Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘Poor Clare.’

  ‘And also poor Peter.’ Isabel now smiles, revealing her large, white teeth above her slightly pendulous lower lip. She wants to be placatory to this odd, distant girl, who, when she calls her mama, always seems to be putting the word into ironic inverted commas. ‘I wonder if you could possibly take over his lessons?’

  ‘Oh lord!’ Helen closes her volume of Trollope and throws it across to the table. Only two or three days ago, Isabel noticed some scratches on its surface, where Helen had pressed too hard on a sheet of paper while writing there.

  ‘It’s just a question of giving him something, anything to do. He loves it when you read to him.’ Isabel decides to flatter her. ‘He makes so much more progress with his reading when he follows you. You get the results which Clare often fails to get.’

  Reluctantly Helen rises, pushing her left foot into one of the shoes which she must have kicked off when she settled herself in the chair. Isabel hates to see someone ruining a good shoe like that, using neither shoehorn nor even a finger, as Helen first treads down the heel and then wriggles her foot about.

  Isabel, watching her, says ‘The servants complain they can never get into your room to clean it.’

  ‘Oh, I hate the idea of other people going over my things. You know how inquisitive they are. The ayah especially.’

  ‘The room must be cleaned some time, dear.’

  ‘Must it? Oh, all right. I’ll let them in tomorrow.’ Helen begins to assemble the sheets of paper strewn across the table. They look as if they have been torn out of an exercise book. Surely she cannot be using that kind of coarse, lined paper for her letters? Or does she keep a diary?

  Isabel crosses her hands over her swollen belly. ‘ Clare looked so … No make-up. A different person. Sallow, terribly sallow. And those eyelashes – they seemed so short without all that mascara. A surprising, sandy colour.’

  Helen, head lowered, goes on stacking the sheets of paper.

  ‘You’re lucky to need no make-up. You have your mother’s complexion. I envy you.’

  What Isabel really means is that she used to envy Eithne. For Helen she has never felt any envy.

  The two women leave the drawing room. ‘What’s happened to Peter? Peter!’ Isabel calls. ‘Where are you?’

  Peter, seated on a step half-way up the staircase, is peering down at them through the banisters. At the sight of his half-sister, his face was briefly irradiated, as though someone had given him an unexpected present. It amuses him to see the women bewildered by his disappearance and to hear his mother calling, with increasing sharpness: ‘Peter! Peter!’ One of his games is to hide himself. But now he can no longer contain himself. ‘Helen!’ he cries out.

  ‘Oh, there you are!’ Isabel says. ‘For a moment I thought something must have happened to you. Come down from there!’

  ‘Hello, Peter. I’m going to teach you.’ Helen’s tone, though not unfriendly, has about it something cool and measured, which both disappoints the boy and irritates his mother. As he reaches the bottom of the stairs, she puts out a hand. ‘ Come!’ The boy rushes forward and grabs the hand in his.

  As Isabel sways on alone, thrusting her protuberant belly before her, first to the hall cupboard for some rubber boots, then into the drawing room and out, through the French windows, on to the verandah, where she picks up a pair of secateurs off the floor, her annoyance with Clare and her irritation with Helen both begin to dissipate. Once again she begins to feel happy. Happiness, she has long since decided in the course of a life blotched with poverty, disappointments and sudden deaths, is akin to health. One possesses it or one does not possess it, one loses it and one regains it. Outward circumstances are seldom relevant. Why should she be so happy on this ordinary morning of an ordinary day? Her husband wants to carry on, or is perhaps already carrying on, with that sallow, sleepy, groaning girl on the rumpled bed in that curtained room. The father whom she cannot remember has long since vanished, God knows where, perhaps he is dead. Her heroic mother, who taught at a primary school and took in lodgers in the high-gabled, damp Victorian house overlooking Clapham Common, is mouldering in an old people’s home in Bognor, her fierce independence making her ungracious in the manner in which she accepts Toby’s monthly cheques. The mutilated body of her only sibling, her twin, must by now have rotted away or been devoured by jackals on the edge of the Rajput desert; but even the thought of him – such fun, oh such fun, people always said – cannot take away this happiness which she draws into her and exhales, evenly and calmly, as though it were the clear, thin autumn air up here on the first foothills of the Himalayas.

  As she snips at the deadheads of the roses, each dissolving on her palm as though into dust, a memory stirs. It is the faintly acrid odour of the roses, a ghost of an odour, which brings the memory back … Sister and brother, nine years old, were at the far end of the garden, where, instructed by their fretful mother, they were struggling to raise a pergola, a tangle of snapped wire, twisted supports and murderously trailing branches, swept down by a gale. Their mother was among her shrill, unruly pupils at the school down the road. The lodgers were all out. The clammy deadheads – no one in the house had either the time or the inclination to deal with them – had the same ghost of an odour as these deadheads now disintegrating, one by one, in her palm, before she empties their petals into the trug beside her. The day was one on which a thundery heat haze enveloped the Common.

  The two struggled to raise the pergola, heaving, tugging and panting, but each time it fell back. Isabel kicked at it: ‘Stupid old thing!’ ‘Bloody old thing!’ Jack amended. Isabel kicked again and a dust rose and drifted over them. They both began to cough. Again they struggled and this time, somehow, Isabel managed to hold it upright while Jack wound wire first round and round its base and then round and round its concrete support. Completed, the job looked, like so many others performed in that fatherless household, flimsy, amateur and botched. Wiping his nose on the back of his hand, so that he left a greyish smear of dust and grime across its narrow bridge, Jack said: ‘ Chuck me that other bit of wire and the cutters. I’ll do the same the other side … but try to hold it straight! Straight!’

  The sturdy girl, who at day school jumped highest and farthest and ran fastest of the pupils of her age, heaved at the swaying half of the pergola and at last got it erect.

  ‘Terrific! Now we’ll have to see to the roses,’ Jack said. He put out a hand: ‘Secateurs!’ He was always issuing peremptory commands to her and she was always docile in complying.

  Later: ‘Blast!’ As she tugged at it, a branch scraped against her elbow. She peered round at the wound, then squeezed it and watched, with both wonder and satisfaction, as small beads of blood began to swell and coalesce with each other.

  ‘You’d better wash that.’

  ‘You’d better wash your nose.’

  Satisfied that they had done all they could, they wandered back towards the house. There was a cavernous downstairs cloakroom, by the back door, which was also used as a store for unwanted luggage belonging to the lodgers, piles of dusty newspapers bundled up with twine and preserved against some eventuality, who could say what, gumboots, ancient raincoats, and the bowls and lead used for a dog long since dead. In one section of this cloakroom, there was an old-fashioned, high-pedestaled washbasin, with spindly brass taps, a gas geyser above it. A door led on to the other section where, under a high window, there was a lavatory-basin, with a mahogany seat set up on a wooden platform to give it the appearance of a throne. The paper in the holder was abrasive and brown, the linoleum frayed.

  Isabel raced into this second section. ‘Gosh, I must have a pee!’ She struggled with her knickers with one hand, while with the other she pushed the door half-shut. She heard the preliminary bark and then gargle and hiss of the geyser, as Jack began to run water into the washbasin. She seated herself, legs wide apart, and felt the intense pleasure of the long-retained urine streaming from her.

  Suddenly the door
creaked wider.

  ‘Hey! Do you mind?’ She put out a hand and pushed at the door; but Jack pushed too, so that for a while the door shifted an inch forward and an inch backward between them. Then, as he put his shoulder to it, it smashed open. ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded, scrabbling for her knickers.

  ‘Let me have a look, let me see. I want to see what it looks like. Then you can see mine.’

  Many years ago, they had shared their baths for reasons of economy, with their mother stooping over them, sponge or flannel in her hand. They had glanced occasionally down at each other but, so alike in every other way, they had not speculated on that trivial unlikeness.

  ‘No! Certainly not!’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ He was undoing his flies with hands still damp from the washing he had given them. Then suddenly he leapt forward and hitched up her skirt, as she struggled to rise, her legs still fettered by the elastic of the knickers at which she was tugging. She saw the pink thing dangling out of the fly and suddenly a wondering curiosity stirred in her.

  ‘Touch it,’ he said. ‘Go on, touch it.’

  The pink thing began to harden in the hand which, with infinite caution, as though she had been told to touch a snake in the zoo, she had extended. His own hand went down. She turned her head aside, looking away and down at the coarse roll of paper in its holder, and he turned his head the other way, to gaze out of the window. His mouth opened, she heard his breathing, like that sound of the geyser coming to life, and the thing in her hand kept growing and stiffening, while she felt his finger exploring what she herself had never until then explored.

  For a few months, whenever they had the house to themselves, they would continue what each of them regarded as no more than a game, even if a secret and vaguely shameful one. ‘Let’s explore,’ one of them, usually Jack, would say – that being the way in which they had come to speak of it. The other would demur half-heartedly and then the two of them would go into the cloakroom or, more safely, into the potting shed, with its rusty, seldom used tools untidily stacked, caked with soil, against its cobwebbed walls, its pots trailing rank, etiolated growths like seaweed, and its deckchairs, their canvas frayed and faded, piled higgledy-piggledy in one corner, in expectation of the next unlikely heatwave. Always associated with those rapt moments, when neither their lips nor their eyes ever met, was, for Isabel, the faint odour of roses and dust. On the first occasion, when they had stood in the cloakroom, the curve of the lavatory-basin chill and hard against her bare legs and the edge of the door sharp against a shoulder, that odour was all about them, on their hands, in their tangled hair, impregnating their grubby clothes.

  … Isabel clicks on with the secateurs, serene and happy, despite, or perhaps because of, these memories which have drifted back, an aromatic dust, unsummoned to her. Jack went away to a church boarding school, at fees drastically reduced because his grandfather, his mother’s father, had been a clergyman. Their mother worked even harder now, dispensing with the services of the diminutive skivvy, little more than a child, who had once come in to make the lodgers’ beds and clean their rooms. Isabel, disconsolate in her isolation, awaited Jack’s return. When next she saw him, he had broadened; his thighs were strangely muscular and his knees strangely knobbly between stockings and shorts. He had also developed a habit of roughly teasing her. He never now said ‘Let’s explore’ and she, though she wished so much to do so, never said it either. He no longer liked her to touch him, protesting ‘Oh, don’t be so soppy!’ ‘Get off, do!’ ‘Do you want to suffocate me?’ if she put a hand on his arm, a cheek against his or, most daring of all, threw herself down near to him where he lay out on the tangled, overgrown lawn and then cautiously, deliberately rolled over and over until her body came to rest against his.

  This physical diffidence between them never passed. It amused Toby, as it pained their mother, when the twins would meet after some long separation and Jack would say ‘Hello, old girl! How are things?’ and she would say ‘Jack! How nice to see you again!’ No kiss, not even a handshake. They might already have seen each other breakfast that same morning, Toby would remark. Their demonstrative mother would sigh: ‘You seem so far from each other and you used to be so close.’ But they were close, innumerable, inextricable filaments joining them to each other. On the night before the news of Jack’s death, Isabel had woken out of a deep sleep, with the sensation of a hammer crashing down repeatedly on an anvil within her, so that her whole body shook and reeled beneath its onslaught, and had at once known, with all the cold, cheerless clarity of the dawn beginning to break over the eastern end of the lake, that he was somehow gone from her. When Toby, the telegram shaking in his hand despite all his efforts, had come up to the bedroom where, to compensate for that early, terrified waking, she was having a siesta, and said: ‘Isabel, prepare yourself, darling, prepare yourself, I have some terrible news,’ she knew the news already, she had no need to prepare. After the funeral, as Toby, embarrassed in his helplessness, held her stiff, desolate form in arms which ached as though they had been carrying some heavy burden and murmured: ‘Don’t cry, sweetie, don’t cry,’ she, who was not crying and who never cried over this bereavement until days later, whispered into his ear, her cheek strangely cold: ‘Oh, Toby, he was half of me.’

  … She picks up the trug laden with the shrivelled, disintegrating heads of the roses and then sets it down on the path. The gardener will see it there and will empty it for her, as the sweeper empties the thunder-box and the ayah picks the long strands of black hair from her hairbrush with the intentness of a monkey gathering fleas. She does not have to carry the trug round to the rear of the house, to the rubbish heap, unless she wants to do so. There is so little that she has to do unless she wants to. She stands, erect, her belly thrust out before her, and looks down to the lake. A single sailing boat moves in an unerring line across its surface and, above, a flock of small birds – starlings? she does not know – wheel, spray upwards and regather, as though at the caprice of every gust of wind. Beautiful, beautiful world. She is happy.

  Part II

  ACT

  Chapter One

  Now that deliverance from her pregnancy was so near, Isabel slept propped against a mound of pillows, hands crossed over belly as though to protect it and mouth slightly open. Each night, as she humped her ungainly body on to her creaking bed, it was with a sense of physical and emotional repleteness. She hardly had time to switch off the bedside lamp, put her head back and draw up the bedclothes before, no longer a creature of flesh and blood but a figure of marble, she plummeted down into a fathomless lake of oblivion. To draw her up from it again required a violent shake or some loud, persistent noise.

  It was such a noise that Clare, her eyelids leaden, was making as she first knocked and then hammered with the palm of a hand on the door.

  ‘Yes! Yes! What is it? What time is it?’

  Clare turned the door-handle and entered the frowsty, curtained room, where her mistress now lay beached, a statue dragged up from icy depths, on the high, Victorian brass bedstead. She looked all around her. ‘ Isn’t he here then?’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t who here?’ Isabel demanded, stretching up her arms and yawning.

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘Peter? But isn’t he with you?’

  Clare shook her head, her hands deep in the pockets of a wrap stained and scented from having so often been worn while she was making up her face. Then she swallowed and said: ‘I overslept. And when the ayah roused me – I couldn’t find him.’

  ‘Overslept! But you must have heard him getting up.’

  ‘I took one of those pills you gave me. For my migraine. It must act like a sleeping pill. I don’t usually sleep as heavily as that.’

  ‘Well, he must be somewhere.’ Isabel picked up the clock on the bedside table, held it in both hands up to the wedge of light slanting through the curtains, and squinted at it. Eight twenty-five. Muhammed must have knocked with her chota hazri at seven as usual, got no answer an
d either have been told by Toby to go away or else have decided to go away on his own initiative. ‘Haven’t you looked for him? You know how he loves to hide.’

  ‘This was the first place I thought of.’ If the child woke before she did, Clare would send him out of the room while she dressed; and on such occasions he would often wander across to his mother’s room, clamber up on to the high, creaking bed and lie against her, one of her arms around his shoulder. If the bearer had already carried in the tray with the chota hazri, Isabel would from time to time feed him one of the narrow fingers of butter-saturated toast or hold her half-drunk cup of lukewarm tea to his greedily gulping mouth.

  Isabel shrugged, swung her legs off the bed, groped for the wrap thrown across the bottom of it, and stood up. For a moment she tottered; then, barefoot, her hair in its thick, black plait hanging over a shoulder, she crossed to the door to the dressing room. ‘ He’s unlikely to be in there with my husband. They’d have heard us talking.’ Calling ‘ Toby! Toby!’ she opened the door. The crossdraught made the cretonne curtain above Toby’s narrow bed billow outwards and slap against the wall. The dressing room was empty.

  ‘Where on earth can he be?’ Clare said.

  Usually it was Isabel who worried about Peter’s disappearances and Clare who remained unperturbed. Isabel now sat down at her dressing-table and stared at her face. Pregnancy had made it too full, too matronly, she decided, with a sudden self-disgust, Clare stood behind her, also looking at Isabel’s face over the shoulder on which the thick, black plait of hair lay stretched out like some sleeping animal. Isabel turned, exasperated. ‘He’s not here,’ she said. Why did the girl still hang around? ‘As you can see. What about upstairs? He might be with Helen. Or with my mother-in-law.’

  Clare did not move. ‘He never visits either. Not at this hour. They don’t like visits in the early morning, he knows that.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure I’ve no idea.’ Isabel rose from the stool, hairbrush in hand. She began to unknot the ribbon round the plait on her shoulder. ‘You’d better look in the garden,’ she said. ‘Do that. He’s always trailing after the gardener and that boy of his.’