...He was seven and.....

Their eyes appeared to follow him around the room, sepia eyes behind the dust covered glass, people frozen in possessive poses on that late summer morning of 1885. A hundred years ago now and yet that Irish morning was still here and now; held captive within the dark brown frame of time varnished wood.

The accusations of their eyes forced him to stop his search and gaze up into their prison - pulling him across the room. The sepiaed group looked down on him, their hands on one another's shoulders, the women seated; their menfolk standing in military precision behind them - proud and stern in their love. The children, grouped around their mothers' knees gazing up to the outward looking faces of the carefully dressed and frilled women.

Here, in the big room, the photograph dominated making him feel small, insignificant, alien in the house. There was no real reason for the feeling, the people were remote in time and attitude. his perception of them masked by the frame and its glass and yet he felt drawn to the photograph each time he entered the room, his eyes drawn upwards to stare into the sepia dark eyes of the tall, forbidding figure of the man in the centre of the photograph.

The man, apparently, was seeing something slightly above the camera lens, which was in the distance, for his heavy eyelids hooded his eyes in the familiar squint of a farmer checking his flock. His hand was laid on the shoulder of the woman seated in front of him, his thumb appeared to have been caught in the act of stroking her neck, a small sign of affection in a formal scene.

Below the woman stood two small long - haired girls, their heads turned upwards toward their mother's face.

...He was twelve....

Why this couple and their children should stand out from the group was beyond him, for the rest of the couples in the photograph were all in similar poses. Today it was raining. There was no possibility of escaping into the sandhills or to roam along the creek spotting for whitebait, past the dilapidated hut of Swedish Charlie and his wife to the driftwood covered mudflats of the river. He smiled to himself recalling the thrill of sneaking past Swedish Charlie's. For Charlie had a reputation that made him one to be feared - who else in the immediate past had been asked to fill the kerosene heaters, only to drink the two half gees of fluid and then complain of being unable to complete the task?

The thrill of remembered excitement stirred him, if he couldn't go out then he had to find something to do. Decisions needed to be made, the idea of hiding in the back verandah room to shuffle through piles of old magazines;...Woman's Weeklies, FreeLances, and Auckland Weekly News' didn't appeal, even the forbidden air-pistol and the temptation of taking pot - shots at the fat farm cats palled. The dull grey of the rain was making the normally interesting boring and unexciting.

He found himself at the end of the hall pleased, at least, there was enough light to show that were none of the strange monsters that had scared him when he was seven hiding behind the velvet curtains across the front entrance and that the doors to the rooms off the hall were all open - he could sprint the length of the passage and into the dusk mysteries of the "front room".

"The Front Room" always in a twilight of drawn curtains and hanging dust motes. The room kept for honoured visitors with its formal, ranked chairs; best china on display; the piano and the dark framed photographs of the past.

He stood in front of the family group...its members long since dead. The severe formality of the man in the centre of the photograph claimed his attention. The man's hooded eyes stared back, unblinking, into his own squinting, gaze. The stiff white of the butterfly collar with its shiny black bow tie held the man's gaze above the camera staring directly at him.

He pulled his eyes away to find another interest in the photograph. His eyes skimmed across the boys with their hair long, curly and uncut until they had to go to school, across the girls demure in their lace dresses and back, inevitably, to the high broad fore- head with its stubbled hair of the man whose eyes always called him - noticing the way the man's beard curled around his jaw - a distinguished symbol of his status in the family.

The world spun. He'd been holding his breath without realising it. He jumped down from the chair, leaving the photograph to the silence of the front room. The rain had stopped - the warm dampness of a late summer afternoon welcomed his bare feet as he raced after the lazy slow moving cows, their udders already leaking milk, towards the cowshed.

...He was fifteen, in bed, weak and vomiting the holidays a waste. He lay under the thick counterpane in the large bed, his body sinking into the mattress, the mass of pillows holding his head so he could see out through the lace covered windows across the verandah to the cowshed on the bluff across the creek. The river damp winds of bleak August eased their way through the house to lick uncomfortably down the long passage and around the front bedroom where he tossed the long holidays away with pneumonia cursing himself for getting ill when he could be out chasing after Judy - the girl who sat opposite him in class. She had given him some hope of a date that last day at school.

He forced his eyes to focus on the heavy-framed photograph on the wall beside his bed. It appeared to be a duplicate to the one that hung in the front room for the same bearded, broad foreheaded man, eyes hooded, gazed out at him. He began to examine the finer detail of the photograph, looking at the way the photographer had framed the family, grouping them in the tight precision of the Victorian ideal. The woman seated, hands folded on her lap, her long formal dress held in modest place by the cameo brooch pinned at he throat holding closed the high lace neck of the blouse. Her blonde hair drawn back into a soft roll that made her neck look excitingly naked and vulnerable.

He looked deep into her eyes and felt that he could sense the pride, the longing within her as she posed with her husband standing behind and beside her.

His eyes followed the hand and arm from the woman's shoulder up the thick darkness of the suit coat, across the waistcoat with the cord holding the gold rimmed spectacles in ready reach hanging from the top pocket, to the straight beard and moustache shrouded lips of the man. The hair barely disguised a smile. The man appeared to be laughing at him....he could not remember seeing that smile before.

He felt himself being drawn to the man's eyes, hooded and deep within his head, the dark lines of the brows accentuating the deepness.

He dropped back into the pillows and slept fitfully, faces flickering in and out of his dreams.

...He was nineteen, a student and independent.

Fresh from the Ferry he began the long hitch home, up the Island. The early morning mist shrouded the motorway as he turned north away from Wellington. The only traffic was that from off the Ferry heading for the various hotels or out of town. He hoped that someone would recognise a fellow traveller and pick him up. He cursed the strait and its chop which had churned his gut so much that he'd joined the other seasick travellers in the E deck cabin, hot against the dully-thumping engine room. He'd been unable to chat anyone up for a ride off the boat.

He stroked his beard, grinning to himself, his parents wouldn't recognise him with the fiery red beard already bushing aggressively from his jaw.

His glasses were misted over with salt spray blown from the harbour. He stopped, began to polish them on his shirt. A car pulled over:

"Want a ride mate?"

"Sure. Where ya headin?"

"Palmerston North - Suit ya?"

"Great I'm headin' for Wanganui, you could drop me at Himatangi and I'll go from there." They settled into the comfortable silence of early morning driving - past the surf and rocks of the coast road.

From Himatangi the trip home was easy. A ride to Sanson in a stock truck, a couple of rides with farmers out to get the cows for milking and a final hitch with a honeymooning couple who, comfortably drunk from their first night together, pretended they were in the U.S.A. all the way from Turakina to Wanganui.

It was just going 9.00am as he fell through the kitchen door to his mother's greeting. "Son! When did you get in? How did you get here?" and then the realisation of the beard, "My God, what have you got on your face?" He answered patiently, proud of his beard and its unique colour in comparison to the muddy brown of his hair.

He walked into the front room, the photograph was still there. he rubbed the dust covering from the glass vignetting the face of the man standing, proud, behind his seated wife surrounded by his family.

He stood, looking at the photograph. A sense of deja vu swept over him. He recalled all those other times he'd stood and gazed into the depths of the man's eyes, had eyed, with speculation, the long whiteness of the woman's neck and the fine blondeness of her hair.

He sensed, rather than felt, the coarseness of the cane chair beneath his hand, the hardness of the ring on his finger. The room blurred. He spun away from the photograph and hurried out of the room. He'd seen enough the old familiarity of home was there.

Evening. He cradled the glass of wine in his hands reverently. The dull glow of the table lamp, its forty watt bulb lighting the family scene and no more. He was alone, in the Front Room, away from the jangle of the relations, the tales of Swedish Charlie and his exploits with the meths and the endless boasting about butterfat production and calf ratios mixed with debate on the relative merits of various rugby teams and their players.

The eyes caught his. He sipped , speculatively, from his glass. The wine spread warmly in his mouth, across his tongue. The eyes looked across the rim of the glass.

The cane chair back was gritty under his hand. The light hurt his eyes. He could smell the soft musk of soap and perfume. His fingers teased the stray wisp of hair that had escaped from her combs. He wished the children would go away and leave them together.

He blinked, shook his head. He was alone in the Front Room. He wasn't thinking these thoughts. He couldn't.

The vignetted face smiled at him. He felt himself smiling as he stroked his beard. The noises of the family reunion clattered through the room, a burst of chatter informed him of some one's arrival, probably his Grandmother, she was usually late. The wine warmed his stomach, its deep red glowing in the glass.

He took off his glasses, polishing them on a handkerchief, his eyelids dropping to squint upwards into the photograph, into the face of the bearded man whose hand gripped the back of the cane chair so firmly.

The world spun - a moment of dizziness - usual when he'd had his glasses off for a period. He began to reach for them and remembered that damn photographer fussing beneath the black cloth behind the wooden monstrosity of a camera. He contented himself with a blink, a quick shake of his head. Behind the glass the world moved - the photographer assured them that was all.

The family reunion was in full swing as he came down the passage to refill his glass, the glow of the wine and the momentary flash of the photographer's gun fading in his eyes. He stepped into the room, walked to the wine decanter, past the withered woman whose earlier robustness still showed through in the alertness of her eyes. His back was toward her as he poured the drink. Her voice cut across his thoughts.

"Grandson! Come to me son, I haven't seen you in ages. Don't be an auld fluterer and give your auld Nana a kiss!"

He turned, began to walk towards her. She clapped her hand to her mouth, her eyes widened, a look of absolute surprise lit her face.

"Oh my God! You've grown a beard! Shave it off! You look just like father! He smiled.

"George, doesn't he look like ....." He knelt and kissed her on her forehead, taking her hands in his, it felt right.

"It's O.K.......... Nanna. It's still me. How are you anyway?" The usual pleasantries of questions. He smiled inwardly as he reminded himself he was now nineteen, there was time enough to re-find the woman of his dreams, with her blonde hair that would escape in wisps from her combs onto her long neck as the soft musk of soap and perfume floated upwards from her.

In the Front Room the dark framed photograph hung staring across at the display of china, the piano and the photographs of the past, the family frozen in that golden Irish late summer morning a hundred years ago.

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