2/5/67
Today I went into Greenfield on my half-day. Mrs Appleby the headmaster’s wife who often speaks to me asked me to get her some things and it was so strange when she said, You can get them at Frankley’s! So I went in. Then I looked at GOODCHILD’S RARE BOOKS and was a little sorry that the glass ball was not there any longer, sold I suppose or I might have bought it. Only also when I was looking in the window two little girls came from Sprawson’s where I took the fireirons all that time ago and looked in the window at the children’s books. They were so beautiful like angels and I was careful to turn my bad side away. They went back into Sprawson’s and the door of the shop was open so I heard a woman inside say that Stanhope’s little girls were everything to each other. I got on my bike and rode away but I could not help wishing that they were who I am for. I do not mean I looked at them in the way I looked at Miss Lucinda or the daughters of Mr Hanrahan all that is done with I think, gone out of my mind as if it had never been. It is very strange all the events of 20/4/67 are cloudy so that I cannot remember clearly if the word in the book was child or children. Perhaps I am to do not with the children of this school but the little girls, Stanhope they are called or one of them but I would like it to be both. While waiting to find out what I am for I shall keep an eye on them on my half-days. The next time the spirits call me before them I shall ask about the little girls. One of them is dark and one fair. I add them to my list for praying for.
9/5/67
The spirits have not brought me before them. Today on my half-day, I went in to Greenfield again to see if I could see the little girls but they did not appear. I may not see them very often but that will be as God wills of course. I looked at their house. It is a big one but a firm of solicitors lives in one part and there is a flat.
13/5/67
The spirits came again. I asked at once about the little girls and they showed: That will be as it will be. I then had a sudden fear that I was in danger of committing a sin by preferring these little girls to anything else. They did not wait for me to whisper this to them but showed at once: You are right. Do not go into Greenfield unless you are sent. They seemed a bit severe with me I thought. They thrust me away from them quickly. So I am once again in the position of doing a hard thing. I must be content with my lot and talking now and then to the little boys and trust that there are good spirits (angels) looking after the little girls which of course there are. And as they are everything to each other they do not need me.
Part Two
Sophy
Chapter Eight
What Mrs Goodchild had said to Mr Goodchild was quite true. The twins, Sophy and Toni Stanhope, were everything to each other and they hated it. If they had been identical it might have been better but they were as different as day and night, night and day you are the one, night and day. Even when Matty saw them, within a week of their tenth birthday, Sophy had a sharp idea of how different they were. She knew that Toni had thinner arms and legs and a less smooth, pink curve from her throat right down to between her legs. Toni’s ankles and knees and elbows were a bit knobbly and her face was thinner like her arms and legs. She had big, brown eyes and ridiculous hair. It was long and thin. It was not much thicker than—well if it had been any thinner it wouldn’t have been at all: and as if preparing for disappearance it had entirely got rid of its colour. Sophy on the other hand knew that she herself lived at the top end of a smoother and rounder and stronger body, inside a head with dark curls all over it. She looked out through eyes that were a bit smaller than Toni’s with masses of long, dark eyelashes round them. Sophy was pink and white, but Toni’s skin, like her hair, had no colour in it. You could see through it in a way; and Sophy, without bothering to know how she knew, knew pretty well the Toni-ness of the being who lived more or less inside it. “More-or-less” was as near as you could get because Toni did not live entirely inside the head at the top, but loosely, in association with her thin body. She had a habit of kneeling and looking up and saying nothing that had a curious effect on any grown-up present. They would go all soppy. What made this so maddening was that at these times, Sophy knew Toni wasn’t doing anything at all. She wasn’t thinking and she wasn’t feeling and she wasn’t being. She had simply drifted away from herself like smoke. Those huge, brown eyes, looking up from the falls of lintwhite hair! It was magic and it worked. When it happened, Sophy would disappear inside herself if she could, or remember the precious times when there had not been any Toni. There was one with a whole roomful of children and music. Sophy could do the step and would have liked to do it for ever, one, two, three, hop, one, two, three, hop; calm pleasure in the way that threeness always brought the other leg for you to do a hop with, and for some reason, no Toni. Pleasure too because some of the children could not do this simple, lovely thing.
There was also the long square. Later she thought of it as the rectangle, of course, but what was remarkable was that she had Daddy to herself, and Daddy had actually proposed a walk, thus causing her such a confusion of delight that only later had she understood why he did it. She might have been a trouble to him if she had missed Toni! But for whatever reason, he actually took her by the hand, she reaching up and looking—bah!—with a simple trust in that handsome face and they had descended the two steps, passed between the small patches of grass and were on the pavement. He had wooed her, there was no other word for it. He had turned them right and shown her the bookshop next door. Then they had stopped and looked in the huge window of Frankley’s the Ironmongers and he had told her about the lawn-mowers and tools and said that the flowers were plastic and then had taken her on past to the row of cottages with the words on a shield over them. He had told her they were almshouses for women whose husbands had died. Then he had turned her right down a narrow lane, a path it was and then through a kissing gate and they were on the towpath by the canal. Then he had explained about barges and how there used to be horses. He turned right again and stopped by a green door in the wall. Suddenly she understood. It was like taking a new step, learning a new thing, the whole place came into one. She saw that the green door was at the bottom of their garden path and that he was already getting bored in a princely way, standing there on the towpath before the blistered paint. So she ran on, getting too close to the water and he caught her as she intended but angrily, just at the steps up to the Old Bridge. He positively lugged her up them. She tried to get him to stop by the public convenience at the top but he would not. She tried to take him straight on after he had turned right again, tried to make him go with her up the High Street but he would not and they did turn right and there was the front of the house. They had come round and back to it and she knew he was angry and bored and that he wished there was someone else about to take charge of her.
It was in the hall that the little conversation had taken place.
“Daddy, will Mummy come back?”
“Of course.”
“And Toni?”
“Look child, there’s no need to worry. Of course they’ll be back!”
With her mouth open she had looked after him as he disappeared into his column room. She was too young to say the thing in her mind that would be like killing Toni. But I don’t want her back!
However, on the day when Matty saw them they were indeed being more or less everything to each other. Toni had suggested they ought to go to the bookshop next door and see if there were any of the new books there that would be worth having. With a birthday next week it might be worth dropping hints to the current auntie, who needed prodding. But when they got back from the shop Gran was in the hall and the auntie was gone. Gran packed for them and took them away in her little car all the way down to Rosevear, her bungalow near the sea. This was such an excitement it put books and aunties and Daddy clean out of Sophy’s mind, so that their tenth birthday flew by without her noticing. Besides, at that time she discovered what fun a brook was. It was much better than a canal and moved with a chatter and pinkle. She walked by it in the sun a
mong tall grasses and buttercups, the buttery petals with their yellow powder so real at head height making distance itself, space so real. There was so much green and sunlight coming from everywhere at once; then when she parted the greenness which was what the grasses were, she saw water between here and there, that farther bank, outland, water moving between, Nile, Mississippi, trickle, dabble, ebble, babble, prick and twinkle! And then the birds that stalked through the jungle down to the edge of outland! Oh that bird all black with a white keyhole on the front of its head, and the tweeting, squeaking, chirping brood of fluffies climbing and scrambling and tumbling among the grasses at its back! They came out into the water, mother and chicks all ten on a string. They moved on with the brook and Sophy went right out into her eyes, she was nothing but seeing, seeing, seeing! It was like reaching out and laying hold with your eyes. It was like having the top part of your head drawn forward. It was a kind of absorbing, a kind of drinking, a kind of.
The next day after that, Sophy went looking through the long, buttery flowers and grasses of the meadow to the brook. As if they had been waiting for her all night, there they were the same as ever. The mother was swimming away down the brook with the string of chicks behind her. Every now and then she said, “Kuk!” She was not frightened or anything—just a bit wary.
This was the first time Sophy noticed the “Of course” way things sometimes behaved. She could throw a bit but not much. Now—and this was where the “Of course” thing came in—now there was a large pebble lying to hand among the grasses and drying mud, where no pebble had any business to be unless “Of course” was operating. It seemed to her she did not have to look for the pebble. She just moved her throwing arm and the palm of her hand fitted nicely over the smooth, oval shape. How could a smooth, oval stone be lying there, not under the mud or even under the grass but on top where your throwing arm can find it without looking? There the stone was, fitted to the hand as she peered past the creamy handfuls of meadowsweet and saw the mother and chicks paddling busily down the brook.
When you are a small girl, throwing is a difficult thing and, generally speaking, not something you practise for fun, hour after hour, like a boy. But even later on, before she learnt to be simple, Sophy could never quite understand the way in which she saw what would happen. There it was, a fact like any other, she saw the curve which the stone would follow, saw the point to which the particular last chick would advance while the stone would be in its arc. “Would be”, or “Was”? For also, and this was subtle—when she thought back later it did seem that as soon as the future was comprehended it was inescapable. But inescapable or not she could never understand—at least, not until a time when understanding itself was an irrelevance—how she was able, left arm held sideways, upper arm rotating back from the elbow past her left ear in a little girl’s throw—was able not merely to jerk her upper arm forward but also to let go the stone at the precise moment, angle, speed, was able to let it go unimpeded by the joint of a finger, a nail, pad of the palm, to follow—and really only half meant—to follow in this split and resplit second as if it were a possibility chosen out of two, both presented, both foreordained from the beginning, the chicks, Sophy, the stone to hand, as if the whole of everything had worked down to this point—to follow that curve in the air, the chick swimming busily forward to that point, last in line but having to be there, a sort of silent do as I tell you: then the complete satisfaction of the event, the qualified splash, the mother shattering away over the water, half flying over it with a cry like pavements breaking, the chicks mysteriously disappearing, all except the last one, now a scrap of fluff among spreading rings, one foot held up at the side and quivering a little, the rest of it motionless except for the rocking of the water. Then there was the longer pleasure, the achieved contemplation of the scrap of fluff turning gently as the stream bore it out of sight.
She went to find Toni and stood tall among the meadowsweet with the tall buttercups brushing her thighs.
Sophy never threw at the dabchicks again and understood why not, perfectly well. It was a clear perception, though a delicate one. Only once could you allow that stone to fit itself into the preordained hand, preordained arc, and only once do so when a chick co-operates and moves inevitably to share its fate with you. Sophy felt she understood all this and more; yet knew that words were useless things when it came to conveying that “More”, sharing it, explaining it. There, the “More” was. It was, for example, like knowing that never, never would Daddy walk again with you round the long square, the rectangle, past the other side of the outer stable door. It was like knowing, as you did, certainly, that the wooing Daddy would not be with you because he wasn’t anywhere, something had killed him or he had killed himself and left the hawk’s profile stuck at the top of the calm or irritated stranger who spent his time with an auntie or in the column room.
Which was perhaps why Gran’s and the brook and the meadow were such a relief, because despite the fact that the meadow was where you learnt about “More”, you could use it for sheer pleasure. So as the holiday lengthened, in the cheerful, buttercup-plastered enjoyments of the water-meadow and butterflies and dragonflies, and birds on boughs and daisy chains, she thought rowdily of that other thing, that arc, that stone, that fluff as no more than a slice of luck, luck, that was what it was, luck explained everything! Or hid everything. Making a daisy chain with little Phil or being Indians in a wigwam with Toni, the two of them in a rare state of oneness, she knew it was luck. In those times, dancing times, singing times, times of going to a newness and meeting new people who should not be allowed to go away (but did)—the tall woman with red hair, the boy only a bit younger than herself who let her put on his blue denims with the red animals sewn on them, the big hat, party times—oh, it was luck and who cared if it wasn’t? It was also, that summer, the last time they went to Gran’s and the last time Sophy inspected dabchicks. She left Toni looking for small insects in the grass by the lane and waded away through the longer grass, meadowsweet and docks of the meadow and when she saw the mother with her chicks she chased them along the brook. The mother uttered her warning cry, harsh, staccatissimo and swimming faster, the chicks too, faster and faster. Sophy ran beside them until at last the mother took off with her shattering noise and foam and the chicks disappeared. They disappeared instantly, as it were into thin air. At one moment there was the fluffy string of them straining to go faster, necks out, feet whipping under the water; then the next instant there was a phut! sound and no fluffies. It was so astonishing and baffling that she stopped running and stood watching for a while. Only after she had seen the mother come part-way back and swim busily in the brook, brandishing her cry like a hammer, did Sophy find that her own mouth was open, and close it. After, it may be, half an hour, the mother and chicks came back together and Sophy chased them again. She found that the chicks did not vanish into thin air but thin water. There was a point in their fear where it turned into hysteria and they dived. No matter how small they were—and these were about as small as chicks could be—if you chased them, at last they would dive and get clean away from you no matter how fast you ran and how big you were. She brought this astonishing news back across the field to Toni, half in admiration of the chicks and half in irritation at them.
“Silly,” said Toni. “They wouldn’t be called dabchicks if they didn’t.”
That reduced Sophy to putting out her tongue and waggling her fingers beside her head, thumbs in ears. It was unfair the way Toni behaved, sometimes, of being miles away, certainly nowhere near her thin body with its empty face; and then proving carelessly, to be present. She would come down out of the air and be inside her head. Then with what you could only call a wrench, she would bring things together that no one else would have thought of, and there you were with something decided, or even more irritating, something seen to be obvious. But Sophy had learnt to qualify her early dismissal of the Toni-ness of Toni. She knew that when the essential Toni was seated, perhaps a yard above
her head and offset to the right, it was not always doing nothing or sliding into sleep or coma or sheer nothingness. It might be flitting agilely among the boughs of invisible trees in the invisible forest of which Toni was the ranger. The Toni up there might be without thought; but then, it might equally be altering the shape of the world into the nature it required. It might, for example, be taking shapes from the page of a book and turning them into solid shapes. It might be examining with a kind of remote curiosity the nature of a ball made from a circle, a box from a square or that other thing from a triangle. Sophy had discovered all this about Toni without really trying. After all, they were twins, kind of.
After Toni had pointed out the connection between the behaviour of the dabchicks and their name, Sophy felt cheated and annoyed. The magic disappeared. She stood over Toni wondering whether she should go back and chase the dabchicks again. She saw in her mind, that the thing to do was not to chase the dabchicks down the brook but up it. In that way the movement of the water would help you and hinder them. After that, you could keep up with them and watch them carefully under water and see where they came up. After all, she thought to herself, they must come up somewhere! But really, her heart wasn’t in it. The secret was no longer a secret and of no use to anyone but the silly birds themselves.
She pulled her hair out of her ears.
“Let’s go back to Gran.”
They laboured through the bursting fertility of the meadow towards the hedge and as they went, Sophy wondered whether it would be any use asking Gran how explanations took the fun out of things; but two things put the whole matter out of her head. In the first place, they met little Phil from the farm—little Phil from the farmhouse with his curls, just like little Phil in The Cuckoo Clock, and they went off to play with him in one of his father’s fields. There, little Phil let them examine his thing and they showed him their things and Sophy suggested they should all get married. But little Phil said he had to go back to the farm and watch telly with his mum. After he left, they found a red pillar-box at the crossroads and had fun posting stones in it. Then, in the second place, when they got back to the bungalow Gran told them they were going back to Greenfield next day because she was going into hospital.
Darkness Visible: With an Introduction by Philip Hensher Page 12