Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t really like children – though Peter’d be all right if your stepmother hadn’t spoiled him. But I prefer the life of a hotel. Things happen there, there’s movement and change.’

  Boldly Helen said: ‘If you leave us, my father’s going to miss you.’

  ‘I daresay he will.’ No one who answered so coldly and scornfully could be having an affair with the man about whom she was speaking – though she might have had one in the past. Helen felt all the elation of relief from some long-standing anxiety or pain. Then Clare asked, surprisingly: ‘Do you think I’m his girlfriend?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Helen was disconcerted.

  ‘Well, I’m not. Before I got the job, I used to go out with him – while I was working at his hotel. But there was nothing of – that. Of course he wanted but there wasn’t.’ Clare looked at Helen, tilting her head and turning it sideways. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘Of course I believe you.’

  ‘Because he keeps mooning around after me, your stepmother’s managed to convince herself that we’re having an affair. The servants probably think it too.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure –’

  ‘Well, who cares!’ With her court shoe, so unsuitable for the hilly terrain, she kicked out at the gravel. ‘Who cares!’ Once again she turned to Helen, with that tilting of her head sideways and upwards like some exotic bird listening for a sound of danger. ‘And you – do you have a boyfriend back in England?’

  Helen shook her head. ‘Lord no!’

  Clare laughed: ‘One’s better without them. Believe me. One’s better without them.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  Clare intertwined her fingers in Helen’s, she squeezed. ‘Friends,’ she said. ‘We’re friends.’

  ‘Friends,’ Helen echoed, feeling as though she were about to gag on something too large and hard for her to swallow.

  Peter came running over with something wriggling between his fingers. ‘Look, Clare! Look, Helen! Have you ever seen a worm so huge?’

  Clare’s face, wrinkling up in disgust, the mouth pursed, became suddenly ugly. ‘Throw it away! How dare you pick up something like that! Dirty!’ The child began to laugh, dangling the worm before her. She slapped out at the hand which held it. ‘Throw it away! At once!’

  Peter flung the worm in a wide arc away from him. He looked after it, shading his eyes, to see where it had fallen. Then he ran off, laughing delightedly to himself.

  ‘Little beast!’ Clare exclaimed. ‘He needs a good hiding. But he’ll never get it. My father would have taken the strap to any of my brothers – or to me – for doing such a thing. But that kid’ll always have things just as he wants them. Silver spoon.’

  Now Babs is taking Helen by the arm. ‘Come and have some of Alfredo’s delicious vitello tonnato. In this sort of weather, we decided we must have something cold. And there’s an iced cucumber soup to start – oh, and a Pavlova to finish, since that’s our national sweet.’

  ‘I thought Peach Melba must be,’ Helen jokes drily.

  Babs takes her seriously. ‘Oh, no, dear, that was something invented by some chef in Europe.’

  ‘Perhaps one day they’ll invent a Pear Sutherland,’ Hank takes up.

  There is no attempt to place the diners round the table. ‘Just sit where you like,’ Babs tells them. Helen notices that, in addition to Laurel and the people who have travelled out from Sydney, there are also, huddled together at the far end of the long oak table, a number of others, in many cases dishevelled and even ragged in appearance, who say little and that little only to each other and who seem to exude hostility, like some overpowering stench, towards the smartly dressed, gaily chattering visitors whose guests she assumes them to be. Helen looks for Clare but she is nowhere. She feels relief but also an acute sense of loss – emotions precisely similar to those which, on the day of Clare’s departure from the house above the lake, she had experienced as she had trotted off into the hills at the first glimmer of dawn.

  … On and on she rode, punishing the horse more and more brutally, as she forced him up and down slopes and through the woods at the farthest end of the valley. When the syce took the gelding, his sides heaving and his whole body flecked, Helen could see that he was angry with her; but of course he could never give voice to that anger, except by indirection, how could he?

  ‘Memsahib has been far.’

  ‘Yes. Far.’

  In the morning room, which he had never been in the habit of using before the tragedy, leaving it to the women, Toby sat stiffly in an armchair by the window, his head pressed back and his mouth slightly open, as though he were bracing himself for the approach of a dentist with forceps.

  ‘Hello, daddy.’

  She must, at all costs, behave as though nothing had happened. Her father himself had said that. As though nothing had ever happened; as though things were exactly as they used to be; as though there were no change.

  But there was a change. Peter was dead. Clare had left them.

  He returned her gaze with an anguished reproach, so that she found herself, riding-crop in hand, recoiling towards the door.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said, his voice sounding as though he were writing the words with a blunt piece of chalk on a slate.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You never said goodbye to her.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  His eyes glinted cruelly. ‘ I can understand that.’ Then they grew heavy and dull, as though with a weight of unshed tears.

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever see her again.’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  ‘Poor Clare.’

  It amazed her that he should say ‘Poor Clare’ and not ‘ Poor Peter’ or even – why not? – ‘Poor Helen’. It also made her angry. She wanted to hurt him; but, looking around for a weapon, she could find none. She turned and went out.

  Bab’s husband is calling up the table to her: ‘Isn’t this iced cucumber soup really something? Alfredo must be the best cook in the whole of this country.’ The young man, with the beaky nose and the long, black hair falling wispily from under the towering, heavily starched chefs hat, smirks behind the table supporting both the next course and innumerable bottles of the white wine which Helen has found as clean, sharp and bracing as the country itself. There are also some bottles of vin rosé, standing separate, not in buckets of ice like the white. The young man whom Helen saw, almost naked, beating out some metal at a bench, now lurches to his bare feet, shirt open to his navel, pads across to the table, and stretches out a hand for a bottle in a bucket. But Alfredo says: ‘Please, sir,’ smiling but formidable, and hefts a bottle of the rosé. The young man, sulkily abashed, holds out his glass. Then: ‘That’s pink,’ he says. ‘I had white before.’ He sounds like a querulous child, given a strawberry icecream instead of the vanilla one which he expected. Alfredo stares at him until, audible to everyone, he exclaims ‘Oh, what the fuck!’, allows his glass to be filled from the bottle of rosé and wanders back to his seat.

  … Clare talked of her life with her family and at work in the hotel. At home there was never any privacy, there never had been any. ‘I shared a bedroom with two of my brothers until I was fifteen, sixteen. Can you imagine? What I remember most now is the stink of them. Their shirts and singlets when they came back from the railway yards. Their socks. Even their shoes. I’d say, I’m not going to have those shoes in here, they stink, they’re disgusting, put them in the hall.’ She laughed: ‘They’d do what I told them. They always did what I told them. Still do.’

  Helen gazed at her. ‘You’re tough.’

  ‘I’ve had to be tough. Fight, that’s what I’ve always had to do, all through my life. You’re lucky, you don’t realize how lucky. You’ve got your Daddy with his millions to fight for you. You’ve got your Granny and those relatives back in England. You’ve never had to fight, never will have to.’ When she spoke like that, she reminded Helen of some glittering-eyed, nimble
, immensely cunning rodent, which could persistently and patiently gnaw its way through anything.

  Clare admitted with a shrug – so what? It meant nothing – that she had ‘strung along’ (that was her phrase) other men than Toby. ‘You get more by giving nothing,’ she said with the famished wisdom of her upbringing. ‘Girls who worked with me would go the whole way. And then they got the brush-off – and, with luck, a few rupees.’ She stared out disconsolately at the lake, swinging a leg backwards and forwards as it rested over the knee of the other. Then she pulled that same face which she had pulled when Peter had run up with the worm dangling between thumb and forefinger. ‘Awful creatures,’ she said. ‘Those sweaty hands. That taste of drink and tobacco in their mouths. Producing it from their trousers, all swollen and purple, as though the sight of it would be more than one could resist.’ Helen had never heard anyone talk like this. She was appalled, fascinated, thrilled.

  ‘Now tell me what you think of the vitello tonnato.’ Babs, who has got up from her seat, is leaning over Helen. ‘Try it. Try it. Go on, try it and tell me.’

  Helen slices a piece and puts it in her mouth. ‘Delicious,’ she says. ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’

  As the aromatic, creamy veal dissolves in her mouth, Ilse is saying: ‘God, I’m sick of chewing, chewing, chewing on this leather. You know what I dream of, Helen? We’re together, just the two of us, in the Jardin des Gourmets, just as we were for that birthday of mine, and we’re eating – well, what are we eating? You choose. It’s your turn to choose.’

  ‘It’s Alfredo’s speciality,’ Babs says proudly. ‘That’s why I chose it for today.’

  … Clare was in Helen’s room. They tried to make not a sound but at one moment, when Helen was on her knees by the bed and Clare lay across it, Clare gave a strange, choking moan and then old Mrs Thompson called out, alarmed: ‘ Was that you, Helen? Helen, are you all right?’

  The two girls tensed. Clare put a hand over her mouth. Helen replied: ‘I was just coughing. I have this tickle at the back of my throat. Sorry. Did I disturb you?’

  ‘No, dear, no. It’s just that I sleep so lightly. I thought …’

  Clare giggled, her hand still over her mouth. Then she removed the hand, as Helen buried her face between her thighs, and whispered down to her: ‘That was quick of you. And how well you lie!’

  ‘One learns to lie and to lie quickly at a girls’ boarding school,’ Helen raised her head to say.

  The Pavlova crumbles like stucco under the summer fruits and whipped cream piled on top of it. It is too sickly for Helen, suddenly she feels that she wants to vomit. But somehow she must eat, if not all, then at least some part of it. But she should have said what the woman opposite to her said, when the plates came round: ‘No, I really mustn’t, much though I long to. You see, I’m on this diet.’ But would anyone believe that a woman as thin as Helen was on a diet? ‘ No, I really mustn’t, much though I long to. You see, I’m a diabetic.’ Better, much better. But too late.

  … ‘ I’m frightened of coming up there to you. That’s the second time the old girl has woken up.’

  ‘Where else?’

  Once they had gone to a cave, damp and malodorous, far off the footpath along which they had been walking high up in the hills. Once, when everyone was out at the cinema, they had lain, reckless of the servants, out on the flowered chintz of the drawing-room sofa. But both places, the one so alien and the other so domestic, had frightened Helen.

  ‘You could come to me.’

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘I’ll deal with him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll crunch up two or three of those pills your stepmother gave me and put them in his Ovaltine. He drinks his Ovaltine so sweet he’ll never notice.’

  ‘But you might make him ill.’

  ‘Not with two or three.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘All right.’

  The man on Helen’s right, who has, from time to time through the meal, attempted to talk to her – God, Babs was right, she certainly is heavy going – says: ‘So you return to your African mission the day after tomorrow?’

  ‘It’s not a mission. Just a hospital.’

  … There was a red-brick chapel, surmounted by a cast-iron spire which, in one of the violent storms so frequent in the region, had been hit by lightning and had shrivelled and blackened like a bean-haulm nipped by frost. ‘ Do you think that’s a divine judgement?’ Helen had asked. She had intended a joke but Ilse, who had no sense of humour, had taken her seriously. ‘You mustn’t say things like that.’ They never replaced the spire. Helen did not enter the chapel unless in celebration of some wedding, birth or funeral among the Christian members of their staff, but Ilse often did so. She would emerge from it in a state either of morose depression or of feverish exaltation. The moods of morose depression became more and more frequent in the months before her death.

  ‘It’s not for me to convert anyone,’ she would say. ‘Not even you. I tried to convert you once and look how far I got. I leave that kind of thing to Father McCormick.’ Once a month the Irish priest would arrive in his battered Land Rover to hear confessions and administer communion. An austere, finicky, sarcastic man, he had been deeply shocked and embarrassed when Helen had once entered his bedroom, assuming him to be in the chapel, and had found him outstretched, his naked, bony body covered in a fuzz of reddish hair, on top of his unmade bed.

  ‘Everyone seems to be going out,’ Helen’s neighbour says, relieved that he need no longer make conversational forays always repulsed either by silence or a few non-committal words. Deliberately, he leaves Helen, having done her the courtesy of helping to draw back her chair, and joins a group of people with whom he works at his hospital.

  ‘There are to be fireworks,’ a young woman tells her. ‘So I believe. Wasn’t that a lovely idea of Bab’s? She’s so good at parties. On a night as hot as this one doesn’t want to be indoors, does one?’

  … Helen and Ilse walked arm in arm under a vast sky. Ilse had grown even more emaciated over the years and the obduracy of her purpose in running this hospital in a remote area of a hostile country had given her a tautness of expression that never seemed to relax even in sleep. Far off, from the choked jungle which perpetually encroached on the hospital compound, they heard a concerted baying. Then there was a sound like a single human scream. But they had lived there long enough to know that the scream was not a human one.

  ‘Something has killed something else,’ Helen said. ‘Cruel, cruel.’

  Ilse gave her humourless laugh. Was she laughing at the cruelty? Or at Helen’s horror of it? Helen did not know. There was so much in Ilse’s words and behaviour about which, baffled and fascinated, she could only guess.

  Fortunately, everyone seems either to have forgotten the Englishwoman or to have decided that enough is enough, duty has been done, one can’t be expected to spend a whole evening knocking one’s head against a brick wall. People are now squatting or lying out on a grass slope, in groups of two, three or four. Some of the rockets and set-pieces are already in place. Bab’s husband, assisted by the young metal-worker, wanders around to see that everything is in order. There is a naked electric light bulb in one of the two elaborate sconces on either side of the open postern but its light is so feeble that Bab’s husband carries a torch. The young couple who were in the car with Helen are lying together in some thick grass above and beyond the rest. The girl giggles: ‘I feel as if something were biting me.’ ‘I am,’ her husband answers.

  Helen perches herself on a crumbling wall, knees drawn up to chin. The poisonous sweetness of the Pavlova is still on her tongue, she can almost feel its brittle grains. A man who is no more than a shadow in the gloom in which she has placed herself has offered her a drink from a tray which he is carrying round; but she has shaken her head. The gesture has seemed to him unduly peremptory. After all, he is not a servant. Strange woman, he
has thought, as others in the party have thought before him.

  A rocket fizzes up into the huge, starry sky and then sprays outwards and plunges downwards in a cascade of lurid colours. Another follows it, this one a shower of silver coins, flung up and falling.

  … Clare and Helen stood locked in each other’s arms by the door. There was no sound but the heavy, regular breathing of the child in the bed by the window. Clare had been waiting, naked, lying out, one arm behind her head, her delicate ankles crossed. Helen was in her nightdress, her nipples hard against the softness of the picot-edged cotton. Their juices and their odours mingled, as Clare raised the nightdress, Helen extended a hand, their mouths sucked on each other.

  A catherine wheel, bizarre memorial of the Alexandrian virgin whom the Emperor Maximus had strapped to a wheel like that of a chaff-cutter, whirls round and round, scarring the darkness with flame.

  … The boy suddenly sat up, stared, opened his mouth. Helen sees it open now, open eternally. Then Clare snatched up the brassière from the chair beside her and, in a moment, clapped it over the aperture, stuffing it in with frantic fingers. Helen, torn between fleeing and helping her, hissed: ‘ Clare, Clare, don’t, don’t. The child’s eyes skittered from side to side in intensifying panic, he waved impotent arms, kicked spasmodically. Then the eyes closed, the whole body gave a single twitch, a leg kicked out feebly, kicked out again even more feebly, was slowly retracted.

  ‘What have you done?’

  Clare hurriedly pulled on her wrap.

  ‘What have you done?’ Helen repeated. She stared down at the child. She still did not believe that he could possibly be dead. Grotesquely, protruding like ectoplasm in the moonlight, the brassière dangled from the mouth still open in its silent, unending scream.

  Clare sank down on to the bed, as though all strength was draining from her, like blood from a severed artery. She said nothing, her hands clasped between her knees. She stared up at Helen. What are we to do? She asked the question without a single word.