Dark Places (12 page)

Finally she turned out to be a most appropriate wife. She had a pretty turn of phrase with a thank-you letter, she poured tea with much display of now-plump wrist, and she could keep a tinkle of graceful chatter about the price of tussore and the sullenness of housemaids.

But there is a price to pay for everything in this life, and the price a man paid for a suitable tinkling and tittering kind of wife was a certain ennui.

She bored me to tears at times, with long dissertations over the relative merits of rice pudding or tapioca, or exclaiming indignantly to me about the housemaid over some failure to do with dust or grime. ‘That girl will have to go, Albion,' she would tell me. ‘I found her today literally, but literally, sweeping the dust under the rug, and oh she was so cheeky when I told her it would not do.' There was a flush in her cheeks: she was as excited at giving a housemaid her walking papers as if she were a general going into battle. Of such banalities was her life made up: and she had to think it mattered, for no one else ever would.

It seemed to take Norah some time to realise I was not interested in the shortcomings of housemaids, or the ingredients of tapioca pudding. I watched out of the corner of my eye as she sparkled and frothed away at me; I grunted now and then, I said ‘Ah?' in a way that expressed little enthusiasm, and I allowed my eye to be caught by the corner of a newspaper, or if there were no words at hand, I became engrossed in a speck of mud on my trouser-cuff, or the way my thumbnail needed trimming. Do not think that I meant to hurt. But what was there she could tell me that could engage my interest? Details of her dresses or her coughs, the romances and squabbles of her twittering lady-friends, the price of spotted batiste: how could such things interest a man? I did my best, I sat as long as I could bear, I filled my ‘Ah?'s with as much verve as I could muster: I tried, I could not be blamed. But my mind could not be expected to engage itself with the things that filled Norah's mind.

Norah prattled on, no longer waiting for my chilling ‘Ah?' but rushing on into some new tale; her voice grew thinner, the tales lost conviction; and at last she fell silent, fell to working on an embroidered parrot or fiddling with her combs, and after a silence she would get up and ring the bell for tea, or for the fire to be lit, or a fly killed.

She might do that, or I might forestall her: the speck on my cuff or my ragged thumbnail might engross me so far that, in the middle of some desperate bit of sparkle of hers, even as her hands were sketching the shape of the climax of her tale on the air, I might rise and leave the room, murmuring words I did not bother to shape properly, leaving her there as if dropped in mid-air. Later when I came back, all smiles and innocence, I would find her gone quiet, subdued, monosyllabic, engrossed herself now in her silly petit-point, or the way the cushions were arranged on the sofa. Then I could he gentle with her: then I could charm and flatter, and cajole and beam, until she thawed, and would embark on some enthusiasm about Mrs Turnbull's dahlias or the proportions of Mrs Fleming's drawing-room.

It was not what she had expected, or what she liked, but she did not run deep enough for any feeling to last long. How I despised her for that thawing, that forgiving! To a person so shallow, nothing could do serious injury.

A wife was not supposed to be a Valmai, but for all the titillation my wife knew how to provide, a man might as well have been in bed with a teapot. She pitied me my passion as if it was a disease that must be humoured, and handled carefully, and smiled about afterwards like an illness that was over now, but would return.

But she was a tease: she loved to provoke me, lying on her chaise-longue, acting the modest maid. ‘No, Albion,' she would say. ‘No, no, Albion, I am feeling poorly, Albion dearest.' I laughed, because this was a good joke, the joke that she did not want it. ‘You are a rutting creature in heat,' I said, and I took her there on the brocade. I loved the game, and so did she. ‘You are a modest maid,' I would tell her as I embraced her, ‘waiting for the touch of a man, and here I am.' She would keep up the fiction of her headache, or her backache, or her indisposition, as long as she could, lying as unresponsive under me as a lumpy pillow.

But I could not put up with that, for her limpness stole my manhood away from me. Until she was alive and full of protest I was nothing more than a blunt tool questing and finding nothing.

I would have to shake her and prod her, and cram my fingers into her hungriness, until she writhed and gasped, pulling away from my hold on her, like a chorus insisting, ‘No, Albion, Albion no!' but all the while twisting under me in an ecstasy of pleasure. Her ‘No, Albion, no!' was the same, I realised, as Valmai's ‘Yes, dearie, yes yes yes': the words of women were not to be taken too seriously, but what their bodies told a man was the real story. When Norah began to call out, and arch herself under me, I was restored to myself, and became again a man with his wife.

I came to her one night by surprise. She was sitting up in her bed with her embroidered parrot on her lap, staring at nothing. When I came in she made a great show of being busy with the parrot, bringing great clumps and skeins of cotton out of the embroidery-basket, laying them side by side, squinting at them up against the light. ‘Oh, Albion,' she exclaimed when I was right up beside her, ‘you startled me, I did not hear you.' She frowned as if she had made a mistake, and said again, ‘I am busy
here
so I did not
hear
you,' and she might have gone on wondering, had I not put her out of her misery. ‘Norah, lend an ear, since you are in the mood for a jest,' I said, ‘lend your ears, for I am thinking of heirs,' and I laughed to show her I had made a pleasantry, and she showed her teeth in a smile.

At close quarters, which were the quarters at which I preferred her, she was like a peach, in need of a shave. The down softened the contours of her features and gave her a vagueness that I liked, and I enjoyed the feel of that fur under my fingers. ‘My peach,' I said, and she never guessed why she was my peach rather than my angel or my rose.

She watched me closely as if for more, so I found myself speaking in my most coaxing and winning way, and sitting beside her knees on the bed, feeling the warmth of her flesh through the bedclothes. ‘Tell me, Norah, how is a woman to be made happy? How is she to be made whole, or rather how is she to be made no longer hole?'

I had to laugh at my joke, and being so witty made me feel gentle towards those warm knees, which I knew to be dimpled and white, and connected to other dimpled and white lengths of soft flesh culminating in the whole of my wife's hole. I laughed, and continued to smile, and shifted a little closer to those knees: I was warmed from within by the thought of what was about to happen, so that I knew I did not look stern and manly, but was demonstrating the manner in which a truly manly man can allow the softer sentiments to take their place when appropriate, and how much more appropriate than when leaning against my wife's white and dimpled knees, connected to her white dimpled thighs, and etcetera?

So, although as much of a man as ever—more so in fact as I felt the effect of my wife's white dimpled etceteras upon the manhood within my trousers—manly as I was, I was sweet for the nonce, and Norah trusted. She laid down her silly silks and tangles and said, ‘Oh, Albion, could you not be gentle with me? A woman likes a gentle touch, and a little romance.'

Romance is a cheap trick for shop-girls
,
Norah
, I would have liked to say.
Romance is a fiction invented for the convenience of men.

I said none of this, however. ‘Norah,' I said, ‘you are the only one, you are my angel, my cherub, you are the stars that rule my life.' I stared into her eyes, pressed her cool hand, drew closer, in a horizontal sort of way, to where she lay in her white dimples. ‘My Norah,' I murmured, ‘let us discuss the nature of my void, and yours,' and I took her in a loud sound of sighs, and the other sound that only I could hear, of my own amusement.

Eleven

NOW AND THEN Norah quizzed me about my friends, and I had to give the impression that they were unsuitable, or had moved to Melbourne, or died suddenly but painlessly far away, for I was aware that a man was supposed to have friends.

Ogilvie was the nearest I could claim, although I knew myself to be a very peripheral figure in Ogilvie's life; but under Norah's persistent questioning, our friendship blossomed somewhat in retrospect. When we bumped into Ogilvie outside Bartholomew's, and he invited us home to meet his wife, Norah was most enthusiastic.

I remembered Ogilvie as a bit of a gay dog, and expected a lively evening within which I could imagine Norah and I coming across as rather dull, unable to keep up with smart worldly gossip. But Ogilvie's house turned out to be one in a dull street of similar houses, each with a frangipani or an oleander in the corner of the small front garden. It was not a street where anything much would ever happen. It was a street of perambulators, and men in singlets sweating over the lawnmower of a Saturday, and talk over back fences, under lemon trees, of joints of meat and ways with beaux.

Norah, that tiresomely appropriate wife, was already making conventional twittering sounds of praise and pleasure as we pushed open the gate, which swung loose from one hinge, so that I could not help frowning: this was slovenly. ‘Oh,' she murmured and exclaimed. ‘Oh, lovely, frangipani, what a nice quiet street, and look what a dear little brass bell.' This was the kind of thing I had married Norah for, but tonight her girlishness irked me, for I imagined Mrs Ogilvie to be silky and sophisticated, with high-arched pencilled-on eyebrows, and an interesting nose: beside her, Norah's artless charms might seem simply infantile. ‘Quiet, Norah,' I said in the moment before I rang the dear little brass bell. ‘Quiet, Norah, their frangipani is no better than any other, do not prattle, Norah, I beg you.' She fell silent then, and my finger pressed the dear little brass bell, and we stood side by side in silence, listening to it ring.

Ogilvie opened the door to us, beaming in an avuncular way that I did not recognise. In fact, this was an Ogilvie who was altogether strange to me: this was a tooth-showing Ogilvie of many smarmy phrases as he took Norah's coat, and my hat, and hung them in the cupboard. ‘Now come and meet Marjorie,' he cried in a social way I cringed from. Norah twittered away and finally sat, still murmuring amazement and pleasure to be shown to one end of a chintz sofa and be given a sherry. I saw Ogilvie bending over her, offering things on little plates, twinkling away at the rather splendid display of upper chest that was one of Norah's greatest assets. She smiled, showing the dimple in her cheek, and I was pleased to have a wife whose charms were so apparent.

Then, on a cloud of steam and in an aura of roasting meat, Mrs Ogilvie came in from the kitchen, flushed, a lock of hair coming adrift: she was no sophisticate in black satin, with a cigarette-holder and hooded eyes, but simply a skinny woman with a plain face that shone from her exertions in the kitchen, dressed in a brown frock that frankly did nothing for her complexion whatsoever. She came up to me and shook my hand like a man, staring me boldly in the eye and telling me, ‘How much Jim has spoken of you, Mr Singer,' quite taking charge, as if Ogilvie were only an onlooker.

Mrs Ogilvie—‘Oh, do call me Marjorie, everyone does'—Mrs Ogilvie was a woman altogether too bold. What a thing of bones and sharp edges she was! Not a single womanly grace: next to her, Norah seemed watery and more than a little silly, but at least was a woman with a curve or two. Nothing about Mrs Ogilvie pleased me, and I could not make myself call her Marjorie: it would have been a kind of intimacy to call her Marjorie, and the thought of intimacy with this sharp-edged glinty-eyed female was about as attractive as the idea of intimacy with a pair of scissors.

I could only pity Ogilvie, for finding himself trapped with this unlovely woman. Poor old Ogilvie! There must have been a sudden child, I assumed, or a nice lump sum from Mrs Ogilvie's Daddy, or some such tale; I reminded myself to try to get the story out of him if we found ourselves alone, and was beginning to look forward to Ogilvie making some private admiring remarks to me about my own choice of wife, and perhaps even revealing a degree of envy.

‘As you can see, Singer, we are in a fairly small way here,' Ogilvie said, and glanced around at the gaudy chintz, the scuffed piano and the monkey of a wife. She gave him a glance as if to reproach him for apologising for their life, and then he drew closer to her, took her arm in fact, and tucked it up under his own so that she smiled up into his face. ‘But we get along very well with our few books and our music,' he announced heartily, and seeing that I was not going to nod and smile, he turned to Norah. ‘And Mrs Singer, do you play, yourself ?' Norah, with many a dimple, many a flash of white teeth, and much becoming modesty, made a little story of it. ‘Oh, it was attempted,' she laughed, so that her throat in its pearl choker was offered charmingly to the room. ‘It was agreed on all sides that since I could not sing, I must therefore of necessity be a fine pianist—but after eight years I had only got up to Book 2,' she twinkled at Ogilvie and Mrs Ogilvie in a confiding humorous way, ‘and to this day Book 2 has proved to be a mountain I could not climb!' This was not terribly funny, even less so to me, as I had heard it all more than once before, but Ogilvie and Mrs Ogilvie laughed as if it were the best thing they had ever heard.

‘Marjorie is very musical,' Ogilvie said. ‘Really very talented you know, Singer.' I did not wish to hear of any of the virtues of that skinny charmless woman with her bold manlike stare, and did not reply. But Norah rushed in to fill the silence I was leaving. ‘Oh, how wonderful that must be!' she cried. ‘I do so envy you, Mrs Ogilvie!' Mrs Ogilvie appeared to be making an effort to charm Norah. ‘And tell me, Mrs Singer,' she said, taking Norah seriously in a way she was not used to, ‘are you taken up with charity work at all?'