Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘I was awake at six-thirty. I was up and about too.’

  ‘Were you, dear? Well, she could hardly have known that – or expected that. Could she? You’re not usually an early bird.’

  ‘Far from it,’ Isabel said with quiet ferocity, as she turned away from the window out of which she had been gazing.

  Clare sank down on to a chest in the hall, all at once feeling giddy. Her hands grasped its side. She knew that Isabel was referring to the morning of Peter’s death. Isabel would never forgive her.

  There was a crunch of gravel outside the front door and then, all three women waiting in silence for it, the doorbell tinkled. None of them moved, though Clare all but did so. The bearer appeared, walked past them, his head held erect above his slight, sinuous body, and opened the door. An uncertain young man, in a cheap electric-blue suit and a dark blue tie with a silver thread in it, removed a straw hat such as no sahib in the hills at this time of year would ever have thought of wearing. The hat left a darker line across his dark forehead. He was handsome in his pliant, delicate-featured way.

  ‘Clare,’ he said. His voice was immature, as though it had only just broken.

  ‘Robin.’ They did not embrace, embarrassed to do so before the others.

  The bearer stared at the visitor in impudent appraisal, then glided off.

  ‘This is Mrs Thompson.’ The boy’s hand moved slightly at his side and then fell back, when Isabel did not move hers.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Thompson.’

  Isabel nodded, silent.

  ‘And this is Mr Thompson’s mother.’

  The old woman shuffled forward and put out her hand. ‘You must forgive my dressing-gown and slippers.’ She was not to know that the boy’s and Clare’s mother spent most of the hot weather dressed as though for bed.

  Isabel had been consulting the watch on her outjutting bosom, squinting down at it. ‘You’d better step on it. You have precisely forty minutes to catch the bus.’

  ‘Well, goodbye, Mrs Thompson,’ Clare said to her.

  ‘Goodbye, Clare.’ Isabel gave the girl a long, steady look. She made no move towards her.

  Clare turned to the old woman with a feeling of relief.

  ‘Goodbye, my dear. Take care of yourself.’ The old woman put up a skinny, blue-veined arm, placed it around Clare’s shoulder and pressed her cheek to hers. Only recently she had described Clare to Toby as ‘a rubbishy little thing’; now she felt sorry for her, as she had felt sorry, two days before, for the bird which had flown into her room and had broken its wing against the looking-glass in its frenzy to get out again. Toby had wrung its neck when she had summoned him. Clare breathed in a scent of lavender and, with it and less pleasant, one of old age, sour and musty. ‘ Forget everything that’s happened here.’ It was what the old woman had been repeatedly telling herself too – to no avail. ‘Forget it all. That’s my advice. Put it all out of your mind.’ Though she whispered these words, as though in confidence, they were audible both to Isabel and to the boy, so close were they all standing to each other.

  Clare grabbed the battered holdall and her brother then moved slowly forward, stooped his long back and began to heft the suitcases, one in either hand. The bearer appeared silently, as though he had been watching through some chink in the door leading to the dining room, and took the holdall from Clare. He would have taken one of the two suitcases from a sahib and summoned a fellow servant to take the other; but he was not prepared to do such a thing for this awkward, ill-dressed Eurasian. After further goodbyes, only the bearer followed brother and sister out to where the dandies, one belonging to the household and the other hired by the boy, stood out on the green rash of the tennis court. The bearer handed the holdall to a coolie. The boy, after an embarrassed moment of hesitation, handed the two suitcases to another. He put a hand to his breast-pocket, then inserted it in his trouser pocket. He pulled out a few coins and slipped them to the bearer, his dark face growing even darker as the blood flooded it. The bearer took them impassively, his head erect, with no word of thanks. Clare knew that they were far too little, just as she also knew that she herself should have left at least two or three notes from that buff envelope for the staff. But it was too late now, everything was too late now, nothing could be done. Forget everything that’s happened here. Forget it all. That’s my advice. That, however impossible it now seemed, was what she must do.

  Clare seated herself gracefully in the dandy belonging to the household. The boy scrambled into the other, clearly unused to this form of transport. First her coolies and then his let out a cry in unison, as they shouldered their loads. Then, their bare feet pattering over the gravel of the tennis court, they set off at a half-run. Clare looked back over her shoulder. There was no one to whom to wave. Not one of them, even the bearer or the old woman, stood out in the porch, though everyone would have done so if she and her brother had been guests leaving after a dinner party. Good riddance to bad rubbish. She drew a handkerchief out of her bag and held it, with the daintiness which had so much attracted Toby and had so much got on Isabel’s nerves, first to one delicate nostril and then to the other. Despair surged through her and then ebbed, leaving her feeling weak and nauseated.

  Again she looked back, a final glance, before the coolies, grunting and gasping under their swaying load, went out through the gate and began to patter down the hill, past Mr Mukerjee’s modest bungalow and then the wooden villas of the Andersons and the Collector, on exactly the same route which Toby had followed on that terrible morning – only nine days ago, was it? – shouting out ‘My son has been stolen!’

  The ample house, with its high, narrow gables pinching pleats in its red-brick structure, its tidy lawns, flowerbeds and rose trellises and its untidy servants’ quarters, looked deserted at the far end of the tennis court which, in the prevailing dampness, always had the appearance of a well-worn billiard table. She would never see it again. Forget everything that’s happened here. Forget it all. But how could she ever forget that bedroom which she had shared with the child?

  Involuntarily, she glanced up to its window, one hand clutching the side of the dandy, while the other rested, fingers splayed, on her throat. As she did so, the net curtain billowed outwards. Toby stood there, motionless, looking down on the departing dandies. She had an impulse to take her hand from her throat, raise it, wave it in farewell. There was a terrible pathos in his round-shouldered, motionless stance, high up there, in the place where that unthinkable thing had not merely been thought but had also been executed.

  It was too far for her to see, but she knew, with total certainty, that his burning, famished gaze was fixed on her death-cold, satiated one. Then the dandy descended, jolt by jolt, down the steps incised in the rock beyond the gate, and that final, flimsy thread of communication between them stretched, grew intolerably taut, snapped.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Soon after that Helen and her grandmother also left the house, in their case for England.

  ‘Do you really want to go?’ Toby had more than once asked his mother, adding on one occasion: ‘It only seems yesterday that you got here’ and on another: ‘I thought you were going to make your home with us.’

  To that last reproach old Mrs Thompson answered: ‘I meant to, I wanted to. But I feel homesick all of a sudden. I didn’t think I would but I do, I’m afraid. I want to see England and I want to get away from India, and there are the two girls and the girls’ children. Oh, Toby, don’t be cross. Try to understand.’

  He did not have to try. He understood already. He knew that she would go, whatever he said in his attempts to dissuade her, and he also knew that, despite all her promises, she would never return.

  To Helen, the old woman was franker. ‘I’ve come to hate this house, this place, this country. I know it’s irrational of me, such a thing could have happened anywhere in the world. But it’s ruined everything for me.’ She peered into Helen’s face with her watery blue eyes. ‘As I think it’s ruined ever
ything for you – for a time at any rate. Oh, Helen, he was such a sweet little fellow. How could anyone have come to kill him? How, how, how?’

  Helen shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered stonily.

  ‘I hate to leave your father. Perhaps I ought really to stay until the baby comes. But I don’t think Isabel really wants me. I don’t think she ever really wanted me.’

  In that last judgement, the old woman was right. After Toby had once again tried to dissuade his mother from leaving, Isabel had hissed at him in the privacy of their bedroom: ‘Don’t go on urging her to stay. If she wants to go, well, let her go. We’ve done everything possible to make her feel at home. If that’s not been good enough for her, that’s the end of it. No one wants her to stick on here if she’s had enough.’

  When Helen announced that she wished to return to England with her grandmother, Toby’s reaction was wholly different. He did not try to dissuade her, as he had his mother. Instead, he had answered curtly: ‘All right. Fine. You must do what you want to do.’ This was far from the attitude which he had adopted when Helen had declared that she wished to go from school, not to India, but to university. ‘I’ll make you an allowance, of course. And you have the money left to you by your mother. When you’re twenty-one, it will cease to be in trust and you can do whatever you …’

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s talk about money, it doesn’t interest me.’

  Toby felt as affronted as a clergyman told: ‘ Oh, don’t let’s talk about religion, it doesn’t interest me.’ He retorted peevishly: ‘ It would interest you if you didn’t have any.’

  That night, as Isabel sat before her looking-glass brushing the thick, black coils of her hair, she said: ‘I think Helen’s doing the right thing. For herself, for us.’

  Toby, in his dressing-gown, the door open between them, was startled. ‘For us?’

  ‘It’ll be easier to remake our lives – come to terms with everything that’s happened – if she’s not with us. Far, far away,’ she added. ‘On the other side of the world.’

  Toby stood in the doorway, his black bow tie trailing from a hand. His bare feet were purple and swollen from having been squeezed into pumps too narrow for them. He looked overweight, apoplectic, dishevelled. ‘Poor Helen.’

  Isabel smiled bitterly at her reflection in the glass.

  Toby raised an arm and brought it sharply down, cracking the tie as though it were a whip. ‘Do you think we should wait up here until the baby arrives?’

  Isabel shook her head. ‘ No. I want to leave this house as soon as possible. Like your mother. Like Helen. And I don’t want ever to come back here. Next hot weather we’ll have to find another hill-station and another house. Tell Mukerjee.’

  ‘Do you think it’s wise for you to travel?’

  Again she gave that bitter smile, not to him, but to the reflection before her. ‘I don’t know whether it’s wise or not. Probably it isn’t. But I have to travel. I can’t stay here any longer. We’ll take Helen and the old girl down to the plains and I’ll settle everything into the house while you can go on with them to Bombay. And then you’ll be back with me before the baby comes.’ She had decided it all. In the past, it had usually been he who made their decisions.

  ‘But I’m afraid that with all the shock and strain you’ve had – and then with a long journey … I don’t want you to have another miscarriage.’

  ‘I’m not going to have another miscarriage. Anyway, it’s my child, so leave me to decide.’

  He was stunned by this odd claiming of the unborn child as entirely her own. But instead of arguing with her, he merely returned disconsolately to his dressing room, shutting the door between them.

  On the day before they all departed, Toby went out for his usual morning ride. The servants were busy packing the household goods in tea chests, which hired coolies would then lug down the hill to lorries at the depot. Isabel directed them, imperiously efficient. So far from needing Toby’s help, she had cried out, when he had started to give the bearer some instructions about the disposal of his guns: ‘ Oh, do leave things to me! We’ll only get ourselves and everyone else into a frightful mess if you start to interfere.’

  Helen had brought little with her to India and she had packed most of it the night before. Now she was upstairs, helping her grandmother. The old woman was fretful and dithery, as at one moment she cried out ‘Oh, throw that away!’ and at the next demanded ‘What on earth is that doing in the waste-paper basket? Did you put it there?’ There was pathos in the way in which her scant clothes had been so carefully hung up in cupboards or set out in drawers, with lavender sachets and layers of tissue paper; and there was an equal pathos in the obstinacy with which she repeatedly edged Helen to one side in order herself to fold something – a darned cardigan, a worn petticoat – exactly right. ‘Shoes at the bottom!’ she instructed. ‘But put in the trees. That’s right. And books at the bottom too.’ Around her innumerable medicine bottles she carefully wrapped handkerchiefs, which she then knotted firmly over their stoppers. That way, she explained, they would not leak; or, if they did, they would not make a mess.

  Riding off, Toby concluded, with a terrible desolation, that he was nowhere needed or wanted. Clare had gone off on her journey, Helen and his mother were about to go off on theirs; and Isabel too seemed to be already embarked on a journey on which she would not allow him to accompany her. He was alone. He let the horse amble, reins slack, down the slithery path, and, as he did so, he thought of that headlong gallop of his, past the Mukerjee house and past the Anderson house and past the other houses – so many suburban villas and bungalows transported from Harrow or Surbiton or Ealing, to this lush, green bowl among the foothills of the Himalayas – which belonged to all those people who had been so ready with their visits or letters of condolence and who now, whenever they congregated, sailing on the lake, or having picnics on the hill tops, or drinking or playing bridge at the club, whispered, whispered, whispered their insidious gossip.

  ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  It was small, silly, pretty Mrs Anderson, Lola, Lolly to her husband and closest friends, secretly Lollipop to Toby, who was shouting up to him, a pair of secateurs in one hand as she straightened herself, the other hand pressed to the small of her back, in an overgrown, yellowing herbaceous border.

  He waved back, but only after a long pause, since he could not at first believe that the greeting was for him.

  ‘Come and have a cup of coffee!’ she called. ‘I’m just about to have one myself.’ She, too, had joined in that whisper, whisper, whisper of insidious gossip, which had suddenly given a dangerous attraction to a man whom she had previously regarded as ‘just a teeny-weeny bit of a bore’.

  Toby hesitated, the reins slack in his hands and his small eyes screwed up against the morning sunlight. Then he shouted back: ‘All right, fine.’

  Having tethered his horse in some long grass, where the Andersons’ laundry flapped on a line – briefly, with a twist of the bowels, he thought of all that to-do about the missing nightdress – he accompanied Lola into the room which, an amateur painter, she called her studio. Her daubs of sunsets bleeding behind black trees or hills, of giant rhododendron bushes looking as if they had been constructed out of wire and garish paper, of fishing boats bobbing on the lake like toy boats in a bath and of still lifes of half-cut loaves of bread, half-eaten apples and misshapen cups, bowls and vases, hung from the walls, one above the other, or else were stacked against them. Toby peered around him. ‘Rather jolly,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been working like a black. I’ve this exhibition at the club next week. I hope you’re going to come and buy. In aid of rebuilding the poor old mission.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll be gone by then, I’m afraid. What a shame! We’re setting off tomorrow. But’ – he spoke on impulse – ‘I’ll buy something now. How about that?’

  ‘Will you? Will you really?’

  At that moment, the kitmatgar came in, carrying the coffee things on an elaborate electropla
ted tray. Lola pointed imperiously to a table on which a glass jar full of brushes, a half-eaten bar of chocolate and a spool of thread, a needle stuck into it, already rested. Then she sat herself down on the end of a wicker chaise longue and began to pour out. ‘Do make yourself comfortable.’ She fidgeted with the lace-fringed handkerchief which she had daintily wrapped around the handle of the coffee pot, even though it was an inset of wood in the metal. ‘Anywhere.’

  Toby sat; but he looked far from comfortable on the flimsy wooden stool opposite to her.

  ‘Tim and I wanted to have you both over to dinner before your departure. But we didn’t know if … at such a time …’ Her voice trailed away. ‘We didn’t want to appear to be neglecting you and we didn’t want to appear to be bothering you needlessly. A problem.’

  Toby did not answer, as he took the cup of coffee which she was holding out to him, her head tilted slightly to one side and her eyes shining. He noticed, with sudden pleasure, the small blue veins – how blind he must have been in the past! – over the collarbones exposed by the low neck of her simple cotton frock.

  ‘Isabel all right?’ Isabel and Lola had never really hit it off. ‘I mean’ – she lowered her eyelids – ‘considering.’

  ‘Yes – considering. The lucky thing is that she didn’t lose the baby.’ He surreptitiously touched the wood of the stool between his legs, a gesture of propitiation to those dark gods or demons who, during the past days, had seemed to him to be constantly gazing in unwinking menace, uncoiling and slithering, and preparing to strike again with their lethal fangs. ‘McGregor feared that. I only pray she’ll be all right on the journey down. I’ve urged her to wait, to have the baby here, but you know how obstinate she can be.’