Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  After this had been going on for several weeks, Helen asked to see me.

  She was brought in by a wardress so plain, angular and spinsterly that it had always been a source of wonder to me that she had not merely married but had mothered three children. Her years in the service had bred in her a profound, weary cynicism, so that nothing surprised her about the women in her charge except some act of decency. She was one of a small minority of the staff in whom Helen aroused not merely disgust and suspicion but ill-concealed hatred. With her unerring gift for a cliché, delivered in a mournfully nasal voice with the trace of a West Country accent, she would say of her: ‘Oh, she’s as clever as a cart-load of monkeys’ or ‘That one could twist anyone around her little finger, given the time and opportunity.’ In that ‘ anyone’, she clearly included the Bishop and myself.

  She remained standing behind Helen, until I said: ‘Thank you, Lucy.’ She hesitated and then, with a toss of her small, close-cropped head, went out.

  I told Helen to sit in the chair on the other side of the desk from me and then, leaning across it, asked: ‘What’s the trouble?’

  ‘I don’t want to have any more visits from the Bishop.’ Calm and firm, her voice was entirely different from the agitated, obsequious, sullen, distressed or defiant ones which I was used to hearing at such interviews.

  ‘You don’t have to have visits from him, if you don’t want to. It’s entirely up to you.’

  ‘I want him to drop my case.’

  ‘If he doesn’t want to drop it, then neither you nor I can force him to do so.’

  I knew the passion of the Bishop’s advocacy and I also knew the vanity, elaborately concealed, which fuelled that passion. The wardress, Lucy, had shown an unexpected perspicacity when she had once remarked derisively: ‘He’s only interested in Thompson for snobbish reasons.’ Misunderstanding, I had countered with a laugh: ‘Her family’s not all that grand, you know.’ Lucy had corrected me: ‘Thompson belongs to the aristocracy of crime.’ She had brought out the phrase as though she had borrowed it from someone else – perhaps her schoolmaster husband. ‘He wouldn’t concern himself with anyone so common and low as, say, a conwoman or a shoplifter.’

  Now I once again leant across the desk towards Helen, noticing both the extraordinary freshness of her complexion and the care with which she kept her hands and her hair. ‘ What made you decide this?’

  She looked directly back at me, in a way in which few of the other women, their gazes slowly veering up or around to mine, as though to a light too bright for them, ever did. ‘I don’t want any pardon or remission. I want to make it clear that I am never, at any time in the future, going to apply to the parole board.’

  She was the first prisoner in my experience to voice such a decision.

  ‘Do you so much like your life here that you don’t want it shortened?’

  I had intended the question to be one of those dry sardonic jokes for which I know that I had a reputation among both the prisoners and my staff; but it was with complete seriousness that she answered: ‘No, I hate it. But … it’s something I have to go through.’

  ‘I see.’ I was both fascinated and repelled – as I was often to be in the future – by the strength of her self-sufficiency. It was that fascination which now made me prolong our interview, instead of concluding it, as I should certainly have done if she had been one of the other women at that moment waiting to see me. ‘But if there’s a chance of getting out of here sooner than you expected, then why not be sensible and grab it?’

  ‘Sensible.’ She repeated the word, not in interrogation, but as though she were tasting it on her tongue. Clearly, she did not like the taste, finding it synthetic. At once, cheeks burning, I felt that I had said something inept. She shook her head, smiling: ‘ I have something to do. I have to do it.’

  ‘See it through to the end?’

  She considered, head on one side. Again, I had the embarrassing sense that she had established some kind of superiority over me.

  ‘Is that it?’ I prompted.

  Slowly she nodded. ‘ Whatever the Bishop may think or pretend to think, I’m guilty. I confessed, I’ve never withdrawn my confession. I’ve no wish and no reason to withdraw it now. I killed my half-brother exactly as I described it in court and I killed him for precisely the reasons which I then gave. Finis.’ At that last word, she carefully placed her right hand on top of her left in her lap.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you – since you’re a highly intelligent woman and a doctor as well – that, in a state of hysteria, people can convince themselves they did things they never did.’

  She nodded, smiling. ‘That’s one of the dear Bishop’s theories. The other, of course, is that I’m nobly taking the blame for a crime committed by my father. Neither is correct. I’m not an hysteric. And though I’d do many things for my father – whom, yes, I love and for whom I feel terribly sorry – I’d never do that.’

  I stared at her and she stared back. ‘You puzzle me,’ I said at last.

  She turned her head sideways, to gaze out of the window. ‘ I puzzle myself.’ Her eyes again met mine, as she asked: ‘ Don’t you ever puzzle yourself?’

  It is unusual for a prisoner to put a personal question to the governor; and if any other of my women had put that particular question to me, I’d have given her short shrift. Instead, I laughed. ‘Oh, yes. Often.’ In fact, though I did not say so to her, I was puzzling myself at that very moment. Why was I spending so much time on this one woman, when there were so many others waiting to see me that morning?

  ‘The Bishop will be – disappointed.’ I could not keep the irony out of my voice; I was not sorry that he would be disappointed, not at all. ‘He tells me he thinks you’re finding your way to God.’ Again, I could not keep the irony out of my voice, as I repeated the phrase which he himself had used.

  She flushed. It was the first time that I had ever seen her other than completely in control of herself and her circumstances. ‘That has nothing to do with him,’ she snapped.

  I leant forward across the desk, glad to have pierced her defences, however momentarily. ‘ Do you mean that, in finding your way to God, you’ve no need of his help? Or that, if you’re finding your way to God, that’s no concern of his?’

  She stared at me, rigid and silent.

  ‘You don’t want to answer?’

  Still she stared, with a terrifying penetration. Then she said drily: ‘I see no reason to answer. All this is none of your business really.’

  I rose. She also rose. At such moments, although I am a small, frail woman, I usually had the sense of being bigger than the women confronting me. I did not have it then.

  ‘I’ll tell the Bishop.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I pressed the bell on my desk and Lucy came in. She looked from the girl to me and then back to the girl again, her elbows and chin jutting out sharply and her mouth pursed. Clearly, she thought it odd that our conversation had gone on so long.

  When next the Bisop called, I told him of his protegée’s decision.

  His consternation gave me a secret, unworthy pleasure. ‘ But this is ridiculous! When things have gone so far – and so well. Only a week ago I had a confidential talk with the Home Secretary – when I was seeing him about something totally different. That was one of the things I wished to tell her today. You see, so far from her persistence in her confession of guilt and her determination to atone for it militating against an early probation, it makes it far more likely. I don’t have to tell you, Pamela’ – by now, he had started to address me by my Christian name, though I could never bring myself, however much he insisted, to reciprocate – ‘ that if a prisoner shows genuine remorse for her crime and the wish to atone, then that is, well, more than half the battle.’

  ‘Her remorse is certainly genuine. And so is her wish to atone.’

  ‘Well, then!’

  ‘But she seems to feel that the best way to atone is to serve out her sentence in f
ull.’

  ‘That’s an arid kind of atonement. A woman of her gifts and training could do far more to atone by making herself useful in the outside world.’

  ‘Clearly, that’s not her own view.’

  He bit on his lower lip. ‘ In any case, I still have grave doubts – despite all she says – that she did do that thing.’ I had already noticed how he always preferred the phrase ‘that thing’ to ‘ murder’ or ‘crime’.

  Once again he repeated his theory, shared by many others then and even more now, that she had confessed either out of a desire to remove from her dying father the terrible burden of suspicion or else in a state of hysteria in which she had persuaded herself that she was indeed the culprit. He reminded me that the head of our medical staff was inclined to this second theory. He gave me examples of other women who had clamorously insisted, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that they had killed parents, husbands, children.

  ‘It saddens me that she refuses to see me again. I thought we’d established a fruitful and understanding relationship. But I’ll continue with the battle, I certainly won’t abandon it, oh, no.’ He rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and then, fingers interlaced to make a steeple, went on: ‘ Tell her that, please. Please!’

  I nodded.

  ‘You see, Pamela, I’m still utterly convinced that there’s been a terrible miscarriage of justice. I’m still utterly convinced that, on some spiritual odyssey, she is acting out a strange lie of guilt.’ The miniature steeple still erect before him, he now closed his eyes, the lashes making dark fringes on his high cheekbones. As though in some attempt at self-hypnosis, he continued: ‘That odyssey hasn’t been in vain, since it’s brought her – I’m sure it’s brought her – closer to the Kingdom of Love.’ The voice had now acquired the thrilling plangency of the old-time actor-manager whom he so much resembled in appearance. ‘ She’s approached that Kingdom by so selflessly taking on herself the atonement of another’s guilt. Through this hideous self-annihilation, in a place which can only be hell to a woman of her sensibilities, she’s attained a spiritual rebirth. Yes, I think one can say that – a spiritual rebirth.’

  Nauseated by the stale, sickly odour of past sermons, speeches in the House of Lords, letters to the newspapers, interviews, gossip-column items and our own conversations, I wanted to shout at him: ‘Oh, stop, for God’s sake stop!’ But, of course, I restrained myself.

  Helen remained an obsession with him, though he never again saw her. He continued to crusade on her behalf; and each time that we met each other, whether in the prison or elsewhere, he would always ask me about her. ‘A tragic case, a tragic case,’ he would mutter, shaking his head.

  For other people, too, Helen became an obsession. Prisoners – some educated, terrified, depressed, others brutal, ignorant, inarticulate – were visibly sucked towards her, like boats towards a weir, however disastrous the consequences. Their self-immolation was both joyful and desperate. Lucy and other of the prison officers would talk of ‘ something unhealthy’.

  Attachments of this kind are of course common in prison, even among women who, in the outside world, are contented wives and mothers. But I had never previously observed one woman exerting so intense an attraction on so many other women, of so many different types. Helen was not, after all, strikingly beautiful; and she never seemed consciously to have set about her conquests.

  One of the education staff was an untidy, disorganized, happy Irish girl, who gave lessons in art. Helen became one of her pupils; and before long I realized that, between them, an intimacy was developing. The girl, Maeve, had already conceived the idea of a giant mosaic, representing Christ in His Glory, for the mean Victorian prison chapel. Helen, who showed a natural aptitude for the work, became her chief assistant. When I saw their heads, one so glossy and tidy and the other so dull and dishevelled, bent over their work together, I used to feel an angry qualm, which I concealed as I asked: ‘Well, how’s it going?’

  Then it was reported to me that Maeve had smuggled into Helen some small luxuries and comforts and I had to reprimand her.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘yeah,’ lounging in the chair before me in her tight, threadbare jeans and a blouse torn under one plump arm. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it.’ But she was not sorry; and I knew that she would do it again, if she had a chance not to be observed.

  ‘I don’t think they’re a good influence on each other,’ Lucy told me. I longed to reply: ‘ Then keep them apart.’ But instead I smiled, shook my head indulgently and said; ‘When that mosaic’s completed, it really will be something.’

  By now I had come to fear my own feelings for Helen. Days passed between one opportunity to see her and another, and I shrank from creating the opportunities, leaving them, fatalistically, to create themselves. I found that, when I was near her, she would scrutinize me with gentle, wary curiosity, as though trying, unsuccessfully, to puzzle something out. I would be determined not to scrutinize her in return. I knew only too well how, in that sultry, suffocating confinement, every woman, whether prisoner or prison officer, would notice any sign between us, as though it were a flash of lightning.

  Slowly the mosaic grew, fragment by fragment; and in despair I kept imagining the two women, heads close and lips moving in conversations inaudible to others, putting together, fragment by fragment, a relationship which would eventually achieve a similar wholeness. ‘ It’s beautiful,’ I would say, as suddenly Christ’s halo or one of his hands, raised in benediction, emerged; but really it was all hideous to me.

  Helen had few visitors. Her father would come, stooped and yellow-complexioned, his hands terribly swollen. One or other of his sisters, Helen’s aunts, would accompany him but never his wife. Then he went into hospital, then he died. Helen showed no grief when I told her of the bereavement, merely saying in a tone of quiet resignation: ‘Well, it had to happen, sooner or later. Better sooner. He was so ill.’

  ‘Does his death make any difference to your attitude to parole?’

  ‘No. Why should it?’ For the first time in all the months that we had known each other, she sounded hostile to me.

  Helen’s most constant visitor was her former flat-mate, a taut, brisk, emaciated little woman, with the protuberant eyeballs so often indicative of thyrotoxicosis. I often wondered what had been the relationship between the two and what they now talked about. I remembered that the friend had played some part, perhaps even a decisive part, in Helen’s confession of guilt.

  One day – it was my fifty-sixth birthday, I remember, even though I did not celebrate it – I reached a decision. Life had become insupportable and I must do something, however brutal to Helen, to myself or to others, to make it supportable again. I felt the relief of someone who, after weeks of dread, decides to undergo an increasingly urgent operation.

  After I had completed the arrangements, I had Helen brought in to my study, seated her in the chair opposite to mine at the desk and then broke it to her: she was to be transferred to an open prison, where, I felt sure, she would be far happier.

  She made no demur. ‘ I see,’ she said calmly; and then no less calmly, placing right hand over left in her lap, in a gesture which I had come to know so well, she added, with a smile: ‘I understand.’

  I felt sure that she did understand: the strain of wanting to look for her and at her and yet not looking; the sleepless dawns, when my Siamese cat purred under my fingers as I tugged at her coat; the late-night walks along the canal, when I almost wished that someone, man or woman or demon, would suddenly emerge from the shadows and inflict some hideous act of violence on me; the longing, shame, guilt.

  The next day Maeve erupted into my room.

  ‘What’s all this about Helen Thompson being transferred to an open prison?’ she demanded, her round face congested.

  I nodded calmly, as though in no way surprised either by her intrusion or by the peremptoriness of the question. ‘Her conduct here has been excellent. It was time to give her a break.
’

  ‘But the mosaic! The mosaic!’ She cried it out in anguish, as though she were a mother faced with the imminent loss of her child.

  ‘I’m sorry, Maeve. But surely you have a lot of other people also working on it. Jenkins, Talbot, Cowell, that school-teacher – the one who came in last week. Thompson can’t be indispensable. After all, she might even have been released – if the Bishop and those others had been successful.’

  She stared at me with an unsparing, steely coldness. She too, like Helen, might have said: ‘I see … I understand.’ But she merely turned, her hands thrust into the pockets of her jeans, flung open the door and rushed out, without closing it behind her.

  I got up and pushed the door shut. Then I returned to my desk, opened the drawer and drew out Helen’s file.

  I was about to close that file once and for all and, with that closing, also, to close what had been one of the strangest and most painful episodes of my life.

  Part V

  ILLUMINATIONS

  Many Australians assume that she is one of themselves. She has a parting low on the side of her head and from it the crisp, close-cropped hair springs away in streaks alternately dark-brown and tawny. In England, people would assume that variation of colour to be the result of skilful dyeing, but here they know it to have been caused by the sun. There are deep lines around the eyes, too often screwed up against the glare, and her forehead, cheekbones, bare arms and the backs of her strong capable hands are spattered with freckles. Some Australians might even guess that that small, white, scimitar-shaped scar on a temple is where she had to have a skin cancer removed. She dresses in elegant, slightly mannish trouser-suits, even for cocktail parties, dinner parties and visits to the opera arranged for the delegates. She is wearing one now, of an oatmeal-coloured raw silk, with a brown silk blouse beneath it. Her only jewellery is a plain gold ring on her wedding finger. A woman who is introduced as ‘Doctor’ may be married or unmarried; they assume, because of the ring, that she is or has been married. ‘Have you any children?’ hostesses, unqualified to discuss tropical medicine, ask her, and they wonder why she laughs in that way, as though they had said something ludicrous to her. ‘No, I’m afraid not.’