Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  The gardener padded towards her over the tennis court with his shrivelled ‘boy’ behind him. The boy seemed reluctant, even fearful. The gardener said, ‘The chota sahib is lost?’ The ayah nodded. The ‘boy’ stood a few feet away from them, picking his nose with a long, exploratory finger. The ayah said, a note of panic for the first time in her voice: ‘What can have happened to him?’ and then the bearer, who had abandoned the ayah to go about his usual morning tasks, came out to join them in his crisp white trousers and tunic. He combed his beard with his fingernails, a faintly supercilious expression on his face. They were Hindus, only he and the cook were Muslims. ‘The chota sahib is lost?’ he said on the same note of interrogation as the gardener. ‘Lost,’ the ‘boy’ repeated vacantly. He rubbed one bare leg, stork-like, against the other and some of the soil caked to the dark brown skin crumbled and scattered. ‘What are we to do?’ the gardener asked. He turned, not to the bearer, but to the ayah, sensing in her a quiet authority which the bearer, for all his overweening manner, lacked. The ayah spread out her hands, with those strangely pink, yielding palms. Then she looked distractedly around her, as though suddenly – from behind that privet hedge over there, from under that garden roller, from the shelter of a rosebush or the tangle of the tennis net rolled up by its post – radiant and laughing at them for all this needless fuss, her baba, the chota sahib, would emerge. She longed for that to happen, she half-believed that it would – just as, with a mingling of longing and half-belief, she repeatedly told herself that some day, somehow she would visit Nanny Rose, bearing her glutinous yellow sweets or a bunch of the wild flowers which she had taken such joy in pressing between the pages of her Bible.

  Then something caught the ayah’s eye, on the slope of the hill, over-arched by branches so dark that at this hour of the day they looked almost black, above the greenish rash of the tennis court which only the two girls now ever used. She pointed. ‘ Did you look there?’

  The three men gazed in the direction of her finger. The gardener shook his head. The ‘boy’ backed away, as he did when Toby, in one of his brief, volcanic rages, shouted at him either for having done something amiss or for having failed to do something at all. The bearer shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘We must look there then,’ the ayah said, suddenly aware that the two white girls had left their chairs and were standing side by side, motionless and rigid, at a corner of the verandah from which they could watch the four servants. For a moment, the ayah gazed at them with an equal intensity. Then, raising the folds of her sari with one hand to make it easier for her to climb, she started up the zigzag path. The bearer stared down at the ground between his feet, twitched a shoulder, again ran fingernails through his luxuriant, greying beard. The ‘boy’ showed a similar disinclination to follow, going down on his hunkers and lethargically tugging at some weeds. Only the gardener went up after her.

  Having ascended, spine erect and head thrown back, the ayah advanced along the path flickering ahead of her in rapid alternations of sunlight and shade. Her bare feet slapped down now on earth, now on rock, now on jagged stone, indifferent to the changes. The gardener, more circumspect, picked his way, head lowered. The ayah put out a hand, pushed at the creaking door of the little-used lavatory, hesitated on an indrawn breath, entered, stood motionless. In the gloom and stench, she looked about her. A shaft of light from the aperture high up in the wall made the side of the huge pottery urn glisten. A bird trilled, repeatedly, three falling notes. She turned head, right, left, right, all senses alert, as though she feared some ambush. The gardener stood in the doorway, picking at a frayed corner of his sweat-stained tunic. There were some dark blotches on the ground. There were similar dark blotches on the wooden slat with a hole in it, above the malodorous pit. The ayah peered at the slat, the wrinkles around her wary eyes deepening. She put down a hand, rubbed a palm on one of the blotches on the slat, raised it, examined the smear, sticky and near-black on pink flesh. Then she let out a brief wail, ‘Ai-ee!’ The gardener jerked back, the whites of his by now prominent eyes glistening like the sides of the urn in the light from the aperture above. Again the three bird notes fell through the silence.

  Intrepid, the ayah stepped forward, the bangles jingling round her ankles. She peered down through the hole in the slat. Something silvery-grey glinted up out of the darkness of the pit. ‘Ai-ee!’ she wailed again. Then she turned to the gardener, motionless in the doorway, his head cocked on one side as though in an effort to hear those three falling notes of the invisible bird. ‘It’s as I thought, as I knew!’

  There was a sound of feet outside the privy. Then Helen was there. ‘What is it?’ she asked in Hindustani. ‘Have you found him?’

  The ayah nodded. She pointed.

  Helen went forward, she too peered down into the pit. ‘Get a torch! Clare, get a torch!’ Clare was standing outside, shoulders hunched and her fingers pressed to her lips. ‘ Clare!’ There was no response. Helen ran out, pushing past the girl. ‘ Oh, never mind, I’ll get it.’

  The ayah looked over her shoulder. Then she bent forward, stretched out her arms, as she once used to do when she lifted this child, whom she thought of as her own, out of the zinc bath, and pushed them downwards into the fetid ordure. (Later, she was to be told: ‘You should have waited for us to come, you should have left everything as it was.’) She groaned, grunted, turned her head towards the gardener, silently beseeching his aid. But he merely stared in horror. She went down on her knees, feeling against them the harshness and dampness of the concrete floor. A fold of her sari, jerked out of place, now screened all her features but her nose, the gold stud glittering in it. Again her hands plunged, her face contracted in an anguish of effort. Dripping – how often had he dripped over her sari as she had lifted him, crowing and struggling, from the zinc bath, to wrap him in the towel warmed by the paraffin stove – she felt his body in her arms, the head falling back unnaturally and every part of him smeared and soiled. She held out the body of the child as though to pass it to the gardener, but he retreated from her, muttering something inaudible.

  At that moment, breathless from having raced down the zigzag path and then up again, Helen appeared in the doorway of the privy, the torch, which always rested on the hall table in readiness for one of the frequent power failures, held in her hand. She pushed past the gardener, switched on the torch. In the dim, yellow circle of light – for weeks now Isabel had been telling Toby that the torch needed new batteries and Toby in turn had been telling Mr Ram and Hilda – the black gash under the child’s throat, running from ear to ear, stood out against the pallor of the girlish chin above it.

  Helen said: ‘You’ve found him.’ Her voice was steady.

  She still held the torch on the corpse. The ayah looked down. Was that the filth from the pit or was it a bruise which darkened the whole area around the open mouth? The eyes stared up at her blearily, through lashes clotted with a grey-green sediment, which had also bunged up a nostril.

  A suspicion, as cold and slimy as her dead darling’s flesh on her flesh, slithered up, snake-like, within her.

  Chapter Six

  The Inspector of Police of the district was away in England on leave and it was therefore his assistant, Singh, whom Toby had ridden off in the hope of finding. Unlike Hunt, who was lazy, Singh, relentlessly ambitious, often worked on Sundays.

  Singh, son of a wealthy Brahmin merchant, had been educated at a public school in England where, clever at work and a muff at games, he had been bullied by the other boys and patronized by the masters. His father had wished him to go to Oxford or Cambridge but, with a characteristic mixture of pliancy and stubborness, the boy had quietly resisted him.

  Singh was in the habit of wearing pale grey suits, expensively tailored from the finest mohair or worsted in Delhi or even London, striped shirts with stiff collars and cuffs always showing crisp and clean an inch below each jacket sleeve, and wide, dark-hued ties held in place with a pearl or diamond pin. One of his eyeteeth was cappe
d with gold and there was a gold signet ring, too bulky to be approved by the British, who thought it vulgar, on the curiously long little finger of his left hand. His melancholy, delicate face was of the same pale grey colour as his suits.

  He had just seated himself at his desk in his office, having taken off his jacket with its narrow lapels and small ticket-pocket and hung it on the coat hanger presented to him by one of his babttsy when Toby burst in, the freckles standing out on his white, sweaty face, to announce: ‘Singh, something terrible has happened, my boy’s been stolen. We must have a search party – at once!’

  It maddened Toby that the tall Indian should uncoil himself so slowly from his chair and take so much time to slip first one arm and then the other into the jacket, lined with pale mauve silk, which he had removed from the coat hanger on the door. ‘I don’t understand,’ he drawled in that parody of the British ruling class. ‘Stolen?’ The two men, so dissimilar, had always distrusted and despised each other. Singh, patiently well informed, knew about Toby’s constant escapades with women and, with a queasy puritanism derived from his years in England, was shocked by them. Toby thought Singh a supercilious prig.

  ‘Some dacoits must have taken him. Who knows? For God’s sake get a move on! Do something, man!’

  But Singh remained outwardly poised and deliberate, even if his usually pale face darkened with annoyance. Who was this fat, sweaty, blustering lecher to address him like a servant? He summoned some of his men and gave them instructions to comb both the area around the house and the native quarter. Then he picked up the telephone and began to ring round to his colleagues in the neighbouring towns and villages. It was not always easy to make the connections and, when they were made, the lines were not always clear. But while he watched Toby with wary, contemptuous eyes – restlessly, the Englishman flung himself down in a chair covered with creaking leather, jumped up, strode to the window and looked out, muttered under his breath, came and stood over the Indian, again strode to the window, again flung himself down in the chair, crossed his legs, recrossed them, bit on a knuckle – Singh never for a moment showed any impatience either with the operator or with the invisible people to whom he spoke. At the end he said: ‘ Well, that’s that. Now we’d better go up to the house.’

  Reluctantly, for all his impatience, Toby had been impressed.

  ‘We’ve looked everywhere. There’s no sign of him.’

  Singh gave a small, superior smile. ‘Children have a knack of disappearing and reappearing.’

  Toby ignored that. ‘How do you propose to travel?’

  ‘I’ll take the car to the end of the road. Then – well, I suppose I’ll walk up.’ Singh never mounted a horse unless he had to.

  ‘Oh, all right. In that case, I’d better make my way back alone. But hurry, for God’s sake! Who knows …?’

  Suddenly, the Indian felt sorry for this man, the stains of perspiration dark under the sleeves of his shirt, his small, green eyes peering from under the reddish eyebrows with a dazed intensity, and his voice jaggedly rasping.

  ‘So many terrible things have happened in recent months. There was that attempt to poison me. Remember? I have enemies, a man like me has enemies.’

  Again that small, superior smile as Singh stretched out a hand to the Englishman’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. He had learned how to patronize others from having so often been patronized himself. ‘Yes, I know, I know,’ he said, though he had never accepted that theory of poisoning. It was far more likely that some food had gone off. He himself, a bachelor, took meticulous care that his cook never kept leftovers for more than twenty-four hours in the icebox.

  Toby galloped off in a cloud of dust, turning once to raise a hand to Singh, as though in warning, not goodbye.

  Singh climbed into the police Austin beside his driver. Two uniformed men got in behind him. He drew a flat cigarette case, his initials inlaid in gold on its silver, from his breast pocket, clicked it open and removed a Sobranie Egyptian (‘a woman’s cigarette,’ Toby would remark contemptuously of this preference to others). The driver produced a lighter with his left hand from the glove pocket. Singh leant his head forward, drew in, exhaled. The child would have wandered off somewhere, he would turn up. Stolen … He smiled at the word. Toby had always struck him as extremely maladroit in his use of language.

  Chapter Seven

  The grey stumbled and all but fell as Toby urged him up a short cut so steep that he had to clutch with one hand at his mane and with the other at the saddle-bow to prevent himself from falling off. The hooves scrabbled, stones cascaded downwards. Then, with a heave and a lurch, the grey was back on the path.

  Suddenly, far ahead of him, framed by overhanging branches, Toby saw them. They stood motionless, the three women, in the centre of the path, the sunlight, filtering through the greenery, making their faces come into focus and fade, come into focus and fade, as though with each pulse of the blood thudding at his temples. One of them, Helen, raised an arm and waved it, in slow semaphore, from side to side. Toby kicked at the horse with even more savagery than before, grunting: ‘ Damn you! Get on! Get on!’

  The women did not move towards him. As he approached, the arm which Helen had been waving fell to her side. Her face was extraordinarily still and white against all the agitated greenery.

  ‘Any news?’

  Helen nodded calmly.

  ‘Where was the little blighter? Where was he? Where was he?’

  ‘Father … he’s dead.’ She stepped forward. She firmly took the head of the grey, as though afraid that, having received this news, Toby would gallop away.

  All at once Mrs Thompson set up an eerie, uncontrollable keening.

  Chapter Eight

  The body lay out on a blanket woven in mills, hundreds and hundreds of miles away, belonging to Toby. The blanket had been spread on the dining-room table, the curtains drawn against the sunlight which flooded down, warm wave after wave, on old Mrs Thompson, outstretched, mute and motionless, on a deckchair in the garden, her usually hard, tight face, bound together by innumerable wrinkles, now seeming to deliquesce beneath it. It was Helen who had sent Clare for the blanket.

  ‘Fetch a blanket!’ she had shouted down to where the other girl stood, as though in a trance, in the centre of the tennis court, her fingers once again pressed, in that gesture which suggested the choking back either of words or of sobs, against her mouth, while she stared, not up at the privy, but down the drive which had carried Toby headlong away on his horse.

  Clare had merely raised her eyes up to Helen.

  ‘A blanket! Get a blanket! Any blanket!’

  Clare took a step, halted, then stared up again. ‘ Have you found him?’

  ‘Yes. He’s … Oh, get a move on!’

  Still in that seeming trance, Clare began to move slowly towards the house. When she reappeared with a blanket off her bed, she trailed it behind her across the tennis court. Helen shouted to the gardener in Hindustani: ‘ Get it from her!’ she shouted. The gardener went.

  Helen held out the blanket (Nanny Rose held out the thick Turkish towel) and the ayah, with a deep, surrendering sigh, lifted the child towards her. ‘Help me’, Helen said. She spoke the words in English, not in Hindustani, but the ayah understood, going close to her and half-supporting the corpse about which Helen was wrapping the blanket to make a plaid cocoon. Stumbling and staggering, the girl and the woman, both strangely tranquil, carried their burden down the hillside, across the tennis court, past the Eurasian girl, once again motionless, those fingers pressed to her lips, towards the bearer who now stood, with Mr Ram and Hilda, both of whom he had summoned, by the French windows to the drawing room. Hilda’s glasses, as thick as the bottoms of lemonade bottles, again flashed fire as she jerked her head away. Licking his lips, Mr Ram goggled. ‘What could have happened?’ he asked no one in particular. ‘Who would want to do such a thing? My God!’

  … Now Helen said: ‘Don’t go in, father. You don’t want to go in. It’ll only
upset you.’ But Toby pushed past her. Helen followed and then Hilda, an expression of determined eagerness on her face, as though this terrible confrontation between father and dead son was something which she could not possibly forego. Toby walked over to the table at which, with that relentless voracity of his, he had wolfed so many meals, put out a hand and jerked back the blanket. Hilda gasped, her open mouth, its corners downturned, giving her a fish-like appearance. The bruises round the mouth of the child made it appear, in the low wattage of the overhead light, as if some acid had burned away the flesh, leaving a gaping hole. A hand lay stiffly open, two slashes across the palm, each encrusted with beads of blood like tiny scabs. There was a slash in the pyjama jacket, puckered with the same scab-like beads. The smell was repellent.

  Toby stared down for a long time, frowning as though in an attempt to solve one of those problems – should he or should he not buy into Cawnpore Textiles? Would it be wise or unwise to extend the hotel in Simla? – which daily beset him. But, for once, he seemed unable to come up with a solution. Then he turned: ‘This bloody country! Christ, this bloody country!’

  The old woman still lay outstretched on the verandah. Isabel was still in her bedroom. The servants and Mr Ram still stood in a silent group, crowded together, as though for safety, at the far end of the hallway. Clare was still alone on the tennis court, fingers pressed to lips. Only Helen and Hilda heard him.