He read of Lorna Doone from red-bound pages (and I survey now, thirty years after his death, his pencilled annotations that are the nearest I will get: repute means good reputation, dialect a branch of language, coquettish is fond of flirting / flirtatious, eternal reaper could be death), and he had bands that fastened with mother-of-pearl buttons, a bandanna fringed with silk, knotted ribbons of turquoise and grey, corded ribbons of violet and umber (all part of what uniform? — sacred or carnal?) and scout tabs, too, embroidered with: 8th Adelaide (c.b.c.) (did they nest on his shoulders?) and another that said just: South Australia (where did that go?).

I sat in the dark lavatory and wondered what happened to my father to change him from the pious child, the ‘dear Maurice’ of the letters. I could not equate the virtuous boy with the husband who bought friendship with my mother’s thirty pounds.

(Did it happen when he failed the eyesight test for the Railways and took instead the job at Holdens that he hated? Did it happen on those long Sunday afternoons when he read of Joyful Mysteries and kicked his heels? Did it happen when the mother whose favourite he had always been, left him and went to live alone?)

Perhaps the pious child and the virtuous boy never were; just as the father never was.

(It is idle to speculate. I will never know.)

I wiped my eyes as my mother adjusted her clothing and pulled the chain. I clasped her hand — for the path seemed longer, the darkness darker, the dining-room farther away. My mother struck a match, and we began the journey back.

EIGHT

Grandfather Hanrahan and Great-grandfather Collins lived next to each other in Dew Street. Their semi-detached cottages were separated by a small side yard. Each was joined at the spine to a redbrick twin. Grandfather Hanrahan’s neighbour remained anonymous, but St. Teresa, where Great-grandfather Collins lived, drew status from being next to the priest’s house. This house with its rosary-clicking stillness, its incense-laden spruce hedge was lovely.

I visited the grandfathers every Sunday.

My mother called me when it was time, took me out the gate slung with lavatory-creeper, waved me down the lane.

At the corner I turned into Dew Street and advanced slowly along the familiar Kindergarten path. Without Nan to restrain me I stooped to collect bobby-pins from the gutter and saw jelly-fish phlegm, examined initials on fences, saw a man do pee by Olricks’ gate.

I passed the stuccoed turrets of Bradeys’ where rhododendrons blazed on gravel; gazed longingly at the chemist’s mock-Spanish villa, where once I hunted for a lost ball and peered into brushwood greenhouses, saw a bird’s nest at the top of a tree. I passed the monkey-puzzle and the bamboo lane, caught the spark of sun-flowers that told me I was nearly there. Came to number twenty-three and the grandfather who waited.

Once my grandfather was a slender young man in a butterfly collar who stood at the seaside with the child Bob in a linen suit, and a lady in muslin and a cartwheel hat. The lady was my grandmother. Suddenly they were all gone: Bob to the marble cemetery, my grandmother too, and the young man quite vanished with his butterfly — become a grandfather who was fat and lived alone.