Darkness Visible (14 page)

This discovery of what-is-what might have seemed very
important except that their eleventh birthday was the start of a really dreadful month for Sophy and perhaps for Toni, though Toni did not seem to be as affected. It was on the birthday itself. They had a cake, bought from Timothy’s and with ten candles round the top with one in the middle. Daddy actually came all the way down from the column room to share in the tea and he was jokey in the way that did not suit him or his hawk’s face that always made Sophy think of princes and pirates. He told them after only the slightest many happy returns and before they’d even blown out the candles. He told them he and Winnie were getting married so they’d have what he called a proper mother. Sophy knew a lot of things in the burning moment after he stopped speaking. She knew the difference between Winnie keeping her clothes in the aunties’ room and paying Daddy visits; and Winnie going straight in there to undress and get in bed and be called Missis Stanhope and perhaps (because it happened in stories) having babies that Daddy would want the way he didn’t want the twins, his twins and nobody else’s. It was a moment of deadly anguish—Winnie with her painted face, her yellow hair, her strange way of speaking, and her smelling like a ladies’ hairdressers’. Sophy knew it couldn’t happen, couldn’t be allowed to happen. All the same, that was no comfort and she couldn’t get her mouth together to blow but it went wider and she began to cry. Even the crying was all wrong because it began in sheer woe but then because she was exhibiting it before Winnie, and worse, before Daddy, thus informing him how important he was, it got mixed up with rage. Also she knew that even when she had done with crying, the fact would still be there, massive and unbearable. She heard Winnie speak.

“Over to you, cobber.”

Cobber was Daddy. He came and said things over her shoulder, touched her so that she twisted herself away and there was silence after a time. Then Daddy roared in a terrible voice.

“Christ! Children!”

She heard him thumping down the wooden stairs into the coachhouse and then hurrying up the garden path. The door into the hall slammed so hard it was a wonder the glass didn’t break. Winnie went after him.

After she had got rid of all her tears without improving the situation she sat up on her divan bed and looked across at Toni on
hers. Toni was the same as usual except that she was a bit pink in the cheek—no tears. She simply said in an offhand voice;

“Cry-baby.”

Sophy was too miserable to answer. She wanted nothing so much as to get right away and abandon Daddy, forget him and his treachery. She rubbed her face and said they should go along the towpath because Winnie told them not to. They did this at once though it seemed weak and nowhere near a reply to the awful news. Only by the time they had got to the old boat by the broken lock Winnie and Daddy did seem a bit smaller and farther away. They mooned about on the boat for a bit and they discovered a clutch of duck’s eggs that had been left there a long time. When she saw the eggs, everything came quite clear in Sophy’s head. She saw how she would torment Winnie and Daddy, go on and on tormenting them till she had driven them both mad and away, both taken away like Mr Goodchild’s son in the mental hospital.

After that things happened the way they were intended to happen. They fell together in a kind of “Of course” way, as if the whole world was co-operating. It was meant that when they got back to the birthday cake and ate some of the icing—there was no sense in leaving it—they should decide to open the old leather trunk they had been told not to and find the bunch of rusty keys there. The keys opened everything usually kept shut. That night, sitting up in bed, her knees against her new breasts, Sophy saw clearly that one of the old eggs was meant for Winnie. She found herself overcome with a passionate desire in the darkness to be Weird—there was no other name for it, Weird and powerful. She frightened herself and curled down in the bed but the dark tunnel was still there; and in that remote security she saw what to do.

Next day she found how easy it was. You just looked for the areas of inattention with which grown-ups were so liberally supplied and walked through them. You could do it quite briskly and no one could see or hear you. Therefore, briskly she unlocked the drawer in the little table by Daddy’s bed, broke the egg in it and walked away briskly. She put the key back with the others on the heavy ring that quite obviously had not been used for years and felt it was the nearest she could get to being Weird but not really satisfactory. That day she was so preoccupied in school that even Mrs Hugeson noticed and asked what was the matter. Nothing of course.

That night in her bed under the dormer in the stables she brooded about being weird. She tried to join things together about weirdness but could not. It was not arithmetic. Everything floated, the private tunnel, the things that were meant and oh, above all, the deep, fierce, hurting need, desire, to hurt Winnie and Daddy up there in the bedroom. She brooded and wished and tried to think and then brooded again; and presently her feelings made her want so desperately to be weird for this occasion that she saw in a kind of supposing that burnt, how it should have been. Now she saw herself glide up the garden path, through the glass door, up the stairs, gliding through the bedroom door to the big bed where Daddy lay and Winnie curled, her back to him. So she went to the little table which now had three books on it by the bedside lamp and she thrust her hand with the egg through the locked wood and she broke the egg beside the other one, so eek, so stinky-poo, so oof and pah and she left the two messes there. Then she turned and looked down and she aimed the dark part of her head at sleeping Winnie and gave her a nightmare so that she jerked in bed and shrieked aloud; at which the shriek kind of woke Sophy—though it could not wake her as she had never been asleep—and she was in her own bed with her own shriek and she was deadly frightened by the weirdness and she cried out after her own shriek, “Toni! Toni!” But Toni was asleep and off away wherever it was so Sophy had to lie for a long time, curled up, frightened and shaking. Indeed she began to feel that going on being weird would be too much and that grown-ups would win after all, because too much weirdness made you sick. But then Uncle Jim appeared from fucking Sydney.

At first everyone had fun with Uncle Jim, even Daddy, who said he was a natural comedian. But not more than a week after the birthday party that had gone wrong Sophy noticed how much time he was beginning to spend with Winnie; and she wondered about it all and was a bit scared that she might have produced him by being weird. After all, he did kind of dilute the situation, she said to herself, proud of having found a word that was even better than just the right word, he diluted everybody’s feelings and made them—well, dilute.

On the seventh of June, that being approximately a fortnight after the birthday, when Sophy was already accustomed to thinking of herself as eleven, she was behind the old rose bush and
squatting down, and watching the ants being busy about nothing when Toni came flying down the garden path and up the wooden stairs to their own room. This was so astonishing that Sophy went to see. Toni wasted no time in explanations.

“Come.”

She grabbed Sophy’s wrist, but she resisted.

“What—?”

“I need you!”

Sophy was so astonished she allowed herself to be led. Toni went quickly up the garden path and into the hall. She stood outside the door of the column room and put her hair straight. She held on to Sophy’s wrist and opened the door. Daddy was there, looking at a chess set. The Anglepoise light was switched on and lowered over it, though the sun was shining outside.

“What do you two want?”

Sophy saw that Toni had gone bright red for the first time in memory. She gave a little gasp, then spoke in her faint, colourless voice.

“Uncle Jim is having sexual relationships with Winnie in the aunties’ bedroom.”

Daddy stood up very slowly.

“I—you—”

There was a pause of a kind of woollen silence, prickly, hot, uncomfortable. Daddy went quickly to the door, then across the hall. They heard him on the other stairs.

“Winnie? Where are you?”

The twins ran, Toni white now, ran to the glass door down into the garden, Sophy leading. Sophy ran all the way down to the stables again, she hardly knew why or why she was excited and frightened and scared and triumphant. She was up in the room before she saw that Toni had not come with her. It was perhaps ten minutes before she came, slowly and still even whiter than usual.

“What happened? Is he angry? Were they doing that? Like in the lectures? Toni! Why did you say ‘I need you?’ Did you hear them? Did you hear him? Daddy? What did he say?”

Toni was lying on her tummy, her forehead on the backs of her hands.

“Nothing. He shut the door and came down again.”

After that, there was a pause of about three days; and then
when the twins came back from school in the afternoon they walked through a furious grown-up row. It was high above their heads and Sophy walked away from it down the garden path, half hoping that weirdness was working but wondering in a gloomy sort of way if all that really worked was what Toni had done, in letting Daddy know a secret. But whichever it was, that was the day it was all done with. Winnie and Uncle Jim went away that very evening. Toni—who did not, it appeared, concern herself with the idea of being weird at a distance—had stayed as close to the grown-ups as she could and reported helpfully to Sophy what she had heard without trying to explain it. She said Winnie had gone with Uncle Jim because he was a digger and she was sick of fucking Poms it had all been a mistake anyway Daddy was too fucking old and the kids were a consideration and she hoped there were no hard feelings. Sophy was half-sorry and half-glad to know that she had not got rid of Winnie by being weird. But Uncle Jim was a real loss. Toni dropped one piece of information which did show Sophy how carefully her twin had planned and gone about the whole scheme.

“She had a passport. She was a foreigner. Her real name wasn’t ‘Winnie’. It was ‘Winsome’.”

This struck the twins as so funny they were happy with each other for quite a while.

There were no more aunties after Winnie, and Daddy spent regular times in London at a club and doing his chess broadcasts. There was a long series of cleaning ladies who did the bit of the house that wasn’t occupied by the solicitors and the Bells. There was also a sort of cousin of Daddy’s who stayed every now and then, overhauled their clothes, told them about periods and God. But she was a colourless character not worth being friends with or tormenting.

In fact, after the disposal of Winnie time stopped. It was as if after climbing a slope they had both come to a plateau, the edges of which were out of sight. Perhaps this was partly because their twelfth birthday went unnoticed by Daddy, there being no Winnie or other auntie to remind him. Both twins were made aware in the course of that year that they had phenomenal intelligence, but this was no news, really, except that it did explain why all other children seemed so dim. To Sophy the phrase “phenomenal intelligence” was a useless bit of junk lying in her mind and not
really connected to anything that would be worth having or doing. Toni seemed the same, unless you knew her the way that Sophy did. It showed, perhaps, in the way that they quickly found themselves in different classes for certain subjects, though not all. It showed itself more subtly in the way that Toni would sometimes say things offhand that settled a question for good. You could tell then that long thought had preceded the words; but there was no other evidence for it.

Periods, when they happened, hurt Sophy and enraged her. Toni seemed indifferent to them, as if she could leave her body to get on with its job and be away somewhere herself, out of the whole business of feeling. Sophy knew that she herself had these long, still times; but she knew they weren’t thinking, they were brooding. It was when she had a period and it hurt that she began to brood again—for the first time since Winnie—on the whole business of being weird and what there was in it. She found herself doing some strange things too. Once, near Christmas, she went into the deserted aunties’ room and then had to think—why did I come here? She brooded some more—standing by the head of the stripped single bed on which the ancient electric blanket, creased and stained with iron mould, seemed ugly as a surgical appliance—brooded on the
why
and decided that she had had some vague wish to find out what an auntie was and what they had in common; and then, with a shiver of a kind of dirty excitement and also disgust she knew that she wanted to find out what there was about them that made Daddy summon them to his bed. While she was thinking that, she heard him come out of the column room and run up the stairs two at a time if not more, slam the bathroom door—and then there was running water and all that. She thought of the duck’s egg by his bed and wondered why no one had ever said anything about it; but with him in the bathroom there was no chance of going in his bedroom to see. She stood there by the single bed and waited for him to go down.

Any reasonable auntie would have been glad to get out of that room. There was an old rug by the bed, a chair, a dressing-table and large wardrobe and nothing else. She tiptoed to the window and looked down the garden path to the dormers of the stabling. She opened the top drawer of the dressing-table and there was Winnie’s little transistor lying in the corner. Sophy took it out and
examined it with a comfortable feeling of security from Winnie. She felt a bit of triumph as she switched on the set. The battery was still live so that a miniature pop group began to perform miniature music. The door opened behind her.

It was Daddy, standing in the door. She looked at him and saw why Toni had such a white skin. There was a long silence between them. She was the first to speak.

“Can I keep it?”

He looked down at the little leather-sheathed case in her hands. He nodded, swallowed, then went away as swiftly as he had come, down the stairs. Triumph triumph, triumph! It was like capturing Winnie and keeping her caged and never letting her out—Sophy sniffed the case carefully and decided that none of Winnie’s scent had clung to it. She took it away, back to the stables. She lay on her divan bed and thought of a tiny Winnie shut there in the box. It was silly of course, to think that—but as she said that to herself she had a thought to go with it; having a period is silly! Silly! Silly! It deserves to have a duck’s egg, a stink, some dirt.