Between My Father and the King (4 page)

Towards noon Gavin Highly began to prepare a number of packing cases at his front and only door. The cases were labelled ‘Soap Powder', ‘Tinned Beans' or ‘Sunkissed Oranges'. All would eventually contain books, millions' worth, folks said, and old Highly would be someone, richer than anyone in town. He sat crouched like a watchdog on top of the cases, waiting for the men to come and see the books, the experts who lived in clean houses with doorsteps and downpipes and spoutings and taps, hot and cold, and baths; the experts with their folded wallets stuffed to the seams with banknotes. And soon the experts did come, or, rather, one expert. He was an old man, about the same age as Gavin. He was half bald and he looked like a kind ferret, with his long nose leading the way up the path to where Gavin sat like a stone mountain on the cases.

‘Gavin Highly?' queried the visitor.

Gavin looked respectful, ‘That's me, sir. You got my notice no doubt. The books are in here. They mean m'life to me, they're valu'ble books but they've gotta be sold.'

Gavin led the way through the door to his one room. He had spread the books on the bed and the sofa. The thousands were not there — only fifty or so old volumes, some torn, some ragged and zigzagged by the teeth of mice or rats, some without covers.

‘I've talked about them sometimes to people but they're me private life,' Gavin continued. ‘I've never shown them. I don't have people coming here. What are they worth?'

The expert frowned, ‘If they mean your life to you how do you expect me to assess their real value?' He spoke in proper language and he used big words because he was an expert.

Gavin did not answer but reached for a book. ‘This is a hist'ry book. I've had not much education but I know it's valu'ble an' I read it every night.'

The expert leaned forward eagerly and grasped the book. The title? The edition? The publisher? He opened the book and
read ‘Junior History for Schools. Our Nation's Story'. There was childish writing on the flyleaf, somebody's name, Standard Four, then a little rhyme,

Standard Four

Never no more

If this book should chance to roam

Give it a whack and send it home to ME.

The name was written again in red ink underneath.

The expert turned over the pages. There was a picture of Captain Cook, embellished with red hair and a permanent wave and spectacles.

‘The marks can be rubbed out I s'pose,' Gavin said. ‘All old books get some kind of marks, don't they, like stamps, but it's got about when grass grew in the streets of London and the Great Fire and the plague and the people walking from door to door and crying, “Bring out your Dead!” And to think I've got a book about it! And I've others like that, po'try, and the high tide coming up on the coast of Lincolnshire. This is what I call my treasure, and, if anything can buy me a decent house to spend my old age in, it's these books will buy it for me. What are they worth?'

For a moment, the expert looked quite incredulous. Surely old Highly was not serious. Children's history books; old, dirty magazines. ‘Worth millions,' Highly had said in the note he had got the auctioneer to type.

Gavin waited for the expert to answer. ‘They are valu'ble, aren't they? They're hist'ry.'

‘Yes, they're valuable,' the expert answered. Gavin sighed with relief. Real downpipes and spoutings. A doorstep. Taps running hot and cold, a warm fire and no smoke. ‘I guessed their value,' he murmured airily. ‘Though no one's seen them. About what are they worth?'

The expert pondered, ‘A few pounds,' he said.

Gavin looked startled, ‘But there's some mistake — they're valu'ble.'

‘In money they are worth a few pounds, perhaps not even that.'

Gavin opened the history book at the picture of London. ‘Look. Grass growing in London streets, on the floors of the poor people's houses an' up through the cracks in the walls, an' when you go on the street you're going on grass, just like going out onto your lawn, if you've got a lawn.' He turned the pages again, ‘An' look, the Fire in the Fern, that's us, an' the land being fished up out of the sea, and the forest being taken away — it's hist'ry,' he pleaded.

The expert glanced at his watch. He took shelter in formality. ‘I haven't really much time Mr. Highly. Your books are very valuable, I told you that, and they are worth a few pounds, no more. The value is inside you, and I'm afraid you cannot take that down in a van to the auction rooms and call for bids upon it. Love does not go under the hammer, ever. But I must be going.'

Gavin spoke humbly, ‘I see. I've spent years collecting these, down at the rubbish dumps and in secondhand shops. I thought they were rare an' precious. My apologies, sir,' he said calmly and with dignity. ‘But will you stay to tea with me? I don't ever have people to tea, but I like the way you speak.'

So the expert sat down on one of the two chairs to drink a cup of thick black tea. He sat there holding the stained cup in his small wrinkled hands, and he looked like the kindly ferret come to take tea with Gavin Highly in the home that was a rabbit burrow. Away up Central.

After tea, he shook hands with Gavin and left him sitting quite peacefully on the bank of the creek.

By the afternoon the whole town knew about Gavin Highly. Somehow they just knew. Where would he go, they asked, with no money, no house? It was not as if he could make do on social security. And his books turning out not worth anything — it seemed the man had been delivered a mortal blow. ‘He'll go mad,' my father said. ‘A man can't stand a lifetime of dreams being swept away like that. He'll go mad and shoot himself. Or jump off the wharf.'

My brother and I listened, fearful and trembling.

Oh, Gavin Highly and the bird-picked and clouting plums, whose stones told tomorrow, and the blackberries, on which the late-in-leaving autumn sun lavished a shoeshine, hanging around in a gold thirst over the trees. Gavin Highly's trees, and Gavin Highly's creek. Supposing he should die or jump off the wharf. He had to be helped, rescued. So my brother and I, just before the sundown, took some bread and treacle wrapped in newspaper and set off for Gavin Highly's hut.

My brother did some quick calculation, ‘It'll last him pretty long,' he said, ‘All these pieces.'

‘We ought to help him escape,' I suggested. ‘The Health Inspector'll be after him, and you know how he took Lassie to the gasworks — perhaps they'll take Gavin Highly to the gasworks, instead of prison, for not having a proper house.'

We arrived at the fence near the creek and peeped in. We felt afraid. The treacle was sticking to the newspaper, the print getting swamped in the brown coming through. Gavin Highly was sitting on the bank of the creek. He wore his old khaki shirt open at the neck, and beside him was a bag of oysters and in his hand an oyster-knife. He lay the oysters on the bank and — we
could see it clearly through the fence — whenever they opened their mouths he pounced on them with the knife. He was talking to them, saying something like this: ‘Aha, got you. Whenever you open your mouth to breathe or speak, I stick a knife in your throat and kill you! Aha, got you! Never open your mouths to speak again! Got you!'

My brother and I shivered. It was true. Gavin Highly was in league with oysters. How else could he get them at this time of year, anyway? He was in league with them and talking to them. Then he turned to look up at the willow tree. He said something like this — time has changed the words in my mind, but the meaning stays — he said, ‘Willow tree, when your branches die you don't carry them with you to sap your strength, you know they are dead. They drop off into this creek and are buried. This afternoon I came here and buried fifty books below the water. The weed is red like blood, and the creek is a wound of everlasting blood flow.'

We crept shivering away. I threw the sandwiches high onto the hedge for the birds, if they cared for them. We did not speak all the way home. We went to bed and slept deep as willow logs.

The next morning Gavin Highly was gone. No, he was not dead; he was just gone, and no one knew where. Perhaps it was up Central. He may be there today, living in a rabbit burrow, with a rabbit to keep house for him and a ferret — a kindly one — to come for afternoon tea.

My mother was a woman who praised, with God and His Son receiving first consideration and others following in descending order. Her lesser favourites varied from day to day and year to year, but permanently among the mortal chosen she kept the Poets, the Pioneers, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield, Mr Stocker the dentist, and her own mother, our grandmother, whom we had never met.

We were not tolerant children. Repeated praise of the same people made us groan impolitely and because we were what neighbours and relatives used to describe as ‘rude to our mother' we used to say out loud, ‘Oh Mum don't go on about the Pioneers, don't go on about God.' When she described her mother, however, we could not help listening with interest; we caught some of her joy as she described ‘happy times' of her childhood — how her mother had walked with her children in the bush, played games with them, understood them. My mother's delight in her memories
held always the regret that we had never known our northern grandmother, but one autumn — surely it was autumn with huge moons poised over the horizon towards South America, and the soaked morning grass speckled with mushrooms and puffballs that sent up a cloud of poisonous yellow dust when you stamped on them, as you had to do, you had to do, and the air full of cotton and cobwebs and thistledown as if the sky shed its clouds in strands of white fur and silk — it was then that Grandma wrote to say she was coming to visit us ‘after all these years'. My mother's enthusiasm sprang to vivid hysterical life and from morning till night we heard again, with God and His Son put aside along with the Poets, the Pioneers, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield and Mr Stocker the dentist, the stories of our wonderful grandma.

I have said that we were not tolerant children. We were also not civilised — we giggled at Sunday bible readings, we wolfed our food, stuck out our elbows, did not come when called at bedtime, refused to fetch a shovel of coal when asked to; we ran wild and pulled faces and said Bum and Fart and Fuck. My mother's childhood, in contrast, appeared to have been gentle and civilised with all commandments obeyed, while God and His Son and the Pioneers etc. watched with tender care and approval. We wanted to believe — though we could not quite imagine — that our unknown grandmother would, as my mother assured us, share our games and fun and walk with us along the gully and show us how to make pipes that played real music and find twigs that divined water, and name for us the harmless and the poisonous berries and the trees and flowers and, with a special birdcall of her own, entice the birds — bellbirds, tuis, wrens, the riroriro, even the sparrows — for miles around. ‘The birds of the air will fly down and perch on her shoulder,' my mother said with that happy laugh she had where her chin slackened and you could see she had only one row of teeth. The money for her bottom teeth had
paid the rent so that five weeks in our house were, in a strange way, equal to my mother's bottom teeth. I was absorbed in arithmetic at the time and I had a strong sense of horror when I realised the incongruity of the equation.

Long before Grandma's visit Mother took out her few treasured photos and showed us, again, the house and town where she had been born and brought up and the sisters and brothers who had shared her happy childhood. There was the house with the verandah and the cabbage tree and the flag lilies, and Grandma sitting on the veranda with Grandad who had a moustache and was called Alfred but had died before we were born. We heard again the everlasting stories of home and school and work. And Grandma. We began to look forward to her visit. She was to sleep in the front room where the apples were stored. We were to have new dresses with pleats and frilled sleeves and our photos were to be taken on the Japanese Bridge in the Gardens. My mother wrote to Glassons Warehouse, Christchurch, for samples of material which she received in a small rectangular book with pinked edges, and we sat on the form with the book on the table in front of us and turned and touched its cloth pages. My mother took her measurements and marked the material for her new dress which Glassons would make, so much down and so much a week, but it was not every day that grandmothers visited; and our material was chosen — a print of several bright fighting colours — and sent to my father's sister, a tailoress, to ‘run up'.