Free The Good Father by Marion Husband

she was to have this little room so the babies could have the space they needed. It was rotten, but she conceded that it wasn’t unfair. She had always been, as her father kept reminding everyone, including her, sensible.
    Her bedroom remained unchanged since that day, still papered with the same, pink rosebud-covered paper her mother had helped her to choose, the matching curtains still hanging at the window that looked out over the street. Standing at the window, Hope could hear her father and Peter talking in the lounge below; she heard her father laugh, heard Peter’s soft, smiling voice say something in return, unable to make out words, only tone. She had to admit that Peter had a nice voice, quiet – too quiet sometimes because he could never control the classes he taught. She remembered her discomfort when the girls in her class took advantage of him, his weakness – his oddness as she had come to see it. Sitting in that art class, as her friends talked and laughed and ignored his efforts to teach them, she had found her embarrassment turning to anger. He should simply behave like all their other teachers and be firm, as strict as the art mistress who eventually took over from him and wrote such critical reports about her inability to sketch.
    Her father had told her once, ‘Uncle Peter has had a lot to put up with in his life.’
    She had thought he meant Peter’s father, a terrifying old man who would sometimes grab her hand and pull her to him, forcing her to sit on his knee and holding her too tightly, his heavy hand hot on her thigh. The old man had difficulty breathing. She remembered how wet his laboured breath seemed, how it smelled of the peppermints he sucked constantly – sweets he would offer to her, smiling his sly smile. His wheezing was terrible, like that of one of the monstrous creatures Peter drew for his handsome princes to slay. This man would be a lot to put up with, she thought. She had thought then, when she was younger and Peter was still uncle , that he didn’t deserve such a father.
    Lately though, her father had begun to tell her a little about his war and, from his incidental comments about Peter’s war, she had learned that the lot Peter had had to put up with also included being held prisoner by the Japanese. ‘I can’t imagine what he must have suffered,’ her father had said in a rare reflective moment of serious sympathy. She remembered feeling hardly any sympathy for Peter at all, only pleasure that her father had finally begun to talk to her as an adult. After all, he had always treated her as an adult, ever since her mother’s death.
    Hope went to her wardrobe and, opening its mirrored door, stared at her small selection of clothes. The dress she had thought she might wear to the party was pale yellow, with a sweetheart neckline, short puff sleeves and a cinched waist above a full skirt. She was afraid that it would make her look too young, not fit to be invited to an eighteenth birthday party. Fleetingly, it crossed her mind that if this dress did make her look like a child, then Peter would stop looking at her as though she was a grown-up. She let this thought go, not wanting to look like a little girl for whatever reason. She had decided as she’d washed the dishes after lunch that she would begin to treat Peter with a disdainful aloofness. If he wanted to behave badly, then so would she. The decision had steadied her; she felt less afraid of him now she had a planned response to those smiles of his.

Chapter 6
    Hope hardly spoke in the car. As I drove her to the Redmans’ house I tried to think of something to say to her so she’d feel easier about this party. Try as I might, I couldn’t; every opening I thought of seemed too stilted or worse, too childish. I imagined telling her about the drawing I intended to give her of the woodcutter’s encounter with the goblin. But isn’t goblin such a silly word?