didn’t!”
“Why not? It can’t do any harm.”
“What did he say?”
“He sounded intrigued.”
I moistened my tongue and said, “What exactly did Lawrence say when you told him your theory?”
“I don’t remember. He didn’t say anything.”
*
The father ?
I thought about it for a long time after she went out. I told myself the idea was ludicrous, even as I continued to turn over the possibility in my mind. Lisbeth has a way of upsetting one’s preconceptions and insinuating a thought into the subconscious that remains like a hangover long after the trouble has passed. All right. The father was a hard man. That was what Huey had said, “a hard man”. Yet I had presupposed a bond of affection between father and son, a deep bond, that remained unbroken. Certainly the father had “disciplined” the boy. But what did that mean? Certainly father and son had moved apart in the days before the killing and a violent argument had taken place when Huey announced he was going away, so the court heard. The word that appeared in the transcripts was “devastating”.
“What do you mean, ‘devastating’?” Lawrence had asked the father. He cross-examined the father saying, “Did the two of you come to blows?”
“No, no,” the father replied, mildly. “I think we just avoided each other.”
For some reason Lawrence had accepted the father’s reply uncritically and left it at that.
The father was quite fly, according to George Woodhouse. He drove a five-dollar car of Russian descent, a small ill-tempered vehicle with a bent fender and a broken side lamp; the windscreen was pitted and on the back seat sat a plastic drench can containing petrol, with a hoserunning under the bonnet to the engine. The petrol tank had rusted out.
So what did that make him?
There was something about the father that resisted close analysis. OK, he had given the boy a hiding for stealing a sum of money when he was seven; he had picked up the boy and thrown him against a wall. He could be violent. But I refused to see him as a monster.
I heard nothing from Lawrence. I had not told him about my visit to Pikipiki and saw no reason to inform him now. I spent the days preparing a seminar on prison reform and reading into jurisprudence, of all things, trying to plumb the breaches of human rights that were occurring in Fiji (there had been another coup), and hoping the New Zealand government in its wisdom might send me up there again. The seminar I had been asked to organise, on “prisons and problems”, was to be held at the Quaker Settlement in Wanganui. A Quaker most of my life, I had a mistrust of orthodoxy—I think of spirituality in terms of individual relationships and the memory of people I have known and admired—and had never visited the Friends’ Settlement at Wanganui where the young James K. Baxter had once gone to school. I accepted the commission with some reluctance.
The days passed. In February Lisbeth’s cousin Bubi came from Melbourne. The two cousins had been at school in Hungary when the war came, then fled with their parentsto Austria when the Soviet Red Army entered Hungary and “liberated” them in 1945. They had fetched up in displaced persons’ camps in Austria, then lost touch and found each other again twenty years later on the other side of the world, Bubi having migrated to Melbourne and Lisbeth, after meeting a New Zealand diplomat, having married him and ended up in Wellington. Lisbeth and I met in 1966 after she and her husband separated. We were married in 1968.
Some time in March I was approached by a publisher to write my memoirs. I protested, saying that although I was the author of more than two hundred published papers and articles, none of them having the slightest pretension to literary merit, I didn’t see that a book about my life would prove any different. The editor who approached me was one of those postmodern persons, by name Victor (actually a “she”), who seemed to
“Why not? It can’t do any harm.”
“What did he say?”
“He sounded intrigued.”
I moistened my tongue and said, “What exactly did Lawrence say when you told him your theory?”
“I don’t remember. He didn’t say anything.”
*
The father ?
I thought about it for a long time after she went out. I told myself the idea was ludicrous, even as I continued to turn over the possibility in my mind. Lisbeth has a way of upsetting one’s preconceptions and insinuating a thought into the subconscious that remains like a hangover long after the trouble has passed. All right. The father was a hard man. That was what Huey had said, “a hard man”. Yet I had presupposed a bond of affection between father and son, a deep bond, that remained unbroken. Certainly the father had “disciplined” the boy. But what did that mean? Certainly father and son had moved apart in the days before the killing and a violent argument had taken place when Huey announced he was going away, so the court heard. The word that appeared in the transcripts was “devastating”.
“What do you mean, ‘devastating’?” Lawrence had asked the father. He cross-examined the father saying, “Did the two of you come to blows?”
“No, no,” the father replied, mildly. “I think we just avoided each other.”
For some reason Lawrence had accepted the father’s reply uncritically and left it at that.
The father was quite fly, according to George Woodhouse. He drove a five-dollar car of Russian descent, a small ill-tempered vehicle with a bent fender and a broken side lamp; the windscreen was pitted and on the back seat sat a plastic drench can containing petrol, with a hoserunning under the bonnet to the engine. The petrol tank had rusted out.
So what did that make him?
There was something about the father that resisted close analysis. OK, he had given the boy a hiding for stealing a sum of money when he was seven; he had picked up the boy and thrown him against a wall. He could be violent. But I refused to see him as a monster.
I heard nothing from Lawrence. I had not told him about my visit to Pikipiki and saw no reason to inform him now. I spent the days preparing a seminar on prison reform and reading into jurisprudence, of all things, trying to plumb the breaches of human rights that were occurring in Fiji (there had been another coup), and hoping the New Zealand government in its wisdom might send me up there again. The seminar I had been asked to organise, on “prisons and problems”, was to be held at the Quaker Settlement in Wanganui. A Quaker most of my life, I had a mistrust of orthodoxy—I think of spirituality in terms of individual relationships and the memory of people I have known and admired—and had never visited the Friends’ Settlement at Wanganui where the young James K. Baxter had once gone to school. I accepted the commission with some reluctance.
The days passed. In February Lisbeth’s cousin Bubi came from Melbourne. The two cousins had been at school in Hungary when the war came, then fled with their parentsto Austria when the Soviet Red Army entered Hungary and “liberated” them in 1945. They had fetched up in displaced persons’ camps in Austria, then lost touch and found each other again twenty years later on the other side of the world, Bubi having migrated to Melbourne and Lisbeth, after meeting a New Zealand diplomat, having married him and ended up in Wellington. Lisbeth and I met in 1966 after she and her husband separated. We were married in 1968.
Some time in March I was approached by a publisher to write my memoirs. I protested, saying that although I was the author of more than two hundred published papers and articles, none of them having the slightest pretension to literary merit, I didn’t see that a book about my life would prove any different. The editor who approached me was one of those postmodern persons, by name Victor (actually a “she”), who seemed to
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