Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘ALL right, Aunt Sophie. If you wish, yes.’

  ‘Which is it to be?’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Metatone or Sanatogen?’

  ‘Whichever you want.’ It might, Sophie thought, be she herself who was going to take the tonic.

  Sophie confided in Mr Kearney when next he drove her in his Armstrong Siddeley to the settlement.

  ‘Sounds like some kind of nervous breakdown to me,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oh, she’s quite right in her mind. I suppose it’s the delayed shock of that terrible experience of hers in India. Did I ever tell you about it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sophie had told him about it often.

  ‘It could be that, couldn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sure it could.’

  ‘If only she had some faith!’

  ‘Faith in what?’

  ‘Oh, anything, anything. I think faith is so important in life.’

  ‘Faith in life is important,’ Mr Kearney said sententiously.

  Like a taper repeatedly applied to a sulky fire, it was Sophie’s faith in life which eventually, after many weeks, reignited Helen’s.

  ‘Oh, the hail! The hail! Look, Helen, look! It’s bouncing off the pavements! Beautiful!’ The plain, rosy face, as of some old-fashioned nanny, was irradiated with pleasure, as Sophie stood, in knickers and stays, before the window on to the street. One hand raised the net curtain so that, opposite but unknown to her, a young, recently married couple, sitting at their breakfast, could giggle at the spectacle.

  The one-armed ex-soldier with the barrel-organ returned and the square jangled with a waltz from The Merry Widow. Sophie, who had limped in, wan and dishevelled, from a day at the settlement, began to waltz, clutching a cushion to her bosom and singing in a surprisingly deep contralto: ‘Vilia, O Vilia, the witch of the wood …’

  ‘Ah, the muffin man!’ It was winter now and the bell tinkled down the area steps of the house next door. ‘Let’s have some muffins. Let’s make pigs of ourselves, Helen, let’s have lots and lots of muffins, dripping with butter!’

  Sophie held out a scarf, then drew it to her and stroked it with one hand as it lay over the palm of the other. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Just beautiful. Seta pura.’ She held up the scarf to show the label. ‘That means pure silk. Mr Kearney brought it to me from Florence. Wasn’t that good of him? So typical. Fancy remembering an old woman like me, when he must have lots and lots of girlfriends.’ Helen was perspicacious enough to have realized that Mr Kearney had never had a girlfriend in his life; but after weeks and weeks of non-feeling, the old woman’s rapture caused a painful, yet exhilarating stirring within her, as of seeds beginning at last to germinate.

  One morning, with no explanation, Helen got up. It was still dark, the hour only a few minutes after seven, with Aunt Sophie, exhausted from a visit the previous day to one of her girls in Holloway (‘How can one blame people who have nothing for taking something?’), still lying, mouth open, on her back in bed. Helen pattered down to the bathroom, her sponge bag dangling by its strings from a wrist and a towel over forearm, placed sixpence in the rusty gas geyser and watched as the orange water coughed and spurted into the bath. Then, with voluptuous pleasure unknown to her for weeks and weeks, she climbed in, the water so hot that she almost screamed from the touch of it on her flesh, soaped herself over and over, immersed her head, shook out her streaming hair, splashed, splashed again.

  When she finally emerged, the secretary was awaiting her turn outside the door. ‘ Well, you’ve been taking your time and no mistake!’ But she said it without rancour. Then, through the drifts of steam, she saw that there was a pool of water by the side of the bath and another at its head. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, daintily recoiling. ‘ What a mess!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Helen mumbled.

  While Sophie slept on, her mouth wide open like some baby bird’s waiting for sustenance, Helen dried her still wet hair and put combs in it; took out a bottle of transparent varnish and carefully applied it to her nails; brushed her teeth up and down, back and forth behind the barbola screen. Then she went to the chest-of-drawers and got out some underclothes. Slipping into a vest, she thought: How thin I’ve become!

  All at once, sitting up in bed, Sophie cried out: ‘Oh, Helen, Helen! What a gorgeous birthday present!’

  Helen had completely forgotten that it was Sophie’s birthday. But she smiled over the dress which she was about to slip over her head and said: ‘I decided I was going to take you out to lunch. A treat for you. And I couldn’t take you out to lunch unless I looked my best.’

  ‘Oh, Helen, how lovely! It’s so long since anyone took me out to lunch. But nothing too expensive. No extravagance. In fact, I’m going to pay my whack. Dutch treat.’

  ‘Certainly not! I’m going to take you to the Green Cockatoo and you’re not going to pay a penny.’

  ‘No, not the Green Cockatoo, Helen. It’s not my sort of place. Far too chic for me.’ What she really meant was that it was far too expensive for Helen. ‘But I tell you what. Take me to Deny and Toms Roof Garden. Oh, I love it there. The Spanish Cloister, the Old English Garden, the flamingoes and peacocks and ducks. I’ve not been there since Noel Coward was opening it for some theatrical charity or other. And then afterwards we can have a snack lunch in the Rainbow Room below. Oh, what a lovely day!’

  Nine weeks after that, Helen became a medical student; and eighteen months after that the war broke out. Toby, Isabel and their daughter had been due to arrive in England on leave but they cancelled their passages. It was not that they were afraid of torpedoes or air-raids, Toby wrote to explain; but they did not think that they should needlessly endanger the life of their little girl, Angela, Angie, Angel. They would all just have to wait.

  Chapter Four

  The wait was a long one.

  Helen eventually persuaded Sophie to move out of the bedsitting room into a basement flat near to the hospital at which she was studying. ‘We’ll be much safer there,’ she said.

  ‘But, darling, think of the expense!’

  ‘I have money, Aunt Sophie – money, lots and lots of it. And the rent is nothing.’ Everyone who could was fleeing London.

  ‘Well, I must pay my share.’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  But, of course, Sophie insisted.

  The entrance to the flat was down precipitous steps into an area filled with dustbins. Behind the peeling front door, there stretched a long, murky passage, at first containing the electricity and gas meters for the whole block and then leading to two square, low-ceilinged bedrooms, a bathroom, a sitting room and a miniscule kitchen.

  ‘Oh, it’s so cosy!’ Sophie exclaimed, as she stood, sturdy legs wide apart, in the middle of the sitting room and looked all around her.

  Helen crossed to a wall, unhitched a reproduction of Manet’s Au Bar des Folies Bergères and placed it on the sagging sofa. ‘ That must go for one thing.’

  ‘Oh, but dear, I love it. It’s one of my favourite pictures.’

  ‘Then you can have it in your bedroom.’

  ‘May I?’ Sophie was delighted. Again, she gazed around her, her mouth open on uneven teeth. ‘A home of our own! Do you know, I haven’t had a home – a real home – of my own since Daddy died. So many years ago now.’

  There was a terrible pathos in her pleasure. Helen crossed to her and put her arms around her. She began to shake her gently: ‘But you could have had, you could have had! If you didn’t always spend your money on other people. That’s what’s so awful. You could have had.’

  Embarrassed, Sophie gently extracted herself from Helen’s embrace and wandered up the corridor. ‘Which bedroom would you like me to have?’

  ‘Whichever one you want.’

  Sophie peered into the one bedroom and then into the other. ‘You take the front one. It’s bigger. You have so many more bits and pieces than I have.’ Then she put out a hand: ‘ No, dear, I think I’ll take the front one. If you don’t mind. If it’s not too selfish
of me. It’s so much brighter.’

  Helen knew that Sophie had changed her mind because she had suddenly realized that there was less danger of blast in the room at the back. There followed a long argument, similar to their long argument as to whether they should rent this flat or a larger, better-furnished one; and now, as before, it was Sophie who, gently obdurate, emerged the victor.

  Soon, the Blitz had squashed flat that area of Stepney which the settlement, founded by two pious, well-to-do Victorian spinsters, had been intended to serve. The settlement was closed.

  ‘Why don’t you move out of London?’ Helen suggested. ‘You’ve nothing now to keep you here.’

  ‘I have you to keep me here,’ Sophie answered with that simple candour which so often shocked or embarrassed people more complex and devious than herself. ‘And – oh, I know it’s terrible to say this – it’s so exciting to be at the heart of things. I couldn’t bear to be far away in the country.’

  When, at the height of the Blitz, flock upon flock of planes, soaring, swooping, spraying outwards and regathering, had filled what would otherwise have been a tranquil summer evening with the roar and scream of engines, the thud of bombs, the stench of smoke, the wails of sirens and lurid colours welling up over the sky, Helen had come home from the hospital, running in panic from the bus stop, to find that Sophie was not at home. She went into the air-raid shelter, constructed in the other of the two basement flats, where she found an elderly man, three women and a child seated, in the damp and gloom, on canvas chairs set out in a row, as though at the seaside.

  ‘I was looking for my aunt. I thought she might be here.’ She had met the elderly man, a retired bank manager, before. The women and the child were strangers to her. She assumed that they were not residents of the block but there by his invitation.

  One of the women first hauled the child on to her knee and then answered: ‘When we came down in the lift, she was waiting to take it up. I asked her where she was going and she said up to the roof. I told her to do nothing so foolish but she wouldn’t listen to me.’ Clearly, even if Helen did not know any of the women, Sophie knew this one, if not the others.

  Helen waited by the lift but it never came. The current must have been switched off. Eventually she ran up and up the stairs, past one silent flat after another. Silly old thing! What did she think she was doing? This kind of anxiety was the last thing one wanted when one had spent the afternoon in the dissecting room. Her anger boiled up.

  She flung open the door on to the flat roof. ‘Aunt Sophie!’ she called.

  Sophie stood gazing alternately up into the sky, as the bombers droned over, and down towards the City, now spurting flames and billowing with smoke. Her hands pressed to her cheeks, there was a look of childish rapture on her face. ‘Oh, Helen, Helen! Look! Just look! Have you ever seen anything so thrilling? Marvellous!’

  Helen marched over and grabbed her by an arm. ‘Come downstairs at once! Are you out of your mind? Come on!’ She pulled Sophie behind her, first off the roof and then stumbling down the darkened stairs. ‘What on earth did you think you were doing?’

  Behind her, Sophie was gabbling: ‘Oh, darling, don’t be cross with me. I know it was naughty of me. I had no idea you’d be back so early. I didn’t want to cause you any worry. Truly I didn’t.’

  Helen stopped, turned. Far off, there was a crump, followed by a strange, ominous rustle, like paper being screwed up in some giant fist. ‘Whether I was worried is neither here nor there. But you’re mad to risk your life like that.’

  She began once again to hurry on down the stairs and Sophie stumbled and lurched behind her.

  Once in the flat, Sophie panted, a hand pressed to her breastbone as though in an effort to stay the thudding of her heart: ‘Yes, I’m afraid it was naughty of me. After all, one shouldn’t regard as a spectacle something which is causing death, damage, suffering, oh, so much suffering. That wasn’t just naughty, it was wicked. But, Helen, the colours! Beautiful! Extraordinary!’

  ‘Damn the colours! It’s you I mind about. You mustn’t do these things.’

  Sophie shook her head. She looked as if she were on the verge of tears. ‘Wicked. Wicked of me, wicked of me.’

  Instead of working at the settlement, Sophie now worked at a shelter, under one of the London bridges, for the vagrants whose number, instead of decreasing, had mysteriously increased with the war. Why did they stay in the danger of London, when they could escape to the safety of the country? No one knew the answer.

  Helen, visiting the shelter, at once noticed how the other women working there had got into the habit of snubbing and patronizing Sophie. They unloaded on to her the dirtiest and most menial of their duties. They constantly ordered her about and found fault with her.

  Even while Helen was talking to Sophie at the sink at which she was patiently washing up piles and piles of crockery and cutlery, the supervisor, Mrs Blake, a woman with a grey fringe over a bulging forehead and wide hips all but bursting her slacks, strode over with an admonishment: ‘Four more spoons are missing. And a fifteen-pound bag of sugar. What happens to these things?’ It was almost as though she were accusing Sophie of stealing them.

  ‘Was that my fault?’ Sophie asked with an abjectness that made Helen as angry with her as with the supervisor.

  ‘Well, I don’t know who else’s it could have been.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘You must keep an eye on them every single minute. They just cannot be trusted. You know that.’

  But that was something which Sophie neither knew nor believed. ‘I’ll bring some spoons tomorrow. And I’ll save up my own sugar ration.’

  The supervisor gave a grim smile, not to Sophie, but to Helen, as though the two of them were in complicity against this dotty, inefficient old woman. ‘It’ll take you a long time to replace fifteen pounds of sugar. The war’ll be over long before that.’

  When not on duty at the shelter, Sophie was perpetually scuttling around on jobs and errands for others – friends, acquaintances, neighbours, strangers. Helen would protest that surely this or that person could find time, himself or herself, to return library books, buy stamps, collect a prescription, hand in a form, queue for cigarettes or cat meat. But invariably Sophie would find some excuse. Poor Mrs J had so much to do cooking for that demanding husband and all those children of hers; Miss T had such a terror of venturing out, ever since she had been trapped in that wrecked underground train; dear old Mr F from upstairs was in some kind of important hush-hush work that gave him few free hours. It was useless to try to dissuade her. And all the time she was tormented by the guilty fear that, at fifty-nine, she was not really doing enough. Perhaps she should volunteer as a nurse, even though she was so squeamish? Or Air Raid Warden? Become a bus conductress? Work in a factory?

  ‘Oh, Helen, Helen, Helen, I hate to see you looking so pale and tired!’ she would cry out when Helen returned home from the hospital, having worked for hours on end on casualties from the bombings. Sophie was never aware that she herself, having hurried up and down streets emptied by air-raids, having eaten almost nothing and having hardly slept for nights and nights on end, looked far paler and more tired.

  Sophie would often tell Helen: ‘I don’t know how you can bear to deal with people in that condition. When I worked in that hospital in Calcutta, I was so easily upset. Blood terrified me. They had to take me out of the operating theatre. I couldn’t work there. However much I tried, I always used to faint. You’re so strong, Helen, so strong. That’s what I admire about you, that’s what I envy. Fancy being able to help with amputations and sewings-up and terrible things like that.’

  At such times Helen would stiffen. Then she would say something like: ‘Oh, one gets used to anything’ or ‘Well, one gets hardened.’

  Once, after repeated invitations, Sophie and Helen went to spend a long weekend with Joan, her children and old Mrs Thompson in a village outside Chichester. Joan’s husband, now an Army chaplain, was away in the Middl
e East. Joan was serving on innumerable committees – evacuees, civil defence, comforts for the troops – so that she was rarely at home and, when she was, had a tendency to be snappy and preoccupied. Mrs Thompson, far frailer than when Helen last had seen her, spent much of her time lying out on a sofa by the open sitting-room window or, if the weather was fine, on a deckchair on a lawn, much of which had been given up to the growing of vegetables. Doing nothing, she kept peering up at the sky, as though fearful that, at any moment, aeroplanes would swoop down from it like giant birds of prey. Two of the five children were away at boarding school – one of the few advantages, Joan said, of being a clergyman’s wife was that one could get one’s children educated for nothing, or virtually nothing. The other three, all under eight, disturbed Sophie with their wildness and inarticulacy. They were supposed to go to a dame’s school in the village but rarely seemed to be there. Clearly, they neither wanted nor needed regular meals – which Joan, distracted by her tasks, was too busy to enforce on them. Furtive and grubby, they wandered into the kitchen and then wandered out again, munching on doorsteps of bread spread thick with lard, sour cooking apples or eggs which they themselves hard-boiled, leaving the pan full of misty water in which strands of albumen, leaked from shells so thin that they had cracked, writhed like slender worms. From far beyond the towering hedge which shut in the garden, the three women – four, if Joan happened to be at home – would hear their voices ring out, stridently excited, after their mutterings, mumblings and silences at home.

  Suddenly, Helen defected from the adults and became one of them. She taught them to play rounders in the field in which Joan and a woman neighbour kept the cow which each of them was always forgetting to milk. She took them, herself on a man’s bicycle belonging to Joan’s absent husband and they on rusty, rackety ones of their own, for day-long expeditions. She joined them in demon-grab, the four of them squatting on the carpet of the sitting room, with the labrador bitch beside them, as they shouted and pounced. In the evening, all of them perched on a stile while Helen extemporized a story. Joan, pausing in some task, would complain fretfully: ‘It’s far too late for those children to be out. What does the girl think she’s up to?’ and Sophie would then murmur: ‘Bless her heart!’