Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ISABEL

  In dressing-gown and feathered mules, her hair in a net and her sturdy legs, their blueish marble finely streaked with the darker blue of veins, supporting her out-thrust belly, Isabel stirs the fudge in the saucepan before her on the primus stove. Her mother-in-law began to make it but then, overcome by standing and the heat, had what she called ‘one of my little turns’. Soon, the thread will appear; and soon, no doubt, lured by the smell of chocolate and vanilla, Peter, Pete, Peterkin will also appear from the schoolroom, where Clare, suffering from one of her migraines, has left him to do some sums. So precocious in all his other lessons, he has a hatred of arithmetic. He will never be able to take over the business, Toby has often said, half in benevolent joke and half in acrid criticism. ‘ Everything that I have ever achieved rests on the foundation of knowing that two and two make four.’ Toby, so clumsy with words, is brilliant at juggling with figures. At a glance, he can appraise a balance sheet or point out a mistake in a bill.

  The unborn child shifts within her. Stirring, stirring, stirring with a rhythmic movement of the firm white arm from which the sleeve of her Chinese silk wrap falls away, she smiles to herself. It is a habit of hers, that small, secret smile, which irritates Toby, since it excludes him. ‘ What’s the joke?’ he asks; and to that she either murmurs ‘ Nothing’ or else shakes her head. She smiles because she is happy, whereas Toby rarely is. She is happy in stirring this fudge by the kitchen window while, outside, drops of water glitter, small, transparent glass beads, on the blue of the hydrangeas which, many years ago now, the gardener planted, with her standing, sturdy legs apart and arms akimbo, to give him her brisk commands. She is happy in thoughts of the long, cloudless day ahead of her, of the pheasant which Toby shot on his visit to Simla and which they will eat for tiffin, and of Peter at any moment coming through the door, crying out: ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy! Let me scrape the saucepan!’ Above all, she is happy in the thought of this child inside her, even though, two hours earlier, she was retching over the chill enamel bowl of the thunder-box. The child is, secretly, a present neither for Toby nor for herself but for Peter; and because it is that, she is calmly certain that she will not lose it. ‘You will have to be careful, dear lady,’ Dr McGregor told her, the whisky raw on his morning breath. ‘With your history, extremely careful.’ Crankily unorthodox, he then listed all the things which she must avoid. ‘Undue indulgence in alcohol’ came first, the mention of it from this man whose face is covered with the broken veins of a heavy drinker, making her give that small, secret smile of hers. Smoking, of course; riding and lifting; late nights; too many spices and too much fat; strong tea, strong coffee … ‘Most of the illnesses I have to treat are dietary in origin.’ She can believe that. Where there are so many servants and where everyone vies with everyone else in entertaining, meals are both too heavy and too frequent.

  She decided to give Peter, Pete, Peterkin this present when, on their previous stay in the hills, she and he were upstairs on one of those daily visits which, however much he protests, she forces him to make to his grandmother’s room. He was staring out of the high window, watching a kite being flown by someone invisible to him – could it be one of the many children of the rich, obsequious Parsee, Mr Mukerjee, from whom they rent this house each year? – far, far down the hill. The kite soared, lunged dangerously and, jerked by that anonymous hand, soared again. Beautiful. Its tail streamed behind it, now rigid and now lashing from side to side, as though it were some snake high up there in the sky.

  ‘Granny is asking you a question.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother him,’ the old woman muttered, shifting irritably in the armchair in which she now spends so much of her time, when not in bed or lying out on a deckchair on the verandah. ‘It’s of no consequence.’

  ‘Peter!’ Isabel’s sharp voice at last jerked him round, as that invisible hand had jerked the kite to its bidding. But, though his face was turned to them, his eyes still glanced sideways out of the window.

  ‘Granny wants to know what you want for your birthday.’

  The boy, then only four, shrugged.

  ‘You must want something.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There were many things which he wanted; but since he had so often heard his mother and father say that poor old Granny had hardly any money, he now shrank from naming any of them.

  His grandmother stared at him, her gaze clouded by the pearly cataracts which, in a few months, would have ripened enough for an opthalmic surgeon to remove them. Then she gave a snorting laugh: ‘It must be difficult to decide what one wants for a present when one has everything.’

  Isabel was about to protest when Peter, Pete, Peterkin said, eyes still skittering sideways to watch what was happening to the kite: ‘Yes, I have got everything. There’s only one thing I really want.’

  ‘And what is that, dear?’

  ‘A sister.’

  The two women laughed. The boy did not like that. Stamping his foot, he cried out: ‘I do, I do, I do! I don’t want to be an only child. I want to have a sister.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t oblige there,’ his grandmother replied, crossing her hands, knobbly with arthritis, on her lap. ‘But perhaps your mother can.’ She has had four children herself – Toby, two daughters, both married back in England, another son, her beloved, long since rotted away in the mud of Flanders – so that she has always shown a pitying contempt for Isabel, incapable of carrying a foetus to its term.

  Peter now stared angrily at his mother. ‘Why can’t I have a sister?’ he demanded.

  Isabel laughed, though she felt humiliated and raw. ‘Well, I’ll have to see what I can do. Won’t I? It’s not all that easy, you know. The stork may be too busy to visit us.’

  But it was at that moment that she decided. For him she could and would do it.

  Toby was surprised, bewildered and shocked by her sudden ardour. He had already supposed that she knew about the affliction, like some ill-concealed illness, of his obsession with silly, pretty little Mrs Anderson down the hill. (Clare had not yet glided, insidiously potent, into his daily life and nightly dreams.) Was this a ploy to win him back from the intruder, just as Eithne, in those last frenetic, doomed days, had put forth all her ebbing strength and all her fading beauty to win him back from Isabel, implacable keeper first of her house and then of her husband? (In the railway carriage, their bodies swaying and jolting as they rushed into the night, she had suddenly struggled away from under him, a look of terror on her face and her right hand making tearing movements at her left breast, as though some invisible beast had fastened its fangs there. Later, to the cowering Indian doctor, he explained: ‘I think she must have overstrained her heart through exertion. She had this vomiting attack – something she must have eaten.’ That remained his story and so eventually became the story of others.) He was seated on the edge of the narrow bed in his dressing room, massaging the sole of the bare foot which lay across his knee. His boxer shorts cut into the muscular thighs covered with reddish down. His eyes were moony and sad. Somehow he knew that he would never make it with Lola Anderson. In her nightdress, a coarse plait over her shoulder, Isabel swished towards him, ran fingers through his close-cropped, thinning hair, nails scratching scalp in memory of what once would arouse him, and then stooped and grasped the hand with which he was massaging his foot. ‘Come!’ Reluctant and wondering, he allowed her to draw him up. ‘Come, come.’

  He pattered after her into the bedroom in which he had not slept for so long, stretched himself out beside her and, her nightdress now an opalescent pool on the moonlit floor submitted to the arms which, a predator with her victim, she fiercely threw around him.

  After a long-delayed, jerky, painful consummation – ‘What’s the matter with you? Old age? Or have you been back to that brothel?’ – he tumbled off the bed and, with a sensation of physical nausea, picked up the nightdress as though it were something soiled and threw it over a chair.

  Isabel lay back on the rumpled
pillows, her breasts, still moist from his saliva, sticking up above the sheet now wrapped around her. She smiled that mysterious smile of hers, as though at some joke which she would never tell and he would never understand, even if she were to tell it.

  He pulled on the boxer shorts, then thrust his arms into his vest.

  Later, hearing him leaving the dressing room through the door to the corridor, she called out: ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ve not yet locked up.’

  Each night he observes a ritual of going from downstairs room to room, turning keys, pushing home bolts, fastening latches. Out there, in the windy darkness, there are people with knives, guns, bombs, stones, brands. He can safeguard this house, this family and the multiple businesses essential to their maintenance only if, by this nightly ceremony of exorcism, he keeps those dark, invisible demons at bay.

  ‘I’m sure Muhammed has seen to everything.’

  ‘One can never be sure.’ He meant that one could never be sure not merely of Muhammed’s efficiency but of his loyalty.

  In his expensive cashmere dressing-gown, bought from Sulka when last in England, Toby stood for a long time by the landing window. Opposite his dressing room was the room in which Nanny Rose and Peter slept. Far down the hill – he stood on tiptoe to peer – was Lola’s bedroom, with its wide balcony overlooking an irregularly shaped lawn. Her husband was away. As Toby had sweated and grunted over Isabel, he had imagined Lola asking herself, sleepless: ‘Will he come tonight? Will he?’ Preposterous! But the idea persisted. She was lying there in a nightdress so transparent that the dark aureoles of her nipples and the dark triangle of her sex were visible through it. She moaned, tossed her head from side to side, bit her lips, placed a hand between her legs …

  Upstairs, someone moved with a creaking of floorboards. No doubt, since it was far too late for any servant to be in the house, his old mother had been making her way, hand outstretched, to the commode which stood in one corner of her room. She had been embarrassed to ask for it and Isabel had deliberately exacerbated that embarrassment by exclaiming with a mixture of surprise and disgust: ‘You mean you want a commode in your room? But the bathroom is only next door.’ Now, sleepless as so often, she would probably be adjusting her glasses, taking up a book, settling herself on a high mound of pillows …

  He shook himself, as though to break all the invisible filaments that bound him there, a silent, yearning, self-disgusted presence above the bedroom separated from him by a tennis court, trees, walls and that lawn shaped with what seemed to be a deliberately perverse irregularity. Then slowly, one step, two steps, one step, his hands clutching the dressing-gown to him, he began to descend as though into an icy pool. He could see that all the drawing-room windows were closed but none the less he went up to each of them and tested their keys and bolts, resting fingers on the metal, a gesture of magic. He tried the front door, again resting fingers on the metal of keys, bolts, chain. He went on into the dining room, with its smell of the cigar which he had smoked, sitting on there alone, the bottle of port before him, while the frail old woman and the robust middle-aged one sipped, in a lassitudinous ennui, the coffee which had bubbled up through the glass funnel of the Cona percolator. ‘Coffee, mother?’ Isabel would have asked, as she always did; and old Mrs Thompson would have replied, as she too always did: ‘Well, why not? I won’t sleep anyway.’

  Eventually, the elaborate ritual done, he crept back up the stairs. Isabel had shut the door between the main bedroom and his dressing room and her light was off. Sometimes, after his tour of the silent house, she would call out, her voice sharp with irritation at being woken, or with incipient alarm at a possible intruder: ‘ Is that you, Toby? Toby!’ but on this night she was silent. She slept like someone gorged to repletion.

  Toby went out again from his dressing room, into the bathroom. The bearer had left out the usual jug of hot water, with a towel over it; but instead of using that, he splashed cold water out of another, larger jug into the basin on the high, mahogany washstand. Dipping in his sponge, he began to wash off his body all traces both of the woman who was his wife and of what he had just done with her. He worked with the grave, patient absorption of someone washing a corpse, his lips sucked inwards each time that the icy water trickled down his flesh, to soak into the floorboards. He had not thought to remove the bathmat from its rail and place it beneath him.

  Oh, Christ, I hope that doesn’t happen again …

  But it did, for many nights.

  … Peter comes in as Isabel has expected. ‘Oh, Mummy, let me scrape out the saucepan!’

  She hands it to him with a smile. ‘Now don’t scrape too hard. If you scrape too hard, you scrape off the enamel, and I read the other day in the newspaper that enamel can be bad for you.’ The article to which she refers attempted to establish a link between the swallowing of enamel chips from cooking utensils and cancer of the stomach.

  He scrapes with the wooden spoon and then sucks it, a cheek smeared.

  ‘Is Clare still lying down?’

  He nods, scrapes, sucks. The smear extends to his pointed, girlish chin.

  ‘I’d better see how she is. Here, give me that. There’s nothing left in it. Give it to me!’

  Reluctantly, he hands the saucepan to her, the spoon in it, and she fills it with cold water, to make it easier for the scullery-boy to wash. The fudge, thick and dark, lies out on two shallow dishes, which she now carries into the stone-tiled pantry, to cover with bead-fringed doyleys, the work of her mother-in-law. When it has set, she will carve it with a crisscross pattern, remove the pieces one by one and place them in the tin, once full of chocolate biscuits ordered from Calcutta, with the regal profile of Queen Mary imposed on the no less regal one of George V and ‘Dieu et Mon Droit’ inscribed in gold curlicues above them.

  Peter follows her up the stairs; but instead of going with her into the room which he shares with Clare, he remains out on the landing. ‘ Oh, go away, do!’ Clare exclaimed fretfully to him when, only a short while before, he put his head round the door and peered through the curtained gloom.

  ‘How are you, Clare?’ Isabel asks briskly.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ Clare groans and then the groan becomes a bilious yawn, as she raises bare arms above the head propped up on a heap of pillows and stretches extravagantly. ‘ These migraines make me unfit for anything.’

  ‘You should really have a word with Dr McGregor about them.’

  ‘Oh, what does he know!’

  ‘A lot,’ Isabel replies sharply, though she has never believed it. ‘He’s a first-rate doctor, even if he does drink too much.’

  ‘There’s nothing anyone can do about a migraine. They come, they go. I always get them before my period.’

  ‘If it’s your period, then I can let you have some pills.’ Though so healthy, Isabel has pills for everything. She can understand Helen wanting to be a doctor and Sophie having worked as a nurse; she is fascinated by illness as a stay-at-home is fascinated by tales of the distant, exotic countries he will never visit.

  ‘The best pill is to lie in the dark and do nothing. Undisturbed,’ Clare adds pointedly. ‘Eventually a migraine passes. Oh!’ Again she groans, a hand cupping her right eye.

  Isabel purses her lips. Can the girl really be suffering as much as she makes out? Eurasians are notoriously lacking in guts, they give way to the smallest afflictions. After her last miscarriage, Isabel went out to a party on the same day. She cannot imagine any Eurasian woman doing that. ‘Well, I’d better leave you. I’ll see if Helen can take over.’

  ‘She won’t thank you for that.’

  Isabel detects an insolence; but since she is habitually good-natured, she decides to make nothing of it. She slips out, shutting the door quietly behind her. Peter is still standing outside, waiting.

  ‘We’ll find Helen,’ Isabel says.

  ‘What did Clare say?’ Peter asks, as he prepares to slide down the banisters.

  ‘She’s still got her migraine
.’

  ‘What is a migraine, Mummy?’

  ‘A pain in the head.’

  ‘When I went to see her, she told me to ‘‘Bugger off!’’’

  ‘What!’ Isabel halts on the stair and looks up at the boy, who, straddling the banisters, has not yet launched himself on the exciting journey down. ‘I’m sure she never said that.’ But Isabel can well believe it. Once, when Clare accidentally spilled some tea into her lap while filling her cup, Isabel, who happened to be passing the open schoolroom door, had been amazed and angered to hear a loud ‘ Fuck!’ Fortunately, on that occasion the child had not been with her.

  ‘She did, she did! She said ‘‘Bugger off!’’ I promise you, Mummy.’

  Isabel decides that, yet again, she will have to talk to Clare. If it had been anyone else, she would have asked Toby to do so, but in this case it will have to be herself. ‘Nonsense!’ she tells him. ‘And I don’t want you ever to use that word again. It’s not … nice, remember?’

  ‘But what does it mean?’ Peter persists.

  ‘It means ‘‘Go away’’ – which she might well have said to you. But it’s not a nice way to say ‘‘Go away’’, in fact it’s a very rude way to say it. So, please, Peterkin, please, never let me hear it again from your lips.’

  Peter, Pete, Peterkin slides down the banisters with a high-pitched ‘Whoosh!’

  Helen looks up, surprised, from her chair by the window in the drawing room when Isabel comes in. In the afternoon, her stepmother usually goes up to her room for a siesta.

  Before she says anything, Isabel glances around her, taking in the disorder, of books on floor and papers scattered over table, which Helen has managed to create in a room so recently tidied by the servants. Why can’t the girl use her own room, instead of treating this one as though it were her own?

  Isabel’s disapproving scrutiny annoys Helen, who asks sharply: ‘Did you want me?’

  ‘It’s Clare. Another of her migraines.’