Page 56 - Gullivers

Worse than the shadowy absence, the blank space that I rushed to fill with benign and ill-conceived ideas about ideal fatherhood, was the rupture created by the wanderer’s return. A whirlpool of hope - and terror - that Father would stay home this time, and anxiety that he might abandon us again, would consume me. If I were honest, I might admit that I probably always resented this intruder’s – this stranger’s - forays into Mother’s predictable, orderly household. I resented his claim on her attentions in the early days when he touched her
arm and whispered to her and when she blushed and treasured the trinkets he brought from early voyages.
Yet, however bad it was to be obliged to share Mother with him, what seared me to the quick was the effort of holding my head up in public. His travels took him to outlandish shores and inevitably his accounts of them became increasingly grotesque and bizarre. Long before he took to spending his days in the stables or permeating the house with the stench of horse, and leaving a trail of oats through the morning room, I was certain my friends were passing remarks about his eccentric, not so say wildish, traveller’s tales. I had not failed to notice the way they gleefully and mercilessly poked fun at Jonathan Sutcliff ’s pater. He was a man from Nether Redriff known to favour malt whisky more than was good for him, and a neighbour had confided to the local grocer that Sutcliff senior had spent a night in a drunken stupor on the doorstep of the family home. Every time I saw boys cluster and whisper and guffaw, I imagined they were discussing Father’s tales. The tall tale he told about boys and girls playing hide and seek in his hair in the place he called Lilliput particularly fuelled sullenness in me. Not only because it was preposterous and clearly an untruth (although of course that clearly was the case), but because - and I would not have admitted this back then – I wished that he would have played hide and seek with Betty and myself. Just once.
Did I fancy that the boys refused to meet my gaze aster news spread of the Lilliput chronicles? Did their eyes bore into my back during lessons, or was
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