Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  Clare made no reply. Had she taken in what Helen had told her? Helen did not know.

  Helen went out of the room, again leaving the door ajar. She started to mount the stairs. All at once an ineluctable weariness had sapped all her movements and thoughts. She wanted only to sleep, sleep, sleep.

  The fireworks are over. People are beginning to wander back into the ‘ Castle’ but the glow of two cigarettes shows that the young couple, passengers in the same car as Helen, are still lying out together on the grass. Helen looks up. The immense sky is crowded with stars beyond stars. Her sight dazzles, her brain tingles with them. She begins to walk round the castle and up the slope, retracing the journey which she made with Laurel.

  There are lights burning in some of the bungalows and shacks and from one of them – which she cannot be sure – there comes the insistent thud of pop music. That thud, over so much distance, is all that she can hear. It seems to be in time to a thudding within her, here – she touches the place with the fingertips of her right hand – just behind the breastbone. Some nocturnal creature scuttles in the bushes beside her.

  Outside that corrugated-iron shed a naked bulb dangles, encrusted with dead flies as though with beads. The chair is still out in front of it but there is no person in the chair, only a cat. The cat, a tabby, stares at her, ears pricked and eyes glinting, as she approaches, then arches its back and slips off the chair and away into the darkness. She can hear voices but they are the voices, metallic and jumbled, which come from a television set or a wireless.

  Slowly she goes up to the door and stands there for a long time, listening to those American voices, the staccato rattle of shots, the roar and screech of a car being gunned into action. There is no bell. Eventually she raises a hand and knocks. No answer. Again she knocks, now loud and peremptory.

  ‘Who is it?’ The door does not open. The voice is in no way frightened, only irritated and bewildered that so late in the evening someone should disturb her while she is watching television.

  ‘Helen.’

  ‘Who?’ It is the question of someone going deaf, not of someone surprised.

  ‘Helen. From –’ She adds the name of that far-off place in that far-off time.

  A key turns, a bolt is withdrawn. Clare clutched her silk wrap close about her beautiful neck with a trembling hand. This old woman, her face almost the colour of a walnut, clutches an ancient dressing-gown about her raddled neck with a hand like a claw. She stares up, with misty eyes, into Helen’s face. ‘You,’ she says. No shock. No surprise. She holds the door open.

  Helen enters.

  ‘I saw you. Earlier today.’

  ‘Yes. With Laurel.’ But how can Clare have seen her? Her eyes were shut.

  Helen edges into what she now realizes is the only room, kitchen and bathroom apart, which this woman owns. ‘I couldn’t believe it. To have come so far, so many thousands of miles, and then – there – you!’

  ‘It would have been even more unbelievable if you had found me in the street next door to the one in which you live.’ Clare’s voice is hoarse and dry as though, in the intense heat of that paved space in which she sits out in her rocking-chair, doing nothing, day after day, the vocal cords had withered.

  … On the bench by the lake, the Eurasian girl examined her stocking, holding her elegantly shod foot out before her. There was a small snag, which might soon become a ladder. She licked the tip of her forefinger and then touched the snag. ‘Does that stop it laddering?’ Helen asked. ‘Of course.’ The answer was scornful. Satisfied, the Eurasian girl went on: ‘ How I hate mess. They live in such a mess. You should see the kitchen. We have an icebox and we have a pantry but the food lies out there on the kitchen table – just rotting, rotting away! And the cockroaches – as big as rats.’ She laughed. ‘ Well, as big as mice. And the silverfish – as big as fish.’ Again she laughed. Then she frowned in angry remembrance: ‘And I tried so hard to keep at least that room of mine clean and tidy. But those boys would litter it with their magazines and their clothes and their – their mess. That’s why I took this job, really. I wanted to get away to a house where things were clean and orderly and – and nice.’

  The low-ceilinged room, lit by a single naked electric light bulb, similar to that outside the shack, is in an unbelievable state of dirt and disorder. Not nice, at all. There is a sagging unmade bed, with a tawny cat, so still that it might he dead, stretched out across it like a discarded fur. There are cardboard boxes piled in one corner and a litter of paperback murder mysteries, trashy magazines and used Kleenex tissues over the threadbare linoleum of the floor. Pushed to one end of a plain deal table are the remains of a meal. A newspaper is spread out over the rest of it, open at the page which lists the television programmes. Some clothes have been flung, haphazard, over an armchair sprouting horsehair. An old-fashioned brassière lies on the ground. There is a terrible din from the black-and-white television set, until Clare goes over and turns down the sound. The pictures have the blurred, grainy quality of early photographs transmitted by radio.

  ‘Sit.’ Clare picks up the clothes off the chair and stoops, groping for the brassière. Then she flings the whole bundle over on to the bed. The cat, startled, squawks and leaps to the floor, to slink through a half-open door, presumably to bathroom and kitchen. Helen sits. Clare goes over to the straight-backed chair from which she had been watching the television and lowers herself on to it, as though her joints were stiff. One arm goes over its back and her body leans forward, as she stares at the silent people flickering on the screen.

  ‘You vanished,’ Helen said. ‘ No one knew what had happened to you.’

  Still staring at the screen, Clare shakes her head. Contradiction? But no one in India, not even her own family, had known what had happened to her. She had met this man, she had gone away with him. Some kind of artist, a good-for-nothing. That was all they could tell to the police. Suddenly Clare laughs, as though to herself, her visitor forgotten. ‘I wanted to make a new life,’ she says. ‘I made many new lives. Day by day.’

  Helen is puzzled.

  ‘He became a famous painter. You know that? Painted me, painted me often. No, not me, not this me, but all those – all those others. Paintings lost, destroyed, who knows? Those different others lost, destroyed. Gone.’ While she speaks in this jerky manner, still with that chichi accent – that, at least, has not been lost, destroyed, that remains – Helen wonders if perhaps she has had a stroke. Clare turns her head from the screen. ‘ You. You went to prison. Many years.’

  She knows. Helen nods. ‘ Yes. I went to prison.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Because I confessed.’

  This strange, dishevelled, skinny woman, who was once the Clare whom Helen held in her arms, stamps irritably with her slippered foot on the floor. ‘Why confess? Why?’

  So many people have asked Helen that question and only Ilse and the Bishop, both now dead, were certain that they knew the answer. Atonement. Ilse used that word. The Bishop used it. ‘Atonement,’ Helen now says, but tentatively, as though, in some infinitely complicated card game with this woman, she was unsure what to play.

  ‘I thought it was for him.’

  Does she mean the dead child? Does she mean Toby?

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Helen does not yet know. He wandered aimlessly from room to room of the house at the top of the estuary. He tapped the barometer in the hall with a swollen knuckle. He sat out on the lawn, doing nothing, as the water ebbed and the mud glistened in wider and wider rings. He avoided her. He hated her. Yes, he hated her. She sees that now.

  Clare stares back at the television. A commercial. A tot, her hair fastened with ribbons on either side of her plump, freckled face, opens her mouth wide and bites off a piece of chocolate from a bar. Clare turns again, that thin, sinewy arm, almost black from the sun, still hanging over the back of her chair. ‘Atonement.’ she murmurs. Then louder: �
�Anyway, you were atoning for someone else. You were not that one, I am not that one. And so you are not the one who atoned. And I am not the one who read of your atoning. Simple.’ She smiles and repeats: ‘ Simple.’ Then she puts hands to the white hair on either side of her temples, rakes her crooked fingers through it. There is suddenly an expression of horror on her face. ‘Terrible,’ she says.

  They stare at each other.

  Helen glances at her watch. Babs told her that they would be leaving at about eleven. Soon, someone will come looking for her. She gets up from the chair. ‘I must go. I just wanted …’

  Clare appraises her, her red-rimmed eyes going up and down, up and down. ‘ Beautiful,’ she says at last. ‘ You’re still beautiful. Clean. Neat. Nice.’ She does not rise.

  ‘Goodbye, Clare.’

  Clare does not answer.

  Helen goes out of the shack, raising a hand in a quick farewell. At the sound of her closing the door behind her, a dog begins to bay. Other dogs take up the sound. They all seem far, far off.

  Helen stands listening to them, her head on one side and her hands clasped before her.

  In the beginning was the Word (die) and the Word (die, die) was with God and the Word (die, die, die) was God. The girl sat facing her stepmother, who had her hands over her ears, her eyes screwed up and her shoulders hunched, as though in expectation of a blow. The lightning darted from one hilltop to another. The girl watched it strike, like some huge golden snake, at the woman before her. The woman removed the hands from her ears, opened her eyes, straightened herself, straightened her skirt over her knees. She looked up gratefully at the red-haired man whose fingers were caressing the nape of her neck.

  The girl opened the letter. She was seated on the edge of the iron bedstead in the dormitory into which she was not allowed to go except at night-time. She began to read, her lips moving silently. ‘Mama has had a mysterious fever for several days. Dr McGregor has been baffled. It’s not malaria, not enteric, not flu.’ The headmistress said ‘Sit down, dear. I have some bad news for you, I’m afraid. Your mother – stepmother …’ The girl walked into the schoolroom and all the other girls looked up from their prep and stared at her. The mistress in charge called the girl over to her. ‘Come and sit over here with me.’ She put an arm round the girl’s narrow shoulders, hugging her closer to her. The girl read on. ‘Fortunately last night her temperature fell and, having eaten nothing for several days, she announced that she was ravenous!’

  The servants had carried her father into his darkened dressing room and the girl had come back with Dr McGregor, whom she had ridden off to summon. Dr McGregor went into the dressing room, with the battered Gladstone bag of which the girl’s stepmother once remarked contemptuously: ‘Even an Indian doctor would be ashamed of going around with a bag like that.’ Girl and stepmother stood motionless outside the dressing-room door, then the stepmother led the way down the stairs, groping the banister with her plump right hand, as though there were no light shining down on them from the skylight. The stepmother said: ‘It could have been us too. It could have been any of us.’ The girl did not answer. ‘Couldn’t it? Dangerous country.’ The stepmother sprawled threshing, like some huge, pale fish, her mouth agape, on the flags of the kitchen floor, while the poison glided, a corrosive snake, within her. At the bottom of the stairs the old woman looked up at her daughter-in-law and her grand-daughter, her eyes screwed together against the light which flooded down from the skylight. ‘Oh, poor Toby, poor Toby! Poor angel! But thank God that, at any rate, you both are all right.’

  On the calm lake, the boat rocked from side to side as the Eurasian girl rowed it with a jerky clashing of oars on rowlocks. The girl sat in the stern, the rudder in her hand. A long, twisted stick, covered in a silvery slime, bobbed past them and then circled, caught in a lethargic eddy. The boy leaned over the side, reached, lost his balance. He let out a shrill cry, as he tumbled downwards. The Eurasian screamed: ‘Do something, do something!’ She lurched to her feet in the rocking boat. ‘I can’t swim, I can’t swim!’ Almost overbalancing herself, she held out one of the oars over the water, the other abandoned, while the boat drifted away. The girl stared at an arm flailing, a head emerging and disappearing. ‘Oh, do something!’ At last, kicking off her shoes and diving over the side of the boat, the girl did something, when it was too late for anything effective to be done. The girl shot forward and grabbed the boy by the back of his jumper. ‘ You little fool! Be careful! You might have been drowned. Your mother’d never forgive us.’

  The boy pointed to a vast snake, grey mottled with green, uncoiling itself sleepily from a branch. Its eyes glittered. ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ he said. Then he cried out, ‘Let me down, let me down!’ Stooping, she lowered him in her grasp and then let him go. He raced towards the snake, first smiling, then laughing. The old woman screamed, his father shouted, the servants rushed forward, abandoning their burdens. The snake reared up, its tongue flickered, it struck. The girl, her fingers pressing him so tight against her midriff that she felt that she had only to exert a little more strength to crack him open like an egg, restrained him. ‘Don’t be silly! It’s poisonous, it could kill you.’

  The Eurasian snatched up the brassière off the back of the chair in the moonlit room and with frantic, red-nailed fingers thrust it downwards into the open mouth. The girl did not at once hiss at her, ‘Clare, Clare, don’t, don’t!’ A second passed. Two seconds. Three seconds. ‘ Clare, Clare, don’t, don’t!’ The girl at last said it. Too late.

  At the end there was the Word (atone) and the Word (atone, atone) was with Aunt Sophie and the Word (atone, atone, atone) was Aunt Sophie. A sudden intensity kindled in the dying eyes under the heavy lids, as she squinted up at her niece. ‘Who would want to do such a thing? Who? Who?’ But Aunt Sophie, with that piercing simplicity of hers, knew who would want to do such a thing and who had wanted to do it for years and years. She knew and she held out the gift of forgiveness, even without atonement. But the gift was like those beads which Aunt Sophie had dreamed that the murdered boy had snapped with a tug – beads rolling, rolling everywhere. It was a gift unuseable, unless the girl went on her knees and collected them up, with infinite patience, one by one, and restrung them, as once, long ago, that child had strung beads together with infinite, pathetic patience to make her a bookmarker.

  Atone, at one. Looking up into the wide sweep of the sky above her, her head tilted and her eyes dazzled by stars and tears, Helen is now at one not only with Aunt Sophie but with Ilse, who was part of her atonement, with Clare, who was the fragile implement of her will, with her dead father, who was another such implement, with Isabel, implacable in her grief, and even with the child, his small palm scored with two brief gashes and his head lolling back at that other, deep, long gash which had all but severed it from its neck.

  Helen shudders. The dogs have ceased to bark, it is now very still. Momentarily, as she once again feels that knife in her hand and that warm body beneath it, something dark and terrible, the undying worm in a constantly dying world, stirs again within her. Then: ‘Dr Eliot! Dr Eliot!’

  It is Laurel or Babs or Hank or someone calling to her. Once again from the bald slope stretching away in front of her and from the dark, humped hill beyond it, the dogs begin, one by one, to set up their barking. They sound demented with terror.

  ‘Dr Eliot?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it’s me.’

  Copyright

  First published in 1982 by Hutchinson

  This edition published 2013 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  ISBN 978-1-4472-5809-4 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-5808-7 POD

  Copyright © Francis King, 1982

  The right of Francis King to be identif
ied as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material

  reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher

  will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication ( or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

  without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does

  any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to

  criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by

  any author websites whose address you obtain from this book (‘author websites’).

  The inclusion of author website addresses in this book does not constitute

  an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content,

  products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

  This book remains true to the original in every way. Some aspects may appear

  out-of-date to modern-day readers. Bello makes no apology for this, as to retrospectively

  change any content would be anachronistic and undermine the authenticity of the original.

  Bello has no responsibility for the content of the material in this book. The opinions

  expressed are those of the author and do not constitute an endorsement by,

  or association with, us of the characterization and content.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books