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

Yes she says Yes and when Dad says No she says No, so what’s the use of having a mother at all?’
    I did not quite agree with Joan that our mother was no use. It might have been so with Joan, for it seemed that as soon as Joan became grown-up (and no one but her and me admitted she was grown-up) Dad took charge of her, to ‘train her’, as he said.
    â€˜The girl must have training, discipline. She’s running wild.’
    I wished sometimes that I could get on the other side of things to see the view other people had, especially of Joan, ‘running wild’. She bit and pinched, of course, as one sister to another, and she got excited and enjoyed herself. How, I wondered, was that ‘wild’? I myself found our mother useful chiefly because she was there . If she wasn’t in the dining room she was in the kitchen. If she wasn’t in the kitchen she was in the wash-house. She was always somewhere. She was also useful because if I asked persistently enough for the best biscuits she almost threw them at me,
    â€˜There’s your whack! Now are you satisfied?’

    Sitting in Emily Gull’s kitchen, talking about the dance dress, Joan forgot her sniffling. This day Emily Gull was baking a cake, and ash from her cigarette kept dropping into the bowl.
    She screwed up her face.
    â€˜Why worry?’
    Her face was brown and wrinkled. Her hair, dyed blue-black, was really grey, and to me it seemed as if she camped rather than lived in her house, and this was proof that she was a gypsy and, when she chose, could take her place on the heath with Petulengro and Jasper and others whose story had been in our School Journal and who had impressed me with their earnest conversation and the way they kept saying, ‘Life is sweet, brother.’ I hadn’t thought about whether life was sweet: I merely tasted and swallowed it; but I knew that for some reason Joan wasn’t finding much sweetness in it; indeed, I could have said that for Joan at thirteen, life was sour.
    The matter of the dance dress was perhaps the sourest part she had tasted. To be given a long purple lacy dance dress (with some of it more holey than lacy) and not to be allowed to dance in it was like being told that because you had feet you must be crippled, or because you were given eyes you must shut them and never look out at the world.
    â€˜You see,’ Joan was explaining to Emily Gull, ‘Dad said.’
    Dad said was always final, could never be argued against or changed.
    â€˜I told him it’s on at the Scottish and Bill Grant will be there, and Nance Murphy and lots of others.’
    â€˜And what did he say to that?’
    Joan frowned.
    â€˜He said, Who does Bill Grant think he is?’
    â€˜And who does Bill Grant think he is?’
    Joan shrugged a don’t-care shrug,
    (Don’t care was made to care,
    Don’t care was hung,
    Don’t care was put in jail
    And made to hold his tongue!)
    put her head on one side so that her blonde hair could fall the way she’d practised it to fall, and smiled.
    â€˜Who in the world,’ she said knowingly, ‘does Bill Grant think he is? I’ve no idea. He doesn’t interest me one iota .’
    She had caught that word from Dad who made it sound impressive.
    â€˜Not one iota,’ Dad would say.
    Before she heard that expression Joan used to say Not a jot , which hadn’t half the power and challenge of an iota .
    â€˜I suppose you’d better do as he says and not go to the dance,’ Emily Gull said mildly, while I marvelled at the calm way Joan accepted from her almost the same words that, spoken by Mum or Dad, would have sent her into a rage. Perhaps when parents said anything to their children they always wrapped up the words in something else that could be felt but not seen?
    â€˜Do as he says and don’t go.’
    If Mum had said that it would have had Joan in tears with Why, why if so-and-so can go why