Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  Innocent! Were children ever really innocent? Was it all not a myth?

  Toby ought to get up, if only to relieve the pain of the erection throbbing beneath his bedclothes. Can there be something wrong with his prostate? Drunken old McGregor, making a joke to relieve the embarrassment (‘I bet you’ve never allowed anyone to do this to you before, I could be clapped into jug if I didn’t happen to be your doctor’), was reassuring. ‘No, no sign of anything, nothing at all. Just a little spongy.’ Perhaps he wakes each morning like this because Isabel is no longer willing to fuck, and here, up in this little hill-station, it is difficult to find anyone else to do so, other than some Indian bint. He will never forget the shame of that time when, after a hurried visit to a woman in the bazaar (Muhammed arranged the assignation), he suffered, urinating a few mornings later, that sensation of pissing red-hot needles – as they used to put it in the Army. The cure took a long time and, clumsily administered by a venerealogist at the Army convalescent home, had been hideously embarrassing, uncomfortable and even painful. (‘ This works on the same principle as the umbrella, it’s not nearly as bad as it looks.’) He had tried not to tell Isabel, but of course she had discovered, how could she fail to, with that sleepless curiosity of hers? It was from that discovery that he dates the failure of their sexual life together. Once she even mused: ‘All those miscarriages. I sometimes wonder …’

  ‘Wonder what?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘This is the first time I’ve ever had anything like this. The first bloody time!’

  She stared up at him, her head and shoulders propped on a mound of pillows. Then she gave that small, derisory smile which always maddened him. ‘Oh, I never believe a word you tell me. Not now. I’ve long since learned my lesson.’

  … Well, it’s true enough – now he reaches out for the lukewarm cup of tea, his muscular, freckled arm bare as the loose sleeve of the pyjama jacket falls away from it – oh, yes, it’s true enough; he’s never been wholly straight with her. But what the eye doesn’t see and the ear doesn’t hear … He sips and pulls a face at the bitterness of the tannin. It might be the aloes which that other nurse (‘ Give you a kiss? What an idea! You’re far too old for kisses’) would put on his fingernails to prevent him from gnawing them. But, for all that, he’s always been a good husband and it’s not as though he were cheating her out of anything she really wanted. For God’s sake, after those first months, when poor little Eithne was dying and he must have someone, anyone to clutch to him in his terror and desolation, she had never even made a pretence of enjoying sex with him. Odd that. It was as though her rivalry with the dying woman had been an aphrodisiac and then, when the unequal battle was over, all that wild, clamouring frenzy of desire was over too, ‘Don’t you ever think of anything else?’ she was in the habit of asking when he eased himself into the bed beside her at night or, as they were dressing for some dinner party, inserted a hand into her wrap and attempted to rouse her by touching one of her nipples.

  ‘Oh, I think of many things! But of this most of all.’

  It was true, though neither she nor his male intimates believed it. In the city where Clare had her home, he had got into the habit of borrowing from an ageing bachelor, one of his senior employees, his frowsty, untidy flat. ‘ What, again! Of course you can have it, dear chap – only too willing to oblige – but, gosh, I’d be a wreck if I kept at it, day and night, as you do. How on earth do you manage to run all those businesses of yours? I’m at an age when once a week is all I can manage – if that!’ There was both admiration and the disapproval of envy in the voice with its oddly strangulated vowels.

  Toby would bring up from his car his own bottles of Scotch and gin and even, if his partner was someone whom he was particularly eager to impress, champagne. ‘You left half a bottle of champers behind you, so I finished it off,’ his host would say. ‘I didn’t imagine you’d want it kept for you.’ In the guest room, Toby would leave two or three notes tucked under the base of the bedside lamp. It was a tacit agreement between the two men, to pay for the cost of having the bed linen laundered and the room cleaned. The narrow, high room, with its amateurish woodcuts of Lincoln and Ely cathedrals facing each other across the bed, always accentuated Toby’s mood of self-disgust and depression when, his partner gone, he went back into it to pick up the twists of Bromo scattered on the floor, to remove the sheets and pillowcases and neatly fold them for the dhobi, and to make sure that he and his partner had left behind them nothing other than the smears and smells of their congress.

  … Sometimes, as now, lying on this bed of his, while from the verandah he can hear Clare’s low voice and Peter’s shrill one in some protracted argument (‘Won’t!’ ‘ Oh, yes, you will!’ ‘No, no, no!’ ‘ Now Peter, that’s enough!’), he thinks with longing of that dim, dingy room, with its frayed Persian rug (Good God, the man can’t be that badly off, why doesn’t he replace it?), its cracked enamel basin, jug and slop pail on their rickety stand, and its Victorian bedside table, far too high for the bed, with a flowered chamberpot in the cupboard at its base. But there are other times when, in memory, that same room seems to him like some place of torture.

  There was that Italian violinist from the girls’ orchestra engaged to play at the hotel, a child she seemed despite all her experience, who showed first shock and then a wondering delight when, having shot his sperm (her purple-lidded eyes screwed tight, her mouth twisted as though in agony), he performed the difficult feat, the opening of the bladder being contracted on such occasions, of pissing inside her. The urine steamed out of her cunt and began to drench the bed. Oh, Christ, Christ, Christ … What would the owner of the flat, so finicky and conventional, think?

  … Or there was that married woman, grass widow of a civil servant absent on tour, who, during a game of bridge at the club, had made it clear to him, by the intermittent pressure of her knee against his own, that she would be as reckless in undertaking an affair in the future as in now overbidding her hand. How bored she had been, both during an interminable sequence of rubbers and then, perpetually yawning and glancing about her, during dinner alone with him; and how frantic she had become in the room in the flat, kneeling down on the floor and tearing at his flies, even while he was unknotting his tie and unbuttoning his shirt. There was a despairing greed in her lovemaking, as of one long famished. When she left him (‘Oh God, I hope no one sees me, one of my closest friends has the flat two floors up’), her face was ashen, her hands trembling.

  … Or that Indian girl, so silent and solemn, a waitress in the Viennese patisserie, who, for some reason never confessed to him, needed money so badly that, though it was clear that her hairless cunt had never had anything larger than a finger up it, endured with silent stoicism, an extended hand gripping one of the brass bars of the bedstead, as he first put his mouth down and sucked, sucked on those marine juices and then savagely mounted her, thrusting deeper and deeper. Through her clenched teeth, he could hear her ‘Oh – oh – ah!’ She would not answer him when he spoke to her afterwards, averting her face as she clambered off the bed and then standing with her back to him as she frantically pulled on her clothes. She took the notes which he held out and, without counting them, tucked them into her scuffed leather handbag. ‘Shall I see you again?’ Once more no answer. When he went into the bathroom to wash – she had shaken her head when he had suggested that she might want to do so – he found blood on him and there was more blood on the counterpane, which he soaked in cold water. Two days later, he returned to the Viennese Patisserie, but there was no sign of her. He asked one of the other girls, pallid and wary in her black dress with a white frilly apron, whether her colleague were not on duty and, her tray balanced on a corner of his table, she replied: ‘She went away. Last Thursday. She said someone in her family was sick and went away.’ It was on the Wednesday that he had had her. ‘Where did she go?’ The girl shrugged her narrow, bony shoulders. No one in the cafe knew. He was overcome by a terrible sense of mystery
and a no less terrible remorse.

  … Still he lies here and the pornography of memory and the memory of pornography (in his locked desk in his office he keeps the books, magazines, photographs, drawings) become confused as in a dream so that he cannot always remember if certain things really happened to him – the girl in nothing but her riding boots, a switch in her hands, the two enormous women, their tongues intertwined, on a balcony overlooking the sea, the girl strapped to the iron bedstead in the cavernous, weirdly creaking brothel, ripe haunches, silky hair, darkly aureoled nipples, sights of pleasure, sights of pain – or if he merely read of them or saw them depicted.

  Again, from the verandah, he hears Clare’s voice. He lumbers up and crosses, in bare feet and pyjamas, to the open window. Through her tennis dress, he can see the outline of her small rounded breasts. He even persuades himself that he can make out the dark triangle lower down, though that is impossible. She lifts an arm, her hand patting her hair into place, and he notices, not for the first time, that unlike most other women whom he has ever known, she does not shave. He watches her as she bends forward to examine one of Peter’s drawings. Then he becomes aware that his mother, Isabel and Helen, seated out on the lawn, are in turn watching him. He must be careful, oh so careful, but he does not know for how long he has the strength to be so. He is afraid and he guesses that Clare is afraid, as she so persistently avoids being alone with him or even near to him. She must fancy him, he is sure that she must. He has that kind of vanity, since, even if he were not so rich, he would be attractive to women. Oh Clare, Clare …

  At last he starts to dress, with the debilitated feeling of someone who is either sickening for a fever or just recovering from one. This afternoon he must start on a long journey, first on horseback, then by car and then by rail, to Simla, where he has a meeting with the Viceroy. There are rumours that he is to be asked to join the Viceroy’s Executive Council. There are people who do not like him, thinking him devious, unscrupulous, ruthless and ambitious; and there are those who like him but who know too much about his private life to regard him as suitable for office – suppose some scandal blew up? The Viceroy is a pious High Anglican, and his innocence has the high and unyielding burnish of steel.

  Toby goes round to the stables to mount the horse which the syce has been grooming for him, and there is Helen, in jodhpurs and an aertex shirt, just returned from her usual morning ride. Sometimes they ride together but usually it is he who is too early for her. As he looks up and she looks down, he thinks how like her mother she has become, and that gives him a pang, as though, somewhere deep inside him, some long-borne weight had suddenly slid first to one side and then to the other. People all supposed that he married Eithne, an invalid eleven years his senior, for the money which she had already inherited from her mother and would eventually inherit from her father. But, though it was true that it was her fortune which became the strong foundation of his, he had really loved her, even if he had also hated her for being host to the bacilli which, frantically multiplying like the population of this bloody country, had eventually done for her. She had appeared so ethereal, with her shifting, dark-ringed eyes, her temples so delicate that one could see the veins throbbing within them, and her husky, often barely audible voice; but what extraordinary hours of lovemaking they had had together, their bodies involuntarily coalescing in a frenzy even as they were in process of doing something or saying something wholly mundane. Toby would be leaning over her as the two of them examined the household accounts kept in her small, neat handwriting, or they would brush against each other as one entered a room at the same moment as the other left it; and then, all at once, there they would be clinging to each other, as though some tidal wave were about to sweep through the house and sweep them away with it, or some earthquake were about to shake it until the roof collapsed over them, hammering them down into the rubble.

  … ‘ Did you have a good ride?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Daddy.’ She swings herself down from the gelding. ‘First I thought you must have gone out ahead of me and then I waited a while. But mama said you were lying in this morning.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to lie in. But, I don’t know why, I felt terribly tired. It’s not as though I’d done anything particularly exhausting or been to bed particularly late. Odd.’

  ‘You do too much.’

  ‘That’s the only kind of life I enjoy.’

  ‘And I do nothing. Nothing!’

  He senses dissatisfaction, even though she is smiling as though she has said this in joke.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘You know what I wanted to do.’

  ‘Well, it’s not too late … After a year or two.’

  ‘You won’t succeed in marrying me off, you know.’

  ‘Won’t I? An attractive girl like you …’

  ‘Bosh!’

  She walks away towards the house and he thinks that that lithe, erect body, the hands and feet a little too large and the legs, and arms a little too thin, is oddly sexless, despite its health and youth. Perhaps she is right, perhaps he will not succeed in marrying her off. For that is what he and even more Isabel are bent on doing. Women do not have careers unless, like those countless shopgirls, waitresses, and typists, unless like Clare, frowning before her abacus as her hands push along the beads, they have to have them; and in any case to be a doctor is no career for a woman – it was bad enough that Sophie, dotty old dear that she is, should have insisted on working in that hospital. He does not like to think of hospitals but, as he now rides out of the stableyard and the grey begins to pick its high-stepping way up the hill towards the woods, he cannot put out of his mind that horrible sanatorium on the foothills of the Himalayas.

  Each morning he would have to steel himself to say goodbye to Isabel and Helen, to trudge up the zigzag path, and to enter that wide, airy, linoleum-covered vestibule, stinking of formaldehyde. Eithne too stank of it, as he bent down to kiss her cheek and quickly she warned him: ‘Don’t come too close, darling. They say I’m still teeming with horrid germs.’ He feared and loathed the other patients to whom she introduced him, because he feared and loathed their illness: the elderly Begum, so rich that she had taken over a whole floor for the use of herself, her private doctor and her servants; the pallid boy with a stutter, who wrote weak, wet poems to Eithne, not knowing that, later, she and Toby would laugh over them in the privacy of her bedroom; the irascible old man, an impoverishied tea-planter, his estates mortgaged to one of Toby’s companies, who was always shouting out for attention in both English and Hindustani and to whom no one paid any heed. It was a relief to go out into the gardens and so escape from both that horrible chemical smell and all those horrible human reminders of mortality.

  … In a clearing in the woods, two women in saris, their faces half veiled, are cutting grass with bill-hooks and then stuffing it into burlap sacks. He wonders, idly, what they will do with it – use it or sell it for goats, bullocks, rabbits? – as he reins in his horse a little above them and looks back. He notes appreciatively the firm, glabrous smoothness of their arms, ankles and bare feet; the round of a buttock upturned to him; a breast pressing against the coarse fold of a sari. The women know that he is watching them and he knows that they know. The knowledge only serves to excite him the more. One woman mutters something to the other and they then pause for a moment in their slashing at the soft, moist grass and glance up at him from under lowered lids. One of them giggles. He feels his erection harden yet further against the hardness of the saddle. Enough. He kicks with his heels at the belly of the horse and, with a grunt, it resumes its ascent.

  He will ride past the Anderson house in the hope that, as he looks down from the road above it, he will catch a glimpse of young Mrs Anderson, working in the garden or playing tennis or sitting out on the verandah of a house so much smaller and darker than that of the Thompsons, her envied neighbours. If she is somewhere outside, he will shout a greeting; but he will not go down, because there has already b
een gossip, in the form of innuendoes and jokes among the men at the club and of suspicions and surmises among the women at their bridge parties, and he does not want, and even more she does not want, that it should spread any further. They have never, in fact, slept together but in the past he was in the habit of riding down, tethering his horse to one of the posts of the tennis court, and then joining her for a mid-morning cup of coffee, while her husband was at his office. She is a pretty, insipid little thing, who longs for the children which, either through her fault or that of her husband, she has never been able to have.

  Toby could give her those children, he had no doubt of that; and as he trots on – she is nowhere to be seen – Toby now begins to brood darkly on that girl whom, when he was a cadet at Sandhurst years and years ago, he seduced when he was her widowed mother’s lodger. The girl became pregnant; and, after days of hysterical pleading on her part and quiet obduracy on his, he eventually took her to a young, contemptuous doctor, recommended by a fellow cadet, with a practice in Kentish Town.