no more guarantees. And he leapt from the bed, felt beneath the sheet and gently rolled his dead wife away from the electric blanket, withdrawing the blanket itself from the bed. Carefully now and without panic he folded it to fit back in the deep cardboard box living under the bed. He had pulled it too hard at one corner and the cotton padding stretched in a soft slab of snow. Then he sat down in the wicker chair by the bed and wept for morning to come quickly and the sun to shine on the kitchen window and the paling fence and the smoke-blue cloud of catmint.

Joe left the bowl of dark blue and bog loneliness — the swampy flaxy tussocky town skewered with telegraph poles and smeared with burned gorse. He climbed from the rut, dusted himself of habit and a few dead years, and took the Limited up north to Auckland.

‘The jumping-off place to Sydney,' he said to himself. ‘Who knows?'

He was full of hope.

First, he thought, a place to live for a while, maybe a job, not school teaching, then, Get Out. The country's a fish and a bone, they say. Who can walk on the back of a fish or tapdance upon bone for the secret of living?

Yes, well, a place to live, then.

The front windows of the hotel looked wide into the eyes of the sea. The back windows of frosted glass decently obscured a yard containing — if anyone cared to find out — a pile of wood;
a turquoise car; two or three hatted and crammed rubbish tins; a brick building used by the men customers between five and six o'clock. The windows on one side faced a shopping area — a street where a telephone box stood like a stray burning dovecote; an upstairs dancehall; a downstairs milkbar; a decayed wooden wall painted with a faded, once vivid-green plea,
BRING
us
YOUR HOUSEHOLD LINEN
. The fourth side of the hotel overlooked another yard, a playground leased from the rats, where after school and at weekends gleeful children cried and quarrelled.

No guests were disturbed, however, by these ‘everyday' aspects of living, for a thick lace curtain was fixed across the lower half of any window that was not frosted or facing the sea.

‘You will find the harbour view very beautiful, Mr Hislop,' the proprietress said, as she took Joe's five shillings and unhooked his room key from the wall. ‘You are number eleven. It doesn't give directly on the water; but listen . . .'

The place was like the inside of a shell: when you walked the fragile, ancient staircase, it shuddered as with the tide; there was a secret swishing noise going round and round like blood in your head. Ah, Joe thought, not long now and off on the sea of blood I sail in my peagreen boat — and that,
that
sort of thinking is what comes from school teaching in cowmuck and cream. But how the old hotel rocked with the sea! You could hear the flood-wild and trapped murmur surging from the bar.

The proprietress, Mrs Possum, of all names, passed his room key to him. He took it, like a pledge. She placed his two half-crowns inside the mouth of the safe. It was an old and shiny safe, like a child's outsized money box got up in worn uniform — it even had brass braid around the edges. Joe glanced at it, with down-to-earth and profitable thoughts of jemmies and gelignite and blowtorches; then he tried to remove his guilty thoughts by using the habitual and hated detergent, the guaranteed whitewash of respectability.

‘I'm a school teacher, you know.'

He thought, Now she'll be proud to have me. I've got to trade on something, some secret handshake or badge or poppy on my lapel, to give myself some standing.

He repeated, ‘Yes, I'm a school teacher.'

The words had the same effect on Mrs Possum as a cushion and the plea, ‘There, put your feet up.' She was tired. A school teacher. They were quiet and paid promptly. You didn't find them in the bar, day in day out. They were on time for meals, too, with school finishing early, and that was important for keeping the staff satisfied. Surely there was no one quite so harmless and well mannered and considerate as a school teacher. Even to making his own bed and wiping out the bath after him.

She shut the door of the safe. Seven threes are twenty-one, carry two, seven thirteens are ninety-one.

‘So you're teaching in the district?'

‘No, that is, not just yet. I'm on research.'

‘Oh. Research.'

He would want the utmost quiet then.

She led him to number eleven, apologised that in a small hotel like Harbourview the guests carried their own bags and were not provided with extras such as morning trays, suppers, afternoon teas; that it was better to be early for meals in case the staff wanted to get away. Then she reminded him that if he went onto the balcony at the front he would have a wonderful view of the sea.

‘Not a ship leaves for overseas without we know.'

She spoke possessively, as if she had rigged a secret bell under the threshold of ocean, to tell in a flash what ships trod the harbour, to help her to spy on them, perhaps prevent them from going. Joe felt a moment of panic in case she would try to stop him from Getting Out of the Country. He looked more closely at her. She was tired and grey and wore a mottled glinting dress of some grey material, he guessed it might be called oyster grey but
he was not up in fashion lingo. How strange, standing inside a seashell with Mrs Possum who dressed herself like an oyster — but that,
that
sort of thinking is what comes from school teaching in flax and tussock.

With a final word about the wonderful view and a reminder of the hours for dinner, how the staff wanted to get away, she left him. He did not explore his room, fling open the wardrobe, shuffle out the drawers, for fear an ocean would flow out and over him; nor did he draw the lace and foam shroud of curtain that fitted so tightly, dirtily brown, across the lower pane of the window, but he pulled the light cord and lay down, shoes and all, on a coral hillock and paddock of eiderdown. So I am a schoolteacher, you know, dot and carry one, and I've leased a seashell for a couple of weeks, with an oyster to look after me, but the thing is a beer because I remember I am Getting Out of the Country.

He went downstairs to the bar, collected half a dozen bottles of bitter, upended the glass from the shelf above the washstand, and began drinking. He poured and drank beer till the shell suddenly echoed with the boom of an Eastern-sounding gong. The small unharemlike Harbourview shook. Dinner. Joe glanced at the card on the dressing table. It told him the mealtimes, the price of his room and how often he must pay the landlady. It told him how to get into the hotel if he were late coming home at night. There is a back entrance, it said, and revealed the secret of it. Joe felt very pleased. He finished his last beer, wished for more but no genie brought it to him, and not unsteadily drunk he went downstairs to find the dining room. He could hear an unleashed violent roar coming from each of the public bars. It must be close on six, panic-time, he thought. Kids at play hour. He groped at the foot of the stairs in the direction shown by a painted vermilion thumb labelled Dining Room. The same muffle of dirty foam covered the glass door of the dining room. He opened the door.

Where should he sit? A woman in white, who seemed to be
peeping at intervals through the swing-door at the end of the room, hurried up to him.

‘Good evening. Your room number?'

He gave the password. ‘Eleven.'

She looked respectfully at him. He could not guess why, unless she knew he was a school teacher. Could she, so soon? And did it make all that much difference?

‘Oh, you're Mr Hislop the school teacher. I'll put you with Mr Blake at this table.'

He sat while she dangled a menu in front of him.

‘Soup,' he said, ‘thick soup.'

‘Crème Julienne. And to follow?'

‘Pork.'

The waitress looked less respectful. Pork. Just like him to have pork when it was a small roast, with few servings. Most likely they would all have pork. Nothing like being stubborn; still, it was the cook's worry.

She withdrew the menu and walked quickly through the door to the pantry. Joe heard her cry out something like Help Help Help, it was some kind of urgent desperate cry. He chose the soup spoon and held it, waiting. He hoped he was not going to feel drunk after all. No doubt they could smell it on him. Furtively he cupped his hand over his mouth and breathed into the cupped hand, then sniffed his outgoing breath. It was beery all right; but he was in a pub wasn't he, after all — no, no, a seashell, trapped there; and the door was opening and here was the oyster, the married oyster; and that,
that
sort of thinking is what comes from school teaching in sheep and cloud.

Mrs Possum and her husband looked worried and tired. She smiled at Joe, trying to convey to him that she was glad he was early for his meal, and surely, being a school teacher, he would understand how important it was always to come early so the staff could get away. Then she looked about the room for the rest of
the guests, searching each place, anxiously, as if she had entrusted each guest with a pearl to be returned each meal, on time, so the staff could get away . . . As an incentive, Mrs Possum wore a string of pearls, and the same grey glinting dress.

Halfway through his meal Joe felt dizzy and sleepy and thought it best to retire to his room. The waitress, seeing him get up without even touching his pork, looked near to tears.

‘Did you find it overdone?' she asked him.

‘No,' he said in a loud voice. ‘I've got a bone in my throat.'

Indeed he felt as if he were about to choke.

‘But you've had no fish,' the waitress protested.

‘It's a bone, all the same.' He leaned towards her. ‘What'll I do for it?'

The waitress smiled down at him. ‘Eat something soft, a bit of bread will do, I'll get a bit of bread, or some crumbs, but surely you know, you being a school teacher.'

She left the room to get him some bread, and he did not wait for her return. He felt sick. He got up, quickly, and went to his room. He found that his eiderdown had been removed, his pyjamas taken, without permission, from his half-opened suitcase, and laid invitingly upon his bed which was turned back ready for the night. Evidently they wanted him to go to bed. So he went to bed. He lay there, feeling the bone in his throat and knowing it was useless to swallow anything that he hoped would stop it from hurting. He tried to think of the soft cosy things he had wrapped round the bone all the time he had been teaching. What had he used to soften or dissolve it? Cottonwool, lambswool, feathers, white bread, silver poplar seeds, tussock — he had swallowed them all, or given them to others to swallow to ease the bone in his throat. And what about white of egg and lemon juice? Words mixed with white of egg and bleached with lemon juice should have taken the pain away years and years ago; but the thing stuck — you couldn't pad it or bleach it or dissolve it or neutralise it,
so how about Getting Out, having a small interview with fish not piper, pakiti nor the dead fish of one island, the floating bone of the other island, but . . .