Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  Bloody-minded, Lola thought, nodding her well-kempt head as she recalled arguments on the club entertainments committee.

  ‘Tim away still?’ Toby’s voice, though he made a determined effort to steady it, carried a tremor of excitement.

  She sipped, little finger curled as her hand raised her cup. Over its rim she nodded. ‘H’m. He’s gone to talk about another irrigation project – beyond Biwali. He has so many irrigation projects in hand that this province will soon be a marsh.’ She laughed, then added: ‘He’s coming back tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s often away.’

  Again she laughed. ‘I sometimes think – not often enough! No, I don’t really think that. But, oh, he’s getting awfully crotchety. I suppose it was missing promotion to that job in Delhi.’ All at once her small, pretty, pug-like face assumed a dissatisfied, even peevish expression. ‘And he always seems to be too tired to want to go anywhere or to do anything. Last Sunday, the Noel-Smiths suggested a picnic to Mount Pleasant and he refused, refused just like that without consulting me. Not that he often consults me about anything.’ She peered at Toby: ‘You must be older than he is.’

  ‘A good bit. Unfortunately.’

  ‘But you’ve still got some life in you. A lot of life. By all accounts!’ She peered at him again and then looked down into her cup, beginning to giggle.

  ‘What gossip have you been hearing about me?’

  ‘Oh. A lot.’

  ‘Such as?’ He felt his bowels now twist with excitement as they had previously twisted with apprehension at the sight of that washing line, with its reminder of the missing nightdress.

  ‘Well … you’re very much a lady’s man, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘In the club the other day, someone called you an old lecher.’

  ‘Charming! I wonder who it was.’ But Toby was more flattered than annoyed.

  ‘Is it true that you sleep with native women?’

  ‘That’s something I’m certainly not going to answer.’

  ‘Then it must be true.’

  ‘I’m terribly uncomfortable on this stool.’ He could feel his penis hardening. ‘I’m going to come over and sit on that chaise longue beside you.’

  ‘No. You can sit over there. On that deck-chair.’ She pointed. But already she had shifted herself further to the end of the chaise longue.

  ‘I want to be close to you. Does that offend you?’

  ‘Not at all. Why should it? But I think it might be … safer, if you were either to stay where you are or take the deck-chair.’

  But he shambled over and placed himself, even more uncomfortably than on the stool, beside her on the wicker chaise longue. He was too far down it for the rest to support his back and, his body twisted askew in order to face her, something sharp and unyielding – a book? – was pressing into his left buttock.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to be naughty,’ she said skittishly, pulling her skirt down lower over her knees.

  ‘I feel naughty. Don’t you ever feel naughty?’

  ‘No. Just sad.’

  ‘Sad?’ He turned round and extracted the object digging into him. A writing pad. He held it in both his hands.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Tim’s so often away – if not physically away, then away in his mind. And I haven’t got any children. I wanted children. How odd it is, how cruel. Here are all these Indians, with too many children to feed, and here are Tim and I …’

  ‘Perhaps you should try a change of partners. That often helps childless couples. So they say.’

  ‘What an immoral suggestion!’ But when he put an arm round her shoulder, swivelling round at an even more uncomfortable angle, she made no move or protest.

  ‘I could give you a child. I’m sure I could.’

  ‘I’m sure you could too.’ She thought of the dead child, Peter, Pete, Peterkin, found in those horrible circumstances in the servants’ bathroom (as she termed it); but, instead of that thought chilling her, it brought a flush to her face and a glitter to her usually moist, pale blue eyes.

  ‘Then let me!’

  She said nothing, turning her face away from him.

  ‘Then let me, let me, let me.’ He put a hand under her white, accordion-pleated crepe de chine skirt, feeling its incredible softness on the back of his hand at the same moment that he felt the incredible softness of the skin of her thigh under it. With the other hand round her shoulder, he now forced her face back, until they were squinting at each other, and then, with a groan, pressed his lips on hers. She gagged, squirmed, raised the leg that he was fondling. Then, all at once, she went strangely rigid and still.

  ‘Christ, how smooth your flesh is! He was babbling incoherently as his hand, venturing further, tugged at her knickers. ‘ Oh God, let me feel your cunt, let me feel it! Open your legs, open them, oh, please, please!’

  She jerked her lips away from his. ‘ Careful. The servants …’

  ‘Bugger the servants!’

  He jumped to his feet, unbuttoned his fly and pulled out his penis and testicles. Involuntarily, she stared. The penis was enormous. He dropped down on his knees and, as she lay back, still strangely rigid, her pretty little pug-face pale and glistening, he began frantically to kiss first her thighs and then her cunt. He felt the moisture of the cunt on his tongue, its smell in his nostrils.

  ‘No, no, no!’ She spoke in the tones of a nanny admonishing a child. ‘ Stop that, will you! Stop that at once!’

  Frantically licking her cunt, his tongue probing deeper and deeper, he slid both hands round her haunches and pulled her forward on the chaise longue, her knees by now pressing against his, until she was balanced precariously on its very edge. The wicker creaked, as though at any moment the whole structure would disintegrate under so much weight and movement. He guided his penis, swollen and purple-veined, towards her with a hand, but it was so stiff that he could not bend it sufficiently to get it up her. He thought of pulling her down on to the floor, among the stacks of canvases, or of himself mounting the chaise longue on top of her; but the challenge of their present uncomfortable position only excited him the more. He half raised himself on an elbow, leaned partly over her, the wicker of the rest pressing so hard against his forehead that it subsequently left a lattice of lines on the flesh, and raised one of her thighs with a hand. He put the penis in but at once it slipped out. She gave a little squeak. Somehow he got himself further forward, even though there was a danger that his forehead, pressing so hard against the wicker, might burst through it. He felt her clitoris, slid fingers backwards, then forward again. Her eyes shut, she neither helped him nor hindered him.

  At last, by some miracle, he managed both to get his penis up her cunt and to keep it there. Oh, God, God, God! All at once, he thought of Clare: that fine down above her upper lip; the small breasts, unrestricted by a brassière because of the heat, which she had once inadvertently – inadvertently? he was not sure – revealed to him during one of their dinners together, as she had leaned forward to drink from the glass which he had just filled for her; her small white teeth biting on the cigarette holder, tanned with nicotine; the tendrils of coarse hair – like horsehair, Isabel had remarked contemptuously – above the tiny, lobeless ears. He thrust away, in, out, in, out, drops of sweat from his face falling on Lola’s shoulder to stain the crepe de chine. In, out, in, out. ‘What’s the matter with me?’ he thought; and then he said it aloud, ‘What’s the matter with me?’ She was no longer gripping him, he felt his penis dwindle. ‘Oh, Christ!’ More and more frantically he shoved.

  Then, suddenly, with a sound of splintering wood, the whole rickety edifice of the chaise longue disintegrated, depositing them on the floor.

  Lola, Lolly, Lollipop put her hands to her flushed, sweating cheeks and burst into tears, rocking back and forth on her haunches, her knickers around her calves.

  ‘Oh, how could you, could you, could you? What am I to tell Tim? He loved that chaise longue, loved it!’
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  Part III

  DARKNESS

  Chapter One

  The other two aunts, Joan and Janet, in their tailor-made suits, their crisp blouses, their low-heeled shoes and their almost identical toques, wished that Sophie had not insisted on accompanying them to Tilbury. Sophie, without intending to do so, drew attention to herself. There was something comic about that rolling walk of hers, as of a sailor just off his ship, and something even more comic about the way in which, in time to the rolling, her breasts – was it possible that she did not wear, well, any support at all? – swayed from side to side. Then there were those hats: on this occasion, a grey felt one, like a schoolboy’s sunhat, one side of which she had fastened to the crown with a large safety pin. And how she talked – so loud and with no sense that there were certain things which one did not instantly communicate to strangers on a train.

  ‘Are you going to Tilbury to meet someone too?’ she leaned forward to ask the little girl opposite to her.

  The girl, who was busily smearing choc-ice over her mouth and chin, glanced up at her mother, her tongue, dark with chocolate, coiling round the ice, as though it were a snake.

  The mother straightened and shook herself, arms crossed under her outjutting bosom, drew in her chin and said bleakly: ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Isn’t it exciting?’ Sophie went on, looking first at the child and then at the mother. Neither answered. Joan pretended to be busy with her crossword puzzle in the Daily Sketch – quick crossword, they called it, but she had been intermittently working on it ever since breakfast. Jane looked out of the window, wishing that she had insisted, despite Sophie’s objections, on travelling first class. The other passenger in the carriage, a supercilious young man in a charcoal-grey pinstripe suit, noticed that the stocking on Sophie’s left leg had a ladder from instep to knee.

  Irrepressibly, Sophie ran on. She and these two ladies – relatives in a sense of hers by marriage, no, not her marriage or their marriages but the marriage of their brother to her sister, her darling sister, now dead – were all going to meet their niece, Helen, on her return from India with her grandmother, the mother of these two ladies here. Helen had been through a ghastly experience – so ghastly that one could hardly bear to think about it, let alone talk about it. She had had the sweetest little half-brother you could ever imagine, like something made of china, and then, in a house which had seemed to be a perfectly safe house in what had seemed to be a perfectly safe hill-station in India, that half-brother, believe it or not, had been murdered …

  By now the little girl had become so interested that, disregarded, the choc-ice was beginning to melt in her hand. The supercilious young man was also interested, though he pretended not to be, as, head on one side, he pinched the creases of his trousers between thumbs and forefingers. But the mother was plainly affronted, and the two sisters were no less plainly embarrassed.

  ‘Who murdered him?’ the little girl asked – as the young man had been wanting to do – only to be reprimanded by her mother: ‘Now, Elsa, don’t be nosey!’

  Sophie smiled indulgently at girl and mother alike. Why shouldn’t a child be nosey? How else was a child to learn? She leaned forward again: ‘That’s what makes it even more terrible. The man or men – Indian, of course – have never been caught. Never. Who would want to do such a thing? Who would want to cut the throat of an innocent, beautiful little boy? That’s what I keep asking myself, day after day. Somehow’ – she rubbed at her forehead with the back of a hand, as though in a futile attempt at a physical erasure – ‘somehow I just can’t get it out of my mind, try though I may.’

  Joan and Janet suddenly and simultaneously were stricken with guilt at the idea of poor Helen doomed to stay with someone so eccentric – or, as Joan later put it to Janet, someone so batty. In consequence, on the train back from Tilbury they felt obliged once again to ask her if she really and truly preferred living in London to living in the country with one or other of them. ‘Cornwall has the better climate, of course, and the more attractive scenery,’ Joan, who lived in Sussex, quickly added; and Janet, who lived in Cornwall, then took up: ‘But of course it’s much quicker and cheaper to get up to town from Sussex.’ Each was relieved, though feigning disappointment, when Helen replied: ‘No, it’s very sweet of you both, but I think the best solution is for me to make my home with Aunt Sophie. If she’s really prepared to have me, that is.’

  ‘Really prepared to have you!’ With that demonstrativeness of hers, as embarrassing to the two sisters as her extraordinary clothes and loud voice, Sophie clutched both of Helen’s hands in hers. ‘Oh, darling, I love the idea! You’re going to transform my life!’ She was being wholly sincere.

  Mrs Thompson, who had been dozing in her corner seat during this conversation, with an occasional grunt or snore, now opened her eyes and said in a plaintive voice: ‘I do hope that wretch of a porter got all our things into the van. He looked shifty to me – apart from being so slow.’

  ‘Oh, don’t fuss, Mother!’Janet told her, and then Joan took up: ‘You’re not in India now.’

  ‘No, I’m not in India now,’ the old woman answered with what, surprisingly, sounded like regret.

  At Fenchurch Street they went their separate ways. Joan, who had five children and a vicar for a husband, opted for the underground to Victoria. She had to count the pennies – as she herself often put it with dry self-pity. Janet shoved, rather than supported, Mrs Thompson into the taxi which would take them to Paddington and their train to Cornwall; but, before that, the old woman had first to check her cabin-trunk, hatbox and suitcases for yet another time and then to embrace Helen.

  ‘Goodbye, darling. Let’s meet again soon. It made such a difference having you with me on that long, dreary voyage.’ Her lips merely brushed Helen’s cheek, because she had long since learned that Helen did not really like to be kissed. Then she gripped the tips of the fingers of Helen’s right hand between the fingers of her own. ‘Oh, you do deserve something nice to happen to you – after all that!’

  ‘All that’ was something which Helen had clearly not wished to discuss on the voyage, since, each time that the old woman had obsessively returned to it, wondering yet again who could want to do such a thing and how a supposedly good God could have permitted it, she would always become silent and distant, her eyes going out of focus in a face frozen into a sudden blank. Strange girl, the old woman would decide. She oughtn’t to bottle things up like that inside her. A recipe for trouble later.

  Sophie and Helen also took a taxi, the aunt insisting that the niece should get into it ahead of her, just as she had insisted on helping the porter and the taxi-driver with loading the luggage up in front. Standing by the open window, her squat legs astride, she had fumbled in her leather purse for a tip for the porter. Helen had known what would happen, since it had so often happened before. ‘ Oh! Oh lord! Oh, oh, oh!’ Coins had rolled in all directions. Clearly Sophie had forgotten that the stitching had become unravelled at one corner of the purse. Passers-by had rushed to her assistance, proffering pennies, halfpennies and farthings, many of them laughing with the lofty indulgence shown by adults to a clumsy child.

  Having first tipped the porter, so lavishly that he later remarked ungratefully to a colleague that the old girl must be barmy, and then heaved herself aboard the taxi, Sophie had put her hand over Helen’s. ‘Comfy, dear?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Aunt Sophie. Thank you.’

  Helen looked out of the window at the scarlet buses, the grimy buildings, the honking cars, the occasional horse-drawn carts and everywhere, like the termites which the gelding had once revealed, kicking open a nest beneath a tree in the woods above the lake, people, people, people. She said expressionlessly: ‘When Daddy and Mama were over here last, we all stayed at Brown’s Hotel. You probably remember? And Mama’s mother came there too for a week. Mama, Mama’s mother and I were always taking taxis, never buses or tubes, while Daddy was away on business. Mama and her mother always placed themselves o
n this seat, looking forward. And I was always left on one of those tip-up seats opposite. Of course it was Daddy’s – or perhaps even Mummy’s money – which paid for the taxis, as it paid for everything else. When we got out of the taxi, Mama would say to the driver: ‘‘Now let me see. That’s seven and six, isn’t it? And sixpence extra for the girl.’’ I was always ‘‘the girl’’ and always the extra.’

  Sophie looked troubled. ‘Oh, I expect that was just a manner of speaking. Don’t you, dear?’

  ‘A manner of speaking can tell one a lot.’

  ‘I think Isabel’s really very fond of you. I think she looks on you as – as a daughter.’

  Once again gazing out of the window, Helen did not answer.

  ‘Or a sister,’ Sophie amended.

  Chapter Two

  In the lodging-house in Earls Court, aunt and niece shared a long, low-ceilinged room, with a wash-stand behind a barbola screen of cracked and yellowing arum lilies, two divan beds draped in counterpanes sent by Toby from his mills as one of the many Christmas presents over the years, and a gas ring, a kettle on it, which swung out on a swivel from beside the gas fire.

  ‘You don’t mind sharing with me for a day or two, do you dear?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Signora Rossi promised me that you could have the first-floor back, oh, ages ago – when I first mentioned your coming to her. But then old Mr Lawrence, who was going to move to his daughter’s, got this ’flu which everyone is having. Which reminds me – I must take him something tasty to eat. I wonder what would tempt him?’

  When, many days later, grumpy, ungrateful old Mr Lawrence had recovered sufficiently to move out of the house without even a word of goodbye to Sophie (‘ I expect he was feeling too seedy and fussed to remember’), Helen showed no eagerness to transfer to his room upstairs. ‘It’s rather poky,’ she commented when Sophie took her to inspect it. ‘And it has such a funny smell. Don’t you get it?’