Between My Father and the King (28 page)

The scones were freshly baked and covered with a clean cloth. Ewart sat eating hot scones, he ate three of them, one was burnt, the other two golden and just right, and there was a blind cord by the window which kept flapping and flapping, a cord like a shawl tassel.

Like Solomon Grundy in the nursery rhyme, Old Charlie Beecham died on Saturday and was to be buried on Sunday, though his birth, christening, marriage and the onset of his illness happened too long ago to be remembered here by days of the week. He had died in the early morning, his wife had phoned the doctor, the doctor had phoned the undertaker, and with the smooth precision of messenger to messenger attentive in the disposal of the dead, before the morning blackbirds began to sing in the three apple trees in the back garden Charlie had been taken for the funeral to his widowed daughter's home one hundred and fifty miles south.

Alone in the house his wife Sadie was preparing to make the same journey by the twelve o'clock Limited. She had declined a neighbour's offer of help, for she who had used the homes and lives of others as legal tender in the currency of gossip trade was aware that rival gossips would find her home stocked with bargains; and more than she could understand or explain she felt that no one
else should see, try, buy or exchange, test or price the death that penetrated every corner of the house, even outside up the narrow concrete path by the clothesline to the washhouse and the dumpy with its weathered heaps of newspapers where old scandals of indiscretions of violence and lust lay week burdened upon week, their details flickering nightly as black-headlined food tempting in the cheese-coloured candlelight.

Sympathetic neighbours, Sadie felt, would rob her. They'll see everything I've got, she thought. Mrs Next Door has eyes like a hawk.

She knew they would take more than the colour and material of her curtains, the age of her three-piece suite, the proud shine of her green and cream enamelled range; the details of knickknacks on the mantelpiece — the old general whose pot belly changed from pink to burgundy when fair weather became foul; the small wooden house with the two front doors from one of which at the approach of a storm a tiny woman with rolling pin raised swung slowly outside to match her brand of domestic thunder with that of the gods in the sky; the pine cone, varnished, with buttons for eyes, to resemble an owl; the miniature ship's wheel and motor tyre that were ashtrays.

If neighbours intruded, Sadie felt, Charlie's death, the house, the furniture, would be handed round at the Bridge or Institute teas as casually as if they were butterfly cakes, or fudge cake that does not need cooking before it is eaten. As an inveterate bargain-hunter, ready reckoner of months at christenings, of guests and presents at weddings, of wreaths and lines in the obituary column at deaths, of signs of good heart and grief in the people (and the furniture) of a bereaved home, Sadie, with a lifetime's experience, knew.

Her centre of concern, though she could scarcely understand why, was the atomiser. It lay on the kitchen table. It had been in Charlie's hand when he died. Sadie wondered if she should
take it with her — then might she not just as well take the bottles of pills, the raspberry-coloured medicine sticky in its square-shouldered bottle? And what use would these be? Charlie had had such relief from the atomiser, and even now the death that filled the house could not quite overpower this last defence. Yet the atomiser was nothing but a half-collapsed little bulb on the end of a rubber cord that had sucked a breath-giving drug from a small bottle. It had been a novelty present among the weather-vanes, kitchen knickknacks, quilted handkerchief sachets, calendars, exchanged between Charlie and Sadie and their old friends Rolly and Joan. At first Charlie had scoffed at it, made jokes about its name, frightening the grandchildren by referring to it as a deadly weapon.

‘One puff of this and you're out like a light. The whole world's out. It's an atomiser, see?'

‘But Mummy's got a squeezy one with powder in it and a nice smell.'

‘Powder? What's powder? Nothing but dust swept up. This is an atomiser, see?'

The children had not been at home with their grandfather, for often just as they were enjoying Old Maid, Strip Jack Naked, Sevens, he would frown, advising them seriously,

‘Cheat fair. Always cheat fair. Do others before they do you. The quickness of the hand blackens the eye.'

Their grandmother's suggestion that they take their grandfather's words ‘with a grain of salt' had increased their puzzlement. Atomiser, talcum powder, dust, grains of salt, the grains of time, too, in the calendar gold-printed beneath the hollyhocks of a country garden:
One by one the grains of time fall and are lost
. What was the connection between these and their Australian grandfather who told tales of his father, Ned Kelly, his grandfather Old Nick, and himself, born up a gum tree among the koala bears? The children were fascinated by the wart, the size of a gum nut, on the
side of his nose; and his long legs that stretched when he stood up and half-folded when he sat down, like the twilight shadows of the blades of pocket knives.

Charlie and Sadie had been married almost fifty years, with more words of sarcasm than of love exchanged between them; and though others not in on the secret might have said, and did say, ‘What a life, bicker bicker!', both knew that what each said to the other was of little consequence: their lives belonged one to the other as footsteps belong to the same feet, whatever shoes are worn.

On a more practical level, it was a different sound but the same feet walking when Sadie tap-tapped in high heels (costume, white gloves, petalled hat) to the morning teas or mudged and murgled in galoshes to pick up the apples. It used to be Charlie who picked up the apples, filled the coal buckets, dug and planted the garden. Then, his asthma growing worse, all he could manage was a row of potatoes and cabbages, a morning bucket of coal, a small basket of windfalls. Finally, he spent his days sitting at the front door overlooking the town and the people coming and going in the street at the foot of the valley and the late-afternoon sea mists floating in to strangle and obscure the southern headland.

In the weeks before his death he had tried to sit motionless; he put as much effort into his breathing as the Olympic athletes put into their four-minute mile. And night after night while Sadie slept an old woman's deep sleep (a lemon crocheted cap over her pinned curls), Charlie knew only the humiliation of defeat when he was forced to get up, to sit at the kitchen table, his breath rasping, choking, one hand trying to hold the cup of tea made from the water in the kettle always on the boil, the other pumping away at the atomiser.

Sadie looked with horror at the atomiser. Oh, it was wicked, she thought, to be dependent in your old age upon stuff sprayed like deodorant or weedkiller into your lungs! It had been no use listening to the argument — intended to comfort — that other people had been worse off, had even less to rely on; for it wasn't a question of other people, it had been Charlie, squeezing away at the little bladder with the warlike name. Atoms. Everyone knew how deadly atoms were! It was not right that something as hideous as an atomiser should take control of one's last breath!

‘My friend,' Charlie had often said, pointing to it. ‘The only friend I've got.'

Then he would smile slyly at Sadie, who looked indignant, then pert, proud of her sharp nature — she belonged in a Doyley Age when sharpness and toughness were inventive, with lacy patterns and peepholes mixed with the considered unselfishness of giving to others the things that, cricking the joints of her fingers, poring over intricate spider-printed patterns, she had toiled hours to make. She could deal, too, as deftly and inventively with the patterns of Charlie's taunts. The only friend he had, indeed!

She touched the atomiser. She felt that she should get rid of it. She did not want to be reminded. She wanted to start afresh — that was the phrase her daughter and son and neighbours would use. Yet when you were old and stale and most of your friends were ill or dead and you'd begun to think of your own death and to pray that when it came you wouldn't be squeezing the wicked little bulb of an atomiser to help you draw your last breath, you did not find it so simple to turn towards anything new or fresh; there was a stale crust of your life that sheltered you and could not be torn away or softened.

Picking up the atomiser as if it were a repulsive creature that yet must be respected, Sadie carried it to the medicine cupboard. It belongs here, she thought, as she stowed it behind the long-unused brick-coloured enema and the bottle of camphorated oil.
A flush of guilt came over her, as if the atomiser or Charlie were reproaching her, as if the thing should have been put elsewhere; but where? Then she smiled sadly at her anxiety. Charlie's reproaches had always been two a penny, cheaper than none except her own when the two edges of her tongue were sharpened on her temper and her pride. The atomiser was useless now and its bulb was filled as much with anxious unhappy memories as with a drug to ease breathing; a squirt of the spray might stop the breath rather than ease it. It belonged, surely, in the medicine cupboard out of sight.

She banged the door shut, turning her eyes from the door-mirror and the face that looked from it as if it too had been shut inside the cupboard and could not get out.
Her
face. Dry eyes reflecting not ordinary dryness but a drought of tears. Eyebags, shrunken mouth, yellowing skin; frizzed dyed hair that for over fifty years had been set, patted, coaxed, laboured over as if each strand had been cotton or wool in Sadie's quickly tatting, knitting fingers.

She turned her face away, separating herself — as people do — from her dismaying image in a mirror, and went to finish packing. Then she toured the house to make sure everything was switched off, shut, locked. How tired she felt! She had been expecting Charlie's death, yet when it came it had surprised, like weather. Like a whirlwind in and out of the house in a few seconds.

She secured the back window and ran her finger along the sill as Charlie, teasingly, had often done. Her finger was covered with an unpleasant grey dust. From the quarry, she thought, trying not to heed the sense of strangeness as she remembered that the day was Saturday, and calm. It must be from the quarry, she told herself. Some days when there was blasting the lime dust came blowing over the hill and inside the house, settling on everything. But the lime dust was white: this was dirty grey.

She found a wet cloth and wiped the windowsill. At least her neighbours could never say she was not a good housekeeper.
Her house had always been shining like a pin and like a pin it had pierced her thoughts constantly. At times Charlie had said, half-joking, half-complaining, when she mopped up a molecule of tea or rubbed away a dot of fly dirt,

‘I could take my tucker and eat off the back step.'

This pleased rather than insulted Sadie. It was good. Was not the true test of cleanliness passed if you could eat your dinner, as Charlie said, off the back doorstep, the kitchen linoleum or the swept front path?

The day was clear, cold. Down in the town the prunus blossoms were showing like snowflakes with blue winter light shining mistily through each flake. In a few weeks the apple blossoms would be out, yet the air was still cold, with surfaces like marble to the touch and a chill curtain every few yards that admitted you and tried to imprison you; there were more such curtains when you were old, and then, too, your blood was a reluctant servant, and old dry bones at every patch of all-day frost on the damp side of the street said
quick-snap quick-snap
with every careful footstep.

The taxi would be coming in ten minutes. In half an hour Sadie would be on her southern journey in Car E seat 48, smoker. Six hours. Crossing brown rivers by green land clumped with flax, tussock, and darkly shadowed macrocarpa. Then Gore, and Molly at the station. Then the newspaper bus to the small country town, and Charlie, waiting. He'd be there now, the wreaths and sprays would be there, the telegrams too (messages to 46 Stone Street) and Sadie would be the last person to arrive. And then on Sunday they would go to the cemetery on the hill and bury Charlie while the plump pampered ewes, nestled by the first pink-white lambs, turned to stare, their slit eyes like minus signs unknowingly foretelling all, even their own savagely simple arithmetic.

There was a sound of gravel on the roadway fronting the gate. The taxi. Honking its horn. Bert Brown, Sadie told herself. His is the only car with a horn like that. If it were Bert he would
come to help with the suitcase. She stood a moment, undecided. Then suddenly, her fingers working as desperately as when she had tatted, crocheted, knitted, she unstrapped and unlocked her case, and hurrying to the medicine cupboard and jerking it open she seized the atomiser. Then she packed it, almost lovingly, in her suitcase, between her toilet bag and her blue winceyette nightie. Even for the sake of the friend who had given it to Charlie, should she not keep it? After all, neither she nor Charlie had scorned to keep, year after year, the clutter of knickknacks and the weathervanes that in spite of their role had never shown the power of prediction, decision and command held by the atomiser.