Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  Yet again she wonders why she ever took on this job. Madness. Oh, yes, she is paid well; and there is nothing on which to spend her wages except on the clothes which she orders from the durzi, so that she can both save for herself and send money home to help to pay for the youngest of her brothers to go to a good boarding school and so – who knows? his teachers are optimistic – to win a scholarship to some college or university in England. But she regrets now that she gave up her job at the reception desk of the hotel owned by Toby, even if the peremptory commands, the irrational complaints and above all the condescending pleasantries of the customers had long since become all but unbearable to her. ‘May I have my bill, please?’ ‘Yes, sir, of course, sir, one moment, sir.’ ‘There seems to be something wrong here. Why does this hotel always manage to get something wrong? Every time I stay here, every bleeding time.’ Or else: ‘The last time I was here, some old dragon gave me my bill. Not nearly as attractive as you are. A welcome change.’ Or else: ‘How much longer do I have to stand about here, waiting? Isn’t there any service in this place? I want my bill – now, pronto, double-quick!’

  On the jolting tram, which none of the hotel customers would ever have dreamed of taking – the apocryphal story is that the trams were all bought second-hand from Bournemouth, after a switch there to trolley-buses – she would make her way home as the fag end of the once-scorching day smouldered away to a grey, powdery ash. Then, with so many alien identities crowding in on her, she felt her own identity first dissipate and then coalesce into the indifferent mass. Where was she? Who was she? What had happened to her? As she stepped off the tram, often having to push her way through the people clinging to its outside like so many bluebottles clustered thick on a hunk of putrefying meat, she had a habit of touching her clothes, hat, hair, lips, even lobes of the ears, with those long, prehensile fingers, their nails red-laquered (‘I don’t think the customers really like painted nails,’ the dragon remarked more than once), as though to reassure herself that, yes, she was all of a piece, she did really exist, a nineteen-year-old, attractive, convent-educated Eurasian girl.

  Her home is a red-brick villa, with a steep gable, a tufty front lawn and a crazy-paving path which leads up from a gate which, for months, has been hanging askew on a single rusty hinge, to a front door with a gnome knocker on its chipped red paint. If one of her innumerable relatives is visiting, there is a camp bed, sometimes folded but usually open, at the far end of the hall. If the camp bed is open, then it is usually unmade, with clothes flung across it and over the chair beside it. The family lives in a comfortable, crowded squalor of meals eaten anywhere and at any time, often separately; of clothes, money and intimate secrets shared; of dogs, cats and a mynah bird enjoying all the privileges of their owners.

  Clare hates that life, because she hates mess. Everything she has ever known has always been a mess, such a bloody mess. Her genes, part Irish and part Indian, are a mess, and the family home is a mess, and the family itself is a mess. Her mother and father are not legally married because somewhere, she does not even know where, her mother still has an English sergeant husband. It would not be impossible to find him and arrange a divorce, if indeed he is still alive – the War Office could surely tell her his whereabouts or his fate; but Clare’s mother, like all the rest of the family, does not want to emerge from the mess, she takes no action despite Clare’s urgings. Clare’s father has made a mess of one business after another – his grocery store failed when an Indian opened one, much cheaper and more efficient, next door to it, he was cheated over his dry-cleaning business, the equipment all in need of replacement or repair, no one bought the Japanese kitchen gadgets for which, briefly, he became exclusive agent – and so he now sells tickets for the railway on which one of his five sons is a guard, one a fireman and one an engine-driver. ‘We’re really a railway family,’ he boasts, ‘always have been.’ It is all part of the mess that that boast is not even true.

  In the whole house, only Clare’s room – now full of the mess of two visiting cousins – was ever clean and tidy. She would frequently scrub the woodwork, sweep the floor or shake the bedclothes out of the window with a violent malevolence, as though she were ordering each of them in turn ‘Be clean, damn you, be clean!’ She would never trust a plate taken down from the crowded kitchen dresser or off the no less crowded kitchen table but would always rinse and dry it before allowing her mother to put food on it for her. ‘Not so much, not so much!’ she would then cry out, her appetite as dainty as her clothes.

  Bored, she would sometimes fling aside one of the women’s magazines (Home Chat, Britannia and Eve, The Lady) or one of the romantic novels (Ethel M. Dell, Ruby M. Ayres, Countess Barcynska) which she would read for hours on end not in the communal living room but upstairs on her own bed, and would agree, with morose reluctance, to accompany her brothers to one of the railway socials. Though far too attractive to be a wallflower, she would place herself on one of the straight-backed chairs ranged round the dance floor, among a number of plain, lumpish girls, each achingly, humiliatingly longing, unlike her, to be asked to dance. Many men, friends or colleagues of her brothers, would come up and make a formal bow to her and then either she would wordlessly first shake her head and then turn it away or else she would rise with a little sigh of resignation, smoothing down her frock and raising hands to pat her hair, before condescending to let a partner take her. In fact, she loved to dance and danced well, spending many hours practising alone to her wind-up gramophone with a chart open on her bed; but she hated proximity to these awkward, often sweaty youths, their fingernails engrained, for all their scrubbing, with engine-oil and their hair stuck down, in stiff, lifeless prongs, by the glue-like Anzora hair cream which they lavished on it. Sometimes one would press indecently close to her, a mouth to her ear, as he muttered some inanity. (Terrific … You’re terrific … Do you know, I could fall for you? … A corker …) She thought of Fred and Ginger, he romantically dapper in tails and top-hat, she romantically elegant in lace, flounces and furs. Somehow, somewhere, she would find that world. She would leave all this mess of frothy beer, stewed tea, thick sandwiches and garish cakes set out on trestle tables, of wild, good-natured horseplay and clumsy sexuality.

  Toby came on one of his visits to his hotel and the manager, Signor Volpi, an Italian with wary, care-worn eyes and an inability to smile, accompanied him as he wandered round the crowded kitchens or into empty bedrooms. ‘Everything all right?’ Toby would say to this or that member of the staff and never wait for the routine ‘Yes, thank you, sir.’ It was usually Isabel’s task to examine such things as the state of the linen, the curtains, the carpets and the furniture but, now that she was pregnant, she had decided, in view of her many miscarriages, not to accompany her husband. Toby was relieved.

  Toby always came last to the accounts department of the hotel, housed in a room so dark – there was only a single, high barred window, looking out on a well – that, in order to see to work, it was necessary to keep the lights on all the day. ‘ Do you need that light at this hour?’ Toby would ask, always eager for some economy, however small; and the Italian manager would then go ‘Tsk, tsk!’ in reproof to the staff and walk over and turn it off. But as soon as Toby had left, someone would turn it on again.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Toby asked Clare; and though that morning everything had been far from all right – the dragon had dumped on her desk the bills normally the responsibility of a girl who had only to have one of her periods to go off sick at once – Clare nodded and replied, ‘Yes, thank you, sir.’

  ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’ Toby asked, never having seen her before.

  ‘I’ve been here three months, sir.’

  ‘Well, new to me. Do you like the job?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir.’ She might have added: It’s better than idling around at home. At least, there’s no mess here.

  ‘Good.’

  She had already noticed the glistening of Toby’s stiff collar, the perfect kno
t of his tie, the carefulness with which the half-moons of his fingernails had been pushed back and the pink gloss to which the nails themselves were burnished, the crispness of his thinning, reddish hair and the clear skin beneath it, the neatness of his moustache in a face obviously shaved that morning (her father and her brothers often deferred shaving until their return from work), the gleam of his brogues, the gleam of his teeth. He smelled of a perfume which later, creeping into his bathroom in the house on the hill above the lake, she learned to be Caron Pour Un Homme.

  Toby kept returning to the sombre room behind the reception desk on what, it soon became apparent to her, were the flimsiest of pretexts. On the first occasion, remembering that ‘Do you need that light at this hour?’ she had jumped up from her seat before her abacus as she saw him approaching, and had hurriedly switched it off. But to her surprise, he himself, having peered around him through the gloom, turned it on again.

  ‘I wanted to have another glance at that new specimen bill for business conferences, Miss er – er –’ Surprisingly, the manager was not with him. He gave her a smile from under the reddish, severely clipped moustache. ‘I never remember names. I’ve forgotten yours already.’ In fact, no one had ever told it to him.

  ‘O’Connor,’ she said.

  ‘Miss O’Connor.’

  She brought out the specimen bill from a drawer in her desk – Toby, restlessly acquisitive, was always changing the methods of accounting at his companies – and was about to hand it to him when he leaned over her desk. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck, she could smell that acrid perfume. The dragon paused for a moment in her typing, looked over her glasses, touched the jaunty chiffon bow at her neck and then resumed. It was none of her business, she always told herself; but after each such incident involving the boss and one of the girls, she would later talk in the staff rest room or dining room.

  ‘I think it’ll work rather well. Don’t you, Miss – er, O’Connor?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. Very well.’

  He straightened. ‘Yes, I’m really rather pleased with that.’ He smiled down at her and then sauntered out. The dragon began to whistle as she typed:

  She wore a little jacket of blue

  She wore a little jacket of blue

  And all the sailors knew …

  Those days one heard the tune everywhere, as much at a thé dansant in the Manhattan Room of the hotel as at an evening social at the Railway Institute.

  Toby came back again and yet again, sometimes with the Italian manager, who would give Clare a sardonic, appraising look when he thought that Toby would not intercept it, and sometimes, as on that first occasion, alone. Clare noticed that each day he wore not merely a different, clean shirt but also a different suit and a different pair of shoes. She was always aware of such things.

  One evening, as she was waiting for her tram, the still, humid air soft and cool on the skin of her bare arms, forehead and the back of her neck, and the cracked pavement hard and hot beneath her low-heeled, calf-skin shoes, she was conscious of a large car – Bentley, Rolls, Daimler? unlike her brothers, she knew nothing of makes – drawing up beside her, to the astonishment of all the people apathetically waiting with her for their buses. A door opened.

  ‘Let me take you wherever you wish to go, Miss O’Connor.’ It was Toby, his head tilted to one side as he smiled up at her from the driver’s seat.

  She hesitated.

  ‘Please!’

  Slowly she approached the car and then eased herself into the seat beside him. He leant across her and pulled the door shut.

  She had no idea where she wished to go; she certainly did not wish to go to her home with him, since she would then feel obliged, out of politeness, to ask him in and he would see all that mess.

  ‘Well, I wanted to do some shopping before going home. Victoria Place.’ As soon as she had spoken, she wondered if he knew that she was lying. If she had been going to Victoria Place, she would have been waiting at the bus stop on the other side of the road.

  ‘Victoria Place it is.’

  She stared ahead of her, saying nothing. She had travelled from time to time in ramshackle taxis, their leather seats cracked and spewing horsehair and their side-screens yellowed and flapping noisily; but she had never been in a limousine such as this.

  ‘It’s hotting up,’ he said. ‘Next week or the week after we’ll make for the hills.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  People like her family did not go to the hills. At night, they lay sleepless and naked, the fans above them churning the sluggish air. During the day, their clothes became saturated, their hair limp, their faces glistening.

  ‘One day I want to put air-conditioning into the hotel. I have it in my office. The latest thing. But it costs so bloody much – to instal, to maintain. The Americans insist on it. Which is why, in the hot weather, they prefer the Royal to us.’

  He slowed as he threaded his way, through dense, erratic pedestrians, into Victoria Place. ‘Where exactly?’ he asked.

  She saw the haberdashery at which she sometimes shopped. ‘ Over there. Jones’s.’

  ‘My wife buys her gloves there.’

  ‘I have to buy some gloves.’ It was true. When the summer came, she always wore white cotton gloves out of doors and sometimes even in the office.

  ‘Right.’ He parked the car, got out of it and held open the door for her with a mock bow. ‘There you are, my lady.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ She smiled at him; then, not sure if this was the right thing to do, she held out her hand. ‘Thank you,’ she repeated.

  ‘Oh, I’ll come in with you. Somehow I’ve got to get through the next hour before meeting some friends at the club.’

  She was disconcerted and became even more so when he began to take part in the selection of the gloves. ‘No, not those. No. They look cheap. Flimsy.’

  ‘But I want cheap gloves. I can’t afford others.’

  ‘And those look cheap too. Yes.’ He examined them. ‘ Yes, I thought so. Made in Japan. Now these – these are perfect.’

  ‘But they must cost a fortune.’

  ‘Nottingham lace,’ the Indian assistant told them.

  ‘Would that be your size? Try it on. Go on, try it on.’ He dangled the glove before her, between forefinger and middle-finger.

  She eased it on to a slightly trembling hand. He peered down. ‘Perfect. Have those.’

  ‘But how much are they? I must know what they cost.’

  ‘Why? Why must you know?’ He turned to the assistant. ‘Memsahib will take those.’ He drew a crocodile-skin wallet out of the inner pocket of his grey pinstripe suit and went over to where a large woman, a vermilion caste-mark in the centre of her forehead, sat slumped despondently before a cash-register. He began to pay.

  ‘Oh but … please …’ Clare was partly appalled and partly delighted. When he continued to put down one crisp note after another, paying no attention to her, she touched his sleeve: ‘Please! Please, Mr Thompson! You mustn’t! It isn’t right!’

  Still he paid no attention.

  She felt, as they left the shop, that some secret bargain had been struck; but the nature of that bargain remained worryingly obscure to her.

  No less irresistible in his quiet insistence, Toby took her to the races, where she lost some of his money, to the cinema, where they sat in armchair-like seats in a private box at the rear, to a dance at the Royal, not at his own hotel, and to innumerable meals in restaurants, during which she picked daintily at a single course and he stuffed himself until the sweat poured down his face and, dripping off it, made his stiff collar limp. He did not offer to take her to the club and she would not allow him to take her to her home.

  ‘What’s going on?’ her amiable, lazy mother eventually asked, not in disapproval. ‘Got a boyfriend?’

  Clare shook her head, carefully dipping the brush into the bottle of red nail varnish before her and then beginning to apply it with meditative strokes.

 
; ‘Then?’

  ‘Then nothing.’

  Her mother was satisfied. She had seen the gloves in their pale blue tissue paper in a box inscribed ‘Jones’s’in elaborate copperplate. She had also seen a string of cultured pearls, a pair of sheer silk stockings, and a rolled-gold Waterman fountain-pen. Sooner or later the girl would tell her. ‘ Well, provided you’re happy.’

  But Clare did not know if she were happy or not. She liked the huge, silent car, like a luxurious sofa on wheels, the crisp, white napkins in restaurants, those armchair-like seats in boxes at the backs of cinemas, the hushed, expensive shops and their obsequious assistants. But she did not like the hands, large, square and with reddish hair on them, which seemed forever to be touching her, on the shoulder, at the back of the neck, on the cheek, even on the knee. Once, when they were saying goodbye, Toby even leant forward and sideways in the seat beside her in the car and attempted to place his mouth against hers; but she quickly turned her head aside, so that his lips merely brushed a cheek.

  ‘Oh, you are a tease!’