Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  Today her hostess, whose husband is part-owner and director of a fashionable clinic, is showing her her garden. The house is a long, low one, with cool rooms, full of pictures by living or recently dead Australian artists, opening out, one off another, in luxurious perspectives. It stands on the ridge of a hill, one of a number of similar houses, each with a garden which falls away, in a series of terraces linked by steps and winding paths, to the sea far below. This suburb is a rich one. ‘I’d really like to live in King’s Cross,’ the hostess says. ‘That’s where one finds some lovely old houses.’ But she does not really mean it. Her daughter and son-in-law live there and, though she thinks their house ‘charming’ and ‘quaint’, she feels, each time that she enters it, that those narrow rooms, one above the other beside the narrow staircase, will close in and suffocate her.

  There is an oriental gardener – Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese? The visitor cannot guess for certain – working, back bowed and straw hat on his head, in one of the flowerbeds. ‘Everything all right?’ the hostess asks as they stroll past him, and he answers, surprisingly with an American accent, ‘ Yes, thank you, mam.’ Out of his hearing, the hostess explains to the visitor that they have to pay him a fortune, no one wants to be a gardener these days, people think they’re too grand for that kind of menial job. ‘It’s the same in England now, isn’t it?’ The visitor does not reveal that it is many years since she visited England. She merely replies, ‘ Yes, I suppose it is.’

  The hostess, pausing for a moment, hand to forehead to shield her eyes as she gazes seaward, asks the visitor: ‘Have you ever heard of funnel-web spiders?’

  The visitor shakes her head. She has, in fact, heard of them but she cannot remember in what connection.

  ‘Mr Otani – the gardener – found one yesterday. He killed it, of course. It was lucky it didn’t sting him before he found it, as otherwise he might now be dead instead of weeding that border for us. I often wonder how God – if there is a God – can have come to create things as murderous as that.’ She turns. ‘This is, as you see, a dangerous, as well as a beautiful, country.’

  The visitor does not reveal that she has come from a country far more dangerous and beautiful. She does not reveal that her companion of many years died, within a few hours, of a mysterious, undiagnosed fever. She does not talk of the marauders with their machetes and stolen revolvers nor of the troops, feared even more, with their machine-guns. She is immured in a flinty reticence. It is this reticence which has led her hostess to describe the visitor to her husband as ‘ rather heavy going’.

  The hostess continues, as they now descend to the shore: ‘I have a buddy who has this extraordinary phobia about funnel-web spiders. You may have met her. She’s one of the guests tonight. Husband in oil. Rosie Freeman. She won’t have a garden, she won’t even go into anyone else’s garden, not this garden, not any garden. She’s terrified of the countryside. Isn’t that strange? To allow one’s whole life to be dominated by a single irrational fear.’

  ‘I knew someone once who had that same kind of phobia about rabies,’ the visitor says quietly, thinking of her dead companion, who was otherwise so fearless.

  ‘My husband says it’s not really a fear of funnel-web spiders, it’s really a fear of death. The spider’s bite and death are equally irreversible. Like rabies too, of course.’

  ‘Irreversible,’ the visitor repeats, in a way which strikes her hostess as odd. It is as though she were meditating on it and might even say, at the end of the meditation: ‘But are they irreversible?’

  The two of them, the plump, round-faced Australian, with her slightly bandy legs swelling above low court shoes, and her English guest, with her sinewy figure and back held so straight that she might almost be wearing an invisible brace, now make their slow way back up the paths and the steps to the house.

  ‘Would it be painful to die of the bite of a funnel-web spider?’ the visitor suddenly asks.

  Her hostess, panting a little now from the heat of the December afternoon, pauses, one hand pressing a scented handkerchief to her upper lip. ‘ I imagine it would.’ She laughs: ‘ It would certainly be quick. There are worse ways to die.’

  The visitor, remembering the death of her companion, thinks that she may be right.

  Can it have been for this hard chip of knowledge, about the funnel-web spider and the instantaneous death following its sting, that she has been mysteriously impelled to make this journey from the country which sometimes seems to be the only one she knows to one which she knows not at all? After the death of her friend had precipitated within her a kind of infinitesimally slow dying of her own, she felt herself to be like one of those leaves which, looking up into the cloudless sky from the deckchair in which she would be lying out, a drink in her hand, at the end of a day of sweaty endeavour, she would see whirling round and round aimlessly, close to the giant sycamore from which it had detached itself. The leaf and she both spun on and on and on, in a frantic, unwilled spiral. But just as, on some rare occasion, a sudden wind would snatch away the leaf, so a sudden impulse snatched her away when the shabby, unshaved Greek who ran the local store and post office handed to her the Australian invitation in a bundle of letters tied up with string. She has come here for a purpose, she has no doubt of that; but, unless the purpose is to learn about funnel-web spiders, she does not yet know what that purpose is. Soon she will know.

  The voices in the house seem louder to the visitor than when she and her hostess left it; but that may be because the garden was so quiet. ‘ Well, there you are!’ The host greets them both. ‘ I was wondering what had become of the two of you.’

  ‘I was showing Dr – er – the garden.’ The hostess is bad at names.

  The host turns to the visitor. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? But it needs so much doing to it. Gardeners cost so much these days that we can only afford ours for three afternoons a week.’ He fills a glass for his guest. ‘Vodka and tonic, wasn’t it?’ It was, in fact, whisky and soda; but she politely takes what she is given. ‘Did the wife tell you about the funnel-web spider?’

  ‘Yes. I never knew of their existence before I came to Australia.’

  ‘Sh!’ He put a finger to his lips. ‘We mustn’t talk too loudly about them. One of our other guests has a phobia about them. The mere mention …’

  Like others, he finds it difficult to talk to this woman about anything except medicine. Conversation with her is like a game of tennis with someone who has not grasped that it is not enough merely to stop the ball, one must also return it. He wanders off on a pretext and she finds herself alone. But that does not worry her. She is used to being alone, with people all around her. She feels none of the awkwardness or embarrassment which others usually suffer in such circumstances. She sips at her vodka and tonic, wishing that it were a whisky and soda, and examines the pictures. There is one of a naked young man, seated on a bent-wood chair, one shoulder sagging as though from an invisible burden, and his legs wide apart, revealing penis and testicles. There is a chilly abstract, bearing the title Dream Chamber, which might be by Ben Nicolson but which is signed indecipherably by someone else. There is a picture, clearly from another time, of a long, narrrow, pink cloud nervously fluttering, like a chiffon scarf, above a totally still, deep lake, surrounded by what are not so much trees as wispy, evanescent trails of lightest blue, the ghosts of trees long since fallen to the axe. This last fills her with unease, she does not know why.

  A voice behind her asks: ‘Do you know Ivor Fieldhouse?’ For a moment she thinks that someone is trying to introduce her to someone else, but then she realizes that the man who has addressed her – she has met him, wasn’t it he who told her that he had lived for many years in Papua New Guinea? – is speaking of the artist who painted the picture at which she has been gazing.

  ‘No.’

  ‘One of our best. He was originally English, trained at the Slade, but no Englishman has ever heard of him. Bet you never have!’

  ‘No. But then I know
so little about pictures. In Africa …’ She shrugs. In the remote house, now empty but for its servants, there are some magnificent examples of primitive African art, collected by her companion over a period of years.

  The man who has addressed her looks terribly ill. As a doctor she knows that look. Probably the poison of the funnel-web spider is already at work in him. But she likes the pliancy, softness and grace of that boyish physique, the eager vibrancy of the voice, that sense of teasing irony.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ she says, going towards a sofa.

  ‘Well …’ She sits and he sits down beside her, carefully tweaking each of his trouser-legs at the knee so that it should not stretch. He left England – Southampton – on a cargo-boat at the age of nineteen. Went to Ceylon, Burma, the Seychelles, India. Painted part of the time, worked at innumerable odd jobs for part of the time. Part of the time did nothing, enjoyed himself. Few of his pictures from that period now exist – or, if they do exist, the people who own them have no idea of their value, since they never come on the market and are never exhibited. Then he landed up here. Married a rich woman, much older than himself. Inherited her money. And that enabled him to build Drumlanrig Castle.’

  ‘Drumlanrig Castle?’

  ‘You’ve never heard of it?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Well, not in Australia.’

  ‘He called it after Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland. Apparently his mother was cook, maid, I can’t remember, to the Buccleuchs. It’s not really a castle, though it might be part of one. And there he lived happily ever after, with his numerous women and his even more numerous children and the pictures – like that one over there – which he painted in such profusion.’ He leans his head forward, to say in an undertone: ‘Our hostess was briefly one of the women – though you might not believe it now. That’s how she got that picture and several others. Yes, in her day, she was really quite some girl!’

  At that moment their hostess comes over. Her husband always tells her that she must not drink too much at one of their parties but somehow she always does so. She has done so now. ‘Your glass is empty, my dear!’ She calls the boyish middle-aged man ‘My dear’ not because she knows him well but because she knows him so little that she has forgotten his name. ‘ Do go and get yourself a refill.’

  The visitor examines her surreptitiously as she stands before them, her glass in her right hand and her left hand, her arm crossing under her breasts, supporting her right elbow. It is still just possible to conceive of her as young, pretty and unconventional, the mistress of a painter who had other mistresses.

  ‘This is fine.’ The man gets up from the sofa and the visitor then also gets up. He points with his empty glass at the landscape of the long, narrow, pink cloud above the still river. ‘ Our friend here was admiring your Fieldhouse.’

  ‘Everyone does. I think it one of his best.’ When he first gave it to her, she pushed it, unframed, under the bed of the lodging-house room in which she was living. Now the Sydney Museum of Modern Art had offered to buy it from her for a large sum. But she does not need the money.

  ‘I was telling her about Drumlanrig Castle.’

  ‘Oh, Drumlanrig!’ Her sigh manages to express both derision and a romantic nostalgia. ‘Drumlanrig!’

  ‘She ought to go there.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you must! You’re staying on for a few days after the conference?’

  ‘For the weekend.’

  ‘Well, then! It’s only a drive of an hour and a half. Let’s make up a party and go. A picnic – we’ll have a picnic’

  ‘Do people still live there?’ the visitor asks.

  ‘Do people still live there? Of course they do! All the flotsam and jetsam of his life – the women and the children and the children’s children and the friends and the friends of the friends. It’s called an artists’ colony. But the only real artist was Ivor. Those who are left weave or make jewellery or mess around with pottery or batik or woodcarving. You’ll see.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s a beautiful spot,’ the man says. ‘Well worth a visit.’

  The visitor has been wondering how she will spend the weekend before she flies back to Africa and that house, deep in the bush, from which someone may or may not have stolen the Benin bronzes and the other treasures about which she no longer cares.

  There are five cars, because the party has grown; and the picnic has now become a dinner, so that Italian caterers have gone on ahead, with a van containing food, wine, crockery and cutlery. The hostess, who is called Babs Alexander, and who has arranged the whole evening, tells everyone that Alfredo is producing his piece de resistance, his vitello tonnato.‘In this kind of weather no one wants hot food,’ she says not once but many times, as though, if anyone did want hot food, the repetition might eventually persuade them otherwise.

  Helen is in the Mercedes belonging to the man, now known to her only as Hank, who first told her about this English-born painter so famous out here and totally unknown in his country of origin. Babs is with them and a shy, charming couple, so recently married that they are interested neither in the scenery nor in their fellow-travellers but only in their proximity to each other, thigh against thigh, arm against arm and sometimes even cheek against cheek, in the back of the car. Babs, who is also in the back, thinks that, really, they’re going a little too far. Surely they can wait until they get to bed? She is growing slightly deaf and she feels left out, since for much of the time she cannot hear what Hank and Helen are saying to each other above the hum of the engine and the purr of the air-conditioner.

  Hank is trying to flirt with Helen, but she does not respond. He has told her that he is divorced, that his children are in Tasmania, that he is bored with his bachelor existence. Does she have any children? She replies truthfully no.

  The countryside through which they are driving is beautiful in its wide, empty aridity. The soil, though brown when close at hand, seems to lighten to ochre in the distance; and, above it, everything seems to be tinged with the faintest blue, as though smoke were clinging to its outlines. The road is straight and shiny, rippling slightly in the late evening glow. It might be a canal flowing sluggishly from the base of the mountains to the plain.

  ‘They really are blue,’ Helen says in wonder.

  ‘What are? My eyes?’

  ‘No, the mountains. Though your eyes are blue too.’

  ‘Not such an attractive blue,’ says Babs from behind, since she has heard this exchange.

  Helen looks back over her shoulder. The shy young man is nibbling his shy young wife’s ear-lobe, like a rabbit nibbling at a lettuce. He stops when he sees that Helen can see him. But it is not at him that she is looking back but at the other cars, one, two, three, four, strung out behind them. Sunlight flashes from a hood. She shuts her eyes and there is a brilliant, jagged scar branded on their lids. She opens them.

  They climb and, as they do so, the long day begins at last to burn itself out. A cool breeze passes across Helen’s face, through her hair, over her arm resting along the open window.

  … She and Ilse sat out before the dusty circle of buildings, their bungalow its hub, and then, as a faint breeze quickened from beyond the hills to rustle the canopies over their chairs, Ilse sighed deeply with contentment. The moment for which I wait each day, she said. For your whisky? No, for this cool. For the moment there were no more ulcers to be probed or lanced, no more needles to be jabbed into quailing flesh, no more skeletal bodies to be examined for their tumours or parasites. Ilse said: How far we have come. Helen knew that she did not mean geographically.

  They pass houses, in an extraordinary variety of architectural styles – chalets, English seaside bungalows, Spanish villas, Japanese teahouses – set far back from the road. Then they are in the open country once again. Since his car is air-conditioned, it irritates Hank that Helen should have opened the window beside her. It means that so much dust will come in. But, looking sideways at her, as the onrush of their passage draws taut the skin of her face and blow
s her crisp, close-cut hair backwards, he decides to say nothing. Let her enjoy herself, let her do what she wants. Why not?

  They turn through massive wrought-iron gates, each supported on a stone column surmounted by a stone eagle perched on a ball of stone. But there is no reason for gates so elaborate or indeed for gates at all, since there is no wall, no fencing, no hedges, no wire. The grass sticks up in tufts, on what must have once been a smooth gravel drive. There are huge trees with silvery boles, dead branches trailing from them, in the deserted parkland. Helen sees something move in the distance. A horse? A dog? Or would a kangaroo be found up here?

  ‘Oh, how sad, sad,’ Babs murmurs from the back. ‘Each time I come here it’s just a little sadder than the time before. Why can’t they do something about keeping things in order.’

  ‘Because most of them spend their lives high on pot,’ Hank answers.

  ‘Oh, nonsense!’

  ‘Surely Ivor was never above a little sniffing?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Babs is indignant. ‘Cocaine? Utter nonsense. The only drug Ivor ever used was booze.’

  ‘And sex,’ Hank adds wickedly, with a glance of complicity to Helen.

  Babs flushes and is silent.

  … Ilse drew up the sleeve of her white jacket and twisted the rubber tighter. Ilse, should you? Helen pleaded, rather than asked. Why not? Ilse answered. I’ve done it for years. I’m not addicted. But when I’m deathly tired, as I am now, and when I’m deathly depressed, as I am now, well, I want a little nirvanah. Oh, don’t, Ilse. But Ilse was always in control of everything: of the hospital staff, of Helen, above all of herself.