“I can’t think why they’ve let that man out of you-know-where again. He’ll simply do it all over again, and there’ll be some other poor little mite—”
Mr Goodchild broke in.
“Well at least now we know who’s been taking the children’s books.”
After he had said that he became silly again, bowing to the twins.
“And how are the Misses Stanhope? Well, I trust?”
They answered him in beautiful unison.
“Yes thank you, Mr Goodchild.”
“And Mr Stanhope? He is well?”
“Yes thank you, Mr Goodchild.”
There was no question of being well as Sophy realized already. It was a thing people said, just as wearing a tie was something they did.
“I think, Mrs Goodchild,” said Mr Goodchild in a more than usually silly way, “that we can offer the Misses Stanhope some liquid refreshment?”
So they went with comfortable Mrs Goodchild who was never silly, but calm and matter-of-fact, into the shabby sitting-room through the door at the back of the shop, where she sat them side by side on a sofa in front of a television set that was switched off and went away to get the fizzy drinks. Mr Goodchild stood in front of them, smiling and rocking on his toes and said how nice it was to see them and how he and they saw each other most days, didn’t they. He had a little girl of his own, well she was a big girl now, a married lady with two little children but a long way away in Canada. It was half-way through his next sentence, which was about how much pleasanter a house was with children in it—and of course he had to add something silly like, “or not children precisely, let us say a pair of delightful young ladies like you,” whereas when they left home if they went a long way away—half-way or somewhere in this twisting sentence Sophy had a naked realization of her own power should she care to exercise it, to do anything she liked with Mr Goodchild, that large, old, fat man with his shopful of books and his silly ways, she could do absolutely anything she liked with him only it would not be worth the trouble. So they sat, toes only just reaching the old carpet and gazed at things over their fizzy drinks. There was a large notice on one wall that said in big letters how BERTRAND RUSSELL would address GREENFIELD PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY in the Assembly Rooms on HUMAN FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY at such and such a date. It was an old notice and getting dim and seemed odd since it was stuck or hung where most people would put a picture; but then in the rather gloomy light Sophy saw under the big BERTRAND RUSSELL, in small print, Chairman, S. Goodchild, and understood, more or less. Mr Goodchild went on talking.
Sophy asked what interested her.
“Mrs Goodchild. Please, why was the old man taking books?”
After that there was quite a long pause before anyone spoke. Mrs Goodchild took a long drink of her instant before she said anything.
“Well dear, it’s stealing, you see.”
“But he’s old,” said Sophy, looking up over the rim, “He’s old as old.”
After she said that, Mr and Mrs Goodchild looked at each other over their instant for quite a time.
“You see,” said Mr Goodchild at last, “he wants to give them to children as presents. He’s—he’s sick.”
“Some people would say he’s sick”, said Mrs Goodchild, meaning she wasn’t one of some people, “and needs a doctor. But others—” and it sounded as if Mrs Goodchild might be one of the others—“just think he’s a nasty, wicked old man and that he ought to be—”
“Ruth!”
“Yes. Well.”
Sophy could feel and almost see those shutters coming down that grown-ups had in constant supply when you wanted to know something really interesting. But Mrs Goodchild went off round a corner.
“What with W. H. Smith taking over and ruining the assembly rooms and the supermarket giving away paperbacks it’s hard enough keeping the place together without nasty old Pedigree helping us on the road to ruin.”
“At least we know now who’s been doing the shoplifting. I’ll have a word with Sergeant Phillips.”
Then Sophy saw him change the subject behind his face. He became fatter, rosier, beaming with his head a bit sideways. He spread out, his cup in one hand and the saucer in the other.
“But with the Misses Stanhope to entertain—”
Toni spoke in the pause, using her faint, clear voice in which every syllable was as precise as a line in a good drawing.
“Mrs Goodchild. What is Tran-scend-en-tal Phil-os-oph-y?”
Mrs Goodchild’s cup rattled in her saucer.
“God bless the child! Does your daddy teach you words like that?”
“No. Daddy doesn’t teach us.”
Sophy saw her fly away again and explained the thing to Mrs Goodchild.
“It’s the name on a book in your shop, Mrs Goodchild.”
“Transcendental Philosophy, my dear,” said Mr Goodchild in a jokey voice that had nothing to be jokey about, “might on the one hand be called a book full of hot air. On the other hand it might be considered the ultimate wisdom. You pays your money as they used to say and you takes your choice. Beautiful young ladies are not generally considered to stand in need of an understanding of Transcendental Philosophy on the grounds that they exemplify in themselves all the pure, the beautiful and the good.”
“Sim.”
It was evident that nothing was to be learnt from Mr and Mrs Goodchild. For a little while longer Sophy and Toni did their “remarkable children” thing, then said together—it was one of the few benefits of twinship—that they must go now, got down, did their “thank yous” demurely, to hear as they retreated down the shop old Mr Goodchild going on about “enchanting children” and Mrs Goodchild breaking in—
“You’d better have a word with Phillips this afternoon. I think old Pedigree is having one of his beastly times again. They ought to put him away for good.”
“He wouldn’t touch Stanhope’s little girls.”
“What difference does it make whose child it is?”
That night in bed, Sophy did a long brood that was almost a Toni, a drifting away up into the boughs. “Stanhope’s little girls?” It seemed to her that they weren’t anyone’s little girls. She sent her mind round the circle of people who impinged; Gran, who had disappeared together with Rosevear and all that, Daddy, the cleaning women, aunts, a teacher or two, some children. She saw clearly that they belonged to each other and to no one else. As she didn’t like belonging to Toni and contrariwise, it was clear she wouldn’t like belonging to anyone else either. And then—that personal, that wholly isolated direction at the back of your head, the black place from which you looked out on things so that all of those people, even Toni, out there—how could the creature called Sophy who sat there at the mouth of the tunnel behind her belong to anyone but herself? It was all silly. And if belonging was like being twin with a lot of people out there the way Daddy had lived with aunts and the Bells with each other and the Goodchilds with each other and all the others—but Daddy had his column room to disappear into and when he had disappeared into his column room—she saw suddenly, knees up to her chin—he could go further, do a Toni and disappear into his chess.
When she thought that, she opened her eyes and the room came into view with a glimmer from her dormer so she shut them again, wishing to stay inside. She knew she was not thinking the way grown-ups thought and there were so many of them and they were so big—
All the same.
Sophy became very still and held her breath. There was the old man and the books. She saw something. She had been told it often enough but now she saw it. You could choose to belong to people the way the Goodchilds and Bells and Mrs Hugeson did by being good, by doing what they said was right. Or you could choose what was real and what you knew was real—your own self sitting inside with its own wishes and rules at the mouth of the tunnel.
Perhaps the only advantage of being everything with a twin and knowing the exact Toni-ness of Toni was that in the morning Sophy had no hesitation in
discussing the next step with her. She suggested they should steal sweets and Toni not only listened but contributed ideas. She said they would use a Paki shop because the Pakis couldn’t keep their eyes off her hair and she would hold the man’s attention while Sophy did the actual stealing. Sophy saw the reasonableness of this. If Toni let her hair fall over her face, then tried in a deliberately baby-way to get it clear and looked up through the tresses it was like doing a bit of magic. So they went to the shop kept by the Krishna brothers and it was simply too easy. The younger Krishna was standing in the doorway and talking in a liquid voice to a blackie—“Now you go off you black fellow. We are not wanting your custom.” The twins sidled past him and inside the shop the older Krishna came forward from between sacks of brown sugar that were open for the scoops and said the shop was theirs. Then he positively forced curious sweets on them and added some curious sticks which he said were incense and refused to be paid for anything. It was humiliating and they abandoned the project, seeing that if they tried it on Mr Goodchild’s books it would be much the same; and the books were silly anyway. There was another thing that now presented itself to Sophy. They had more toys than they wanted and more pocket money than they wanted. All Daddy’s cleaning women and cousins ensured that. Worst of all, they found there was a group of kids at their school who were doing the same thing only on a larger scale, really stealing and sometimes breaking in and then selling the loot to those children who could afford to buy it. Sophy saw that stealing was wrong or right according to the way you thought, but both ways it was boring. Being bored was the real reason for not stealing, the reason that counted. Once or twice she thought about this matter so piercingly, it was as if right and wrong and boring were numbers you could add and subtract. She saw, too, in this particularly piercing way that there was another number, an x to be added or to be subtracted, for which she could find no value. The combination of the piercingness and the fourth number made her panicky and would have settled into a chilly fear, if she had not had the mouth of the dark tunnel to sit at and know herself to be not Sophy but This. This lived and watched without any feelings at all and brandished or manipulated the Sophy-creature like a complicated doll, a child with all the arts and wiles and deliberate delightfulness of a quite unselfconscious, oh a quite innocent, naive, trusting little girl—brandished her among all the other children, white, yellow, brown, black, the other children who surely were as incapable of inspecting this kind of sum as they were of doing the others in their heads and had to write them down laboriously on paper. Then, suddenly, sometimes, it would be easy—flip!—to go out there and to join them.
This discovery of what-is-what might have seemed very important except that their eleventh birthday was the start of a really dreadful month for Sophy and perhaps for Toni, though Toni did not seem to be as affected. It was on the birthday itself. They had a cake, bought from Timothy’s and with ten candles round the top with one in the middle. Daddy actually came all the way down from the column room to share in the tea and he was jokey in the way that did not suit him or his hawk’s face that always made Sophy think of princes and pirates. He told them after only the slightest many happy returns and before they’d even blown out the candles. He told them he and Winnie were getting married so they’d have what he called a proper mother. Sophy knew a lot of things in the burning moment after he stopped speaking. She knew the difference between Winnie keeping her clothes in the aunties’ room and paying Daddy visits; and Winnie going straight in there to undress and get in bed and be called Missis Stanhope and perhaps (because it happened in stories) having babies that Daddy would want the way he didn’t want the twins, his twins and nobody else’s. It was a moment of deadly anguish—Winnie with her painted face, her yellow hair, her strange way of speaking, and her smelling like a ladies’ hairdressers’. Sophy knew it couldn’t happen, couldn’t be allowed to happen. All the same, that was no comfort and she couldn’t get her mouth together to blow but it went wider and she began to cry. Even the crying was all wrong because it began in sheer woe but then because she was exhibiting it before Winnie, and worse, before Daddy, thus informing him how important he was, it got mixed up with rage. Also she knew that even when she had done with crying, the fact would still be there, massive and unbearable. She heard Winnie speak.
“Over to you, cobber.”
Cobber was Daddy. He came and said things over her shoulder, touched her so that she twisted herself away and there was silence after a time. Then Daddy roared in a terrible voice.
“Christ! Children!”
She heard him thumping down the wooden stairs into the coachhouse and then hurrying up the garden path. The door into the hall slammed so hard it was a wonder the glass didn’t break. Winnie went after him.
After she had got rid of all her tears without improving the situation she sat up on her divan bed and looked across at Toni on hers. Toni was the same as usual except that she was a bit pink in the cheek—no tears. She simply said in an offhand voice;
“Cry-baby.”
Sophy was too miserable to answer. She wanted nothing so much as to get right away and abandon Daddy, forget him and his treachery. She rubbed her face and said they should go along the towpath because Winnie told them not to. They did this at once though it seemed weak and nowhere near a reply to the awful news. Only by the time they had got to the old boat by the broken lock Winnie and Daddy did seem a bit smaller and farther away. They mooned about on the boat for a bit and they discovered a clutch of duck’s eggs that had been left there a long time. When she saw the eggs, everything came quite clear in Sophy’s head. She saw how she would torment Winnie and Daddy, go on and on tormenting them till she had driven them both mad and away, both taken away like Mr Goodchild’s son in the mental hospital.
After that things happened the way they were intended to happen. They fell together in a kind of “Of course” way, as if the whole world was co-operating. It was meant that when they got back to the birthday cake and ate some of the icing—there was no sense in leaving it—they should decide to open the old leather trunk they had been told not to and find the bunch of rusty keys there. The keys opened everything usually kept shut. That night, sitting up in bed, her knees against her new breasts, Sophy saw clearly that one of the old eggs was meant for Winnie. She found herself overcome with a passionate desire in the darkness to be Weird—there was no other name for it, Weird and powerful. She frightened herself and curled down in the bed but the dark tunnel was still there; and in that remote security she saw what to do.
Next day she found how easy it was. You just looked for the areas of inattention with which grown-ups were so liberally supplied and walked through them. You could do it quite briskly and no one could see or hear you. Therefore, briskly she unlocked the drawer in the little table by Daddy’s bed, broke the egg in it and walked away briskly. She put the key back with the others on the heavy ring that quite obviously had not been used for years and felt it was the nearest she could get to being Weird but not really satisfactory. That day she was so preoccupied in school that even Mrs Hugeson noticed and asked what was the matter. Nothing of course.
That night in her bed under the dormer in the stables she brooded about being weird. She tried to join things together about weirdness but could not. It was not arithmetic. Everything floated, the private tunnel, the things that were meant and oh, above all, the deep, fierce, hurting need, desire, to hurt Winnie and Daddy up there in the bedroom. She brooded and wished and tried to think and then brooded again; and presently her feelings made her want so desperately to be weird for this occasion that she saw in a kind of supposing that burnt, how it should have been. Now she saw herself glide up the garden path, through the glass door, up the stairs, gliding through the bedroom door to the big bed where Daddy lay and Winnie curled, her back to him. So she went to the little table which now had three books on it by the bedside lamp and she thrust her hand with the egg through the locked wood and she broke the egg beside the other one,
so eek, so stinky-poo, so oof and pah and she left the two messes there. Then she turned and looked down and she aimed the dark part of her head at sleeping Winnie and gave her a nightmare so that she jerked in bed and shrieked aloud; at which the shriek kind of woke Sophy—though it could not wake her as she had never been asleep—and she was in her own bed with her own shriek and she was deadly frightened by the weirdness and she cried out after her own shriek, “Toni! Toni!” But Toni was asleep and off away wherever it was so Sophy had to lie for a long time, curled up, frightened and shaking. Indeed she began to feel that going on being weird would be too much and that grown-ups would win after all, because too much weirdness made you sick. But then Uncle Jim appeared from fucking Sydney.
At first everyone had fun with Uncle Jim, even Daddy, who said he was a natural comedian. But not more than a week after the birthday party that had gone wrong Sophy noticed how much time he was beginning to spend with Winnie; and she wondered about it all and was a bit scared that she might have produced him by being weird. After all, he did kind of dilute the situation, she said to herself, proud of having found a word that was even better than just the right word, he diluted everybody’s feelings and made them—well, dilute.
On the seventh of June, that being approximately a fortnight after the birthday, when Sophy was already accustomed to thinking of herself as eleven, she was behind the old rose bush and squatting down, and watching the ants being busy about nothing when Toni came flying down the garden path and up the wooden stairs to their own room. This was so astonishing that Sophy went to see. Toni wasted no time in explanations.
Darkness Visible: With an Introduction by Philip Hensher Page 14
