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

thirty-nine-piece dinner service: ‘For you and your wife with best wishes for a happy retirement.’ The thank you and the muffled remarks and the dither of the man who housed his personality on one track, who shunted his life back and forth over rusty rails by sleepers overgrown with dock and dandelion, past cattlestops and flag stations and the red blistered houses with the women waving from the clothesline and the children throwing stones?
    You say you don’t know the cause of Gregory’s death? You would laugh if I told you the cause was a gravy boat.
    At 9 p.m. five weeks ago, Gregory retired. He received his dinner service, coughed his smoker’s cough, and would have liked to spit except that it wasn’t form, and sank deeper into the luxurious plush chair reserved for the guest of honour; sank as a snail would sink into a new shell that offered protection yet nopatterned and worn familiarity. Mrs Firman hadn’t come. Her heart. And her ankles swelled at night. Poor Lil, and here was a dinner service of thirty-nine pieces, dazzling china printed with the new artistic wiggles and squiggles that were part of ‘design’, so the chairman had said, for his wife painted mountain scenes and Queenstown, and his daughter who had been married with her name in The Free Lance also belonged to an art society and herself drew wiggles and squiggles that were, it was said, ‘promising and revealing’. Gregory horned his eyes from the depths of his red house to stare once more at the service. He felt wavery and bewildered, trying to make his gaze reveal understanding and security in the face of thirty-nine pieces of art and modern at that — and then he saw the gravy boat, which immediately held fascination though he didn’t believe in gravy boats. Not really. It was best from the old jug with the crack in the top, or already on, poured unseen in Lil’s world of kitchen, magical rich fluid seeping into the warmth of the Sunday roast, perhaps forming a tiny creek through the cauli, or snowing brown snow only homemade and warm on the blind potato hills.
    â€˜For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow. Three hearty cheers for the man who has stuck to the railway through thick and thin.’
    The guest bowed, looked embarrassed, thought how silly what do they mean through thick and thin. I stuck to the railway because there was nothing else to stick to, and sometimes it was like being a fly on a flypaper, sweet and arsenic, I don’t suppose I’ll find out which till I retire, but I am retired. They say your vitality fails when you retire, the Reader’s Digest has an article on it, and only the other day I saw in the paper about retired people dying suddenly but I won’t die, I’ll garden and help Charlie with that building he’s pulling down, how cheap it was, a bargain. For sale, building for removal. Most buildings go cheap when they have to be pulled down, they’re like us retired people, dinner service andall. And look at Larry Parks, how wizened he’s become, he and his dinner service too. He was a signalman. He used to lean his face like a flag out of the signal box, and even when I met him in the street something in his expression said Go or Stop or Danger and other signals that are strange to the railway. Yet now his face is blank, and it’s queer, as if the very night they gave him his farewell, and his wife in black velvet like a bird, and he stepped out the door into the dark, something came, without any signal, age or fear or an ambassador of death saying, ‘Wait a minute Larry, here’s my gift,’ and there and then on the steps of the railway hall his face and brow were carved in deeper lines, his hair whitened and made thinner on top, the kind of thinness that no radio may offer remedy for . . .
    But they’re staring at me. I’m dreaming. ‘It’s a fine service, my wife will love it.