Between My Father and the King by Janet Frame Read Free Book Online Page A

had new bright blue bathing togs.
    We lay on the beach in the sun, half-closed our eyes, and looked up lazily at the remote birds of the air wild and free in the spinning blue sky.

In Alco Hall
    One of the few people who gave comfort and advice to my eldest sister Joan was a middle-aged widow with a name like that of a bird — Gull or Sparrow or Robin. I think it was Gull, Mrs Emily Gull who lived alone in a corner house in front of a clay bank that, unlike other clay banks in the neighbourhood, had no pink-flowering iceplant growing on it. It was typical of Mrs Gull, people said, to leave her clay bank naked to the world! Mrs Gull smoked, too, in the days before smoking was accepted in a woman. She swore. She put on make-up. She committed the crime of speaking to my thirteen-year-old sister as to an equal, and insisting that Joan call her by her Christian name (her Christian name!), Emily. Emily Gull, living alone in a corner house in front of a naked clay bank on an unkempt section where tinker-tailor grass grew waist-high along the wire-netting fence and old cabbages of years ago rotted yellow in their unmade garden beds and a forest of hemlock surrounded the weathered grey boards of a long-untenanted fowl house.
    Mrs Emily Gull. That Mrs Gull. Everyone knew what Emily Gull had been, and how she’d led young girls astray.
    When I listened to the grown-ups talking about her I could not understand for I did not fathom where young girls could be led astray to, and I did not know, though I was curious about it, what Mrs Gull had been. My knowledge of her was so different from that of the grown-ups who talked about her that sometimes I believed they were speaking of another person, a wicked Emily Gull whom I had never met or known. The woman I knew, when Joan came crying to her place, taking me with her clinging to her hand, would invite us into the kitchen while she cooked a meal or baked cakes; and she would never speak an angry word to us.
    â€˜Take a pew.’
    When we had taken our pew and Joan had stopped sniffling, Emily Gull (peeling the potatoes or dropping the ‘dry’ ingredients into the bowl and mixing) would say,
    â€˜Trouble at home?’
    Joan would begin sniffling again.
    â€˜It’s Dad. He won’t see reason.’
    Emily Gull would smile and grunt, ‘My father never saw reason either.’
    Seeing reason was a most admired gift which everyone claimed for himself and denied to others. Perhaps it was not so important to be able to see it, for when you’d seen it no one believed you and you had to keep telling people you’d seen it, and if there were no witnesses how could you prove it?
    â€˜He said I’m too young to go to the dance, that he’ll lock me in the bedroom on the night so’s I can’t go.’
    Now Joan had been given a long purple lacy dress by someone whose name was — strangely — Violet. It was a dress for dancing in. I was four years younger than Joan and had no thought of dancing, but I assumed that if you had a dress for dancing you must surely use it. If you had feet you walked, didn’t you? Ordanced? If you had hands you waved and hit and clapped? If you had a dance dress you danced. And if our father hadn’t wanted Joan to go to a dance he should not have let Violet Jackson give her the dress. Violet Jackson had gone dancing in it. What did age matter? Joan was as grown-up as anyone could be and with a touch of powder and paint and mascara she could make herself look even more grown-up, so why the fuss?
    â€˜My own father was a hard man,’ Emily Gull said.
    We stared at Emily, thinking how strange it was that she’d ever had a father — or a mother. She must have got rid of them early, we thought. Perhaps killed them.
    â€˜Dad’s awful. He’s the worst father anyone had. And Mum’s too soft. If you ask her something she says, Ask Dad, because she’s scared to say. And when Dad says