I had come home for the university long vacation. This covered the period November, December, January and February, and therefore included Christmas, which in our southern clime comes in the middle of summer.
I did not want to come home. Instead, I would much preferred to have gone backpacking round the country and doing a bit of fruit picking, and perhaps pick up a girl or two to have sex with, since my university regulars were no longer available.
The reason for my going home was my mother. She was alone so much of the time, and by that I mean, my father might be around, but to be with him was really to be alone. He led a life of his own and had almost nothing in common with mother.
At times, he would be away for weeks on end, claiming either work or some leisure activity with “the boys,” as the reason for his absence.
He is a barrister mainly working mainly for large corporations; his task being to bully little people in courtrooms who could not afford to hire a loud mouthed, cynical intimidator of their own to defend them. For this he received fees that stagger the imagination and he knew how to string a case out so as to receive the maximum amount of money, and wear out those with limited means.
One of the results was that we lived, as they say, “High on the hog.” The one virtue I can claim for him is that he did not keep my sister and I short of money, or at least, my sister had been included in his beneficence until she departed from home, apparently for good.
Why she left home permanently has never been properly explained to me. I have my suspicions but have never been able to bring myself to ask mother. I have a further suspicion that my mother sent Barbara money until a few years after her departure, when she married.
Mother and I went to her wedding, but father did not. He declared that he would have nothing to do with “that ungrateful slut.” My sister, Barbara, on the other hand, swore she would never come near our house as long as that “lecherous pig” was there.
When I was about seventeen, and my father had been more than usually obnoxious both to mother and I, I was bold enough to ask her why she had ever married him. It was after all, a question I had asked myself ever since I was about six. In those childhood days, my way of approaching the matter was to inform my mother that when I grew up I would marry her. She would reply with something like, “That will be lovely, darling,” clearly not wishing to delve into the intricacies of such a union with one so young.
Perhaps some description of my mother and father is in order.
Mother’s name is Cleo. Cleopatra really, but she finds that embarrassing. She is tall – about five feet ten inches – slim with long slender legs. She is, perhaps, a little top heavy in the sense that she has a very full bosom. I can recall as a very small chap, snuggling into her cleavage, perhaps as an expression of regret at being weaned from those fountains of nourishment.
Facially she has ageless classical features, with clear creamy skin. Her neck is long and slender, and her hair is a sort of red-gold colour, worn at shoulder length.
I have heard people describe her as “a beauty,” and when, during my high school years I happened to bring some friends home, I noticed how struck they were by her, and one or two became positively horny over her. I made sure that these more enamoured boys were not invited home again.
Mother is a very dignified person; some might call her austere or remote. This was never the case with my sister and I, and we could not have wished for a more loving mother. With others, it was as if she wanted to maintain a wide private space.
Her interests included music, theatre, books and a number of charities to which she not only gave money, but also worked for in a volunteer capacity. All of these, when mentioned in my father’s presence, provoked jeers and sneers on his part.
This brings me to a description of my father. I have already mentioned his profession and his manner of conducting himself in it. This leaves his physical appearance and leisure interests.
Father’s name is Dennis. He is about two inches shorter than mother. He is also ten years older than she is. At one time, so I am told, he presented a fine, athletic figure. Now he has a paunch, and a face flushed and blotched with over indulgence in red wine. He has a receding hairline, and always seems to have a sheen of perspiration over his face.
His general manner is one of cynical disregard of other people’s feelings, and he always strives to put others down, except when he is with “the boys,” in other words, colleagues of similar disposition. When they are together, they engage in a general denigration of all apart from themselves.
As for his interests outside work; he is president of a football club; he has an expensive cabin cruiser in which he and the boys frequently go “fishing”. I put the word fishing in quotations because we never see any fish when he returns from one of these trips, often lasting up to a month. Clearly, he also has had a longstanding love affair with money.
I have my own idea about what “fishing” means in the father’s vocabulary. He also has a serious interest in wine – mainly the consumption of it.
To my youthful question as to why my mother had married my father, she gave in substance the following reply. Father had indeed been a dashing figure when she first met him. He had come to work in her father’s legal practice. In those days he was described as “a brilliant up coming young fellow.”
Mother was in her late teens at the time and he in his late twenties. She became completely captivated by him, and apparently, this lovely young girl enraptured him in turn. Mother did not use the term “lovely” of herself, that is my interpretation.
He quickly asked her to marry him and she accepted just as quickly. What they did not take account of, was the opposition of my late grandparents. They were adamant that their young daughter would not marry my father. Perhaps they saw more deeply and further than my love mesmerized mother.
Grandfather had the whip hand in the sense that my father was then his employee and only in the early stages of his climb to “fame.” To be dismissed from the practice would be a serious set back.
Father, as crafty then as he is now, saw a way round the problem. Being totally enchanted by him, my mother fell in with his plan. She became pregnant with my sister. Mother was eighteen that meant that they could get married without parental approval. This they did, thus presenting my grandparents with a fait accompli.
Grandfather was trapped. If he dismissed father, he put at risk his daughter’s future life, and that of his unborn grandchild. So, he and my grandmother had to accept the situation.
That explained how mother had come to marry father, but there were other questions I longed to ask like, why did my mother and father sleep in separate rooms? That had been the situation ever since I could remember. Why did mother continue to be married to father, especially after the death of her parents that gave her a large amount of money of her own? Did mother and father still make love? Why was father so often away from home? Above all, why was he so nasty to mother? What had happened between father and my sister to provoke such animosity?
Answers to these questions had to wait for several years, and even then, I didn’t get, and don’t think I ever will get, all the answers.
During my rather gross teenage years, I used to think, “If I had a wife like mother, I wouldn’t sleep apart from her, and I’d make love with her all the time (I did not actually think the words, “make love,” but something less delicate).
So there I was, home for the sake of my beloved mother, and as dearly as I loved her, I anticipated a rather boring, and with my father present, unpleasant time.
It was on Christmas Day that father announced that he would be off on a fishing trip with the boys. “Could be away as much as a month.”
Neither mother nor I commented. This was partly because any comment was likely to give rise to a scene, and also because we would be glad to see the back of him.
Saying that, I feel one tiny corner of pity for him. I think he is going to be a very lonely old man who had destroyed the love of a beautiful woman, and failed to enjoy his children.
Almost as soon as he had left the next day, mother became more animated.
“What shall we do, Alex?”
Not understanding the full implication of her question, I made a desultory reply. “We could go for a walk.”
“No, no, darling. I mean, let’s pack up and go away somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I haven’t been to The Peninsular for years, let’s go there.”
