Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  ‘Oh, yes, dear! I could see at once that something had. I know my poor old Toby. But of course he wouldn’t tell me. Never does. He thinks I’m too old to be upset. But in fact’ – she gave a bleak smile – ‘ as I get older and older, less and less seems to upset me.’

  ‘Are you going to move with them?’

  ‘To the other house, you mean? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Of course, I’d like to be with Toby – between ourselves, he’s always been my favourite, as you may have guessed. But Isabel is fully occupied with little Angie, she’s quite a handful, isn’t she? It’s only natural, after all that awful business, that she should want to take special care of the child. No, I don’t think Isabel would want me to look after too. Though of course I’ll visit them. And they’ll visit me. After all, it’s little more than ten miles between the two houses. No, I’d better live out my days here. Janet has been such a good daughter to me and Harry is a dear. I’d not want to hurt their feelings by moving in any case.’

  There was an irony so sad in all this that Helen, stooping over the old woman, would have put her arms round her, were she not so undemonstrative by nature. Only the previous evening, after Mrs Thompson had retired early to bed, Janet and Harry had been talking of the home, run by nuns, which they had recently inspected in a neighbouring village. ‘ If one could get the servants, it would be different,’ Harry had said, helping himself to another glass of whisky from the decanter at his elbow. ‘But all this carrying of trays on the days when she can’t get down … Well, Janet may still look a slip of a girl but, frankly, it’s getting beyond her.’

  ‘And then there are our holidays,’ Janet had taken up, frowning at her knitting. ‘Now that the war is over, we want to get abroad again and see all the things we’ve been missing for so long. Of course we can always dump her on Joan, but Joan’s hands are full enough already, what with that delinquent daughter of hers and

  all the work of the parish.’

  Isabel had nodded in agreement; Toby had sat silent.

  As Helen now began to carry the tray to the door, she heard

  behind her: ‘Happy?’

  She turned. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I asked if you were happy.’

  The old woman’s eyes, strangely milky in her shrunken face,

  looked up at her with an expression which might have been of

  either pity or appeal.

  ‘I don’t know. Does one ever know? Until much later.’

  ‘I think I’m happy.’

  The declaration was defiant, not convincing.

  Balancing the tray on a knee, as she used a hand to open the

  door, Helen went out.

  Chapter Nine

  That evening, Isabel and Helen did the washing-up in the bright, roomy kitchen, while Janet, Harry and the two other guests settled to a rubber of bridge, with Toby watching them intermittently, a perplexed frown on his face, as though the game were strange to him.

  ‘You can cut in later,’ Harry had said; but Toby had shaken his head lugubriously: ‘No, my bridge days are over.’ Long ago, in India, he had been known both for his skill and his sudden anger or sarcasm when a quailing and apologetic partner had misread him.

  Isabel, dipping her plump white arms up to the elbows in the soapy water, drew a deep sigh. ‘ There’s only one thing I miss from India. The servants.’

  ‘They were good, weren’t they?’

  ‘Good? They were terrible. Dishonest, disloyal, unreliable. But at least they were there.’ She seemed to speak with as much contempt for Helen as for those far-off, former servants, now in the employment of people to whom she had recommended them.

  Helen began to dry, with an agitated clumsiness. Then she said: ‘Father tells me he’s sold up everything in India. All his interests.’

  ‘Of course. Didn’t you know that?’

  Helen shook her head. In all those formal, uncommunicative letters, so often stacked unopened for three or four weeks on end, there had been no mention of a decision so important. Odd. Chilling. ‘No. I didn’t know. No idea.’

  ‘Didn’t Joan or Janet tell you? Or the old woman?’ Isabel often referred to Mrs Thompson as ‘ the old woman’.

  Helen shook her head over the plate which she was turning round and round in her hands, as she applied the cloth. ‘No. But then I saw so little of them, still see so little of them. There’s so much to do at the hospital, I rarely get away,’

  ‘It was best,’ Isabel said. ‘Best for him. Best for us.’ By ‘us’ she clearly meant only Angela and herself.

  ‘I can’t imagine how he could bear to leave India. It was his whole life. He so often used to say that he hated the tameness of England.’

  ‘Perhaps in the end India proved too wild for him.’ Isabel spoke with cool sarcasm, as she handed Helen another plate.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘How do I mean?’ Suddenly the white skin of Isabel’s neck began to redden; the colour mounted up into her cheeks. Mysteriously, alarmingly, she was angry. ‘Do I have to tell you?’

  Helen forced herself to continue the conversation, just as, long ago as a medical student, she had forced herself to swallow a snake-like tube, chill, slithery length by length, in order to carry out an analysis of the contents of her stomach. ‘You mean – Peter’s death?’

  ‘That was the beginning of it. I daresay he’d have got over that. Eventually. It was all that followed.’ Isabel violently shoved the next dripping plate at Helen, as though it were a weapon to be rammed into her chest.

  ‘What followed?’

  Water splashed up on to Isabel’s apron and even her neck, flecking both with a greasy, iridescent foam, as she slid more plates into the sink with so much force that it was a miracle that none of them got chipped or broken. ‘Gossip. How they gossiped.’ She picked up a ball of wire wool and squinted down at a plate as she scoured some fragments of cabbage stuck to its rim. Janet would have been horrified to see her Wedgwood service treated in such a manner. ‘Idle women. With nothing to do but dress themselves, paint themselves, play bridge, play tennis, have affairs and gossip, gossip, gossip. Then the men took it up. Innuendoes in the newpapers – rags all of them. The invitations stopped. No visitors. Oh, except those people too curious to be able to resist some contact …’ Again she thrust a dripping plate at Helen. ‘I didn’t care. I didn’t care a fuck. But for Toby. You know how sociable he was. Night after night in that ghastly club – drinking, playing bridge, playing billiards, gossiping with his cronies. And those affairs of his.’ She had jerked the plug from the sink. Now, hands on hips, she stared down as fresh hot water spat out of the tap. Rapidly, she began to plunge one glass after another into the scalding water. Steam rose around her but she seemed to be impervious. ‘Well, the affairs came to an end. Full stop.’ As she withdrew one of the glasses, it cracked and disintegrated in her hand with a high ping. ‘Damn!’ She bent over to pick up the fragments and one pierced her finger. Angrily she sucked on it. ‘ Perhaps he no longer had the appetite. Perhaps. Or perhaps he’d learned his lesson. Perhaps. But more likely there just weren’t any women who were prepared …’

  Helen stood tugging the expensive Irish linen cloth between both her hands. It was a long time since Isabel had handed her anything to dry or she had picked anything up off the draining board. ‘But what – what was all this gossip?’

  ‘You know! You know!’ Her face and neck mottled and her hands dripping and scarlet from the water, Isabel whirled round on her. ‘That girl – that, that, that Clare.’ She fumbled for the name, as though, trivial and submerged in the distant past, it had slipped from her memory.

  Helen stared at her; Isabel stared back.

  ‘Well, of course, he was having an affair with her.’

  ‘No, no! He wasn’t! He wasn’t!’

  ‘What do you know about it? What do you know of the life of your precious father? Before he married your mother, when he was married to your mother, when he was married to me.
A lady’s man, that’s what they used to call him at first. But then – after, after the murder – they had uglier words for it. Oh, yes!’

  ‘But if they had accepted all his other … affairs, then if he and Clare … I don’t see why that should have …’

  ‘Christ! You really are a fool! Even more of a fool than I’ve ever imagined.’ She wiped the back of her right hand, the mop in it dripping water down her dress, across first her forehead and then a burning cheek. ‘Everyone decided that, between them, he and that, that slut had killed my Peter.’

  Helen’s mouth clicked open sideways, as though her jaw had suddenly been dislocated. Isabel glared at her, cruelly triumphant that she had been able to inflict a blow so unexpected and so lethal. Then she went on: ‘It was all quite logical, what they decided must have happened.’ She leaned, arms crossed, against the side of the sink. ‘He’d gone into her bedroom, because she obviously could not come to him in the dressing room, with its door on to the bedroom in which I might or might not be sleeping at the time. Perhaps they’d drugged the child – with one of those bromide pills I’d given her for her migraines. At the inquest, there was some doubt – remember? – about whether there were traces of bromide in his body or not. Obviously that old soak McGregor bungled the postmortem. Not enough dry ice, was that it? Something like that. Anyway, they’d started their fucking. And Peter woke. Saw. Was terrified. Was about to cry out. He or she grabbed the first thing to hand, that brassière, thrown across the bed or over a chair, and pressed it to Peter’s mouth. Pressed too hard, too long. Then the rest … the rest followed.’

  Suddenly, her body, so tense before, relaxed, softened, crumpled. She gripped the side of the sink with both her hands, stooping over it, as though she were about to vomit.

  ‘But you don’t believe that?’ Helen’s voice was almost inaudible.

  Isabel straightened herself and swung round violently. ‘Of course I don’t believe it! What do you imagine? Toby knew that I knew all about his countless goings-on. Better that slut than some diseased prostitute procured for him by Muhammed. Why should he kill his son, his only son, the son he loved so much, merely in order to hide from me that he …?’ Again she wiped flushed forehead and cheeks with the back of her hand. ‘If Peter had gone on screaming, I’d have come in, as I often did when his nightmares woke me. I’d have told Toby to get back to the dressing room and the next morning I’d have sent the girl packing. I’d done it before. I’d have done it again. And I wouldn’t have sent her packing because she was having it off with my husband. I’d have sent her packing because she wasn’t a fit person to have the care of my child. But not one of all those so-called friends of ours, with their poisonous gossip, knew anything of that. To them I was the poor, pathetic, put-upon wife, who, faithful to hubbie, had kept her mouth shut and decided to make the best of things, even though I knew the whole truth. That was the role they created for me. Me!’ She gave a strident laugh and once again began violently to scour a dish with the ball of wire wool.

  ‘I never knew Father had been made to suffer like that.’

  ‘No. Of course you didn’t.’ The tone was contemptuous. ‘And Joan and Janet and the old woman never knew. He didn’t want them to know, I didn’t want them to know.’ She picked up one of the glasses dried by Helen. ‘ This is all smeared. Do it again.’ Helen took it. Then she went on: ‘ He’s smashed. You’ve only to look at him to see that. Smashed. He’s interested in nothing – not even in making money, not even in cunt. Certainly not in me, certainly not in Angie. Nothing, nothing. One day he’ll kill himself. I’m waiting for that. It’ll happen. You’ll see.’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no!’ Helen cried it out in anguish.

  Serene now, her grey hair sticking in matted strands to her forehead, Isabel nodded with a dreadful complacence.

  At that moment, Janet put her head round the door. ‘What are you both doing? Aren’t you finished yet? I’m dummy. Perhaps I ought to lend a hand.’

  ‘No, no, Janet. We’re getting along fine. Thank you.’

  ‘Sure? Well, then, I’ll leave you to your natter.’

  Chapter Ten

  The awkward young man, with acne scars pitting his chin, cheeks and the back of his long, thin neck, gazed, troubled, at Helen. The child between them, afflicted with Addison’s disease, might have been Indian, so dark was its colour. The young man was troubled not for the child, prematurely doomed in those days before the discovery of cortisone, but for his colleague. As they walked away from the bed, he asked her: ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course I’m all right. Why?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ To other of the women doctors, however senior to him, he could have said something like: You look worried, you look pale, you look as if your mind were hundreds of miles away. But there was something about this beautiful, straight, stiff, efficient girl, with her courtesy, her discretion and her willingness to take on any job at any time, which distanced and even chilled. If only, at some moment, she would exclaim like the other girls: ‘I’m bloody well not going to do that! I’ve had enough!’; would agree to have a drink or to go to the cinema or to take a country walk; would laugh, tease, confide. One of the consultants, half in admiration and half in annoyance, would refer to her, never to her face, as ‘The Ice Princess’. She was cold, everyone had decided; and she was superior, if not in her own estimation, then in the reluctant estimation of those with whom she worked.

  Back at home, Helen stretched out on her bed. She never wanted to get off it. Smashed. A strange word to use. He’s smashed. You’ve only got to look at him to see that. Smashed. It suggested some horrible accident, two cars in head-on collision with each other, a body tumbling out of a top-floor window, the explosion of a bomb in a crowded store.

  She got off the bed, went to the secretaire and opened the small drawer. Once again she unwrapped the package concealed in it. Brown paper, tissue paper. Then she took the object in both her hands, stroking it with the balls of her thumbs, as she looked down at it. She climbed back on to the bed with a groan and held it to her mouth. She lay there like that for a long time as the light in the area dimmed, dimmed slowly as though a pool were filling up with chilly, cloudily brackish water.

  Ilse came in. ‘Hi!’ she called. She knew that Helen must be back because her cashmere overcoat was hanging in the hall, her umbrella propped beside it. Ilse, always tidy, carried the umbrella over to the stand and dropped it in. ‘ Helen!’ Still Helen did not answer. Ilse removed her cloak, to reveal her sister’s uniform, and hung it up beside Helen’s overcoat. She should have felt tired, after so many hours of work; but she never did, even though lack of sleep had ringed her eyes with bruise-like shadows and her face was even more sallow than usual.

  She hesitated before Helen’s door, then entered.

  ‘Aren’t you well?’

  It might have been Aunt Sophie.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m well. All right.’

  ‘Then why are you lying like this in the dark? And why didn’t you answer when I called?’

  Smashed. He’s interested in nothing – not even in making money, not even in cunt.

  ‘Oh, leave me, Ilse.’

  ‘But look, my dear –’

  ‘Leave me.’

  Ilse left her. She went into her own room and put on a 78 rpm record of the second movement of Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet. She stood over the wind-up gramophone, watching the shiny disc revolve, until that constant circling, not the music of the andante with its febrile throbbing, induced in her a hypnotic state of calm. When the gramophone began to run down, the pitch of the dialogue between first violin and cello falling inexorably, she let it do so, arms crossed over her white, starched hospital apron and her eyes sombre. Then she knelt down beside her bed and, chin cupped on hands, formulated a silent, repeated prayer. Oh God, in your mercy, goodness and omnipotence, pluck away from her heart whatever is festering in it, as you would pluck a splinter from under a finger nail or a thorn from a heel …
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  As she squeezed her eyes tighter and tighter, oblivious of the floorboards pressing up, hard and cold, against her knees, she apprehended, rather than heard, a rustle and rushing, as of a vast flock of birds, which wheeled, swept down, crowded round her. The whole room and her whole being were clamorous with them. Invisible beaks rained down their blows, pecking and tearing; but she welcomed an agony which was also a joy. Oh God, in your mercy, goodness and omnipotence …

  But God did not pluck away from Helen’s heart whatever was festering in it. Her face grey, rigid and scaly in texture, she travelled to hospital, performed her hours of duty, travelled back. Then she would retreat into that bedroom looking out on the area, with the traffic booming above it, and, the curtains open and the lamp unlit, would lie out on her bed, holding against her chest, her mouth or her stomach the clumsily made bookmarker with its pendent strings of multi-coloured beads. The bookmarker felt dry and friable; the beads were hard and chill.

  Ilse would come in and stare down, usually without a word, the light from the street lamp above the area glinting on one of her protuberant eyeballs as her head tilted. Then she would go out and return with bread soaked in milk, a cup of soup, a bowl of porridge. Pap. She saw Helen as a terrified, distracted child. ‘Eat,’ she would say sternly. ‘Come on.’ And Helen would sit up, supporting herself on an elbow, and take one mouthful and then another, before, tears coming to her eyes, she would say, ‘ I can’t, can’t. No more.’ The bookmarker lay under the bedclothes, where Ilse could not see it.

  After some days, Ilse did not walk out of the room, as she usually did, once Helen had eaten, but remained there, by the bed, looking down, with those stern, passionless eyes, the half-empty bowl of chicken soup held, like some libation, in both her hands.

  Helen stared back with famished gaze. Her tongue moved slowly over lips cracked with dryness.

  Ilse said: ‘Tell me. Tell me about it.’ She sat down on the side of the bed, her body as taut as an athlete’s braced for a final effort, and then she put out a hand, drew back the bedclothes and removed Helen’s hands from over her breasts. The hands were holding the bookmarker. Ilse prised apart the fingers, one by one, as Helen, silent, beseeching, gazed up at her.