Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘Don’t be too long, dear. We’ll have some tea,’ her grandmother, old Mrs Thompson, calls from the other side of the door.

  Helen does not want to go down. But she must go down.

  The half-brother whom she has never seen is painting under the grand piano in the drawing room, while her stepmother is seated in a high-backed chair, just as her mother used to be seated, before the silver tea service passed down through generations of her family. This alien woman, once the keeper of the house and now its mistress, has no business to be seated there, as though the dead woman’s chair, tea service and position were all hers by right. Isabel smiles nervously at Helen, as though she guesses these thoughts of hers.

  ‘Unpacked?’ Helen’s grandmother asks.

  ‘Partly.’

  ‘I’ve told Muhammed to put one of the kerosene stoves in your room,’ Isabel says.

  ‘Oh, I hate the smell of kerosene.’

  ‘There’s no other way to heat it. If one uses an electric fire in this house, it causes a fuse. You probably remember that.’

  Helen remembers a late afternoon when a thunderstorm fused all the lights as they sat in the drawing room, she, her father, her ailing mother and the robust woman who had come to be their housekeeper, with a lamp flickering on the grand piano and the sky a lurid orange darkening to purple above the rain-shrouded hills. Her mother said to the other woman: ‘You pour out for me. I haven’t the strength to do it.’

  As Isabel poured out, the lightning zigzagged from the crest of one hill to the next, to be followed by a hollow boom of thunder. Isabel let out a scream and, doing so, involuntarily tipped the silver teapot forward so that steaming liquid cascaded to the carpet. She put down the teapot and then raised shaking hands to her ears. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh!’ Toby crossed over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s nothing. It’s too far away to strike us. There’s no need to be frightened. No need at all. Isabel, I promise you.’ She looked up at him, strangely calmed. He said nothing more, he removed the hand. Helen’s mother reached out for the Benares brass bell on the table beside her to summon the bearer to wipe the carpet. Helen stared across at her father.

  Peter crawls out from under the piano, the dripping paintbrush in his hand, and sidles over to his mother, at the same time gazing at this tall, thin girl whom he has been told is his half-sister.

  Isabel throws an arm round him and draws him close to her knee: ‘This is your half-brother, Peter, Pete, Peterkin.’ She puts her cheek down to the child’s, as though deliberately to draw Helen’s attention to the likeness between mother and son, despite her robustness and his delicacy. The child turns his face away from the newcomer, burying it into the side of his mother’s neck. Then, coquettishly, he peeps round.

  Toby comes into the room: ‘Tea! Tea!’ he all but sings, rubbing his hands together. He has changed out of his pinstripe suit into baggy flannels and hacking jacket, and there are slippers on his large feet. Then he asks: ‘ Where’s Clare?’

  Isabel’s face momentarily darkens. ‘Is she ever on time for a meal?’ She gives Peter a little push: ‘Go and tell Clare the tea is getting cold.’

  ‘Must I?’ He pouts.

  ‘Do what Mummy tells you,’ Mrs Thompson puts in, risking Isabel’s frequent reprimand: ‘Oh, please don’t interfere! It only makes things more difficult with him.’

  Peter goes, but slowly, trailing one reluctant foot after the other.

  ‘Lazy little blighter!’ his father exclaims, taking up two cucumber sandwiches and stuffing them into his mouth and then taking up a third. Isabel hands Helen a cup of tea. The cup belongs to the Crown Derby tea service, now sadly depleted, which was also an inheritance of Helen’s mother, Eithne.

  ‘Clare, I don’t think you and my daughter have ever met,’ Toby says. ‘Helen – this is Peter’s governess, Clare.’

  The girls stare at each other; then shake hands with awkward formality. Helen thinks that Clare uses too much make-up, not yet realizing that the Eurasian dabs on all that rouge and powder to conceal the darkness of her complexion. Helen also thinks that she is overdressed, with that dangling amber necklace, all those bangles and rings, and those extremely high heels beneath shoes covered in an impractical, shimmering pale green silk. Clare thinks that Helen cannot have changed after her journey, so grubby does her blouse seem above her tweed skirt. She also thinks that the newcomer is plain, terribly plain.

  The child pushes between them, one hand thrust out masterfully to remove Clare from his path, and approaches the tea table.

  ‘Peter!’ Clare cries out in her sing-song chichi accent. ‘Manners, please! Don’t push me like that!’

  Peter pays no attention.

  Helen stares at him as he picks up a buttered scone and, with some of the voracity of his father, bites into it.

  Helen would like to be alone with Toby; but her grandmother, her stepmother, her half-brother and the governess are constantly obtruding and obstructing presences. In any case, since Toby is a man whose greed for food and women is equalled by his greed for money and success, he is often away on business; and if he is not away, then he is in his office, the low, two-storied building at one end of the house, into which none of them must enter. He employs a babu, Mr Ram, who went to a Christian school in Lahore and then took an External Degree in Economics at London University, and a Eurasian woman, Hilda, who has sparse grey hair and bloodshot eyes magnified by thick, horn-rimmed glasses, which keep slipping down her nose.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Toby asks Helen absently, when chance brings them face to face, and she then answers: ‘Oh, yes, thank you, father, fine, fine.’ She sometimes wonders whether he would react at all if, instead, she replied: ‘No, everything is hell.’

  It was so different when he met her in Bombay. ‘Darling!’ he had called out and, racing across the deck to where he was standing, a white panama hat in one hand and his rubber-ferruled stick in the other, she had flung herself into his embrace. He had kissed her over and over, as though she were someone whom he had imagined that he would never see again. That night, at dinner in the Taj Mahal Hotel, he insisted: ‘We must have a bottle of the Widow to celebrate.’ The Widow? She did not know what he could mean. But when the turbaned waiter brought the bottle of champagne in its bucket of ice, she cried out, her cheeks flushed: ‘Oh, father! Champagne! Champagne! I haven’t drunk champagne for, oh, years and years.’ (The last time when she had, in fact, drunk champagne had been at the wedding of her father to her stepmother, but she did not want to think of that.)

  ‘To the happiness of my girl.’ He held up his glass and slowly raised it to his lips.

  ‘To … to happiness.’ She blushed. She could not say ‘To our happiness,’ as she had first intended to do. It sounded too proprietorial; it might imply, as many of the other diners assumed, that they were lovers.

  He was wonderfully thoughtful and kind to her on the long journey, a day and then a night, in the private coach put at his disposal by a railway director for whom he had once done an unobtrusive but all-important favour. There were two narrow bedrooms and a drawing room with chairs covered in red plush, lamps of burnished brass and a highly polished, round mahogany table. There was a lavatory, a kitchen, with kerosene stoves and an ice-chest, and servants’ quarters from which came a constant murmur of voices as Muhammed and the cook hired for the journey talked to each other. ‘Oh, this is fun!’ she cried out more than once, thinking that she wanted nothing more than to travel on like this, for immeasurable mile on mile, across plains and beneath hills and over dusky winding rivers, with this man who was both a stranger and her father.

  After the train journey, they climbed into the Rolls-Royce, the two of them in the back, while the chauffeur, perpetually grinning to himself in the mirror, drove recklessly up and up the hairpin bends. The servants, with the luggage, followed in a truck. Toby put a hand over his daughter’s. ‘It’s lovely to have you back,’ he said, not for the first time. ‘It’s lovely to be back,’ she answere
d, thinking that, for all her previous reluctance, she was now glad that she had come. She peered out through the window beside her at the lush slopes rising up, broad sweep on sweep, above the dusty road. ‘Oh, how wonderfully everything has been arranged! How lucky I am!’

  ‘Yes, I like to think that my little set-up works efficiently. Not many things work efficiently in this blasted country.’

  Now that closeness has gone. It is as though a love affair flared up briefly between them and then burned itself out. But she still loves him. She will always love him. She knows that for sure.

  Isabel is not the wicked stepmother of a fairy story but she is not a mother either. Isabel remembers that Helen must remember that once, many years ago, there was another mistress of this household, who, ailing, needed a housekeeper. Helen remembers that Isabel must remember that, when that other mistress had been dead for only five months and Toby and Isabel came to tell the eight-year-old child that now she was to get another mother, she had screamed: ‘ No, no! You can’t! You mustn’t!’ and had begun, in hysterical frenzy, the tears pouring down her cheeks, to punch her father in the chest, until, grasping both her arms in his hands, he had at last managed to control her. Isabel is now always coolly polite to Helen and Helen, in turn, is now always coolly polite to Isabel. The two women are scrupulous about passing things to each other at table, at greeting each other, at each waiting for the other to enter or leave a room first. But there is a constant awkwardness between them, as between two people who have each done the other some injury which neither will now ever mention.

  There are few young men in this remote hill-station sprawled around the lake who would be suitable companions for Helen. Toby says that she must wait until they have returned to the plains. Then there will be plenty of young men, dances, parties, gymkhanas, tennis tournaments, she won’t have a moment to herself. On the other side of the range of hills, there is the other, bigger lake, with many more English people – half the Government of the province in retreat from the hot weather now scorching the distant plains. But it is a long and tedious journey and, though Helen at first receives many invitations, she rarely can be bothered to accept them. Clare is envious of her: ‘If I were asked to that dance, I’d go like a shot.’ No one asks Clare out, except that ‘cousin’ of hers, the soldier convalescing from malaria in the Army rest-home.

  Clare and Helen have little in common. The Eurasian girl is bright but indolent, often spending her free time lying on her bed, a De Reske Minor cigarette burning itself in an ivory cigarette holder as she looks up, with a squinting gaze of her almond-shaped eyes, to watch its smoke wreathe away to extinction. When she reads, it is what Isabel contemptuously calls, even to her face, housemaid’s trash. She does not ride and on the first occasion when Helen persuaded her to go for a walk with her along one of the rocky paths through the woods above the house, she appeared in a dress, hat and pair of high-heeled shoes all of an identical pale blue colour, as though for a garden party. Clare is vain about her appearance, spending many patient minutes retouching her face whenever she finds herself alone before a mirror. But sometimes she wonders what is the point of all this attention to lips, cheeks, eyes, to frock, stockings, scarf, when there is no one, except silly old Toby, to notice. Clare likes to be noticed.

  Helen is slow and painstaking. She has an immensely strong inner obstinacy, of which most people are unaware. Her progress through a book is so leisurely that sometimes Toby says to her in amazement: ‘You’re not still reading that, are you?’ The books which she reads, classics of Victorian fiction, belonged to her mother. The damp has foxed the pages and silverfish have fretted them. No one has opened any of them since her mother died. She hates idleness and so she secretly exasperates Isabel by insisting on taking over a number of household duties from her. She also becomes a leader of the local Brownie troop; but in India, for obvious reasons, they are called not Brownies but Bluebells. In her uniform of sepia-coloured twill (‘You’d have thought they could have come up with something a little less unchic,’ is Clare’s disparaging comment), fastened at the waist with a leather belt, her brown cotton stockings, her brogues with their flapping tongues and the jaunty hat under which she tucks away her hair, she has the awkward wiriness of an adolescent boy. The troop, some thirty in all, under the winsome, scatty leadership of the drunken Scottish doctor’s wife, is composed both of white girls of any class and of Indian girls from what the Scotswoman calls ‘ the better type of family’.

  One weekend they travel higher up into the Himalayas, the two adults on horses and the excited children in dandies or on ponies, to a small lake, embedded like a dark blue glittering bead in a setting of snow-capped mountains. The air is clean and sharp and except for a few scattered farms, owned by English people, a few low-roofed dwellings, owned by Indians, and, high up on the first slopes of a mountain, partly cantilevered over a steep face of rock, a long, low white building, with wooden huts untidily grouped around it, there is no sign of the domestication of a once-wild terrain as in the hill-station from which they have journeyed for all but a day. In a field belonging to one of the farms, the servants – it would be inconceivable to travel without them – set up the tents. They are expert at it, from years of accompanying their masters on tour or shikari. There are even folding tables, chairs and beds, enamel washbasins on folding stands, and three thunder-boxes, each in a tent of its own, which a local sweeper had been engaged to empty, since the servants are all of a caste too superior to do so.

  As they pass through a narrow defile, first ascending a rocky road, with the children in the dandies delightedly shrieking and clutching at the sides with every roll and bump, and then descending towards a golden haze, the afternoon sun a misty bubble low in the west before them, Helen suffers that bewildering, disconcerting sense ‘I have been here before.’ Before they emerge into the valley, she already knows how it will look; and when, craning her neck, she sees that long, low white building, with its many balconies cantilevered over the rock face, a shiver runs through her even though, here in the shelter of the surrounding mountains, out of the wind, it has become suddenly warm. Yes, everything is mysteriously familiar and blotted with a sombre aura of dread, even though the sun is glittering on the lake and on the high mountain-tops and even though the girls, under the leadership of the Scotswoman, have begun to sing ‘ This old man, he played one …’ The girls squawk like a flock of starlings at approach of evening; but the adult contralto beneath them is strong and true. Helen tries to join in the singing; but her mouth is parched, the sounds refuse to come.

  Later, when the girls have been refreshed with a tea of doughnuts and thick, mahogany-coloured tea in which the condensed milk, poured from the tin, swirls in yellow eddies, the Scotswoman, Mrs McGregor, asks if Helen would be an angel and go to the farm over there – she points – to arrange for some milk to be sent for breakfast. ‘This condensed milk is so sticky and sweet, though the kids love it.’ The farm which has lent them the field does not have cows; the other does. Helen sets off with one of the Indian girls, the daughter of a Christian civil servant, who insists on clutching her hand tightly in hers, as though, so far from her home and her numerous siblings, she feels somehow endangered. Helen is still overcome by the strangeness of the familiarity of this remote place in which she now finds herself. It is as though she were living a dream and were not sure if that dream were a nightmare or not. She puts out the hand which the child is not clutching, snatches at an overhanging branch and snaps it off. The smell, as she crushes some of its leaves in her palm – mint, eucalyptus, rosemary, it is all of these things and none of them – insists: ‘Yes, yes, you have experienced all this before.’

  Helen’s face is drawn and wan when at last, having passed through a field of grazing cows (the child, terrified now, grips her hand with an extraordinary ferocity), climbed a stile and made their way through the straggling, overgrown rose-bushes of what looks like an English cottage garden, they approach an old woman, in a faded pinafore
and bedroom slippers, who is rocking herself, eyes closed, on the porch, a black-and-white mongrel with a long, sweeping tail outstretched beside her. The dog looks up with a beseeching look in his rheumy eyes and then sidles towards them on his stomach as though to placate them before, suddenly raising himself on all four legs, he instead decides to start a low, insistent growl. The Indian child squeals and runs behind Helen, clutching her about the waist. The old woman opens her eyes with no alarm or surprise; and it is then that it all becomes clear to Helen.

  The old woman had a kindly, simple face, with heavy lines from the sides of her nose to her mouth and pale blue eyes, as washed out as her pale blue pinafore. On the sagging dewlap of her throat there is an angry purple stain, an ineradicable birthmark. Strange. Helen remembers that birthmark better than the lake or the surrounding mountains or the long, low white building cantilevered out over a void. When she lived in this farmhouse, a frightened and bewildered child, with her father and the woman who was soon to become her stepmother, occupying the whole of the upper floor, while the old woman, her husband and a brood of children and grandchildren somehow squeezed themselves into the lower floor, a ramshackle caravan, two tents and what looked like a cowshed, that birthmark always made her shudder, so that she could hardly bear it when the old woman, then not so old, would put her face down to hers to ask: ‘ Now, what would my little angel like? Scrambled egg or fried egg?’

  They were staying down here in the farmhouse in the valley because they could not stay up there, with Mother, in the sanatorium, and there were no hotels. Toby would go to the sanatorium each day, the path so steep that, a large hand to each plump thigh, he would seem to lift now one leg and now the other, at each step he took.

  ‘Do let me come too!’ Helen, only seven, would plead.