Dark Places (37 page)

Poor old Lilian, I thought when I remembered. She had been made of pretty poor stuff, after all. What she had wanted, she had got, but it had turned out to be all bluster, and now all she could do was sulk and play the fool. She was huge, but she had turned out to be hollow, and it had taken only a single touch to burst her bubble. Personally, I was skeptical of
rest and routine
doing much for her: looking back, I could see that she had always been unstable, and had never fitted in with what was expected. Norah worried, sighing and fidgeting, back on the eternal couch again, and John produced long desperate hoots from his tuba like cries for help, but it seemed to me that the place where Lilian now was, was the best place for her.

She had proved herself to be a viper in my bosom, and had been officially certified to be insane, no longer a member of the human race
—
but she had left a gap. Life in the Singer household was orderly these days, and no one dreamed of
running wild
: but it was a little dull, and no one took me up on my facts now at the dinner-table, and returned them to me brought to life by disagreement. I decided to visit Lilian, to see if
wonders
had in fact been worked. As I trimmed my nostril-hairs in the mirror before I left the house, I remembered that the colour of her eyes was brown, the curve of her nose mine entirely, the dimple in her left cheek like a third little eye, winking.

Into the dim vestibule of the hospital, gleaming with the polish of institutional surfaces, I stepped like a giant among men. There was a mincing nurse bustling and fussing in there, ingratiating himself in a quean's leering way, no doubt lusting after me within his pants. He squeaked suggestively along the linoleum corridor ahead of me in his rubber shoes, his tight white trousers presenting me with two little melons bobbing up and down at every step. ‘In here, Mr Singer,' he said, and unlocked a door, and my face began a smile, my lips prepared to form themselves into welcoming words. Even after so long, and after so many vicissitudes, here was my daughter: once a daughter, always a daughter. ‘Lilian!' I would cry, and see her look at me in surprise, and in her pleasure at seeing me she would be smiling all over her face and lost for words.

But the person in the room was just an expressionless fat woman in a coarse calico jacket, piled onto a wooden chair, and although her face was turned towards mine as I entered, and her eyes appeared to have me in their sights, she showed no response at seeing me. The nurse was still leering and bustling around, rearranging chairs, opening and closing windows, and heaving at the heap of daughter on the chair, trying to make it more upright: I thought he would bustle around all day, but finally he made to leave the room. He stood in the doorway with one hand round the edge of the door, which I saw had no handle on its inner side, and made large conspiratorial faces at me. ‘Mr Singer,' he hissed, as if Lilian would not hear if he hissed, and squeezed up his face in an unpleasantly rubbery sort of way. ‘Mr Singer, you must knock when you have finished, just knock and I will unlock you, and if there should be—' he screwed up his face even more so that I wanted to shout at him, his hissing and grimaces were quite spoiling my expansive mood—‘if there should be any kind of problem, Mr Singer, or anythink that worries you, just put your finger on this button—' he showed me, ‘and we will be here immediately.'

I thought he had finished, I nodded as he spoke, but in the act of closing the door he opened it again to deliver a large wink at me, as if Lilian behind me could not see it as well, and said, ‘Immediately, if not sooner, that is,' and laughed loudly at this display of wit, perhaps louder for the fact that I did not see fit to laugh at all.

Now I was able to give my full attention to Lilian, and I was as banal as a person visiting the insane could possibly be. ‘Good morning, Lilian,' I exclaimed in a hearty hospital sort of way. ‘And how are we feeling today, my dear?' Lilian stared, but she did not show the slightest flicker of expression, and my bright smile went stale on my face: she was going to be difficult, then!

She was, if possible, even fatter than she had been in her heyday of
running wild.
Her face was puffy and pale, like some bit of offal rolled by the tides, and her eyes were nothing more than wet holes in a bloodless bag of face. I began to be sorry I had come, but could only go forward now, although I could see that if she kept up this thing of not responding, I could be made to look foolish. ‘The family is well,' I said, determined to ask no more questions. ‘Your mother's researches are going swimmingly.' How normal and admirable it all sounded! No one listening at the window would ever guess at Norah hunched over her stopwatch again, timing the passage of time itself ticking away, and writing her meaningless columns of numbers in the book. ‘Yes, she is hard at work.' I was enjoying this! ‘And of course John, you remember your brother, he is still as keen as mustard about his music.' How naturally the words rolled out of my mouth! What an utterly convincing sane person I was, concerned with bringing my daughter up-to-date about her brother, when we both knew that he was a blank boy who could hardly ever be extracted from within the coils of a tuba.

Lilian continued to say nothing. Not only did she say nothing, she did not smile, or nod, or shake her head. ‘Well, Lilian, you do not have a great deal to say to me,' I said at last, tiring of this game. ‘Have you forgotten that I am your father?' Lilian stared and blinked quickly twice, but did nothing else. At least I had made her blink, but I wondered whether it was not I who had done it, but the eyelids themselves, going about their own private business of making sure the eyeballs did not dry out.

I could hear the degenerate's whinnying laugh from outside now, somewhere away beyond the barred window, and moved my chair closer. I brought my face up so close to hers that I could feel the heat coming off her cheeks, and I puffed out a few breaths to see her blink in the breeze of them: she could not fail to notice me now! But not by a single flicker of muscle did she betray that she knew I was there. She could have been quite alone in this gleaming cage of a room, dreaming of times gone by: my head, filling her line of sight, seemed as transparent to her as water, and my voice no more significant to her than the breeze from a moth's wing. I stared at her, checking off the features that had always given me back to myself: the brow, the jaw, that curve of nose and arch of eyebrow. But I could no longer find anything of myself in my daughter's face. I had joined with that person, had become one with her: yet she was a stranger now. No one looking at her at this moment would cry, ‘What a chip off the old block!'

I could not have this. I moved around until my lips were close to her ear. ‘Come on, Lilian,' I coaxed in my softest way. ‘Come on, my dear, give your father a smile.' I was reluctant to touch her flesh, for it had a waxy look and I thought it might be as cold and dry as a snake's skin. But when I put my hands on her face it was not clammy, but warm and firm, muscular under my fingers as I forced her lips up into a winsome smile. ‘There, that looks so very much prettier, Lilian,' I said to her kindly. Or was I shouting? Could that be my voice, ringing around the room?

‘Lilian,' I cried again, and heard something pleading in my tone. ‘Lilian! Buck up, girl, for God's sake,' but Lilian simply sat slouch-shouldered on the chair, staring blankly at my face as if watching the skin grow. I could not bear that inhuman gaze any more, and I pushed back my chair and stood up, so that now her stare was directed at my belt-buckle. ‘Come on, Lilian, enough is enough!' I cried, and pushed at her shoulder in a bracing, snap-out-of-it sort of way. But at my touch, Lilian began to crumple, quite slowly, starting with the shoulder I had touched. She folded in on herself and slipped all of a heap onto the lino, like a dead person, and lay there without moving.

I was appalled to hear myself, as if from miles away, utter a strangled sort of exclamation: it appeared that Albion Gidley Singer, that masterpiece of control, was capable of making a quite extraordinary sound, part snort, part squeak. Surely she could not be so lost to me! Surely no one alive—and I could see that she was breathing— could be so dead to the world! Surely in a moment she would get up, dust herself off, and laugh her big throaty laugh. ‘Well, Father,' she would exclaim, ‘had you fooled, didn't I, and do you know there is a woman here who believes she is made of glass?'

I bent down to look into her face: she was smiling on and on blindly at the linoleum, lying sprawled sideways, one foot tangled with the leg of the chair, the black slipper of the other skewed sideways half-off her foot, both hands palm-down on the floor as if checking its temperature. I stayed bent over until the blood pounded in my temples and my cheeks seemed to hang off my face, but she showed no signs of ever intending to do anything different.

I turned to the door, putting a hand out for the knob. I wanted simply to walk away from this whole situation. But there was no knob there: I stood groping for a way out that did not exist, like an amputee with a phantom limb, trapped in this blank white room containing nothing but two chairs and an empty daughter. For a long airless moment I was given up to fear.

When I got a grip on myself and remembered to knock, the nurse came quickly. He showed some surprise at Lilian having collapsed to the floor, but made no move to pick her up. ‘I only just touched her,' I began to explain, but he was not interested. ‘Most days she is ever so normal, Mr Singer,' he remarked, and left her there while he took me to the front door. As he unlocked the main door, he winked one last wink, but he had lost interest in me, and the wink was nothing more than habit.

It was true that the world was all sky with my daughter gone from it, but a man could have too much sky. Beyond the walls of the hospital, a cold wind had sprung up and I hurried along, clutching my coat together across my chest, looking inward at what I had left behind. A car bore down on me so I had to leap back onto the footpath all of a scramble; then a tram took me by surprise, rounding a corner on top of me, its sudden bell a peal of scorn.

Where to
,
sir?
the tram conductor wanted to know, and for a moment I stared at him, and could not quite think of anywhere I wanted to go.

The thought of the Club did not appeal. Ogilvie was there most days now, his chair drawn up close to Mackenzie's, their corner of the room staked out with their cigar smoke and the way they laughed together and bent over pieces of paper jabbing at numbers with a pencil. Ogilvie would wave to me across the room before bending towards the papers again, but while nothing actually stopped me from drawing up a chair with them, lighting a cigar, and telling them the one about the doctor and the train-driver's wife, somehow I did not wish to do so. Men watched you like hawks at the Club, and I had felt recently that everyone there, including Ogilvie—perhaps especially Ogilvie—was scrutinising me as I ate my steak-and-kidney or read my newspaper.
His daughter is in the madhouse
,
you know
, I knew they were telling each other behind my back, and I had been finding it a strain to go on making sure that I ate my steak-and-kidney and read my newspaper in a way that was absolutely and perfectly normal.

Nor did I fancy my own home at this moment. Norah would be lying on the chaise-longue, or perhaps even frankly have gone to her bed, where she spent longer and longer these days, in spite of all the specialists with their beautiful embossed prescription-paper. She would give me one of her diffident glances, as if I might bite her if she looked at me too hard, and she would either ask with terrible delicacy,
How did she seem
,
Albion
,
and do they think she is improved at all?
or even more delicately ask me nothing at all.

In the end I went to the shop, as usual, but today all its splendours somehow failed to console. I sat at my desk, but was not quite able to come to grips with the papers in front of me. I sat for a long period of time turning a letter this way and that, trying to find the right way up. ‘Miss Gidding,' I made to call. ‘This letter appears to be in some foreign tongue, Hindustani perhaps, is there someone who can interpret for us?' but stopped myself in time and put the letter away at the bottom of a drawer.

I would have to go back to see Lilian again: I had to know whether she was mad to the point of deafness, or whether she had simply determined to get the better of me. The more I thought it over, becoming calmer as I smoothed the grain on the edge of the desk, the more certain I was. Lilian had not been pretending: surely no one could pretend so well, or for so long. Surely no one would have that kind of will-power. I would visit again, to make quite sure, but I was almost sure now. She was simply beyond the touch of human contact, had slipped away beyond recall. A man was simply wasting his time, if all his daughter could do was fall to the floor in a heap when he visited: I had done my duty by her, and frankly, I washed my hands of her now. I may once have had a daughter, but that thing I had seen with the blank eyes, wasting her smiles on the floor, was not any daughter of mine.

Thirty-Two

SOMETHING HAD happened to facts while I had had my back turned being a
family man.
In the modern world we were in now, it seemed that it was no longer
things
that scientists discovered, but the very absence of
things:
there appeared to be fewer and fewer actual
things
in the world with every discovery that was made. Eminent men, men you could trust, men with degrees from Oxford, were saying that the most solid matter, even a man's boot or a man's 18-carat gold collar stud, was in fact composed of millions of tiny particles of absolutely nothing at all.

Something similar appeared to have happened to the Singer family as the years had gone by since Lilian's removal from it. Where once I had been the core of a solid little family molecule, things seemed now to be breaking down into the constituent parts of their nothingness.