Dark Places (24 page)

Mine was a house of many openings where a man might enter unannounced. It was full of traps, too, but I was not caught out. I knew that the hinge of the back door squeaked if you pushed it slowly, so I gave it a single decisive thrust, and it was silent under my hand. I knew how to step from rug to rug on the polished wood of the hallway, and never forgot now just where the squeaky boards were. I glided into the heart of my house causing not the faintest ripple in its stillness: I was like a paradox from geometry, a man become a flat plane, turned sideways to the air, a man of length and breadth but no volume whatsoever.

I stood quietly at the foot of the stairs, a man invisible at the core of his house, and listened to its life. What did they all get up to when I was not here? No matter how many times I had compacted myself between the particles of air in my house, I had never satisfied myself. Something was always just out of reach, something had just that moment fallen silent, someone had just left by the front door as I had come in the back—why else were the dust-motes dancing in the light of the coloured panes?—or it had been yesterday, or would be tomorrow, that it would happen.

It did not seem to be today. I held my breath and listened, and all seemed innocent enough. From the kitchen, I could hear Cook clashing things together: she was getting hard of hearing, and it reassured her to get a clatter out of her saucepans. There was no mystery in Cook.

Closer at hand I could hear an irregular swishing and thumping, and craning silently round and looking up I could see Alma at the top of the stairs, crouching in a cloud of dust, flicking a rag between the banisters. I had had occasion to speak to her about the banisters not long ago, and saw now with approval that her tongue was poking out in concentration and she was flicking away mightily, and was too completely absorbed by her task to notice a man like a sheet of paper standing edge-on to her and watching.

From the drawing-room I heard the tinkle of best china upon best china, the rattle of a teaspoon in a saucer: there was Norah accounted for, entertaining ladies, elaborating the drinking of a cup of brown water into a whole afternoon's project.

As I stood listening to the various types of sounds made by the various types of females under my roof, it occurred to me that, with John away at Miss Birtwhistle's, mine was the only male organ on the premises. This ratio of men to women—about one to six— seemed, purely in scientific terms, to be about right. To waste the possible seed of one man on a mere one woman, who at best could only produce offspring once a year, was a reckless waste of resources. In theory, a man could service dozens of females at once, and sire thousands of children in the course of his lifetime! Only the day before, I had noted and filed the fact that Fateh Ali Shah, Emperor of Persia from 1797 to 1834, had fathered a total of one hundred and fifty-four sons and five hundred and sixty daughters by his many wives. If the world destroyed itself in the next moment, and left only Rosecroft surviving, the human race could get going again from just the few specimens of it here.

Naturally, restraints had been imposed upon this potential, but they were constraints of a purely social and artificial order, and beneath them, the pulse of biological compulsion beat away steadily. There were times, in fact, when it was almost audible. And at this moment, in this house of women, I was vividly aware of the animal maleness of me tucked away beneath my clothes.

A sudden loud burst of female laughter came from behind and startled me. I took a step back, gave myself a fright with my reflection in the mirror, stumbled on the rug, knocked into the hallstand with my elbow, dropped my hat. And of course it was just a trick of the acoustics in this hall: there was no one behind me, watching and laughing to see me in disarray.

‘Oh Mr Singer, you gave me such a fright, sir,' Alma squeaked at me, peering around the corner of the stairs. ‘I never knew you was home, sir,' and she guffawed meaninglessly, and seemed prepared to elaborate on the subject of surprises and frights, standing up now with the rag in one hand, the other on the banister, like a parody of a belle making a grand entrance with a fan in her hand. ‘Indeed, Alma,' I said. ‘As you see, I am home, and will be checking those banisters shortly,' and she crouched down again and bowed her head to her duster.

Another gust of mocking laughter came from the drawing-room. There was something about standing here in this gleaming draughty place, hearing laughter on the other side of a closed door, I did not like: I had to resist the impulse to check my fly-buttons.

A man does not sidle into his own drawing-room. I flung the door wide and stood there until I had their full attention. The room was a long one, as befitted the drawing-room of a man in my position, and the women were gathered at the far end, in the curved bow-window. My eyes had accustomed themselves to the dimness of the hall, for picking out fine details of dust-motes and rugs: the blast of light pouring in these windows was an assault. The huge radiance engulfed the women, reducing them to insubstantial silhouettes, so feathery that they hardly interrupted the flood of light. There were three, or was it four? When they moved against one another it was hard to tell, all faceless, filmy, nothing more than smudges marring the great chord of light.

By contrast, I was conscious of the bulk of myself, the solidity of toy footfall on the wooden floor, the massy darkness of my garments sucking up the light. As I came down the room towards them, the silhouettes became still: the laughing died completely away, and dimly I could see that all their faces were turned toward me, waiting for me to speak.

As I drew near, the figures resolved themselves into individuals, and there was Norah, there was Mother, there was Kristabel, and there was Lilian. Norah's hands flew about her person, smoothing her hair, smoothing her waist, smoothing the brooch at her neck, positively caressing herself as she gave me a wavery social smile. It would have been appropriate, I thought, for Norah to have told me what they had been discussing with such a lot of mirth, but she could only fiddle with the buttons of her blouse in a suggestive way and flounder, ‘Oh, Albion!' Her astonishment and agitation at seeing me in my own drawing-room could not have been greater had it been Marco Polo standing on the rug before her. ‘Albion, oh, we were just…' But she could not quite locate the idea of what it was they had all just been doing, and glanced around at the others.

‘Oh yes,' Kristabel said quickly, in what I thought was far too loud a voice for a lady in a drawing-room, ‘We were just...' but she caught Lilian's eye, and could not go on for thinking of how terribly funny the thing was, whatever it was, and the others all laughed again, so hard their faces twisted: if they could only see how ugly they looked! They knew—oh, they knew!—that I did not know what was so amusing, so that I had to stand there awkwardly, someone who had not got the joke.

‘Oh Albion, take no notice of us silly girls!' Mother cried through her hysteria, and Norah tried to call out, ‘A cup of tea, Albion?' but even in asking me, her voice was choked with laughter, and her eyes were not really paying me attention.

‘I see,' I said in my most chilling way, and loudly so that it was clear that I intended to take the reins of this moment back into my own hands. ‘No, Norah, no tea is required.' Norah shrank away, curving her hands around the teapot as if to warm them.

That tiresome Norah had recently developed yet another enthusiasm, which was no doubt the reason for the tea-party today. The smeary watercolours and the pumpkins in oils were long gone, and so was the lace-making, the petit-point, the china-painting and the flower-pressing. In their place the fallen girls of Sydney had been installed in Norah's empty hours. My drawing-room had now become a kind of factory for the production of tiny coarse garments in calico, and hand-knitted pilches and leggings, each one a slightly different size from any other, so that a man could not even sit down on his own Chesterfield without first moving great bundles of them. Other women's little interests seemed to stay within tidy bounds: why could my wife's not do likewise? There had been times when I had even felt that the all-pervading smell of turpentine of our early married life was preferable to the all-pervading skeins of silks, the endless bobbins of lace, the tangles of wools, and now the piles of small garments encroaching on every horizontal surface.

Norah was the centre of bustle and fluster about her responsibilities as to pilches and bootees, with lists of names and tasks spilling from her hands, her hair awry, her skirt hanging crooked—I did not like to see any wife of mine letting herself become so slatternly— consulting her lists and getting into a tangle about whether Blue Group was supposed to be stitching fifty calico smocks and knitting twenty pairs of pilches, or was it supposed to be twenty calico smocks and fifty pairs of pilches? She made heavy weather of it, but how could the efforts of a few well-meaning but leisurely ladies in their elegant drawing-rooms possibly make a difference to all the bastard children of New South Wales?

Mother was ancient now, a woman long since past any biological usefulness, and in this light her neck was as loose-skinned as an elephant's knee. But Mother was still a woman: under the folds of dress, under the petticoat, under the silk drawers, lay the same unsatisfying, ungraspable, hidden bit of flesh that all these women sat on all day: that swallower of men's organs, that spitter-out of greasy babies. It troubled me to know—I knew it in my brain, but could only reject it in my heart—that I had once been such a blood-streaked blind bit of tissue being expelled from between those very thighs. It had been many years since I had thought babies arrived in the beaks of storks, but it was a much prettier idea than the reality.

Kristabel had turned out—not altogether to my satisfaction—to be fond of Lilian. The girl appeared to enjoy her company, even visiting her at home, although I did not encourage this, as Kristabel was not the best influence for a young girl. But I could not go so far as to forbid, and here she was now, winking at Lilian like a gypsy.

Kristabel and Mother had been uneasy with each other years ago, but as their lives had gone on they seemed to draw somewhat closer, and now they had widowhood in common. Poor old Forbes had turned out to have a weak heart under all that red-faced hail-fellow-well-met carry-on, and apart from providing my sister with her independent means, poor silly Forbes had not left as much as a ripple on the surface of the world.

Marriage had never done anything to make a woman of Kristabel, and widowhood had done even less; but today she was wearing some sort of thing with a nipped-in waist that made the most of her slenderness. It was no accident—oh no, Kristabel had no womanly bust or behind, but was cunning enough to have got together with her dressmaker to tease with the little she had—no, it was no accident that my mind filled with images of grasping and seizing and snapping in two!

I looked at her, standing with her back to the window so I could not see her face: there she was, flesh of my flesh since I could remember, and a sad figure. Poor creature, she had never really got the hang of being a woman. Even Lilian, looming very large beside her, was more feminine than she was.

Lilian should not have been there. I made a mental note to find out why she was not at school: a man did not work his fingers to the bone to pay Miss Foote's fees to have his daughter stay at home sipping tea!

At thirteen, Lilian was a massive body of flesh: she had grown immense on a diet of facts. What great slabs of haunch lay beneath her muslin! What volumes of bone, gristle and lung were enclosed in that torso of hers! I thought of sieges and castaways, and the eye of my mind watched a knife slicing into her soft meatiness.

It was a ghastly thing for a female to be so enormous. In particular, her breasts, or
titty-bags
, were far too big. I could hardly bear to look. In the past I had occasionally taken Lilian to lunch at the Club, but I did not feel at ease doing so now.
Did you get an eyeful of Singer's daughter
, I imagined.
Did you get a look at the chest on her?
The sallow face of Morrison came back to me, and I smelled again the sharp stink of burning rubbish and forbidden cigarettes.
It is scientific fact
, Morrison had said.
Big tits mean they love it.

I had brought it up with Norah one evening, although aware it was not a father's place to have to remind his wife of such things. But Norah had laughed, actually laughed in my face! ‘Oh no, Albion!' she crowed. ‘You will find it is quite normal,' she said smugly. ‘You will find she will grow out of it, she will slim down in due course, take my word for it, Albion.'

Now the women watched me in an expressionless way, and rather pointedly did not say anything further. The silence extended itself; there was a clicking of knitting-needles as Mother got on with something in pink, her lips pursed in the way they always had when she was concentrating. Norah had retreated behind her eyes, and Lilian stared at something in her lap. It looked to me rather as if they might be waiting for me to leave, so I sat down and made a space among the pilchers on the table for my elbow.

‘Lilian!' I cried, and they all paid attention. ‘To what use are you putting your day, Lilian?' I asked. Finding Lilian at home was not the surprise I had expected when I had decided to come home early, but I intended to make it clear that I did not approve of her being here wasting her time with these women and their gossip and giggling.

‘I am a bit poorly today, Father,' she said, and suddenly blushed. We all watched as blood poured up her neck and into her cheeks, mottling her like a sausage. She struggled on, ‘So Mother and Nanna are teaching me to knit, I have done half a pitch already.' She held up a bit of knitting that was full of holes, and hung warped off the needles. Her pride in it was obvious, and her pride filled me with rage. Knitting, crocheting, tatting and petit-point were all things I had expressly forbidden Lilian to learn, also cross-stitch, edging, and applique. ‘But Albion, it will not hurt her to know how to knit!' Norah had wheedled, but I had had the scientific answer, as usual. ‘Norah,' I said evenly, ‘the human brain is finite. Some human brains, of course, are more finite than others,' I added, and let a significant silence fall. ‘But even the best brain is finite. Fill it with piffle, and there will be no space left for thought. Even you, Norah, cannot deny the logic of that.'