Darkness Visible (13 page)

So that year wore away unnoticed, what with school and living in the stables and having Mr and Mrs Bell to the stables for tea in a very grown-up way; and then they were out of thick trousers and sweaters and into jeans and light shirts and their eleventh birthday showed up on the horizon. Toni announced that it would be a good thing to go looking for books that they might like for their birthday. Sophy understood completely. Daddy would give them money, it was easier than thinking about them. Books chosen by Winnie would be ridiculous. They would have to make her mind up for her without her knowing since there was all this pretence of secrecy about birthday presents and she had to think it was her own idea. They went, therefore, from the stables at the bottom of the garden up the path under the buddleias, up the steps to the glass door into the hall, past Winnie who was playing her transistor in the kitchen, past Daddy who was playing the electric typewriter in his column room, then down the two steps to the front of the house where it looked up the High Street. They turned right to
GOODCHILD’S RARE BOOKS
and there they were, between the two
boxes outside Goodchild’s window, the sixpenny box and the shilling box, all full of books no one would ever think of buying.

Mr Goodchild was not in the shop but Mrs Goodchild was at the back doing some writing at the desk by a door that led somewhere. The twins paid no attention to her, even after they had got the door open and been ever so slightly startled by the ting! of the shop bell. They looked round the books for children but had most of them in the stables anyway because books were the kind of thing that seemed to come from every direction, and though often interesting were not particularly precious. Sophy soon saw these books were too simple and she was about to go when she saw that Toni was examining the old books on the shelves with her particular silent attention so Sophy waited, turning over
Ali
Baba
and wondering why anyone would want it when there were the four thick volumes in Daddy’s column room to be taken away if you felt like it. Then the old man who was so helpful to little boys in the park came in. Toni ignored him because by then she was right inside a grown-up book but Sophy greeted him politely because though she did not like him she was curious about him; and the one thing all the aunts and cleaning women and cousins were keen on was being polite to everybody. Certainly he came under the interdict of not-talking-to-strange-men-in-the-street, but Mr Goodchild’s bookshop wasn’t a street. The old man poked about among the books for children, then he went up the shop to where Mrs Goodchild was sitting. At the same time old Mr Goodchild came in ting! from the High Street and immediately talked in a jokey kind of way to the twins. But before this had got properly under way he saw the old man and stopped. In that silence they all heard the old man who was holding out a book to Mrs Goodchild say, ‘For my nephew, you know.” Then Toni, who had had her nose in a grown-up book but had seen him out of the back of her head, said helpfully that he had forgotten the one he had put in the right-hand pocket of his raincoat. After that things were fast and mixed. The old man’s voice went shrill as a woman’s, Mrs Goodchild stood up and talked angrily about police and old Mr Goodchild walked up to the old man and demanded the book now and no nonsense or else. The old man came in a sort of dance, a twisting of the body, inward movement of the knees with arms almost flailing but not quite, and his high woman’s voice complaining, down the shop by the shelves and under the
cases and Sophy opened the door for him ting! and shut it after him, because that too had a bit of the
meant
about it that sometimes happened. Mr Goodchild’s face stopped being red quite quickly and he turned towards the twins but Mrs Goodchild talked to him first in the voice and words they were not supposed to understand.

“I can’t think why they’ve let that man out of you-know-where again. He’ll simply do it all over again, and there’ll be some other poor little mite—”

Mr Goodchild broke in.

“Well at least now we know who’s been taking the children’s books.”

After he had said that he became silly again, bowing to the twins.

“And how are the Misses Stanhope? Well, I trust?”

They answered him in beautiful unison.

“Yes thank you, Mr Goodchild.”

“And Mr Stanhope? He is well?”

“Yes thank you, Mr Goodchild.”

There was no question of being well as Sophy realized already. It was a thing people said, just as wearing a tie was something they did.

“I think, Mrs Goodchild,” said Mr Goodchild in a more than usually silly way, “that we can offer the Misses Stanhope some liquid refreshment?”

So they went with comfortable Mrs Goodchild who was never silly, but calm and matter-of-fact,
into the shabby sitting-room through the door at the back of the shop, where she sat them side by side on a sofa in front of a television set that was switched off and went away to get the fizzy drinks. Mr Goodchild stood in front of them, smiling and rocking on his toes and said how nice it was to see them and how he and they saw each other most days, didn’t they. He had a little girl of his own, well she was a big girl now, a married lady with two little children but a long way away in Canada. It was half-way through his next sentence, which was about how much pleasanter a house was with children in it—and of course he had to add something silly like, “or not children precisely, let
us say a pair of delightful young ladies like you,” whereas when they left home if they went a long way away—half-way or somewhere in this twisting sentence Sophy had a naked realization of her own power should she care to exercise it, to do
anything she liked with Mr Goodchild, that large, old, fat man with his shopful of books and his silly ways, she could do absolutely anything she liked with him only it would not be worth the trouble. So they sat, toes only just reaching the old carpet and gazed at things over their fizzy drinks. There was a large notice on one wall that said in big letters how
BERTRAND RUSSELL
would address
GREENFIELD PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
in the Assembly Rooms on
HUMAN FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY
at such and such a date. It was an old notice and getting dim and seemed odd since it was stuck or hung where most people would put a picture; but then in the rather gloomy light Sophy saw under the big
BERTRAND RUSSELL
, in small print, Chairman, S. Goodchild, and understood, more or less. Mr Goodchild went on talking.

Sophy asked what interested her.

“Mrs Goodchild. Please, why was the old man taking books?”

After that there was quite a long pause before anyone spoke. Mrs Goodchild took a long drink of her instant before she said anything.

“Well dear, it’s stealing, you see.”

“But he’s old,” said Sophy, looking up over the rim, “He’s old as old.”

After she said that, Mr and Mrs Goodchild looked at each other over their instant for quite a time.

“You see,” said Mr Goodchild at last, “he wants to give them to children as presents. He’s—he’s sick.”

“Some people would say he’s sick”, said Mrs Goodchild, meaning she wasn’t one of some people, “and needs a doctor. But others—” and it sounded as if Mrs Goodchild might be one of the others—“just think he’s a nasty, wicked old man and that he ought to be—”

“Ruth!”

“Yes. Well.”

Sophy could feel and almost see those shutters coming down that grown-ups had in constant supply when you wanted to know something really interesting. But Mrs Goodchild went off round a corner.

“What with W. H. Smith taking over and ruining the assembly rooms and the supermarket giving away paperbacks it’s hard enough keeping the place together without nasty old Pedigree helping us on the road to ruin.”

“At least we know now who’s been doing the shoplifting. I’ll have a word with Sergeant Phillips.”

Then Sophy saw him change the subject behind his face. He became fatter, rosier, beaming with his head a bit sideways. He spread out, his cup in one hand and the saucer in the other.

“But with the Misses Stanhope to entertain—”

Toni spoke in the pause, using her faint, clear voice in which every syllable was as precise as a line in a good drawing.

“Mrs Goodchild. What is Tran-scend-en-tal Phil-os-oph-y?”

Mrs Goodchild’s cup rattled in her saucer.

“God bless the child! Does your daddy teach you words like that?”

“No. Daddy doesn’t teach us.”

Sophy saw her fly away again and explained the thing to Mrs Goodchild.

“It’s the name on a book in your shop, Mrs Goodchild.”

“Transcendental Philosophy, my dear,” said Mr Goodchild in a jokey voice that had nothing to be jokey about, “might on the one hand be called a book full of hot air. On the other hand it might be considered the ultimate wisdom. You pays your money as they used to say and you takes your choice. Beautiful young ladies are not generally considered to stand in need of an understanding of Transcendental Philosophy on the grounds that they exemplify in themselves all the pure, the beautiful and the good.”

“Sim.”

It was evident that nothing was to be learnt from Mr and Mrs Goodchild. For a little while longer Sophy and Toni did their “remarkable children” thing, then said together—it was one of the few benefits of twinship—that they must go now, got down, did their “thank yous” demurely, to hear as they retreated down the shop old Mr Goodchild going on about “enchanting children” and Mrs Goodchild breaking in—

“You’d better have a word with Phillips this afternoon. I think old Pedigree is having one of his beastly times again. They ought to put him away for good.”

“He wouldn’t touch Stanhope’s little girls.”

“What difference does it make whose child it is?”

That night in bed, Sophy did a long brood that was almost a Toni, a drifting away up into the boughs. “Stanhope’s little girls?” It seemed to her that they weren’t anyone’s little girls. She sent
her mind round the circle of people who impinged; Gran, who had disappeared together with Rosevear and all that, Daddy, the cleaning women, aunts, a teacher or two, some children. She saw clearly that they belonged to each other and to no one else. As she didn’t like belonging to Toni and contrariwise, it was clear she wouldn’t like belonging to anyone else either. And then—that personal, that wholly isolated direction at the back of your head, the black place from which you looked out on things so that all of those people, even Toni,
out
there
—how could the creature called Sophy who sat there at the mouth of the tunnel behind her belong to anyone but herself? It was all silly. And if belonging was like being twin with a lot of people out there the way Daddy had lived with aunts and the Bells with each other and the Goodchilds with each other and all the others—but Daddy had his column room to disappear into and when he had disappeared into his column room—she saw suddenly, knees up to her chin—he could go further, do a Toni and disappear into his chess.

When she thought that, she opened her eyes and the room came into view with a glimmer from her dormer so she shut them again, wishing to stay inside. She knew she was not thinking the way grown-ups thought and there were so many of them and they were so big—

All the same.

Sophy became very still and held her breath. There was the old man and the books. She saw something. She had been told it often enough but now she
saw
it. You could choose to belong to people the way the Goodchilds and Bells and Mrs Hugeson did by being good, by doing what they said was right. Or you could choose what was real and what you knew was real—your own self sitting inside with its own wishes and rules at the mouth of the tunnel.

Perhaps the only advantage of being everything with a twin and knowing the exact Toni-ness of Toni was that in the morning Sophy had no hesitation in discussing the next step with her. She suggested they should steal sweets and Toni not only listened but contributed ideas. She said they would use a Paki shop because the Pakis couldn’t keep their eyes off her hair and she would hold the man’s attention while Sophy did the actual stealing. Sophy saw the reasonableness of this. If Toni let her hair fall over her face, then tried in a deliberately baby-way to get it clear and looked up through the tresses it was like doing a bit of magic. So
they went to the shop kept by the Krishna brothers and it was simply too easy. The younger Krishna was standing in the doorway and talking in a liquid voice to a blackie—“Now you go off you black fellow. We are not wanting your custom.” The twins sidled past him and inside the shop the older Krishna came forward from between sacks of brown sugar that were open for the scoops and said the shop was theirs. Then he positively forced curious sweets on them and added some curious sticks which he said were incense and refused to be paid for anything. It was humiliating and they abandoned the project, seeing that if they tried it on Mr Goodchild’s books it would be much the same; and the books were silly anyway. There was another thing that now presented itself to Sophy. They had more toys than they wanted and more pocket money than they wanted. All Daddy’s cleaning women and cousins ensured that. Worst of all, they found there was a group of kids at their school who were doing the same thing only on a larger scale,
really
stealing and sometimes breaking in and then selling the loot to those children who could afford to buy it. Sophy saw that stealing was wrong or right according to the way you thought, but both ways it was boring. Being bored was the real reason for not stealing, the reason that counted. Once or twice she thought about this matter so piercingly, it was as if right and wrong and boring were numbers you could add and subtract. She saw, too, in this particularly piercing way that there was another number, an x to be added or to be subtracted, for which she could find no value. The combination of the piercingness and the fourth number made her panicky and would have settled into a chilly fear, if she had not had the mouth of the dark tunnel to sit at and know herself to be not Sophy but
This.
This
lived and watched without any feelings at all and brandished or manipulated the Sophy-creature like a complicated doll, a child with all the arts and wiles and deliberate delightfulness of a quite unselfconscious, oh a quite innocent, naive, trusting little girl—brandished her among all the other children, white, yellow, brown, black, the other children who surely were as incapable of inspecting this kind of sum as they were of doing the others in their heads and had to write them down laboriously on paper. Then, suddenly, sometimes, it would be easy—flip!—to go out there and to join them.