Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘I don’t really … don’t really like that kind of thing.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  She did not answer; but what she meant was mess – the mess of entangled bodies and entangled lives, of conspiracies and secrets, of possible pregnancies, diseases, scandals. She wanted her existence to be as clean and crisp as his collars and handkerchiefs.

  At dinner in a restaurant the following night – it was the first time she had ever eaten smoked salmon and she hated it – he told her that, on the morrow, he would be returning to the other, even bigger city in which he had his home and that a week after that he would be taking his family up into the hills. The news genuinely saddened her. She bit her lower lip, stared down at the pink, nauseatingly salt slivers of fish before her, and thought, with surprise, that she might be going to cry.

  ‘You’re sorry I’m going?’ His voice was joyful; he could see that she was sorry.

  Head still lowered, she nodded.

  He put a hand across the table to cover the one which was restlessly fingering a knife. ‘Clare, you could come to the hills too.’

  She looked up now, startled.

  ‘Our little boy’s nurse is about to leave. She’s fallen ill. Nanny Rose. She nursed my daughter too. A stroke. He’s old enough and bright enough to need a governess now – not a nurse. You told me you’d passed matric. That the nuns thought you’d have been able to get into teaching-training college if the money had been forthcoming.’

  ‘A governess …’ She said the word in a tone of such numb stupefaction that it moved him more than anything he had ever heard her say before.

  ‘Why not? Far better than your work in the hotel. You’ll have much more free time. Time to read, time to study, time’ – he grinned at her – ‘to improve yourself in every way.’

  ‘And you really think I could do it?’

  ‘A boy of barely five? Why not?’ Again he grinned. ‘Simple – no problem. Oh, Clare, it’s a terrific idea!’

  ‘Well …’

  … Clare bites on the cigarette holder and then draws smoke deep into her lungs. She exhales it with a cough. She is not used to this damp and cold, it’ll be the death of her. No wonder that TB finished off that first wife of Toby’s. She would rather be sweltering in the plains, even though each letter from her mother – she is the only one of the family who can be bothered to write, the brother to whom she sends the money never does so – tells her how much they all envy her, up there in the hills.

  An Indian woman strides confidently, bare feet wide apart as they go slap-slap-slap, along the steep path which zigzags down the cud. There is a bundle of what looks like washing on her head – perhaps she is the dhobi’s wife and joins him in his constant petty pilfering of the clothes sent to him? So noiseless is everything at this hour that Clare can hear two brass bangles on the woman’s wrist tinkling against each other. Momentarily she wonders about the woman’s life – where is she going? What is she thinking? Is she happy? – as she often finds herself wondering momentarily about the lives of others. But an innate lethargy makes her flag; the effort to reach out and encompass something so alien is too much.

  In a similar manner, when she was playing catch with Peter this afternoon and the ball, misdirected by him, soared over the verandah and bounced down the cud, she at first genuinely wished to retrieve it. ‘I can see it!’ Peter cried, as the two of them leaned over the railing. He pointed excitedly: ‘ There! By that bush!’ Peter behind her, she began to descend. But it was all too much trouble, there might be snakes in the undergrowth, it was an easy enough walk down but it would be a tiring haul back, her shoes would get ruined. She turned, she gave up.

  ‘Aren’t you going for it?’

  ‘No point. It’s not worth it. It’s miles and miles down.’

  ‘But I want my ball!’ he whimpered.

  ‘I’ll get you another.’

  ‘I don’t want another! I want that one!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’

  As she began to climb back on to the verandah, he grabbed her hand. ‘Clare! Please!’

  ‘Oh, let go, do!’ She snatched her hand away. ‘And stop that whimpering! You know how I hate it! When you whimper like that, I feel like choking the life out of you!’

  She glanced up at the face of the house, hoping that no one had heard her say that. Only the day before, when she had supposed that she and Peter were out of earshot in the garden and she had scolded him, Isabel had put her head out of the open drawing-room window and cried out: ‘ Clare! Clare! You mustn’t speak to him so roughly. There’s no need.’ How could one hope to teach the brat discipline and good manners if his mother always took his side?

  … The sun is low. It seems, throughout this fag end of summer, so terribly distant. Looking at it, she feels a crazy impulse to stretch out her fragile arms and cry: ‘Come closer, closer, closer!’ She gives a little shiver and again bites on the ivory of the cigarette holder with her small, white, slightly prominent teeth. Everything here is much as she imagined it would be and yet the happiness which she also imagined as flooding into her has somehow proved elusive. There are the eleven indoor and outdoor servants, each with his scrupulously defined tasks, whereas, back in the red-brick villa by the railway depot, one ancient woman, with wild, greasy hair, and a boy with the prematurely withered arms and legs of someone who has all his life been hungry, lackadaisically attend to the innumerable chores which Clare’s mother does not have the time or energy to finish or, often, even to start. Each day here, the indoor servants dust the furniture and sweep the floors, and the sweepers, having emptied the commodes in each of the bathrooms and lavatories, then scour out the enamelled containers, rubbing sand into them with their bare hands, before repeatedly rinsing them in a strong, opaque solution of Jeyes.

  She likes this sense of constant renewal. Even the clicking sound of the gardener and his ‘ boy’ cutting deadheads from the roses or pruning back the creepers which, if left to themselves, would soon smother the house, gives her a tranquil satisfaction. Nothing is allowed to get dirty or shabby or out of hand. Nothing gets into a mess.

  But that tranquil satisfaction is always being disturbed by a restless dissatisfaction. What does she want? She does not know but she knows that she does not have it.

  ‘I hope Clare is happy,’ Isabel said last evening, as she smeared cream over her face before her dressing-table mirror.

  ‘Isn’t she?’ Toby replied from his narrow dressing room, in which, since Isabel’s pregnancy, he now always sleeps.

  ‘I didn’t say she isn’t. I said I hoped she was.’ Isabel now raised her chin and began to pat the flesh beneath it with the back of a hand – a nightly exercise. ‘Strange girl,’ she added.

  ‘Strange? How?’ He stood in the doorway between the two rooms, taking the studs from his evening shirt. Usually, he left that task to Muhammed.

  ‘I never know what’s going on inside her.’

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t know herself.’ Toby can be as shrewd about people as about money, though in general he values the latter more.

  … Clare’s bedroom is far larger than any room in the red-brick villa by the railway depot; but she has to share it with Peter and she does not care for that any more than she cared for sharing a bedroom with two of her brothers until she was fifteen. Not that she’s not fond of the little beggar – in as far as she can be fond of any child. His fragility touches her, as does his dependence on her and his eagerness that she should love him. He is capricious and spoiled, oh, dreadfully spoiled, and he has often made trouble between her and Isabel by repeating something, in a garbled or exaggerated version, which she has told him, or reporting something – with or without malicious intention? she can never be sure – which she has done. Curiously she feels fondest of him when he is frightened. Like his mother in the past, he is frightened of thunder and, woken by it, he always screams: ‘Clare, Clare, Clare!’ Muffled in blankets and in vague, comforting dreams of once again being a child
back in the house by the railway depot or in the convent, she sits up, pushing her dark hair away from her forehead with a hand pricking with pins-and-needles. ‘Don’t be silly, it’s nothing, it’s far away.’ The lightning flashes again, he screams again. Then, if his screaming has not summoned Isabel, he whimpers that he wants to get into her bed with her. Eventually she gives in. ‘Oh, all right then! All right!’ He cuddles up to her, his arms around her. She feels a palpitating quickening of the senses; the blood suddenly seems to be coursing through her veins with a speed of which she has not before been conscious. She has a sense both of vertiginous excitement and of discomfort and dread. Last night she had to tell him: ‘ No, don’t do that! Don’t do that!’ His small hand was clawing at her breast.

  ‘Nanny Rose never minded.’

  ‘I daresay not. I do! Go on, leave me alone, you little beast!’ But she was laughing and then he too began to laugh, a high-pitched crowing.

  … Clare knows that the ayah, moving soundlessly about the room as she tidies it, hates her. The fragile, uncertain Eurasian girl, with her silks, her heavy perfumes and her boxes of paints and powders, has come between the strong proud Indian woman and her baba. The ayah has long since decided that Clare is no good.

  Shall she go down into the town this evening or shall she stay here? The soldier, Pat, whom, improvising a lie, she claimed to be her cousin, will be waiting for her at the Gardens Hotel. But does she want to see him? Pat is Irish and she feels a vague, ancestral kinship with him. He is ‘rather sweet’, she has written to her mother. Clare is touched by his yellow faintly lined, youthful face, with its suggestion of some anxiety that he can never wholly put out of his mind. Already he is better, soon he will be leaving the convalescent home, to return to the plains. He is too young to have fought in the war but he has been shot at on the North West Frontier, his arm grazed – he has shown Clare the milky scar, above the elbow, just as he has shown it to many other women – by the bullet of a Pathan insurgent whom he still wants to kill. Like Clare, he is one of many children and, like her again, he has always had a craving for tidiness and discipline. It was that craving which brought him from a village in County Down to a battalion in India.

  When, only the day before, Clare and Helen were on a walk together round the lake, they accidentally ran into him with a group of other soldiers from the home. He was embarrassed that Clare had a companion with her and even more so that he was surrounded by companions of his own. But he halted awkwardly, a tall, handsome boy, still yellow and thin from the ravages of malaria. ‘Hello, there!’ he called. The other men stood behind and some distance from him, appraising the girls.

  ‘Hello, Pat.’

  ‘How are things then?’

  ‘How are things? Oh, as they always are. How are things with you?’

  ‘The doc saw me this morning. He thinks maybe in another week I’ll be on my way back.’ He shifted his weight from foot to foot. One of his companions caught Helen’s eye but, when he winked at her, a sunburned hand stroking his moustache, she quickly looked away.

  ‘Well, that’s fine.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing you this evening. As arranged.’

  Clare did not answer. Would she be seeing him? She did not know then, any more than she knows now.

  He has taken her rowing on the lake, his khaki shirt darkening under the armpits, even though the ‘doc’ has told him to go easy on the exercise until he has finished with the quinine. He has walked her around the lake, an arm about her narrow waist, with his nicotine-stained fingers – the ‘doc’ has also told him to go easy on the cigarettes – from time to time pressing against her ribcage. She likes his sense of humour (‘Did I ever tell you the one about the priest, his housekeeper and the parrot?’), the transparency of his nature, so different from the opacity of her own, and his dogged perseverance in attempting to woo her, even though she gives him no encouragement. In the fleapit, when they are watching a Chaplin film, he keeps glancing at her to see if she is laughing; then he puts out a hand, its palm hot and sweaty, and takes her hand in his. She leaves her hand there, as though it were some inanimate possession of hers, a book or pen, which she is happy enough for him to borrow. When he presses it, she does not press back.

  Because of his upbringing – one of his many brothers is a priest, his mother is profoundly devout, if not profoundly religious – he is tormented by his carnal thoughts about her; and because of that upbringing, he shrinks from turning those thoughts to action. Often, as he walks round the lake with her, he is obliged, deeply ashamed, to put the hand not round her waist into his trouser pocket to contain his erection; and later, having said goodnight to her, he succumbs, again deeply ashamed, to the temptation of masturbating into the thunder-box which, next morning, the sweeper will empty. Clare allows him a chaste kiss on her cheek or on her forehead – the taste of strands of her hair on his lips fills him first with an intoxicated exaltation and then with a draining despair – but it is only rarely that she does not turn her head away when he tries to meet her lips. ‘No, no,’ she murmurs.

  ‘When we’re engaged?’ He admires her for the strength of her abstinence.

  ‘If we’re engaged. Ever.’

  It is her way of telling him ‘Never’ but he is too simple to see that. He has had many Indian women in flimsy, dusty rooms buzzing with flies and shaking with the exertions of his fellow soldiers. That he cannot have this woman convinces him that she is the only one he wants for his wife.

  ‘He’s handsome,’ Helen said with a faint note of interrogation in her voice, on that afternoon when they ran into him and his companions by the lake.

  ‘Yes,’ Clare agreed. Yes, he was handsome, even when he looked so yellow and emaciated.

  ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘I like him.’

  ‘Love him?’

  ‘Oh, love, love!’ Clare laughed, throwing back her head, and Helen laughed with her, the noise making some teal clatter up out of the undergrowth by the margin of the lake and take off into the sunset with a dazzle of wings and water.

  ‘What’s it like to be in love?’ Helen asked. ‘I don’t think I know.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know either.’

  ‘Oh, you must!’

  ‘Must I? Why? Do I look so experienced?’

  ‘No. But someone … someone like you … so attractive … I bet you’ve had lots and lots of men after you.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve had those.’ She did not mention that Helen’s father was one of them. ‘But men will go after anything.’

  Not me, not me, Helen wanted to say; but she did not do so. Instead, she put an arm around Clare’s waist, exactly (though of course she does not know this) as Pat does when walking with his ‘sweetheart’ – as he terms Clare to his pals – around the margin of the lake.

  … ‘ What are you doing here, all by yourself?’

  Clare now starts at the voice. It is Helen, holding a book, with a forefinger between its pages, to mark her place.

  ‘I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on Peter. But the gardener can do that.’

  ‘He’s fascinated by that gardener and his boy. Weird!’

  ‘You don’t really like him, do you?’

  Helen is disconcerted. Clare, who is usually too lackadaisical and self-centred to notice the reactions of others to anyone but herself, has for once been observant. ‘He’s such a spoiled brat,’ Helen says.

  ‘He’s fond of you, you know. Very fond. He worked so hard at that bead bookmarker and now you never use it. Look at you – you have your finger in your book.’

  ‘I put it away somewhere. I can’t remember where. It kept slipping out when I tried to use it. Oh, yes, that was nice of him, I must buy him a present when next we’re in the bazaar.’

  ‘It must be odd to have a stepmother.’

  Helen nods. The tawny disk of the sun has just begun to slot itself into the divide between two hills in the west. ‘When I was a child, I had this idea that, but for Isabel, my mother would n
ever have …’ She cannot say the word ‘ died’. Suddenly she thinks of that glass bottle, such a beautiful shade of blue, into which her mother coughed away her life.

  ‘But what could she have had to do with your mother’s death?’

  ‘Witchcraft?’ Helen laughs with the same surprise as Clare – as though, now that she has expressed it, she finds the idea no less odd. ‘ I thought of her as a witch. Who first put a spell on my father and then put a spell on my mother. We think witchcraft impossible, we’re so civilized, aren’t we? But he’ – she points to the gardener who, no longer stripped to his loin-cloth but wearing trousers and a woollen jacket, has come round a corner of the verandah, with Peter behind him – ‘he would find it a perfectly acceptable notion, I’m sure.’

  ‘It’s a pity she spoils Peter so.’

  ‘Well, he’s the only thing she’s got,’ Helen replies.

  ‘She’s got your father.’

  ‘Has she?’ Helen’s voice, previously so gentle, takes on an edge. She turns away and wanders off down the verandah.

  Clare stares after her. Surely she cannot know?

  TOBY

  Toby lies on his side on the narrow dressing-room bed, one hand beneath a cheek, while his chotah hazri, brought into him by Muhammed a long time ago, lies untouched. He heard Peter enter Isabel’s room, his voice high and clear, and, propping himself on an elbow, then saw him, in dressing-gown and slippers, through the door left carelessly half-open by the bearer, as he sat perched on the edge of his mother’s high brass bedstead. He has often told Isabel that, at five, the child is too old for such intimacies, but she has merely laughed, shaken her head and asked what harm they can do to him – ‘He’s an innocent, a complete innocent.’ An innocent? Is he? Toby finds it hard to remember a time when he himself was innocent.

  There was the nursemaid – or was it nurse? – in the bleak Lincolnshire vicarage, who, when she bathed him, would each time insist on easing back his prepuce (‘You must always be clean down there’), even though it hurt him so much that he would wriggle and the tears would prick his eyes. Lying here on the bed, the tea gathering a pale film of milk and the butter congealing on the fingers of toast, he can see her hand in all its strong, implacable, chapped, marvellous beauty. Later, with her or with some other nurse or nursemaid (he frowns now, as he struggles to define the memory), he got into some argument over a game – demon-grab was it? – and as, half in play and half in earnest, he snatched away her cards, they suddenly began to wrestle. They rolled over and over each other on the floor, her skirt rode higher and higher and all at once, on some wild, terrifying impulse, he pushed a hand up to where he could glimpse the pink of a suspender against shuddering marbled flesh. ‘ Ooh, you little devil! How dare you!’ Then his mother, old Mrs Thompson came in, stared down at them and demanded: ‘What on earth are you doing? Get up from there at once!’ He knew from the tone of her voice that he had done something wicked but in the weeks ahead, until the nurse or nursemaid was sacked for some misdemeanour never clear to him (‘ I’d never have believed it of her,’ he heard his mother tell an aunt), he longed for some opportunity to do it again.