Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  Helen experienced an acute pang, like a stab of toothache, when she all at once realized that the small, elderly, stooped man tentatively making his descent down the gangway, one knobbly hand gripping the rail, could only be her father; and yes, that stately woman, grey hair wound round and round her head as though it were a toque, one arm clasping a frail, blonde child against her ample, outjutting bosom, could only be Isabel.

  ‘He’s aged terribly,’ Joan muttered to Janet.

  ‘Heavens! One would hardly recognize him.’

  ‘And she’s put on weight.’

  ‘Quite grey.’

  ‘Well, I suppose time hasn’t dealt all that kindly with us either.’

  The two of them laughed, not really believing it.

  In Helen’s embrace, her father smelled strongly of tobacco and not, as she remembered from the past, of that astringent French toilet water, Caron Pour Un Homme. One of his front teeth was missing; his collar was not clean and one of its points stuck out askew. ‘Oh, Helen, Helen, Helen!’ He rocked back and forth with her, in what seemed to be a paroxysm not so much of joy as of grief.

  Isabel put a cold cheek to Helen’s. Then she drew forward the little girl, in long white ribbed stockings and white strap-shoes, her hair tied in two powder-blue bows on either side of her unnaturally narrow head, who was hiding behind her, and said: ‘This is my Angela, Angie, Angel.’

  The child, amazingly, gave a little bobbing curtsey to each of the three women in turn.

  Toby, once so imperiously efficient on such occasions, now left everything – passports, luggage, customs, transport – to his wife and two sisters. Whenever there was somewhere to sit or even perch, he would take it: on a bench, on the edge of the counter where the porters set out the luggage for the customs officers, even on a window-sill.

  Helen tried to talk to him, with a growing sense of horror and sadness: ‘Did you enjoy the voyage?’

  ‘Not bad. Not bad.’

  ‘I hope you got the letter I wrote to Marseilles?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘And what are your plans now?’

  ‘Well, first we’ll go down to Cornwall to stay with Janet and Harry. I want to see your grandmother. Yes, that’s the first item on our agenda.’ He cleared his throat, in the fashion of old men choked up with phlegm. ‘After that, well, we’ll see, we’ll see.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to stay in London at all?’ She was almost beseeching.

  ‘No. Straight to Cornwall. Can’t abide hotels.’ Again he cleared his throat, with that disgusting, loose rattle. ‘Odd, since I made so much money from them.’ He still did not look at her, his hands clasped over his protruding belly, thumbs twiddling restlessly. Then he said, as though in concession: ‘But you’ll visit us in Cornwall, won’t you? I’m sure Janet would be delighted to have you. Large house, plenty of rooms.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes!’ Then she cried out, as though in a last appeal: ‘If only my flat were bigger!’

  Isabel waddled over, head erect, Angela trailing from her hand like a toy dog on a lead. ‘Have you got the key to the holdall?’ As she spoke the words, Helen had an image of a ward-maid smartly slapping pillows or snatching up a bedpan.

  ‘Let me see.’ Toby began to fumble in his pockets until, impatient, Isabel herself inserted a hand into his left hand trouser one and came up with the keyring.

  ‘How long are you here for?’ Helen asked, when Isabel had gone.

  ‘Here?’ He looked bewildered, as though she were referring to the custom shed.

  ‘In England.’

  ‘Oh …’ He hesitated, staring after Isabel and the child. Then he said: ‘Forever, I think.’

  ‘Forever? Oh, Daddy, how lovely!’

  But she had the sensation of something black and leaden falling, falling, falling through her.

  Chapter Seven

  Ilse deftly spun a letter across the room, so that it landed on the sofa beside Helen. ‘From Papa,’ she said. She took ironic pleasure in using such outmoded colloquialisms. By now she knew Toby’s handwriting.

  Helen went on reading The Times.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Ilse asked, as Sophie used to ask in the past.

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘It seems so unfair. You get letters from your father and you never want to open them. If I could get a letter, just one letter, from my father …’

  Ashamed, Helen picked up the envelope and inserted a finger under the flap.

  Ilse sat down on the sofa beside her. ‘What’s gone wrong between the two of you?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘It’s – what? – five weeks since he came back. And you’ve never been down to see him.’

  ‘He’s never been up to see me. Has he?’

  ‘You said he’d aged. Become so frail.’

  Helen began to read the letter. Like all Toby’s, this one too had about it a curious, damp, crumbling deadness, as of mouldering wood. They were househunting, or, rather, Isabel was, since he could really not be bothered. They had found a local dame’s school for Angela. Old Mrs Thompson was recovering from bronchitis. Then came the conclusion, like every other conclusion since his return: ‘We do hope that you’ll soon be able to come down and visit us. Janet says there’ll be no trouble at all about a room.’

  Ilse, her head tilted to one side and a slight crease between the pale, protuberant eyes under the eyebrows which all but joined each other, watched Helen closely, as her lips silently read the words.

  Helen put down the letter in her lap.

  ‘He’s on at you again about going to see them.’ A statement, not a question.

  Helen nodded, all at once feeling suffocated by a personality, so controlled and yet so insistent, which constantly threatened to wrap itself round and round her own, its tendrils searching out the most secret recesses of her being.

  ‘Why don’t you want to go?’

  ‘But I do.’

  Ilse shook her head.

  Chapter Eight

  Nothing now interested Toby for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

  He would limp slowly along the lawn in front of the square, red-brick neo-Georgian house, his hands in his pockets, and then, pausing as though in an effort to remember something, he would gaze down to the estuary. Sometimes the water would be so high that it seemed as if it would go on rising and rising until it had filled this bowl in the hills, submerging the garden and even the house above it. Sometimes the water would be no more than a distant shimmer beyond a vast, wrinkled expanse of mud. However things were, there would always be the same expression of morose desolation on his flushed, jowly countenance.

  At her bedroom window, Helen would look down on him with a mixture of pity and dread.

  He would shuffle between the rosebeds, occasionally stopping to cup a bloom in a hand and even raise it to his nostrils. Then he would break away, totter over to the white-painted garden shed, and emerge with some piece of the garden furniture of which Janet’s stockbroker husband, Harry, was always so proud. He would set up the chair or chaise longue and would lower himself on to it. He would close his eyes. But soon, as though some voice, inaudible to Helen high up at her bedroom window, had summoned him, he would hoist himself up and hurry indoors again.

  Helen would descend the stairs. He was now seated in the hall, on a high-backed chair under the barometer which he was constantly tapping. He was holding the parish magazine which someone at some time had pushed through the letter box but he was not reading it. ‘Helen,’ he said, glancing quickly at her and then looking away. ‘ Helen.’ No more. He put down the magazine on the Jacobean chest beside him, got up and wandered off. Whistling under his breath, he began to mount the stairs.

  Harry, down for the weekend, was always organizing all of them in his jolly, slightly hectoring voice. He would summon Janet, Isabel, Angela, Helen and his other two guests, a colleague and his wife, to come and play croquet, to sail on the estuary or to make an exc
ursion to some church or country house open to the public. But he never summoned Toby and clearly Toby neither expected nor wished to be summoned. ‘All right, Toby?’ he would ask briefly as they all moved off, Angela clutching Isabel’s hand; and Toby, his jowls slightly quivering, would either nod or mutter ‘Fine, fine.’

  Angela rarely approached her father and then only with reluctance and even dread. When Isabel spoke of her to strangers as ‘ my child’ or ‘my daughter’, she was merely stating a truth. Angela belonged exclusively to this tall, ample woman, at whom she was always grasping if the woman did not grasp her, whom she would seek through the house wailing on the same high-pitched note ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’ and in whose bed she always slept, even though there was a separate cot for her in the room which they shared.

  Nor did Isabel show any closer attachment to Toby than did the child. Briefly, her life would brush against his, as she moved, gravely imposing, about her many tasks; then she was gone. A woman takes over a house and with it, reluctantly, she takes over the care of an ancient, ailing dog. She feeds it, she lets it out into the garden, she airs its basket, she gives it an occasional perfunctory, absentminded pat. It was like that.

  Only old Mrs Thompson seemed to take genuine pleasure in Toby’s company. Harry might perch himself on a garden bench beside his brother-in-law, pat his knee and ask: ‘Well, how goes it, old chap?’ Janet might comment chirpily over breakfast: ‘Oh, Toby, I do like that tie of yours! Most dashing!’ The two other guests might look out of the window and then turn to Toby and ask: ‘Do you think it’s safe to take a walk, Mr Thompson, or do you think it’s going to rain?’ But it was clear that, like many people who bore themselves, he had become fatally boring to others.

  If she was well enough to totter down the stairs from her upstairs bedroom, her back now humped and wisps of fine grey hair making a cloud about her oval, high-cheeked face, Mrs Thompson would always seek out her son. So deaf now, despite her shell-pink hearing-aid, that she could hear only what was shouted at her, she rarely spoke to anyone and, if anyone spoke to her, would usually content herself with a violent nodding or shaking of the head or a sweet, vague smile by way of answer. To Toby she made no attempt to speak at all, just as he himself seldom addressed her except in greeting. But she would touch him on his shoulder with an arthritic hand as she approached him, and would then place herself as close as possible to him: beside him on the sofa, if that was where he was sitting, next to him at table, opposite to him in the garden. For seconds on end, she would stare at him with a wistful intensity, though he seemed to be unaware of it; then she would look down into her lap or outwards to the estuary, now draining itself to those lees of chocolate-brown mud and now renewing itself, an ever swelling bubble, and an expression of anguish would briefly convulse her face.

  It was early on in the week that Helen realized that Toby felt acutely uncomfortable in her presence and was doing everything possible to avoid her. He would enter the panelled study, where she was reading a book alone, and would then stammer out: ‘Oh, sorry, sorry, I was looking for Harry’ and disappear again. Since Harry was then in London, it was an odd excuse to give. She would wander out into the garden, to where he stood, on its emerald lip, gazing out at the ebbing waters. But when he saw her, he would shiver, wrapping his arms about himself, and say: ‘Turning parky. I think I’d better go in before I catch another of my colds.’ Once, in the conservatory, she found herself pursuing him up and down the rows of waxen orchids in which Harry took even more pride than in the garden furniture. Sad, comic: an old man, his face congested and his hair dishevelled, shuffling faster and faster in his bedroom slippers to escape his own daughter, whom he pretends not to see or hear.

  Finally, she got him to herself and, more difficult, kept him.

  The others, since it was a clear, warm day of early summer, announced that they were all going on a picnic. Mrs Thompson was having what she called one of her bad days. At the last moment, Helen cunningly announced that she had a headache and would stay behind with her grandmother and father.

  Helen took a lunch tray up to Mrs Thompson; then she and Toby sat down, facing each other, at either end of the long, highly polished mahogany table – now that there were no servants, only a daily cleaner, Harry himself would vigorously work at its surface with wax and a cloth – to eat the meal of scrambled eggs on toast, salad and fruit which she had prepared. There was half a bottle of Algerian wine but Toby, who had drunk so convivially, if rarely to excess, in India, now often refused even his bedtime glass of whisky, so that Helen was not surprised when he put a shaky hand over his glass when she attempted to fill it.

  Toby cut into the toast on which his scrambled eggs rested and raised the portion to his mouth. He chewed, watery eyes gazing sideways out of the window at the estuary, in order not to look at Helen.

  She sipped. ‘Are you sure you won’t have a drop of this? It’s not at all bad.’

  ‘Quite sure.’ He masticated slowly, his jaw moving sideways, like some old, purblind bull chewing on the cud.

  ‘When do you expect to move into the house?’ Helen knew the answer, since Isabel had told her, but she could think of nothing else to say to this man grown so distant and strange to her.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Again he masticated, slowly, relentlessly. ‘I leave that kind of thing to Isabel now. Next month? Yes, I think she said next month.’

  Yes, it was next month. The house lay in the neighbouring valley, shut in, like the hill-station in India, by a ring of low hills but, unlike the hill-station, without any lake. The house, red-brick and steeply gabled, with a hard tennis court before it, was like that other house. People decide to make new lives and then make them in the pattern of the old. ‘Do you like the house?’

  ‘I’ve not seen it.’

  ‘Not seen it!’

  ‘No. As I said. I leave that kind of thing to Isabel now.’

  ‘And you really mean never to return to India?’

  He swallowed, head lowered so that his chin quivered against the loose knot of the ‘ dashing’ tie. ‘I’ll never go back. No reason to. Sold up everything.’

  This was something which Helen did not know.

  ‘But why? Why?’ (And why has no one ever told me this before?)

  ‘Life is finished for us out there.’

  Did he mean for the family in particular or for the English in general? Helen did not know.

  ‘How – finished?’

  ‘They’ll take over – next year, the year after. They’ll nationalize what belongs to us. Or force us to sell. And then they’ll forbid us to take out our money. I decided to get out while the going was good. Cut my losses.’ He raised a tumbler of water to his lips with a trembling, swollen hand. ‘And there were losses. Oh, yes, there were losses. But, all told, I got a good enough price not to have to worry about the future of Isabel and Angie.’ No mention of Helen’s future. But, of course, he knew that she had her mother’s money, all of it now made over to her, since she had passed her majority two years ago.

  ‘Won’t you miss India?’

  He stared out towards the estuary, his face averted from her so that she could see only his temple and the line of his jaw, with a tuft of bloodstained cottonwool stuck beneath an ear, where that morning he had nicked himself while shaving with his cut-throat razor.

  ‘No.’ The monosyllable glittered like a bead of ice between them.

  Silence.

  Then, involuntarily, not knowing how or why she came to do so, Helen said: ‘I often wonder – what happened to Clare?’

  ‘Clare? Clare?’ He placed his swollen hands on either side of his plate, as though preparatory to pushing himself away and up from the table. There was a snarling panic in his repetition of the name, like that of some animal cornered by its predator. ‘What made you think of Clare?’

  ‘I often think of her.’ Helen’s face had all at once become extraordinarily pale, accentuating the brilliance of her eyes and the redness of a mouth which she
had never had to touch up with lipstick. ‘Often … Don’t you?’

  ‘I? No. Never.’ Again that snarling panic.

  ‘Don’t you even know where she is?’

  ‘No. There was some rumour. Australia, was it?’

  Now the swollen hands quivering on either side of the half-eaten eggs, did push him away and up from the table. He swayed, as though from a momentary attack of giddiness, and muttered: ‘ I can’t eat any more. No appetite. I’ll toddle upstairs and see how your grandmother is getting on.’

  When he had left her, Helen forced two or three more mouthfuls down her throat. Then she got up briskly, scraped the remaining contents of her plate on to the top of his, and began to pile a tray with everything from the table. Her heart was juddering wildly and she felt an excruciating pain, stab on stab, in her back, above each buttock.

  Later, when she saw that Toby had come down from his mother’s room and had wandered out into the garden, a tweed cap pulled down low over his forehead and a scarf wrapped round his chin as though to disguise himself, she herself ascended.

  ‘Have you finished with your tray?’

  ‘Oh, yes, dear, a long time ago. I was going to bring it down myself.’

  ‘You mustn’t attempt anything like that. I’ve told you that before. You might have a fall.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to break Janet’s pretty crockery.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about the crockery. I was thinking about your bones.’

  ‘I suppose they’re almost as fragile!’

  Helen began to stack the things securely, while Mrs Thompson, in nightdress, dressing-gown and slippers, watched her from her armchair.

  ‘What’s upset your father?’

  ‘Has anything upset him?’ Helen felt obliged to lower her head to the old woman and shout in order to be heard; but for once, she shrank from the proximity.