Between My Father and the King by Janet Frame Page A

in real life.
    Home and everything in it seemed uninteresting after Emily Gull’s place — her cake and her swear words and her bottle of gin and the crowing noises she made when she laughed and the exciting way she listened to everything you said as if she had been waiting all her life, or ever since she got rid of her horrible father and mother, to listen. I could feel my resentment and sense Joan’s when someone — Mum or Dad — said,
    â€˜I hope you haven’t been to that Mrs Gull’s. I’m warning you to keep away from her and the company she keeps.’
    Now that was strange, for we were her company, she kept us! I’d seen for myself, hadn’t I, that Emily Gull, the kindest woman in the world, knew what no one at home knew, that if Joan didn’t get to the dance she might die of grief; that to go to the Friday night dance at the Scottish and wear her purple lacy dance dress was Joan’s one and only ambition in life.
    Why, I could scarcely believe it when I heard Dad say,
    â€˜You don’t want to go to the dance. You just think you do. You’ll get over it.’
    Three lies — one after the other — from our own father, with no contradiction from our mother, made me want to spit on my hands for a blessing and remember again how the parents took their children into the wood to starve and be eaten by wild beasts.

    Every night that week Joan brought the dress in from the pear tree and slept with it under the mattress where it was safe and the creases of the day were pressed out of it. While it was in the pear tree she kept it well wrapped to protect it from the rain, but luck or something was with her and the week stayed fine and one morning we woke up and found it was Friday. Now I know thatduring this time I was going to school each day and perhaps Joan was too but I can’t remember going to school, I remember only the purple lacy dance dress, in and out of the pear tree, and the vision of the bedroom door locked and Joan inside wanting to get out to the dance. Yet I must have spent, even on Friday, the usual six hours at school, beginning with hymns,
    We are but little children weak
    Nor born in any high estate
    and the sad hymn about the ‘green hill’
    There is a green hill far away
    Without a city wall.
    Everyone knew what it felt like to be without something, and even a green hill without a city wall must have had its feelings of sadness.
    Hymns, observation, sums, composition. Silent Reading and raffia-work (a teapot stand). And after school there were games to be played — hopscotch, baseball, He and She, School, Ranches, Windmills and Sharkie — but that afternoon I did not play games. I could see that Joan had been crying. I wondered if the dance dress was in the pear tree or under the mattress. I wondered if fairy godmothers existed. The nearest to one was Emily Gull and she had advised Joan to do as Dad said! She was on our side, but that was her advice.
    Then, because I myself wasn’t interested in dancing I tried to cheer Joan up by saying,
    â€˜What’s an old dance, anyway? Stay home and play with me.’
    â€˜ Play with you !’
    I deserved it. I was only a child and she was grown-up, andsmelt grown-up. Also there was Professor Plot’s Free Book on Dancing that kept arriving in the post and promising a free book on dancing and though it was a free book it kept promising and never telling, unless you spent money — and that wasn’t free! But Joan kept hoping. She was full of hope. She was even hoping she would still be allowed to go to the dance.
    We had tea. My mother, trying to make peace, murmured,
    â€˜After all, she was given the dance dress, Curly.’
    My father did not relent. Looking up from his meal he spoke a warning to everyone, grown-up or growing up.
    â€˜What I say in this house goes.’
    It did, too. There was no further argument. And when after tea my father said sternly