Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  The summer passes, the violet eye of the lake fades to grey, the fallen leaves scrape across the tennis court at each gust of wind and pile up against the wire netting which surrounds it. The gardener no longer has to carry water, effortful pail by pail, down the steep, narrow track from the well. The petals of the roses are becoming friable and pale and when the child snaps off one of them, holding the small, tight bloom to his nose as he drinks in its scent, Isabel chides him: ‘Oh, you’ve picked one of the last and best of the roses! Why did you have to do that?’ Clare repeatedly says that she cannot wait to get back to the plains, she will see her family again, she will see all her friends. His grandmother wears one cardigan over another and a shawl over the cardigans. Helen sits close to the fire in the drawing room, now reading a book and now merely staring into the flames as they lick at the sizzling, aromatic pinewood. The baby – by now Peter has been told of its imminence – will first come and then they will all pack up and leave this house which has all at once grown inhospitable to them.

  Even now Peter is happy, though the adults, he obscurely senses, are suffering a chilling and darkening of mood as the season chills and darkens. Each morning he still trots out on his pony, with the syce puffing along beside him, up one hill and down another. He has finished the bead bookmarker, with some help from his grandmother, and he has given it to Helen, who for once has hugged him. ‘Oh, what a lovely present! It’s just what I want!’ But though she is always reading beside the fire, her face burnished by her closeness to it, he never again sees the bookmarker. What can have happened to it? He never likes to ask.

  His grandmother cooks divinity fudge in the kitchen, telling him how one must look for the thread to know when it is ready. ‘I can see it, I can see it!’ he cries out, glimpsing the frail white filament dangling from the wooden spoon in her hand. Later, she gives him the saucepan and spoon and says ‘You can scrape it out.’ He loves to do that even if, later, he feels bilious and wonders if he might not perhaps be sick.

  Clare teaches him the beginnings of geometry and says that in a year he will be able to start algebra. His father says that he is a clever little monkey and pinches his ear. The pinch is affectionate but it hurts him and brings tears to his eyes.

  There is a children’s fancy-dress party at Government House, in a larger hill-station some eleven miles away, so that it takes a long time to reach it in the dandies, Clare carried by four coolies and he by two, with two more pattering beside them as reliefs. He goes dressed as a pathan, with a velvet waistcoat embroidered in gold, white flared trousers, slippers which turn up at the toes, and a pugree on his head. He wins first prize. ‘ Oh, isn’t he just adorable!’ the Governor’s wife exclaims to everyone around her.

  On his birthday, his parents give him a fairy-bicycle and Helen, Clare and the bearer take it in turns to support him as he wobbles around the tennis court, the crisp leaves snapping into bronze shards beneath the wheels. He was hoping that his parents would give him another bull terrier but now he decides that a bicycle is better.

  Suddenly, he learns to listen to music. He stands over his grandmother while she inexpertly plays the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffman or a Mozart Sonatina on the grand piano which, because of the dampness, always needs tuning. He cries out: ‘Teach me! Teach me, please!’ The old woman tells him to draw up a chair beside her and then makes him play a scale. ‘ Thumb under third finger, thumb under third finger!’ she commands.

  He is happy; but beneath his happiness there is always an undertow of dread. He thinks of Uncle Jack and of that kukri which the demented Gurkha soldier plunged again and again into the body against which, in the past, his own small, tremulous body has so often pressed itself. He even has nightmares about Uncle Jack, waking up screaming, so that Clare has to jump out of her own bed and put her arms around him, soothing him ‘There, there! It’s nothing! It’s only a dream!’ Often his mother, sleeping lightly in the room opposite to theirs, is also aroused and hurries in, her Chinese wrap swishing about her, to demand ‘What is all this?’

  Like someone who lives far inland but occasionally hears, so distant as almost to be inaudible, the rage of the ocean, and occasionally feels, so gentle as almost to be illusory, the tremor of the earth as wave after wave crashes down on it, so from time to time he senses that the same storm which has swept Uncle Jack away to extinction may also sweep away this house and everyone in it. This is a year of unrest and civil disobedience and, though he is not supposed to learn of such things any more than he was supposed to learn of the death of Uncle Jack, yet somehow, creeping around the verandah, standing outside the drawing room door or crouching on the stairs, he manages to do so.

  The mission to which they once travelled for a jumble sale, so long ago that he can hardly remember the occasion, is burned to the ground. A receptionist at one of his father’s hotels has suffered some terrible humiliation, he cannot discover what. Then there is the army officer, passing through from one posting to another, who tells the story of how, when he was driving out with his wife and two children in his ramshackle Morris Cowley, they were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. ‘I had no idea what to do. I thought that was it. Then I had a brainwave – and I don’t often have those. I put my hand in my trouser pocket and I took out all the change I had there and I chucked it as far as I could all around us. Of course the brutes all began to scramble for it, they forgot us entirely, and so I put my foot down on the gas and we shot off at a speed of at least sixty miles an hour.’

  Then, most terrifying of all, there is his father’s illness. Every Saturday, Ahmed Ali, forgetting his hot-pot or his roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, prepares for them a curry. There are poppadums, chapattis, puris, mounds of fluffy rice, dahl bright with saffron and various kinds of chutneys and pickles. Of these pickles, only Toby ever eats the lime one, since the others all find it far too hot. On this occasion, Toby, a greedy man, behaves as he always does on Saturdays. Voraciously he wolfs the food piled up before him and then shouts for more. He helps himself liberally from the fluted glass bowl of lime pickle for his first helping, he empties it for his second.

  Later, as Clare and Peter play a game of draughts in the schoolroom, they hear a terrible retching and groaning. ‘Wait here!’ Clare tells the child and gets up and goes out. Peter sits, numb, on the edge of his chair, listening. His mother gives a brief wail, he knows it to be hers, and there follows a hubbub of servants. Still Peter sits motionless. He hears Clare cry agitatedly: ‘We must get Dr McGregor! We must get Dr McGregor!’ and Helen, the only calm one among them, answering ‘I’ll ring him.’ But the telephone is out of order, as so often, and so Helen rides off down the hill and round the lake in search of the drunken doctor.

  Toby does not die; but for days he is strangely shrunken, like a balloon from which the air has suddenly escaped, and around his mouth there are small blebs, each so scarlet that it seems as though they must be gorged with blood. At first, it is thought that he must have had food poisoning; but then, when Ahmed Ali comes with the news that the kitchen-boy has vanished, no trace of him, his room in the servants’ quarters empty, all his possessions taken, a darker suspicion is aroused; and when, on investigation by the police, his references are revealed to have been forged and the address which he has given in a distant village not to exist, that suspicion is intensified. But the drunken doctor, suspecting nothing, has allowed the fluted glass pickle bowl to be washed, and so no one will ever know for sure.

  One day – there has been a brief flare-up of the summer which everyone supposed to have died – they all go on a picnic into the hills higher up above the lake. Isabel is carried in a dandy by four sweating and grunting coolies; Toby and Helen ride; Peter either walks with his grandmother and Clare or, when he feels tired, sits up in front of Helen on the gelding. Peter would be on his own pony, if it had not gone lame. The servants trail behind with their impedimenta of folding tables and chairs, wicker hampers and bottles clinking in pails of ice.

  It i
s when Peter is sitting in front of Helen on the horse, her left hand pressed against his diaphragm while her right holds the reins, that he suddenly points up into a tree. ‘ Look, oh, look!’ There is a huge snake, grey mottled with green, uncoiling itself sleepily from a branch. Its eyes glitter at him. His grandmother, leaning on her stick, glances up from under the rim of her grey Henry Heath hat and then lets out a squeak. Helen’s hand suddenly presses so tight against his diaphragm that he can hardly breathe. The servants set up the shrill chatter of monkeys. ‘ Isn’t he beautiful?’ Peter says. He looks up at Helen and sees her rapt expression, the lips parted and the eyes wide open. ‘Beautiful,’ she agrees. The child cries: ‘ Let me down, let me down!’ He wants to approach this supple, shimmering, immensely powerful creature; he wants to touch it. But Helen grips him tighter. ‘Don’t be silly! It’s poisonous. It could kill you.’ The snake suddenly slithers from one branch to another and then disappears into a hole in the trunk of the tree. They all continue to stare at the empty space where once it was. Then, summoned by Toby, who has halted ahead of them, they at last move on.

  ‘Yes, it was beautiful,’ Helen says. ‘Extraordinary.’ As he now leans back against her, Peter is aware of the thudding of her heart against the vertebrae of his spine.

  Dead. Death. He knows those words. He knows them, understands them. The bull terrier staggers forward, sits down with a surprised expression on her face, topples. His father vomits uncontrollably on the floor, writhing in agony, while the white-faced women stare down at him in horrified disbelief. A kukri slashes and plunges. A snake uncoils, swells, shimmers.

  HELEN

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want any help?’ Isabel asks, standing in the doorway and giving an involuntary shudder as, firm shoulders hunched, she wraps her arms around herself.

  ‘Quite sure, thank you.’ Helen’s voice is formally polite.

  ‘The room has been aired,’ Isabel says, the emphasis seeming to contradict an unspoken accusation. ‘ But, oh dear, it does seem damp. Everything seems damp up here in the hills, once it starts to rain.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ That Helen does not deny that the room is damp irritates Isabel, who first says curtly, turning away, ‘ I had the ayah put a bottle in your bed,’ and then ‘Well, if there’s nothing else I can do …’

  ‘Nothing, thank you.’

  Helen stoops over the cabin-trunk, which, covered in scuffed labels of luxury hotels, once belonged to her mother, takes up a bundle of crepe de chine and begins carefully to unwrap it. She lets the crepe de chine, a petticoat, fall to the carpet and holds in her hands the silver photograph frame with the blurred photograph in it of a woman standing at an open window with a child in her arms. There is a white blur above the child where the wind blew out the muslin curtain at the precise moment in the Bordighera hotel bedroom when the invisible photographer, Toby, clicked the shutter of the outsize Kodak. There used to be another print of the same photograph on the grand piano in the drawing room but Helen has already noticed that it is no longer there. She imagines it lying, face downwards and forgotten, in some drawer or even suitcase. She places the photograph on the warped dressing-table of fumed oak and stares at it with an appraising intentness.

  Then she crosses to the window and tries to force it open. But, since no one has slept in this room under one of the two gables for a long time, the catch is rusty and will not shift. Later, she will ask the bearer for a hammer. A hand to the faded cretonne of the curtain and a shoulder pressing to the wall, she looks out. Below her is the verandah, with geraniums in pots, and below that is the cud, where the land falls away in dahlias and rhododendrons and an occasional deodar clinging to an untidy outcrop of rock, and below that again is the violet eye of the lake, with the road which encircles it and, at its farthest end, the bazaar, the bus station and a squat, square, red-brick building, which is an army convalescent home.

  There are no roads for cars or carriages up here in the hills. After they had abandoned the Rolls Royce Henley Tourer in the garage close to the convalescent home, she was carried up to the house in a dandy, and her father rode. There are one or two sailing-boats on the lake, incising its tranquil surface with their swift, erratic wakes. The hills are an intense green at this time of year, the sky an intense blue, with an accumulation of fluffy clouds, as though white and grey feathers had been swept up into a heap, low down in the west, where two of the hills divide and the road serpentines, through innumerable nauseating hairpin bends, down to the plains.

  She lets the cretonne of the curtain fall, straightens herself and returns to her unpacking. But soon she wearies of that, as she never wearied of the incessant shaking and swaying on and on through a day and a night in the train, of being driven up and up in the huge, lurching car, or of being carried in that kind of palanquin by four gasping and sweating little men with bandy legs and sloping shoulders. So she lies out on the damp bed, the back of one hand against her cheek, and stares up at the ceiling, where a diagonal crack runs from one corner almost to the rose of the light in its stiff parchment shade. She sighs deeply, the small breasts under the cashmere jersey rising and falling.

  She does not want to be here, though through all the years in England she wanted, oh so forlornly and oh so desperately, to be with her father. She wished to go on to university, to become a doctor, and all the mistresses encouraged this awkward, hard-working, reserved girl in that wish. But her father would have none of it: ‘ We’re far too impatient to have you back with us,’ he wrote flatteringly in one of his brief, rapidly scrawled letters, which took at least two weeks to reach her by sea to Marseilles and then overland.

  Her mother’s unmarried sister, Aunt Sophie, thinks it a shame. Many years before the War, when only a girl of sixteen, Aunt Sophie herself had travelled out to India to stay with her sister and the penniless young man, invalided out of the Army because of a leg shattered in a fall at polo, whose marriage to an heiress, conspicuously older than himself, started him on his career as hotel proprietor, land owner and financier. On the ship, a raffish, over-painted, middle-aged woman, divorced and travelling out to be companion to a maharanee, said that she supposed that Aunt Sophie was ‘one of the fishing fleet’. Aunt Sophie did not understand the expression and, when it was explained to her, felt angered and humiliated by the assumption that she was making this voyage in the hope of netting a husband. Whatever else she did in India, that was something which she was resolved not to do. She stayed briefly with her sister and brother-in-law and then, much to their disapproval, left them to become a nurse in a native hospital in the slums of Calcutta. ‘ Sophie has never been quite all there,’ Toby would explain to those who asked what had happened to her. He made a joke of what he felt as a shame – as he so often did. He purposely avoided any subsequent visits to Calcutta, since, once there, he would have to call on this eccentric sister-in-law in the hostel in which she lived with her fellow nurses, many of them Eurasian or Indian, and might even have to agree to being shown around the hospital, with its patients crammed higgledly-piggledy into dank, evil-smelling wards. All his life, despite his heartiness and robustness, he has been squeamish about such things as blood, vomit, excrement, illness and death.

  Helen thinks now of Aunt Sophie, since, her mother dead, she is the one person in the world, apart from her father, for whom she feels any real love. This does not mean that she has not been often embarrassed by her, in the way that the young are embarrassed by eccentricity or even singularity in those to whom they are related or with whom they associate. Aunt Sophie wears the kind of clothes, shapeless and rumpled, and above all the kinds of headgear, checked jockey-caps, towering shakos or garden-party straws with chenille flowers in pastel shades pinned above their dipping brims, which excite derision at bus stops or on underground station platforms. She leaves one of a newly bought pair of gloves in a taxi, mislays the books which she borrows from Mudie’s, and is forever locking herself out of the room which she rents in a lodging-house in Earls Court.
Much of the capital which she inherited from her baronet, businessman father she has squandered on seemingly good causes and seemingly good people, both of which have, in time, proved to be worthless. She has retained all the impulsiveness, the faith and the simplicity of a child. She is silly, in the original meaning of the word, wholly a fool and a holy fool.

  Staying with her in that long, narrow room, bereft of all but essential possessions – what became of the silver, the pictures, the furniture inherited, with her sister, from their father? – Helen senses something exceptional, if exasperating, in her. She works for nothing in a settlement in the East End, among girls who, in many cases, openly deride her, cadge off her and respond to her many kindnesses with insolence. Part of Helen is angry with Aunt Sophie when she talks of these same girls as ‘such dears’; part of her is moved. Once she went with Aunt Sophie and the girls on an expedition by charabanc to Brighton. She hated the inane chatter, convulsive giggling and, above all, feral stink. But she hated herself for that hate; she wished that she were capable of Aunt Sophie’s love.

  Now Aunt Sophie is far away, heating up baked beans on her gas ring, visiting in hospital someone who does not want her visit, puzzling over Ouspensky, writing a letter of protest to the old MG (as she calls the Manchester Guardian), selling flags at some gusty street corner, or meticulously recording in her diary one or more of these activities, and she, Helen, is here. Helen has known this house before, when her mother was alive, but it now seems so much smaller, darker and danker than she remembered it back at school in Oxford. Didn’t the lake expand far wider and weren’t those hills once mountains? Was the surface of the hard tennis court always covered in that green rash? And the cud – what has become of that sheer precipice tumbling away vertiginously from the edge of the verandah? It now seems so tame.