Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘But how can she be? How can she be?’

  Aunt Sophie dying.

  ‘Don’t stay with me, dear, I know you’ve such a lot to do … I was trying to remember that sonnet – by Meredith, wasn’t it? – I learned for a recitation contest at school … Of course, I didn’t win … But all these years it’s stuck in my mind, don’t ask me why … Each time I get to ‘‘He reached a middle height and at the stars …’’ and then, then I can’t go on. My poor old brain seems to be even more addled than usual.… You’ve explained to them at the shelter, haven’t you? I don’t suppose they really miss me, I was always doing the wrong thing.… but I wouldn’t want them to think I was letting them down. I ought to be out of here before Mrs Blake takes her holiday. Three weeks from now, four weeks? You see how my poor mind is going! If she’s not there, there’s no one but me to see to the … Oh, Helen, before you leave, you will go across and talk to that poor thing opposite, won’t you? The Cypriot woman. No one ever comes to see her. Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up and hear her moaning or sobbing and then someone shouts to her shut up. One can’t blame them, of course, yes, it is a little disturbing, but she must feel so alone.… Oh, I must tell you, that reminds me, last night I had such a strange and vivid dream. It was of that time when Toby and Isabel were last here on leave. Well, as you know, Peter was not born then but somehow in my dream he was with them and it was as though I knew him, knew him well – as though he were close to me. He was in my lap and playing with my beads, you know those amber beads, well, you probably won’t remember them, I always meant to have them re-threaded but, like so much else in my life, somehow I never got round to it. Well, the beads were intact and his little hand was holding them. And then he gave them a tug and the thread snapped and they were rolling, rolling, beads everywhere, many more than could possibly have been on a single string.…’

  A sudden intensity kindled in the dull eyes under the heavy lids, as she squinted round at Helen: ‘Who would want to do such a thing? Who? Who?’

  All at once the voice was strong and anguished. She half sat up in the bed, clutching at Helen’s arm with both her hands, the nails digging deep into the recoiling flesh beneath them. Helen all but cried out.

  ‘Such a vivid dream …’

  Helen stretched out, hopelessly empty through the hopelessly empty days, while Aunt Sophie sits beside her: ‘Oh, Helen, one simply has to go on without asking why.… You have to find the strength in yourself, there’s nowhere else to find it.… Sooner or later things always get better or, if they don’t get better, one gets accustomed to them.… You must learn to look not backwards but forwards, not inwards but outwards.… Oh, Helen, I do believe what I’m saying to you, I do, I do.…’

  Silly, sentimental clichés. But she had herself lived faithful to them and, in doing so, had somehow transmuted them.

  Aunt Sophie dead.

  She had left Helen her ‘ few bits and pieces’ – as she herself referred to the worn clothes from Pontings and Marks and Spencer, the items of jewellery (ropes of glass beads, a gold christening brooch with a single pearl and her name ‘Sophie’ engraved on it, some coral earrings, an extravagantly carved brass bracelet, a present from Toby) in their dented cardboard box, the gimcrack furniture, most of it of fumed oak, and the ermine coat, once her mother’s which, bundled up at the back of her wardrobe, Helen had never seen her wear or even known her to possess. All as squalid and sad as the detritus left in an empty dock after an ocean-going liner has moved out and passed below the horizon.

  Everything else that she possessed went to the shelter. Mrs Blake, though about to go off on a holiday to a daughter in North Wales, none the less came to the cremation at Kensal Green. ‘We’d no idea she had so much money,’ she whispered to Helen as she seated herself behind her in the chapel. On the telephone, Helen had already told her of Sophie’s legacy. ‘None at all. It’ll make such a difference to our work. Oh, what a dear she was and how we all miss her!’

  After the plain coffin had slid away towards the devouring flames, Mrs Blake said that, no, it was very kind of Helen, but she would not be able to return to the flat with the others for a drink, she had so much to do before her holiday, so much fell on her. Then again she exclaimed, holding Helen’s right hand in both of her own: ‘Oh, what a dear she was!’ They stared into each other’s eyes, Mrs Blake’s brimming with tears, and Helen, remembering how peremptorily Mrs Blake would speak to Aunt Sophie, in exactly the same tone which Isabel would use to the Indian servants, wondered: Can she really mean it? She felt the two long, cold hands pressing hers more firmly. ‘And I think she really loved working for us. Didn’t she? Of course some of our naughtier customers got up to all sorts of tricks with her. She was so innocent, poor dear. Gullible. But that was what really made us all so fond of her. A child. She was always a child, right up to the end.’

  Everyone at last left and Helen lay out on the sofa among the empty glasses, the cut-glass fingerbowls greasy from the potato crisps and nuts which ‘the little man on the corner’ (as Sophie would refer to the Cypriot Greek owner of the store, hardly more than a hole in the wall, in the Earls Court Road) had unaccountably ‘saved’ for her under the counter, the ashtrays overflowing with cigarettes thriftily smoked to their cork tips or the last scorched twist of paper around some fibres of tobacco, the copy of the Daily Mail that someone had forgotten. She stared out of the grimy window at the empty area, where a robin (each morning Aunt Sophie would sweep the crumbs from the bread board on to the concrete paving for it to eat) hopped hither and thither, at once aimless and brisk. Would the winter ever end? Would the war ever end?

  Suddenly she got up and walked into her bedroom, remembering how Aunt Sophie had insisted that she should have it, with no window except a length of frosted glass separating it from the meagre light of the hall, and not the other bedroom, which had the street above it and so was more vulnerable to blast. Perhaps now she would move. She felt totally fatalistic.

  She opened one of the small drawers of the Victorian escritoire which Aunt Sophie had told the removers’ men to place in her room – ‘It’s quite a pretty little piece, it belonged to your grandmother, I’ve no use for it’ – and which was now crammed with her own and Aunt Sophie’s things, and took out, from under a pile of Toby’s letters, something sealed within a large buff envelope. She hesitated, then ran a nail under the flap and opened the envelope, to draw out an object wrapped in tissue paper.

  She sat on the edge of her bed and, the tissue paper rustling under her hands, began to unwrap the past.

  Chapter Five

  ‘You’re a good doctor. But you’d be a better one if you didn’t feel so much.’

  ‘I?’

  ‘Yes, you. Why do you think I’m such a good nurse? Because I feel nothing.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Correction. I feel nothing personal. I hate the suffering and the waste of it all, but for those individual suffering and wasted lives, no, Helen, no. And the children and the parents recognize that in me and, instead of being repelled by it, they feel reassured. No one child is more important to me than any other child. And if one has to go and die on me, well, there are hundreds more children I’m determined not to let die.’

  Ilse and Helen sat facing each other in the flat, each with a mug of tea. Outside, the street was hushed and empty. It was V-Day and everyone, emerging into the sunlight from flats and houses in need of redecoration, was trekking westward towards the Palace. Though both girls were off duty from the children’s hospital at which they had met, they had no desire to go along too.

  Ilse irritated Helen with her constant desire to write out both of their personal equations. Yet Helen was sucked towards her by an undertow of emotion, like a swimmer towards some jagged, treacherously hidden reef. Ilse had come to England in 1938 with her Jewish grandfather, both of them the guests of a left-wing Roman Catholic peer and his wife far too busy to do anything for them but feed them and accommodate them in thei
r huge, untidy country house, first with a horde of servants and then with two servants and a horde of evacuees, and, eventually, to convert Ilse to their faith. Both Ilse’s parents had – as she herself would later put it, as though applying a cautery to a savage wound within her – ‘ been burned to a crisp in the gas ovens’. Her grandfather, lacking the incentive of a major talent to learn to write in English and so to continue with his work in this strange land where no one had heard of him, would busy himself with clumsily executed jobs of plumbing, joinery and wiring about the house, until suddenly, for no reason more focused than a general apathy and boredom, he had gone into one of the barns and hanged himself with the length of flex which he always carried round with him, in case of an emergency, in a bulging pocket of the worn, bottle-green Norfolk jacket handed down to him by his host. Ilse had disconcerted everyone by showing no grief or even shock.

  A pale, angular figure, with protuberant eyes and almost no breasts, she passed, unobtrusive and friendless, through the expensive school to which her foster parents sent her as a day girl. She never won a prize but she never did badly. She took fastidious care of her appearance, darning her stockings with a web of stitches so fine that they were all but indiscernible, polishing her shoes tirelessly until their toecaps gleamed like black ice, and cutting her fingernails in a perfectly straight line above cuticles which she was always easing back with persistent fingers.

  Ilse never laughed; but frequently she had a faint, sardonic smile on lips which, unlike the other nurses, she never touched up even on an afternoon off. It was that smile which first drew Helen’s attention to her. There was no warmth or humour in it.

  Admirable Ilse. She waited for confirmation of what she supposed to have been the fate of her parents with no apparent strain or dread. She offered to take over from other nurses whose boyfriends were on leave, she forwent cups of tea and even meals to sit on and on at the bedside of some ailing child, she never forgot anything or bungled anything or declared that anything was beyond her. Of all the nurses, she was the one whom the doctors respected most; but they never attempted to flirt with her or even to joke with her, as they did with her colleagues.

  Soon after that V-Day session, Ilse mentioned to Helen, in the canteen, that she would have to quit the house in Clapham in which, for the past eighteen months, she had been a lodger. Her widowed landlady’s son, whose room she had been occupying, never bothering to take down his rowing pennants, his photographs of rowing crews or even his pin-ups of film stars, had now been demobbed.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  Ilse shrugged.

  ‘It’s not easy to find lodgings in London now.’

  ‘No. It’s not easy. Perhaps I’ll have to return to the hostel.’ Ilse had not enjoyed the nurses’ hostel, where she had been obliged to share a room with a silly, skittish girl, forever surreptitiously returning through the window after hours, after some meeting with a boyfriend.

  Helen said: ‘You could come and stay with me.’

  ‘With you?’ Ilse was cool. ‘Would that be a good idea?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it? There are two bedrooms, after all. We could live our own lives.’

  ‘Well, that’s something. I don’t think I’d want to lead anyone else’s.’ She gave that faint, sardonic smile. ‘Least of all yours.’

  Helen was not offended.

  Ilse moved into the room which had once been Helen’s, since Helen was now in the room which had once been Sophie’s. On her first day, having unpacked her few belongings, Ilse came and stood in the doorway of Helen’s room. She gave a little shiver. ‘I’m glad I’m not in here. It feels – haunted.’

  Helen looked at her in amazement. ‘Haunted? Well, if my aunt is haunting it, her ghost can only be benevolent.’

  ‘I didn’t mean your aunt.’

  Ilse loved classical music. She had a wind-up gramophone, to which she would listen, often lying sprawled out on the floor of her bedroom, her back against the divan bed, for hours on end. All her spare money she spent on records, which she kept ranged along a shelf on which Helen had once stacked her books. ‘Do I disturb you?’ she would often ask Helen, with a trace both of foreign accent and of foreign idiom, and Helen would reply: ‘Oh no, of course not.’ But as she heard Bach, Handel or Vivaldi faintly through the wall, she was disturbed, if not in the way in which Ilse meant. She had no feeling for music and it puzzled her that this strange, quiet, strong flat-mate of hers should give so much of her time to it.

  Ilse was deeply, if undemonstratively, religious; and that Helen also found disturbing, since she herself had even less feeling for religion than for music, regarding it – as she once told Ilse – as ‘silly superstition’. The German girl would eat no meat on Friday, so that if, in those difficult days, fish were unobtainable, she would restrict herself to eggs or cheese. She would get up long before Helen on Sunday mornings and take herself off to mass. Under her neat white blouses she always wore a crucifix. Once, blundering into her room to borrow a stamp, Helen had found her on her knees by her bed, her eyes closed and her hands clasped before her. Strangely she had not opened her eyes or turned her head at Helen’s entrance. Helen tiptoed out.

  Helen said: ‘Music means a lot to you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  In each case the monosyllable gave away either everything or nothing. Helen was not sure.

  Virtually silent for days on end, Ilse would all at once become garrulous. She would talk of her past: of a mansion, with many servants, in Munich; of her father’s collection of Post-Impressionists, priceless, looted; of the house by the Bodensee to which her mother, a famous actress, had retreated when, because of her race, she was no longer offered parts; of the complicity of an uncle of hers in a plot to murder Hitler and of another uncle now working in Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden for Soviet Intelligence; of her descent, through her mother’s family, from the Mendelssohns … Helen would listen, as enthralled as Joan’s children when she herself would tell them a story; but afterwards doubts seeped in, a chilling tide. It was as though, during all the hours when she sat or lay out on the floor, listening to record after record, this girl, who had had her whole past ripped away from her, had been slowly, dreamily restitching another.

  ‘Soon after the war started, this man – a friend of those people who gave me a home – made an approach to me. He asked me if I’d be willing to work for the organization – MI5, I suppose – of which he was a boss. I was to report on refugees, people like myself.… Of course, I refused.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Or: ‘As soon as I can get back to Germany, my first task will be to try to trace all my father’s pictures. Not for myself, of course. But to give them to the National Gallery, in return for all that England has given to me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  For Helen there was something both thrilling and degrading in drinking from the hallucinatory cup which Ilse proffered to her.

  Ilse had no boyfriends, Helen had no boyfriends. They lived spiritually intimate but physically as strangers, Helen opened the bathroom door which Ilse, thinking her to be working late at the hospital, had failed to lock. ‘Oh sorry!’ Through the steam, Helen had made out, for a moment, the breasts almost as flat as a boy’s and the dark tuft quivering like seaweed under the water. She retreated, appalled. Ilse, having returned from night duty, brought a cup of tea to Helen’s room. She averted her eyes from the body sprawled out, nightdress rucked up above the knees, on the bed, with the bedclothes, on that sultry morning of summer, thrown back.

  One day, as they ate a late Sunday breakfast in the kitchen, each of them in dressing-gowns, Ilse said, cradling her cup of coffee in both her palms as though it were something fragile, of great value: ‘Was it you whose brother – half-brother – was murdered out in India?’

  Helen went on deliberately spreading butter on a slice of toast. Then she looked up: ‘Yes. But how do you know about it?’

  Ilse shrugged. ‘I think I read about it in the papers. I
t was such a horrific thing to have happened. It made such an impression on me.’ She stared into space. ‘Or did someone tell me? I don’t know.’

  Was it possible that Ilse had been going through her drawers? Helen’s grip tightened on the knife in her hand, her knuckles went white.

  Ilse gave that faint, sardonic smile of hers, raising thick eyebrows which all but met under her low forehead. ‘Don’t you like to talk about it?’

  ‘It’s something I prefer to forget.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  (Aunt Sophie leaning solicitously above her: You must learn to look not backwards but forwards, not inwards but outwards.)

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell me. Tell me about it.’

  ‘No. I don’t think I want to.’

  ‘Some time then?’

  ‘Some time. Perhaps.’

  ‘I’ve told you all my secrets.’

  (You’ve told me all your lies.)

  ‘I have no secrets. I just want to’ – she hesitated – ‘I just don’t want to remind myself.’

  ‘All right. Fine.’

  Ilse’s palm, warm from the coffee cup, covered the chill back of Helen’s hand.

  Chapter Six

  Toby, Isabel and Angela at last came back to England.

  As Sophie and the other two aunts had once travelled out to Tilbury by train to meet her, so Helen now made the same journey to meet her father, her stepmother and the half-sister whom she knew only from snapshots. Janet and Joan also went to Tilbury; but they made no effort to accompany Helen, since they had long since concluded, as Janet put it over a cup of coffee in a snackbar near Fenchurch Street Station: ‘I’m afraid she’s precious little use for any of us now.’ It was a long time since Helen had paid a visit to either of them, though she had often been pressed to do so.

  Old Mrs Thompson had stayed down in Cornwall, where she had now made her home with Janet. She had become all but bedridden, so that Janet and Joan were constantly debating whether the time had not come to put her in a home – for her own sake of course, they would say, she needed the constant nursing, one could hardly bear to think of not having her around.