Act of Darkness

by Francis King

  The ‘Castle’ is so extraordinary, with its four angle turrets covered by ogee caps, its bell-tower, its apsidal projection over a chapel set at an angle to it and its lancet windows, many of which have been sealed with corrugated iron, plywood or cardboard, that Helen begins to laugh. This puzzles Babs, who asks, ‘What’s the joke?’ ‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ Helen answers. Where parts of the structure have already collapsed, there are piles of rubble which no one has ever bothered to clear away. Once there must have been a formal garden; but the hedges, now black rather than green in the ebbing light, have grown so tall that they all but meet overhead. On the hillside which slopes up behind, there are a number of cottages, shacks and prefabricated bungalows dotted here and there, with no fencing to demarcate the land of one from that of its neighbours, no gardens, other than a few plants in pots set out in the occasional courtyard or on the bare earth, and no sign of any human being, other than two tiny children, a boy and a girl, who wander over, completely naked, their sunburnt bodies luminous with dust, to stare at the newcomers.

  They all get out of their cars, with exclamations of amazement and pleasure. Babs points. In front of the ‘Castle’, a glossy van has been parked. ‘Alfredo’ – the gold letters glitter in extravagant flourishes as the dying sun catches them. ‘Well, we can be sure of a good dinner. Alfredo’s pièce de resistance. Vitello tonnato. I thought that in this kind of weather everyone would prefer cold food to hot.’

  A tall, beautiful woman – fifty-five? sixty? – comes out through the arched doorway and walks, head slightly inclined to one side, towards the party. She is wearing sandals on her straight, narrow feet, no stockings, a loose, white dress. There is a blue ribbon holding back hair silver-gold in colour.

  ‘Laurel!’ Babs rushes forward.

  Hank whispers to Helen in explanation: ‘She was the last of them. She’s now the guardian of the flame. The housemother.’

  Laurel and Babs kiss; but whereas Babs is eager, throwing her arms around the other woman and hugging her to her, Laurel is clearly determined to maintain a distance. Babs still holds Laurel by a hand as she turns to everyone and says: ‘If you don’t know her already, this is Laurel.’

  But most people do know Laurel.

  Bab’s husband asks Laurel: ‘Are they getting on OK with the dinner?’

  Laurel replies in a bored, vague voice: ‘ Oh, yes, I think so.’

  ‘You’re having dinner with us?’ Babs says anxiously.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘That was understood.’

  Laurel comes over to Helen. Though so many people mistake Helen for an Australian, Laurel does not do so.

  ‘You’re the English visitor.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Dr Eliot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  … Ilse told her, meeting her outside the prison: ‘ You’re Helen Eliot.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Wasn’t that your mother’s maiden name?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Then you’re Helen Eliot.’

  Later in the car, Ilse said: ‘You’ve managed to escape the press.’

  ‘Yes. Thank God.’

  ‘Don’t you want to make lots and lots of money?’

  ‘I don’t think so. No. Why?’

  ‘Then you can go on escaping them.’ Ilse stared ahead of her, silent, as the windscreen-wipers made a faint swish back and forth, back and forth. ‘ I could have made a lot of money,’ she said.

  Helen did not understand.

  ‘By telling your story – or, rather, my part in your story. But, like you, I didn’t want to make lots and lots of money.’

  ‘That was decent of you, Ilse.’

  ‘Not particularly. But it would have been indecent if I’d done the other thing.’

  Now Laurel says: ‘I once wanted to be a doctor myself. But I don’t think I really care enough about people.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do either. But it’s too late to think of that now.’

  Imperceptibly, Laurel is leading Helen away from the rest of the party, along the side of the ‘Castle’ and then up the hillside.

  ‘I thought you were running this wonderful hospital in Africa with another woman.’

  ‘The other woman is dead. But, yes, we ran a hospital together and I suppose I’ll go on running it. There’s nothing better to do.’

  Laurel asks: ‘Do you know about this community?’

  ‘I’ve heard something about it.’

  ‘He left the money to me.’ She says ‘He’ as though it would be impossible for Helen not to know at once whom she meant. ‘On trust for the community. Not legally on trust, I could turn them all out tomorrow. But on that trust which we always had in each other. However’ – she sighs – ‘the capital is shrinking. Who knows how long we shall be able to go on? There’s valuable land here and people think it’s going to waste. One day, the ‘‘Castle’’ will vanish and there’ll be a housing estate here – up, up, up.’ She points ahead of her.

  They pass a house. Through one window Helen can see a woman in a petticoat washing her long hair over an old-fashioned basin with high, brass taps. The woman looks up, bunching her dripping hair in a hand, and calls through the window: ‘Hi, Laurel!’ and Laurel waves a hand in salute, saying nothing.

  ‘She’s a sculptress,’ Laurel tells Helen. ‘He thought more of her than of her work, but I prefer the work.’ Despite her age, her strides are powerful, as they continue to climb.

  Out on a porch, before a hut which is really no more than a summerhouse, a young man, with his hair in a long plait down his naked back, ragged shorts and red, prominent nipples on his narrow chest, is hammering at some metal on a bench before him. He eyes the two women darkly but does not speak. There is a mongrel dog asleep by his bare feet. He has a blond, wispy beard, as silky and soft as the hair round a corn-cob.

  Laurel is telling Helen about a retrospective of Fieldhouse’s work to be held in Adelaide during the forthcoming Festival. ‘When he was alive, people made fun of him. They thought he was just a dilettante rich enough to build this folly and mess around with women and paint. Now they say he’s a genius and the messing around with women was a part of it. Women who never got nearer to him than a handshake now boast of having been his mistresses. Like Babs.’

  ‘Oh, someone told me she really had …’

  ‘Rubbish. She modelled for him, he felt sorry for her – working as a typist for some financier or other. She came to live out here for a while but she wasn’t much good. Mooned around after him. But she wasn’t his type. He hated fat women. She was fat even then.’ Laurel has suddenly become vindictive. Helen wonders whether, out of retrospective jealousy, she is lying. Did Babs force her husband to buy those pictures for her? And if not, and if Laurel’s story is true, why should Fieldhouse have given them to her?

  The two women have now reached what was once a walled vegetable garden. In many places the wall has crumbled and, three or four cultivated patches apart, the ground is covered with giant thistles, clumps of brambles and cabbages grown to the size of bushes. ‘ They’re all so lazy,’ Laurel says. ‘ Lazy and getting old. I do what I can – I planted that asparagus bed over there – and there’s a young Greek who keeps up his plot, even if most of it is taken up by hash. But the rest of them … Ivor would have kept them at it. He believed in discipline, for himself and for others. He had such relentiess energy, all the time producing pictures, all the time producing children, getting the ‘‘Castle’’ built and all these houses built, and then running them and running the lives of everyone who lived here. It’s all beyond me. Let them get on with it – or not get on with it. I have my flat, I deal with the visitors. Basta.’

  They leave the walled garden, or what is left of it, and continue up the hill. Helen has begun to feel hot, even though the sun is sinking, a lurid orange beyond the misty, pale blue hills. She would like to sit down in some dark, dank corner of the ‘Castle’ and sip at a glass of lemonade or ch
illed white wine. She wonders why Laurel should have singled her out for this personal tour of the property and when it will end. But she is drawn to Laurel, with her athletic, bare, sunburned arms and legs, her unlined face, the lips tinted silver, and her air of cleanliness and crispness. That cleanliness and crispness she has noticed repeatedly in this country, since she has come from a country where so much is dirty and limp.

  There is a corrugated-iron shack, so small, with a cobwebby window on either side of a front door hanging open under a steeply pointed roof, that one might mistake it for a gardener’s shed or a place for battery fowl. Outside it, a woman is rocking, endlessly rocking, in an ancient wicker rocking-chair, her eyes closed and her hands resting, like little claws, on the arms on either side of her. She is wearing a loose, cotton dress, with a floral pattern on it, plimsoles and a large man’s watch on an emaciated wrist. She is so dark and her skin is so wrinkled that she might be mistaken for some aboriginal crone.

  Laurel passes her first, then Helen. Helen pauses in her stride, as though a frame of a film had suddenly been frozen, then lowers her foot, stares. Asleep or awake, the woman keeps her eyes closed. The dying sun glistens on her upturned forehead and cheekbones. On one of the claw-like hands there is a ring which flashes fire from a diamond. Helen feels an extraordinary terror and a no less extraordinary exhilaration, as though she were some warrior about to embark on a life-and-death struggle. Now she knows the purpose of her long journey. Laurel looks back. What is keeping the Englishwoman?

  ‘Tired?’

  Helen swallows the sweet-sour saliva which has welled up on to her tongue. ‘Hot’, she replies, so faintly that Laurel peers at her with concern and then returns down the slope, to stand beside her. ‘Let’s go back then. There’s not much more to see. Only an overgrown rock garden and a gazebo that’s falling into ruin. I expect everyone will be wondering what has happened to us.’ She looks at the elegant gold watch suspended round her youthful-looking neck on a black velvet cord. ‘ They’re probably wanting to eat. They’ll certainly be drinking.’

  They begin to walk away from the corrugated-iron shack. Helen at last says: ‘ Who was she?’

  ‘Who was who?’

  ‘That woman on the rocking-chair.’

  ‘Oh, he brought her back with him from India, years and years ago. She had some of the worst years of his life, I had some of the best. He was terribly poor then, no one thought much of him as a painter. They had a little station somewhere in the outback. Then they ran a restaurant. Neither any good. Then he met the woman he married – the woman with the money, who started him making money. But she – she up there – remained a part of his life. He couldn’t jettison things, you see. He clung to everything, to every single thing, even if he no longer had a use for it. The attics are full of theatre programmes and old Christmas cards and cheque-book stubs and bills long paid. The estate is full of people like that. They came, briefly they were cherished, then they outgrew their usefulness. But he hung on to them, as people hang on to memories, as the only weapon, however feeble, to use against time.’

  ‘Does she do anything?’

  ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing. She keeps a number of cats and some chickens. She has a plot of land but it’s years since she went near it. If it’s fine, she sits all day out on that rocking-chair and, fine or wet, she sits most of the night in front of her television set.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Her name?’ The question surprises Laurel. ‘Clare,’ she says. ‘Clare Thompson.’

  ‘Thompson?’ It is weird and Helen betrays that she finds it weird.

  ‘Hm.’ Laurel nods. Then she turns, puzzled: ‘ Do you know her?’

  Helen shrugs. ‘ No. Oh no.’ A shudder rattles her body briefly, despite the heat. ‘There’s just something … something about her … Perhaps – perhaps I saw her somewhere in Sydney.’

  ‘In Sydney? You can’t have done that – that’s for sure. She hasn’t been further than our nearest village for, oh, at least ten years.’

  ‘Oh. I see. Then I must have been mistaken.’

  ‘Where have you both been?’ Babs demands under the barrel vaulting of the musty, panelled hall. In the gloom she seems to undulate towards them like some brightly-coloured carp through muddy water. There is a faint jealousy in her voice, as of someone who only comes to value a possession when someone else appropriates it.

  ‘I was showing Dr Eliot around the community.’

  ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?’ Babs says, in a tone which implies that really it’s the most colossal bore.

  ‘Yes,’ Helen agrees. But ‘interesting’ hardly describes that experience of coming on the blackened, wrinkled woman rocking endlessly outside the shed of corrugated iron.

  Bab’s husband, being a physician, notices that Helen looks extraordinarily pale. Clearly, she is unused to this heat. He hurries over with a drink. ‘Vodka and tonic, isn’t it?’ he says, and though, as at the previous party, Helen wants a whisky and soda, she takes it from him. ‘See how clever I am,’ he says. ‘I remember your tipple.’

  People begin to reminisce about Fieldhouse, whose paintings are hanging all around them. They all pretend to have known him better than they did and they all exaggerate the help which they gave him in his early struggles. No one mentions Clare. Helen sips at her drink, listens, sips, half-listens, sips, listens not at all.

  … ‘This is Peter’s governess, Clare.’ Toby spoke the words as though he were saying ‘This is the Taj Mahal’ or ‘This is Fatipur Sikri’. Helen knew even then, as the girl advanced sinuously towards her, a cigarette holder jutting outwards and upwards from her clenched teeth, that her father was in love with her. Clare seemed to move in a blaze of light, although the evening was late. The light dazzled Helen, making her feel nauseous and faint.

  ‘Clare’s not much older than you,’ Toby said. ‘She’ll be a friend for you.’

  Isabel looked contemptuously at him, her hands clasped over her swelling belly. She knew, she knew. Then, no less contemptuously, she looked first at the Eurasian girl and then at her stepdaughter.

  In those first days, Helen hardly dared to speak to Clare, she even avoided her. Clare was a slow, finicky eater and the other four of them – five, if Peter were there for breakfast or luncheon – would seem deliberately to remain silent before their empty plates, as though to embarrass her as she went on cutting her food into miniscule pieces, raising each piece to her mouth, chewing, chewing. Helen felt both pity for her and a longing to say something to relieve the silence. But if anyone said anything, it was usually Peter. Toby would watch Clare with the same voracious eyes and the same salivating mouth with which he would watch the kitmatgar hand round a dish.

  ‘Don’t you ride?’

  ‘No. I’m terrified of horses.’

  ‘Pity. We could have gone out riding together.’

  ‘We could go for a walk.’

  ‘By the lake.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They took Peter for a walk. He ran ahead of them, playing one of those secret games of his in which he required no one else to join. They stopped and watched a fisherman, squatting far out on a rock on The Bluff, with a rod in his hand. He was so still against the still lake that he might have been asleep.

  Clare sighed. ‘How deadly it is here!’ Helen had been thinking how beautiful it was, with the sun slanting diagonally across the water and the hills all around frothing with bougainvillaea and rhododendron blossoms. ‘It was a mistake.’

  ‘What was a mistake?’

  ‘Accepting your father’s offer. Oh, don’t think I’m ungrateful, but I’m used to more – excitement. Here, nothing ever happens.’

  ‘I thought you had a boyfriend.’

  ‘Oh him, him!’

  Helen almost said: ‘ I thought you had my father.’ Perhaps to that, too, Clare would have replied: ‘Oh, him, him!’

  The life of the beautiful, dark-skinned, discontented girl was something which Helen felt, despa
iringly, she would never penetrate; but its impenetrability also excited her. Once, when she knew that Clare had taken Peter off to a children’s party at Government House in the larger, neighbouring station, Toby was away on business, the old lady was up in her room and Isabel was playing bridge in the Andersons’ house down the hill, she ventured into the bedroom, shared with the child, which smelled so strongly of the perfume of which Clare herself smelled so strongly; (‘Really, that girl must douse herself in Evening in Paris,’ Isabel had once remarked, as Clare had left the drawing room.) Helen had touched the perfumes, unguents, lotions and powders on the dressing-table with her fingertips. She had taken up a bottle, unscrewed its cap and held it to her nostrils, breathing the scent in deeply, as though breathing the troubling, intoxicating essence of Clare herself. She had opened drawers and looked down on neatly folded clothes. She had opened the cupboard, its doors warped from the damp, and run her hand over the dresses hanging there, their shoulders shrouded in tissue paper. So orderly, so clean! As she held against her own body the sequined dress, lime-green panels against chocolate, which Clare had worn the previous night to go out to a dance with that lumpish soldier from the convalescent home, she had felt a thrilling, shameful intimacy.

  ‘Where’s Clare?’ Toby would often demand of Helen, as he wandered lugubriously, unlit cigar in mouth, from room to room. ‘I wanted to ask her something,’ he would sometimes add, never specifying what. Or: ‘Clare seems to have vanished,’ he would comment. Helen wanted to say the same things herself but she never did so. Her iron determination to reveal nothing would make Toby remark to her with melancholy regret: ‘I wish you and Clare got on better together’ or ‘I thought Clare would be such a nice companion for you but it seems I was wrong.’

  One day, when Clare and Helen were seated out on a bench in the garden while Peter wandered round after the gardener and his ‘boy’, Clare sighed and said: ‘ Oh, I can’t wait to get back to the plains!’

  ‘Well, it won’t be long now.’ Helen hesitated before putting the question which she had been wanting to put for a long time: ‘Shall you be staying on with us?’