The Mathesons at Home

1

It was the early summer of ’55, about the beginning of December, one of the driest spells for twenty years. I’d been lent a bach at Paraparaumu, near the sandhills, a ramshackle place with cocksfoot grass growing high round the back verandah. Day after day the sun rose like molten steel, and I lay out on the sand, or in the sand of the bamboos at the bottom of the garden, too dozy to roll over, reading Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade – ‘Ninety- eight per cent of the human body is water,’ he thought. Polly Dacey is all salt water. She sat by his side like a flood in an apron . . .’.

I lived on eggs and bacon and mushroom soup heated on the electric range in the small, smelly kitchen. My wife was away down South. I would have spent the evenings in the new posh pub built at the corner for motor campers; but I’d had to lay off the grog six months before, and I knew what it would do to me if I got on it again. So I went to the pictures on my own, and walked along the wet sand, thinking about God and Te Kooti and my old girlfriends, while the sun flamed down behind Kapiti and young mosquitoes whispered in my ear. That’s how I came to meet the Mathesons. One evening, a few nights after I’d settled in, I was standing on the beach watching a plane glide down towards the ’drome, straight as a carrier pigeon, on a perfect tilt,page 275 with its lights warm on the wingtips. Someone cleared his throat behind me. It was a tubby, middle-aged man in shorts, bald-headed and smooth about the jowls.

‘A fine sight, isn’t it?’ he said. His voice had a brassy, optimistic ring, the voice of the Old Man of the Sea, exercised in a hundred school staffrooms and meetings of the Ratepayers’ Association, confident that a man-to-man talk can cure anything from bleeding piles to juvenile delinquency. ‘I often stand here and watch the planes come in, and think of the fine young men who become pilots these days. A life of adventure. We’ve made great strides, great strides . . .’. He went on in this strain for some minutes; and I did not try to check him, though vacuous depression rose like a groundfog in my mind. ‘You’re new in these parts, aren’t you?’ he said at last. ‘My name’s Matheson. Arthur Matheson. I keep an eye on everything that happens on this beach. A beach holiday’s a fine thing after the year’s toil. And you’re out here on your own. A meditative man, like myself.’ He laid a talon lightly on my shoulder. ‘You must come over and see us some evening. Just me and my wife and our son; John, he’s the youngest of five. There’s no ceremony with us. Just drop over. What about tomorrow night?’

The snare had tightened round me. I mumbled an answer which he took for assent. His thick, androgynous body swerved aside and he began to climb a track through the gritty swordgrass. ‘Remember,’ he shouted, beaming at me over the top of a brushwood fence as if about to whinny. ‘Tomorrow night, Mr Gantry.’ How he knew my name I could not guess. Perhaps he had asked at the store. He left me, as a bulldozer leaves a field, scraped clean down to the grassroots. That night his hunter’s voice blared endlessly among my dreams.

At eight o’clock the following evening, in sandals, floral shirt and my oldest flannel pants, I walked up the steep gravel road towards the Mathesons. Their house was unmistakeable. Among the shabby baches its trim green lawns, knee-high fence and rose arbour, sang protest to the world. On the front lawn stood white plaster penguins, dogs and gnomes. They would never bellow, bark, or waddle through town to the bright blue summer sea. They were taken inside every evening after nine to sit beside the coal-box and the broom bucket.

Old Man Matheson was watering hydrangeas by himself. The brisk water- jet gave a curious impression that he was urinating into the bush. I saw him now more clearly than I had in the half-light of the beach the night before. His back was straight, his belly round as a Christmas pudding; his wattled face shone with health; but the hard, dead bird’s eye stared down at the flowers as if they were children whom he suspected of talking in morning assembly. This, and an indefinable rigidity in his posture, convinced me that he had been long years in the same profession as myself. One can smell a schoolteacher, even watering a bush in shorts and sandshoes. The trace ofpage 276 human decay lingers under the long-established carapace.

‘Ah, Mr Gantry!’ He smiled a wide sentimental smile. ‘You’re here in good time. Punctuality. It’s part of good manners, I always say. But not all the young people are the same as you.’ The thick-fingered talon rested again on my shoulder. ‘Come in, come in, and make yourself at home.’ He steered me up the concrete path to the front door. Though the air was heavy with the heat of the day a coal fire burned in the sitting-room, behind a brass firescreen polished to brilliance, representing an Arab and his camel. In the small glassed bookcase beside the window stood a few unfingered books. I moved closer and glanced into it. A Living Philosophy of Education by Carleton Washburne; Ideas Have Legs by Peter Howard; Familiar Quotations by J.C. Grocott; three volumes of Winston Churchill’s memoirs; These New Zealanders by Robin W. Winks. He saw me looking and smiled again. ‘My little treasury,’ he said. ‘Since my retirement I’ve found great refreshment in books. Ideas have legs. The world of tomorrow will be changed by ideas. Mother’ – he turned towards the fireplace – ‘Mother, this is Mr Gantry, the young man I was telling you about. He and I had a most interesting little talk on the beach yesterday. What did you say your vocation was, Mr Gantry?’

I had said nothing to him about my job. But the heat of the sitting- room and his cheerful hypnotic voice overpowered me. ‘Schoolteaching,’ I answered. ‘I’m teaching at Miramar’ – and then more rashly – ‘sometimes I do work for radio as well.’

A shapeless shadow detached itself from the corner beyond the firescreen. The ebbing light from the sky beyond the window showed a woman with a heavy, spade-square face. The lips were pale and moustached. The eyes had an irritable needle brightness which I had seen before only in the eye of a broody hen. She wore a thick wool cardigan. Her lank grey hair, in an unbecoming pageboy cut, hung over long, burnished earrings. Her broad, misshapen, almost dwarfish body gave a sense of huge vitality turned in against itself and continually jarring.

‘Mr Gantry. Yes, I believe I’ve seen your name in the Listener. You write verses, don’t you?’ The last remark was made in a tone suggesting that my credentials would have to be examined carefully.

I nodded and mumbled as my head swam in the heat. Then I sat down carefully on the edge of a leather armchair which gaped behind me like an undertaker’s wagon. ‘Our son, John, has shown a talent for poetry. He has written several poems about birds. There are a great many birds in this neighbourhood. A worldly neighbourhood.’ She did not make it clear whether birds were worldly per se, or whether the neighbourhood made them so. ‘When Arthur retired from teaching we decided to settle here because it was the best climate for my arthritis. Arthur, as you will know, was headmaster at Northland School. A profession only suitable for a man with a true sense of vocation.’ The needle eye bored into my face. ‘I have hopes that John willpage 277 enter the ministry. There is great work to be done in New Zealand by men of moral integrity. Would you not agree, Mr Gantry?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘yes, of course.’

‘The youth of this country are in special need of guidance. But there are wolves among the flock. I’m afraid that moral laxity is widespread, even among professing Christians.’ The spade face buckled slightly at the edges. ‘Have you been long in Paraparaumu?’

‘Not more than a week.’

‘I trust you will be able to accompany us to church next Sunday. Our minister is a man of great eloquence. We are members of the Methodist congregation.’

‘I should really go to the Anglican church,’ I said.

She did not seem disposed to accept the evasion. But her husband broke in. ‘We mustn’t press Mr Gantry, mother. After all, John Wesley was Church of England.’

‘Yes, that is true. I have heard from Arthur that you are staying in the Randall’s house. I have met Mrs Randall. She has most peculiar views on the rearing of children. I’m afraid that God has played little or no part in that home. The house is in a sad state of disrepair. I believe that Mr Randall’s addiction to drink is one of the main causes. Have you sufficient bedding?’

‘I sleep on the floor. In the spare room. I only need a single blanket.’

Her face stiffened visibly. She seemed about to give birth to a crayfish. But the door opened quietly. A boy of fifteen stepped into the room. She turned her face toward him. ‘Shut the door behind you, John. My arthritis will not allow me to catch cold. This is Mr Gantry, whose verses appear in the Listener. I have told him of your interest in that branch of literature.’

The boy blushed from his neck to his hair. He was a slight, fair youth in patched long trousers, ungainly in his movements, with dark hollows under his eyes. His expression in his mother’s company was continually anxious.

‘Mr Gantry is also a teacher,’ said his father. ‘He might be prepared to give you some coaching in football. Mens sana in corpore sano, as I always say. I’ve tried to interest John in fishing and duck-shooting, Mr Gantry. Both manly sports. They were my favourite sports in my own youth. But unsuccessfully, I fear.’

That evening I learned a great deal about the need of Moral Re-Armament in the teaching profession. The boy made no contribution to the conversation.

I paid only one more visit to the Mathesons; and that was nearly a month later. But the weekend after my first visit, on a scorching Saturday afternoon, I was lying under the bamboos at the bottom of the garden. Beyond the island of shade the ground roasted quietly, brown grass over baked sandy clods. Tom Randall did not love gardening; beyond Social Credit and bottled beer, he did not love anything but his hard-dialled, sweet-as-a-nut, garrulous wife and, at third remove, his three scruffy kids. That day I had given uppage 278 Dylan Thomas for a Science Fiction paperback about twelve-legged intelligent crustaceans on the moons of Saturn. An eight-legged intelligent grass spider dropped down on the page I was reading. The grass rustled behind me. I looked up expecting to see a crustacean with a cigar; instead I saw a thin boy of fifteen with a brown paper parcel under his arm.

‘I’ve got something I’d like you to look at,’ he said. ‘If it’s not bothering you too much. Poems. I write them myself.’ He handed me the parcel and then stood still for a moment. Colour flooded his face. Before I could speak he had turned and run out the gate.

That evening in the bare front room with its view clear out to Kapiti I read through the manuscript. Two grubby school exercise books; the verse written in a sprawling hand – much of it, as I had feared, thin lyrics in the style of Harold Monro about the reassuring song of unidentified birds, and stillborn meditations on God and man. But the last poems in the second book showed a remarkable change. They were photographs of a spiritual landscape, desolate and forbidding; the verse had convulsive energy. I found myself reading some lines again and again –

Hither upon a black far-rugged plain
Such as in lunar spaces might be seen
A shape of dark despair in silhouette
Against a pale-lit sky of brooding hate.
Most twisted, gibbous, is this monster-thing
With low swart countenance and jagged fang,
Yet piteous entreaty in fixed eyes
Lifted towards the merciless moonrise
Whereto it stumbled on with broken feet . . .

The rest of the poem relapsed into a conscious piety. But these lines, whatever their meaning, expressed a very different mood. It appeared the boy had been reading Wilfred Owen – his ‘piteous entreaty in fixed eyes’ was almost a direct lift from Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. But, rightly or wrongly, I felt he had penetrated to the bitter core of the negative spirituality which blanketed both his parents. It shook me considerably. I did not want to be involved in the problems of an adolescent boy locked in a concrete dungeon with Methodist Manichees. Yet he had brought the poems to me, for ‘criticism’, and he would expect a real answer. I waited with mixed feelings for his next visit.

It did not happen for several days. Then one evening at half-past eight I heard a light knock on the door. I opened it. There stood the boy, gawky in school shorts, wearing also in spite of the heat a gabardine overcoat. The dust of the road lay thick on his woollen socks and sandshoes. I felt a strong impulse to give him back his manuscript, with a few polite remarks, and sendpage 279 him on his way. But his strained, eager look changed my mood. I asked him inside.

He sat at the square rickety table Tom Randall had made, his body rigid, his fist clenched under his cheekbone. ‘I had to tell a lie at home,’ he said, fixing his gaze on my floral shirt. ‘Mother didn’t want me to come and see you. She said that any friend of the Randalls can hardly be a true Christian.’ ‘What do you think?’ I asked. It seemed that the Mathesons saw me as

a potential corrupter of their son. The situation both irritated and amused me. It crystallised my vague intention to draw him out a little; to give him ammunition for a war he would one day have to fight.

‘I don’t know,’ he said frowning. ‘Mother is a very good woman. People think she is a saint. But she must make mistakes sometimes.’

‘I’ve read your poems. I think some of them are very fine indeed. Don’t take too much notice of me or anyone else, though. A man’s got to follow his own line. You’ve been reading Wilfred Owen?’

His face brightened astonishingly and his body relaxed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone in the world can write like him.’ He walked over to the mantelpiece and picked up a piece of twisted driftwood which the Randall children had found on the beach and which Jean Randall had polished. He caressed the smooth, female surface of the wood. Then he began speaking about Wilfred Owen. In a high, light, monotonous voice he recited Owen’s poem about the dead soldier:

. . . And in the happy no-time of his sleeping
Death took him by the heart. There was a quaking
Of the aborted life within him leaping . . .

His recitation moved me. It was entirely real. It seemed as if he was able to stand completely behind the poem and see the world through Owen’s eyes. Yet what, I thought, does a fifteen-year-old boy know of death? Death of the body or the smaller deaths of an agony of mind.

‘You know what Owen is getting at,’ I said. ‘A pity he was killed before he could write about a different kind of life. Or perhaps he was burned out anyway, like a flare in the dark. What do you think, John?’ It was the first time I had used his Christian name.

‘Call me Jack,’ he answered sharply. ‘That’s what they call me at school. They always call me John at home.’

We talked for several hours while the big moths, with glowing eyes, and brittle wings banged on the window. Of his own poetry and the philosophy of Wilfred Owen he spoke without reticence, even brilliantly. On all other grounds he was as naïve as a ten-year-old, echoing, as if word for word, his mother’s pious dogmas and his father’s elephantine clichés. Once I tried to break through the crust. ‘Have you got a girlfriend, Jack?’ I said. ‘You mustpage 280 meet some lively little pieces out here in holiday time.’ I spoke crudely, perhaps cruelly, to try and reach the real boy behind the intricate defences.

His face became completely blank. ‘No, I don’t know anyone like that,’ he said. ‘Mother says people shouldn’t go out together till they’re grown up and going to get married.’ Only his hands desperately gripping the edge of the table showed that the remark had any meaning for him. I did not try the same tack again.

From that time onward, usually three times a week, sometimes more often, he would call at the house. Sometimes he would bring a new poem. He would talk excitedly for hours. He had lately bought a volume of Keats’s letters and knew many of the passages by heart. Adolescence is tough for everybody, I thought. I did not always welcome him very warmly. But for a month, while Christmas came and went, we talked together in the Randall’s bach. The waves lapped or grumbled on the beach; the drought held. Then, just after the New Year, my friend Butch Kent drove out from town to visit me. He parked his tarry old Buick half in the ditch and half in the gateway.

‘I’ve come to get you,’ he said bashing me on my sunburnt back. ‘You old sodomite. You may be off the grog but I’m not. You’ve been sitting on your sucker too long doing nothing.’ Butch looks like Lofty Blomfield and only likes people, especially people in the King Country where he teaches. With him he had brought his girlfriend, a lush thrush in bell-bottomed trousers with a voice like a mason fly. They tried to get me to go down to the pub with them. When they could not, they went down themselves and came back with a bottle of Gordon’s gin. As Butch shambled in the gate, bottle in hand and yelling, I saw Old Man Matheson hurry by on the opposite side of the road. He did not stop or speak.

We sat in the front room and babbled like canaries. Butch had brought a tape recorder, with recordings of a number of obscene army songs. The bold, canned voices bellowed out over the sandhills to the sad, moonlit sea. I was very happy.

When Jack walked in I did not see him at first. I looked up from the girlfriend’s rope sandals and trim red toenails to see that thin, grotesque figure standing motionless in the doorway. The gin bottle stood half empty on the table; I was trying inefficiently to make the lush thrush sit on my knee; Butch lay flat on the floor doing chest exercises. The tape recorder was telling the world the story of Eskimo Nell. No doubt it seemed to him a pagan Saturnalia. He did not stay more than a minute; and during the next week I saw nothing of him.

Then on an early Sunday afternoon I was sitting outside on the front steps reading a letter from my wife. She said she hoped I was bearing up under the strain of baching, and that she had bought a new strapless bathing suit for three pounds ten. The rest of the letter was a list of the groceries I would have to get the day before she came home. At the bottom of the letter one of thepage 281 children had drawn a boat in green crayon with this inscription, older than Sanskrit – ‘ThiS iS a bot dAdy by ME’.

The gate banged suddenly open and an old untidy man strode up the path. It was Arthur Matheson. There were tears running down his cheeks. For once he had nothing to say. Roughly he gripped me by the arm and dragged me out into the road. Somehow he did not look foolish any longer. ‘John’s dead,’ he said. ‘Dead. Come and look at your work.’

I walked beside him up the road to the Mathesons’ house. He led me round the back. A small army hut stood there, with climbing roses on the walls and roof. He pushed me up to the door. ‘Go in,’ he said, and look at him.’

The one room of the hut was very tidy. Beside the wardrobe stood a fishing rod; on the round mahogany table a pile of books; and above the head of the narrow camp stretcher an enlarged photograph of Mrs Matheson. It was splashed with blood. The boy lay curled on the bed with bare feet and the muzzle of a shotgun inside his clenched jaws. A mess of hair and brains covered the pillow; his eyes were wide open. The back of his head was blown off.

I turned to the table and picked up the copy of Wilfred Owen which lay on the edge. A folded paper beneath it began to unfold as I lifted the book. I read it standing there in the middle of the room: –

Dear God – I can’t go on the way I am. You know I’ve prayed again and again for you to take this terrible thing away from me. Sometimes I’ve wanted to tell other people, but I know they would only lock me up, and it would still be with me. Why did you have to make me at all? You know I don’t want to hurt Mother and Father. But I would rather die now than go mad when I am older. I’ve tried again and again to stop but it’s no use. So forgive me for what I’m going to do now.

The letter was unsigned. I put it in my pocket with the copy of Owen.

Matheson was waiting for me outside the hut. ‘You’ve seen him,’ he said. ‘Then you can go. Go to Hell where you belong.’ I wanted to punch him in the middle of his tear-wet pudding face. But I went out instead, down the concrete path and out the gate, away from the plaster gnomes and penguins and dogs, into the cool sea air and the rain that was beginning to fall.

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