Dark Places (20 page)

I had made myself as light as a wish to go silently down into the scullery, and there she stood before the tub, waiting for me with her hands in the pile of lather on top of her head. Her breasts thrust and strained against the camisole that was all that covered them, her shoulders were as smooth as a well-turned bit of statuary: she needed only a bit of drapery to be one of those solid marble women who had been my first teachers about the female form. I saw the darkness of her underarms, where the hair was thick and secretive, and felt her lust transmit itself to me from the lewdness of that hair.

Alma did not writhe or gasp as pale Norah did, inflaming me with protest. Alma did not lie under me arching in passion like a fish. ‘Sir,' she said again and again. ‘Oh sir, oh Mr Singer sir!' Her gratitude was touching. Her breasts were cool in my mouth, the nipples engorged with her longing for me, and I felt her under my hands, shivering with the pleasure of it, and I thought of how demure and modest this minx seemed, serving a potato from a trembling spoon, or setting down a plate as if it was an egg, and how she was not demure at all, or modest, and must have been waiting since she had first come to us for this moment when my hands would force her down to her large knees on the scullery floor and she could cry out, ‘Oh sir, oh Mr Singer sir!' until her mouth was too full for words.

There was ecstasy, but later it was only disgust I could feel at some housemaid with her hair falling in wet soapy strings around her blotched face, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and pulling up the grubby straps of her camisole. Her flesh was cold to me now, and a nasty raw colour, and she leaned like a sack against the tub, staring at the floor.

Dinner in our echoing dining-room was not usually an affair to engage the interest of a man of the world such as myself. But on this night I was so eager that I came down early; Norah made a show of putting away her embroidery in surprise and checking the clock.

Alma came in then, tiptoeing hugely around the table, handing dishes, breathing unsteadily with a whistling sound through her nose as she managed the peas and potatoes in their bowls: I heard her holding her breath, ashamed of the noise, as she crouched around the table, sliding food onto our plates like secrets. When she bent over Norah, serving her, so close that her arm almost embraced Norah's shoulder, what a private thrill I experienced in my trousers! Norah, my wife, addressed Alma, speaking in her vague way of salt and parsley, and Alma, my mistress of the scullery, nodded
Yes Mrs Singer
,
no Mrs Singer.
Poor silly Alma fell all over her words, answering, because of me watching and listening, knowing what Alma was like when undone by lust, with the soap shiny on her breasts.

I sat back waiting placidly for my dinner while my maid-of-all-work exchanged a few words with my wife. Alma looked at Norah, whose forehead was still puckering with the difficulty of making herself quite clear about the quality of the peas, and Norah looked at Alma, red in the face, holding the dish of potatoes at a dangerous angle, unable to decide whether the right answer to Norah's question was
Yes Mrs Singer
or
No Mrs Singer.

At last she made a convulsive gesture that caused the serving-spoon to smear Norah's silk shoulder, and with an unusual spurt of temper Norah cried,
Alma! Whatever is the matter with you tonight
,
for Heaven's sake?

How could that demure wife of mine guess that not twelve inches from her face was the pair of breasts that her husband had so recently clawed to himself ? I was moved, I was humbled by the mystery of all things: I felt the universe spinning about me in the wonder of seeing Norah speak to Alma and not know that Alma had held my joy until it burst like a grape.

When Alma left the room, I began to speak of her: I praised Norah's perspicacity in hiring her, praised Alma's thoroughness with the dust, and indicated that I thought she was a very fine figure of a woman, and did not Norah think so too? ‘Why, Norah,' I exclaimed, ‘I sometimes look at Alma, and do you know it crosses my mind that if you put her in a decent frock—your amber taffeta, for example, our Alma would cut quite a graceful figure.'

But Norah's face, always blank, grew blanker with every word I spoke. ‘Really, Albion,' she murmured, but was obviously not hearing, or at least not listening. ‘How interesting, taffeta, yes, but excuse me, Albion—Lilian, do not hold your knife as if you wish to strangle it, please,' and the moment passed: Norah was not prepared even to do me the courtesy of listening while I taunted her.

I was not going to be bested, though, by the inattention of a woman. I knew how to get her to listen, and tried a different tack: and in all these years, Norah had never learned to resist thawing in the face of attention. ‘And did you go to your concert today with Kristabel?' I asked—how many husbands would be able to keep track of their wife's doings to the point of remembering a concert?

As I had predicted, Norah brightened at this like a fanned fire and said, ‘It was a very fine band, Albion, but we did not fancy the music, it was rather bullying.'

She looked up at me and the light fell flat on her face in a way that showed every pore, but she smiled as though she thought she had been rather clever to call the music
bullying
, and thought that I would think she was clever too.

On another day, with a different sort of wind blowing through my heart, I might have. But today was not that day. In my mildest way, in my sweetest tones, I took out the knife and inserted just the very tip into her, so quietly that she did not know it was happening. Norah, do you not think it is rather wrong to condemn the music like that? It might not have been to your taste, but that is no reason to accuse it of bullying.'

Norah had not felt the knife slide in, for she was expecting no knife. ‘Oh no, Albion,' she exclaimed in her arch hostessy manner, which the other ladies thought so amusing. ‘It was positively like being hit over the head with a blunt instrument! Kristabel agreed, and I promise you, Albion, you would have hated it too.'

I became cold then, and slid the knife a little further into her unsuspecting flesh. ‘Norah, I have my own opinions about things, and I would thank you not to tell me what I think.'

Ah! Now she felt it at last, the first stab! Her face clouded, she looked down in confusion, and her hands went to her hair in an anxious way. But when she looked up again I saw she had decided it was one of her husband's jokes, and she cried with a smile that had only triumph in it, ‘Oh, Albion, I have heard you say much worse!' It had been a long time since Norah had roused me to passion, but now I felt a throb of excitement as I prepared to do something decisive with that knife which she had dismissed.

I turned away from her, I drew myself up, and I dusted an imaginary fleck off the table between us. It was sorrow, not anger, that I wished to convey, so I softened now, in order to open her for the deeper penetration of the blade, and said, ‘I am sorry, Norah, but as a husband, it is my duty to warn you that this mocking of others, and this imposing of your own view, is something which, frankly, I have never liked in you.' I saw her face bleach to a putty-colour and her lips part, and pressed home the point. ‘And, Norah, I have to tell you that others do not like it either, and have gone so far as to mention it to me.'

Poor Norah's brief moment of sparkle was now altogether extinguished: she glanced at the children, who were staring with food unpleasantly visible in their open mouths, and pressed her hands together, and began to mumble, ‘I am sorry, Albion, I did not mean, I only meant, I would not dream,' until I left her there, relishing the authoritative sound of my footfall on the floor, and brushing aside Alma as she blundered up from the scullery and almost ran into me. ‘I am going out for a short time,' I called back over my shoulder. ‘Please do not wait up for me, I have a couple of
little things
to attend to.'

It was a fact that Agnes and Una, lovely ladies in kimonos, with white buttery thighs and breasts that smelled of vanilla, loved me, Albion Gidley Singer and all that was within him. ‘Do you love me, Agnes?' I asked. ‘Una, do you truly love me?' and they knelt at my feet, those lovely fleshy women with their slits moist for me, knelt at my feet and whispered and murmured until I lay back and saw the darkness of Albion Gidley Singer's closed eyelids, murmured and soothed, and while they spoke they were interfering with me in the way they knew made my life a joy. ‘Mr Smith, of course I love you,' said Agnes or Una, ‘such a clever and distinguished gentleman, and so athletic too, why Mr Singer, how can you doubt that I love you ever so much.'

Of course there were the pound notes that I slipped under the vase at Mrs Smith's elbow, but it was me they relished, a man with whom they did not have to feign delight. ‘Oh,' they cried, when they found the pound notes as if by accident, tidying up as I was putting on my hat and gloves to leave. ‘Oh Mr Smith, you are too good, really you are, you are a naughty boy, very naughty, to be so extravagant!' How I loved their charming exclamations, and how I loved the way they stood at the door of the house waving and blowing kisses as I left, to go back to my wife. Norah was certainly a lady, but she never tapped the end of my nose with a spit-wet forefinger and exclaimed, ‘Naughty boy! He will have to be punished!'

I did not doubt, but like any normal man I wanted to be sure. I could not come straight out and ask: ‘Agnes, am I doing it right?' or, ‘Una, how do I compare with other men?' At the Club I had discreetly checked, while at the urinal, that I was normal in respect of size, but I could not be sure of anything else. I had heard men talking about it, late into the whisky-and-sodas at the Club, and although I had nodded, and smiled, and exclaimed, ‘My word yes,' I had wondered.

Were they all like me, pretending that the whole thing was somehow a larger experience than it was? Or was it possible that there was something to be done other than what I did, that made a man wax genuinely lyrical over it afterwards? That made men even court scandal and ruin rather than forgo such a pleasure? Nothing I had ever experienced with a woman had even begun to be worth scandal and ruin, and I had to wonder.

Of course I did not doubt, but it had crossed my mind to wonder what might happen if I should ever leave without slipping the pound notes under the vase. Several times, I felt so invincible in the house of the Smiths that I nearly put it to the test. Once, I was so sure of myself that I was actually on the doorstep before I thought I caught something in their eyes, and my hand went to find my wallet.

I went home trying to forget that moment's look in the eyes of my fan-fluttering mistresses. That look was the look of the world gone hollow and loveless, a world where Agnes and Una might stand at the door of their house with no vanilla breasts showing at the tightly bound necks of their kimonos, a world where smiles and warm words would turn into tight pinched mouths. I wanted to know, but I did not think I could bear living in a world in which it was, after all, only the pound notes that stood between bliss and being turned away, without love, into the night. In the end, the pounds were always under the vase, and I could never know.

PART THREE
A Father

Twenty

I HEARD men in the Club: ‘Now, I am a family man,' they would announce. As if being a family man established their credentials, they would clear their throats then and deliver themselves of some observation on the price of wool or the fecklessness of the working classes.

I had tried it out myself, in front of the three-faced pier-glass in the bathroom. ‘Now, I am a family man,' I rehearsed. Should it be ‘I
am
a family man', or ‘I am a
family
man'? In the end I decided that the most significant part of the equation was the manhood part of it. ‘I am a family
man
,' I told myself, watching my moustache move under my nose as I pinched my lips together for the word
man—
and in the end I came to believe.

Breakfast in the Singer household was something of a production, attended by Alma, who had still not learned how to live up to such a blaze of silverware, and presided over by Our Lady of The Platitude, my wife. Poor old Norah still clung to some fancy of herself as
artistic
and she had read in one of her tiresome arty journals that the
al fresco
breakfast was all the rage with the smart set in London. On balmy mornings the entire breakfast paraphernalia was trundled out to the verandah, and as we chewed our kidneys we were watched unblinkingly by various sharp-beaked beady-eyed specimens of birdlife.

Alma did not approve, panting in and out of the house with trays of things, and flapping away at wasps and flies, and trying at the same time to catch my eye, offering me things insistently. ‘Jam, Mr Singer? More jam, sir?' I did not want jam, and I did not want Alma either. She was turning out to be exceptionally slow at cottoning on to the fact that Mr Singer had been interested once, but was not interested now.

Alma did not approve of breakfast out of doors, and I did not approve either, but over the years of our marriage it had been borne in on me that a husband does best not to dissipate his energies. A wise husband knows that it is the war that has to be won, not every single little battle, and that if a fight is to be undertaken, he must be completely sure of winning it. The matter of breakfast did not quite seem to me to fall into this category, so I had been careful never to let Norah see how little I liked it. There were advantages, I could see that: it was true, for example, that the various noises and smells made by the children were diluted by the open air, and a person could busy himself admiring the jacaranda when John brought up his porridge over the tablecloth, or Lilian knocked over her glass of milk again.

As long as no one looked too closely, it all looked just as it should be for a
family man.
There was my wife, pale but well-groomed, crumbling bits of toast on her plate in a way that set off her slender fingers, and addressing her husband now and again, as one would expect of a wife, ‘More tea, Albion?' or, ‘Would you be good enough to pass the jam, Albion?' I did not know whether all wives, in the privacy of the family circle, were quite this polite with their husbands but it seemed satisfactory enough, and what went on behind Norah's eyes was her own affair.