A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  Young girls change so much in adolescence. This is apparent not only to their seniors but to children like me. It was a year since I had seen Eden and if I had met her in the street I would not have known her. She was beautiful and she was grown-up. The Veronica Lake hairdo was not yet in fashion and she wore her hair in that style too awful ever to have been revived, the front rolled up and back into a sausage, the back hanging loose. Eden's beauty could not be spoiled by it. To me it seemed wonderfully chic. She had a gymslip on, a plain, round-neck pinafore, not one of the old box-pleated kind, a dark red blazer with her school crest on the pocket, and hanging from one shoulder, her satchel. She kissed me and called me her little niece in a very kindly way, asked me how my parents were – Vera had forgotten to mention my mother but Eden did not – and said she hoped the train journey had been pleasant. Then she went away to her room, emerging ten minutes afterwards with powder on her nose and lipstick on her lips, her school tunic changed for a skirt and blouse. She seemed even older. We sat down to Vera's enormous tea, working our way through sandwiches and cakes and buns, and tea was always to be the principal meal of the day, this first one being no festive exception. It seems strange to me now to think of those teas, the bread and butter and mountains of sweet food we ate, at least four rounds of bread each, at least one slice of cake, a series of small buns, slices, biscuits, cupcakes. None of us put on weight or came out in spots. And we ate like that every day as a matter of course at five o'clock, Vera encouraging Eden and now me to stuff ourselves, saying it was all good, wholesome and home-made food. She seemed to have the idea that everything bought in a shop was bad for you and everything made at home good for you, a widely held view responsible, no doubt, for many an untimely death.

  Eden said she would teach me to make puff pastry.

  ‘Will you?’ I said but perhaps in a doubtful tone.

  ‘Wouldn't you like to learn?’

  I didn't know. It was a subject on which I had no opinion. I was not even clear about what puff pastry was and I believe I confused it with the choux from which éclairs are made. My mother wasn't much of a cook and both my parents disapproved of girls being taught domestic science at school, my father, however, at the same time believing such things would come naturally as, in his innocence, he thought they had to his sisters.

  ‘What do you like to cook?’ asked Eden.

  When we are old, we know how to answer. We know how we should have answered when we were children. I should have said, I'm a little girl, and I've never so much as tried to toast a bit of bread without having my mother say, leave that, I'll do that. We had registered for food rationing though it was not to start until the following January. I should have said that if predictions were right in a little while there wouldn't be anything to make puff pastry with. But that would have been rude, even ruder than not thanking her for her birthday present…

  ‘I can't,’ I said, taking another lemon-curd tart for support, ‘actually cook anything.’

  They both registered the kind of shock that is not altogether surprised. A barrage of questions began as to what I could do, and this did not mean theorems and French verbs. Having elicited from me that I could neither knit nor sew, crochet or embroider, Vera sighed as heavily and looked as despondent as if I had said I could not master the alphabet or control my bodily functions. She said, incredibly:

  ‘Well, I'm sure I don't know what kind of a wife you'll make.’

  But Eden, always apparently kinder, told me not to worry about it. No doubt I had never had the opportunity to learn but now I was at Laurel Cottage – a place she made sound like an institute of good housekeeping – there were all sorts of things she would teach me. After that they ceased to give me their undivided attention, indeed they gave me scarcely any more attention at all, and began a mysterious, diffused conversation about people who lived in the village whom I had never heard of. One of the difficult things about my Great Sindon relatives was their way of assuming you knew exactly whom they meant when they referred to someone or other and when people called that you would know who they were without being introduced. This would have been all very well if they explained when you confessed your ignorance but instead they became very scathing, at least Vera did, and told you that certainly you did know, of course you knew, but due to some carelessness or forgetfulness well within your control – simple indifference probably – the identity of so-and-so had been allowed to slip your mind. And this assumption that the rest of the world was completely au fait with their ways extended to custom and habits, so that without being told one was expected to know what time to get up, when to use the bathroom, where the back-door key hung, when the milkman came, who was Eden's best friend, what subjects she was taking for her Higher School Certificate, the vicar's name and have by heart the timetable of the Colchester bus.

  I had expected great things of my stay with Vera, a stay of necessarily indeterminate length and governed by whether or not bombs started falling on the north-eastern suburbs of London. Homesickness I had considered as a possibility, for I had never stayed away from my parents before, but I thought this would be compensated for by my enthusiastic reception into a kind of sisterhood with Vera and Eden, I making a welcome third in their lonely sorority. My Uncle Gerald, I knew, was away somewhere in the north of England with his regiment. Francis was at school. I was old for my age, people frequently said so, and I thought my aunts, one only a few years my senior, would treat me as another adult, another sister even. It was a vision or dream I was never entirely to abandon, in spite of constant disillusionment. Desperately I wanted to belong. They had the power, those two, of making their world – narrow, confined and bourgeois, as I now see it – an esoteric, intensely desirable place, rather like an exclusive club with unimaginably strict conditions for membership and with rules no outsider could live up to. Sitting at tea that first day, not knowing what a weary haul was ahead of me, what attempts to enter and qualify, what failures, I listened attentively, hoping, though hoping in vain, for some inquiry to be put to me, asking my opinion instead of the kind of question I finally got:

  ‘Do you always eat with your right hand?’

  I had never thought about it. I looked at Vera, holding aloft (in my right hand) the last of the drop scones.

  ‘I don't know.’

  ‘Left hand for eating, right hand for drinking,’ said Vera, adjusting as she spoke the positions of my plate and my cup and saucer.

  I helped her with the dishes. My mother had told me that while I was at Laurel Cottage I must try to be of some service to Vera, and at a loss to know what service, had suggested drying dishes. Conversation had come to a stop, for Eden had retreated to the living-room with a book to read for homework, and talking was always easier when she was present. I think it was at this point that I was conscious of the homesickness beginning.

  We joined Eden. We had the wireless on. At ten to eight Vera suggested that in ten minutes time I go to bed. It had not crossed my mind I should go to bed before they did. Nine-thirty was my bedtime at home and that only when I had to go to school in the morning. There would be no school here.

  ‘I was always in bed before eight when I was your age,’ Eden told me. Her voice was sweet and low-pitched. It may be my imagination that makes me say it often had a vague note as if the speaker were not much interested in what she was saying or in the person to whom she was saying it.

  ‘Children always make a fuss about bedtime,’ said Vera.

  ‘You mean Francis. I'm sure I never did.’

  ‘No, I don't think you ever did, Eden. But you were different from other children in so many ways. Come along now, Faith. It's starting to get dark.’

  In two months' time it would start to get dark at five!

  ‘Good-night, little niece,’ said Eden. ‘You'll find you'll fall asleep as soon as your head touches the pillow.’

  Nothing could have made me feel more thoroughly excluded from the sisterhood.

  I was to sleep in Fran
cis's room, though on subsequent visits always in Eden's. There was nothing of his about as far as I could see, nothing to show me that this was the bedroom of a boy of my own age. Artifacts made by Vera which proliferated about the house were not lacking here – embroidered cushion covers, seat covers in petit point, pictures made out of silver paper, a cross-stitch bell-pull, a rag rug. Perhaps Francis's own things had been put away in my honour. What had not was a round metal clock that stood on the mantelpiece.

  I was aware as soon as I was inside the bedroom with the door closed of the loud, metallic ticking this clock made. When Vera had brought me up here earlier with my suitcase I had not noticed it.

  I unpacked and put my clothes away, rather intimidated by the hangers in the wardrobe, all of which had covers on them of ruched satin in various colours, and each a lavender sachet attached to its hook. I put on my dressing-gown and went to the bathroom, the sounds from downstairs making my homesickness return in a wave. Vera and Eden were chatting away in animated fashion and every now and then Eden laughed. It was quite unlike the way they had behaved while I was with them, lively and relaxed and somehow cosy, and the conclusion was inescapable that I had been sent early to bed because they could hardly wait to be rid of me.

  The problem of the clock, too, began to loom large. I thought I shouldn't be able to sleep with that clock in the room and I quickly discovered that, short of breaking it, there is no way of stopping a clock of that sort once it has been wound up.

  The book I had with me distracted me for a while but then I became nervous lest Vera or Eden saw the light under my door. Somehow, young as I was, I already knew that, though they had sent me to bed because they were tired of my company, so could scarcely care whether I slept or sat up all night reading provided I were out of the way, nevertheless they would not admit this, they never, never would, but would insist that the bedtime they had ordained was for my own health and well-being. Therefore they had better not see my light still on at nearly 9.30. Once it was out, the ticking seemed to grow much louder. The room was not dark, for the moon had come up, a glowing, yellow harvest moon. It afforded enough light for my purposes… I got out of bed, set one of the cushions on the seat of the pale blue and gilt Lloyd Loom chair and stuck the clock on it, having first wrapped it up in my dressing-gown.

  The ticking was muffled but still audible. The awful feeling came over me that I should never be able to sleep and that this would not be for one night only but many, many nights, a hundred perhaps. I would be trapped in here with this clock, unable to escape it, sleeplessly suffering its tick like someone subjected to the Chinese water torture. With Hans Andersen's tale of the princess and the pea I was familiar, and it seemed to me that if the princess's discomfort had stemmed from an auditory rather than a tactile source it would have made a better story. For a while I thought about this, turning over in my mind what sound might be as disturbing to a princess as a pea buried under the twenty mattresses she is lying on. But it was only a momentary distraction from the ticking of the clock which thumped away through the folds of my dressing-gown.

  Vera and Eden came up to bed. On the landing outside my room they kept their voices down so as not to wake me.

  ‘Good-night, darling.’

  ‘Good-night, darling. Sleep well.’

  The landing light went out. I picked up the rag rug off the floor and wrapped it round my dressing-gown, round the clock. The muted tick was rather worse. I had reached that desperate point – often to be experienced later in hotel bedrooms – when the only way to escape the noise seemed to be to leave the room. I was no more able to do this in Laurel Cottage than I was at the Plaza in New York when an all-night party was going on next door. At the Plaza I made frequent fruitless calls to reception who were polite, willing but unhelpful. Here reception was asleep and would not, I sensed, have in any case taken kindly to a complaint of this sort. I opened the window and looked out.

  Moonlight flooded Vera's beautiful garden. It had never been much of a garden in my grandparents' time but Vera had re-made it, replacing the flowering currants and sumacs with viburnums of esoteric varieties, with a Cornus alba and a smoke bush and many herbs. Of course I was not to know that then but its beauty I could appreciate, the refinement that had come to it by the substitution of these rarer plants for the common ones. The moonlight bathed whitely the leaves, brilliant gold at this season by day, of a delicate, fluttering, man-high liquidambar. The window sill was a broad one, made of stone. I unwrapped the clock, placed it on the sill and pulled down the sash.

  Some momentary qualms came to me while I was doing this that Vera might come into the room in the morning with, say, a cup of tea. Or for some other, unknown, reason. I felt she would be sure to notice the absence of the clock. But with luck, anyway, I should waken before this happened.

  The peace was so beautiful that I tried to stay awake simply for the pleasure of listening to the silence. This, of course, had the effect of sending me to sleep. When I woke up in the morning at about seven-thirty, I remembered the clock and fetched it in, beaded all over with dew but still ticking. There was no reason, I thought, why I shouldn't do this every night. Rain might present problems but I would worry about that when the time came. I began to wish I knew the proper time to get up and if I went into the bathroom, would I be keeping Eden, who certainly had a prior claim, out of it? The house was silent. I debated what to do and after about ten minutes, having decided that Vera and Eden were still in bed, I got up and went into the bathroom to wash. Later on Vera was to ask me why I hadn't had a bath and to adjure me to take a daily bath and not be ‘lackadaisical’ about it. There was still no sound in the house.

  The clock back on the mantelpiece, wiped dry on my handkerchief, I made my way downstairs. The house was very neat, all the cushions in the living-room plumped up. The dining-room was empty. I pushed open the kitchen door, hardly knowing why since I was scarcely capable of making a cup of tea, still less my own breakfast. They were both in there, silently eating shredded wheat out of Woods Ware rectangular bowls. I jumped, a start observed by Vera, who seldom missed anything of that sort.

  ‘My goodness, aren't you nervous! You shouldn't be like that at your age.’

  Eden said that I had nearly missed her. She had to leave at eight-fifteen. Her voice was full of reproach and the implication that to come down to breakfast at this hour was to show a lazy disposition. Vera, who had sprung up when I came in and was now tensely poised between larder and stove, asked me what I should like for breakfast. A variety of foods was reeled off at high speed: poached eggs, boiled eggs, fried eggs, bacon, cereal, toast. There was, however, no porridge. Porridge, she said, was too much trouble to make when neither she nor Eden was likely to eat it. I said I hated porridge.

  ‘It's a pity to take that attitude about wholesome food,’ Vera said.

  ‘But you said…’ I began.

  ‘I said, I said. I hope you're not going to take me up on every little thing I say, Faith. I don't suppose I am as logical as you and your mother. I don't have the time, for one thing. Now then, have you decided what you'd like for your breakfast or shall I sit down and finish my cereal while you think about it?’

  I said I would have a boiled egg. Vera began moving about with over-burdened resignation to get out a saucepan, an egg from the rack. Eden jumped up.

  ‘Let me do it. I've finished. Sit down, darling, you're up and down like a Jack-in-the-box.’

  Eden, in gymslip, her hair tied back with a black silk bow, bustled prettily about, buttering ‘soldiers’ for me.

  ‘Three minutes all right?’

  ‘Could I have five, please?’

  ‘Well, of course you could. But that will be a hard-boiled egg. Are you sure you're going to want to eat a hard-boiled egg?’

  It wouldn't be, but this time I didn't make the mistake of arguing. Instead I said I would watch the egg and take it out of the water myself. Eden possibly thought this a good moment to begin the cooking lessons but Ve
ra demurred.

  ‘She'll only drop it on the floor, Eden, and you know the mess an egg makes.’ Before I had time for indignant denials, Vera turned to me and said in a voice both scathing and reproachful, ‘I'm sorry you don't like Eden's little clock. Eden put that in your bedroom herself because she thought it would be just the thing for someone without a wristwatch.’

  ‘Don't you like it, Faith?’ said Eden.

  I could say nothing. Paralysis seized me.

  ‘Well, she can't do. I mean very obviously she can't do. If she liked it she wouldn't put it outside the window, would she? Yes, I know, my dear, it is most extraordinary, but I assure you that's what she did. Your little clock was most definitely not a success. When I went down the garden first thing this morning, what did I see but your clock on Francis's window sill outside the window. It was a mercy it didn't get rained on, that's all I can say.’

  If only it had been all she could say! She began describing the clock minutely as if neither Eden nor I had seen it before, speculating about the cost of it, whether this had been five shillings and sixpence or as much as five shillings and elevenpence, whether Eden had bought it this year or last year and whether the purchase had been made in Colchester or Sudbury. Eden interrupted to ask why I had put the clock outside the window.

  ‘Was it just because you didn't like it, Faith?’

  Did they think me completely mad?

  ‘I didn't like it ticking,’ I said.

  ‘You didn't like it ticking?’ Eden spoke as if I had revealed an incomprehensible phobia. My egg was forgotten, boiling away audibly but screened from view by Eden leaning against the stove. ‘But clocks always do tick, except electric ones.’

  ‘I know they do.’ Does it sound absurd when I say that by now I was near to tears? ‘I don't like them ticking. I can't help it. I put the clock outside the window so I shouldn't hear it ticking.’