Dark Places (16 page)

Mackenzie stood gesturing us through the door first, but did not actually look at us: his face had the bland benign expression of a man used to being recognised in public. But to my horror, I saw that Ogilvie was pressing forward, was catching Mackenzie's eye, was about to address him! I willed him not to: Mackenzie must spend his days being unctuously greeted by men he could not remember, and I did not wish to be labelled as a gusher along with Ogilvie. I could imagine only too clearly the way Mackenzie's large face would go more bland than ever, the corners of his enormous mouth stretched fractionally by muscles within: he would look at both of us, only too obviously trying in vain to remember who we were, and he would finish by giving us the most remote of smiles, as one might to a servant, and would sweep in ahead of us without a backward glance.

‘Sir Arthur,' Ogilvie was beside me, crying out. ‘Great day for a punt, Sir Arthur, is it not?' Schemes flashed through my mind to disassociate myself from Ogilvie—ideas of bending to tie my bootlace, or having a sneezing-fit into my handkerchief, or simply turning away as if I had heard my name called. But there was no time for any of these measures. Mackenzie's eyes slid over both of us, and I was stiff with mortification.

But to my astonishment his massive face creased and spread into a smile, and there was no mistaking the fact that he gave Ogilvie a wink! ‘I find most days are good days for a punt, Mr Ogilvie,' he said mildly, and Ogilvie let out a graceless cackle which Mackenzie seemed to appreciate. He directed his smile at me for a moment, but blindly: I was simply The Man With Ogilvie. It was clear that I had no existence for him as a man whose opinions of the contents of a steak-and-kidney pie he had appeared to take seriously.

In the bar the crush of gentlemen baying at each other over the din was enormous. I could see that Ogilvie was excited by it, as if it was a bit of a lark that we were here among important men. He acted as though we were here by some sort of accident or trickery, like children sneaking in the back of the circus tent, and I was torn between being a man of dignity with every right to be here, and joining him in being what was much more stimulating, another man-about-town off the leash for the day.

I allowed Ogilvie to breast the bar on our behalf, and established myself in a corner. I busied myself staring at the surroundings, while I could hear Ogilvie crying out, ‘Hoy! Hoy!' to attract the attention of the barmaid, not caring who stared, and I admired him for not caring.

We had a high time of it all afternoon. I was finally persuaded to try the thrill of the wager, and saw just what he meant when, in spite of my resolution to stay completely calm, I found myself shouting, ‘Go, Blue Streak, go!' and experienced a wonderful rush of blood to the head to see my horse actually come third! Ogilvie clapped me on the back and cried, ‘My word, Singer, I knew you would have an aptitude for this gambling business! Well done, my dear fellow, well done!' His praise made me warm, and I found my tongue large and inert in my mouth. Sheer gladness had swelled it into stillness.

Fifteen

NORAH RUSHED to and fro with napkins and bonnets and grew more and more hectoring with the nursemaid. She began to sigh theatrically when the children could be heard crying from the nursery, and she would fling down her napkin and leave another meal to congeal: what heavy weather she made of being a woman! Bearing children was after all no great achievement, but something which millions of illiterate primitives did every day of the week, and thought no more about it.

What a perversity there was to life! Norah, weak and winsome Norah, who had once admitted to me that she could never remember how many feet were in a mile, much less how many inches there were in a rod, perch, or pole—that silly Norah had become possessed of the ultimate fact: other beings out of her own flesh.

The injustice of it all! My wife had looked within herself and seen a living being; I looked within myself and saw nothing. Oh, there were plenty of facts which I could tell over to myself when the world began to spin: I knew how many feet there were in a mile, and how many inches there were in a rod, pole or perch, and I even knew the number of fluid ounces in a gill or firkin. From my now extensive researches, I could inform Norah that a Russian peasant woman had been independently assessed as having produced sixty-nine children, over twenty-seven confinements; that the common tenrec of Madagascar could produce thirty-six offspring at a single birth, whereas the most a female of the human species had ever produced was eight, and all died within fourteen hours. I could even tell her of the Asiatic elephant, with a gestation period of over two years, as compared with the human's mere nine months. All this should have put things in perspective for Norah, but she did not seem to realise what small beer her two children were in the big scheme of things. She remained unimpressed, and although I bought more and more books of a scientific nature, and began a complex filing system for my facts, I knew I could never be filled, as Norah had been filled. I might know every fact in the universe, and was even seriously considering assembling a book from those facts, but I could never create such a colossal fact as my soft-headed wife could do effortlessly in simply fulfilling the laws of her animal biology.

I had to remind myself that it was my own vital spark that had allowed all this to happen within Norah. Out of my own loins, my own homunculus had travelled into the darkness of Norah's interior. I imagined millions of tadpoles, each with my own face, squirting into Norah and doing battle with each other so that it was only the strongest, the swiftest, and the cleverest that managed to burrow into the blank egg within her.

But at those times when all my achievements were nothing more than a puff of air, this was not enough to reassure me. I peered into myself to see more, but saw nothing: there was just this emptiness surrounded by a series of correct facial manipulations and appropriate phrases, going on for a little span of time. Down there along the tunnel of the future, the will operating the facial manipulations and the phrases would wink out like a light, and after that there would be nothing more, ever. The thought drove me up to my study, where I drew paper towards me, filled my pen with my darkest ink, and made a start.
Chapter One
, I wrote in my fine hand at the top of a page, and began at the beginning:
Man (homo sapiens) is a species in the sub family Hominidae of the super-family Horninoidea of the sub-order Simiae (or Anthropoidea) of the order Primates of the infra-class Eutheria of the subclass Theria of the class Mammalia of the sub-phylum Vertebrata (Craniata) of the phylum Chordata of the sub-kingdom Metazoa of the animal kingdom.

Further than this I could not seem to go for the moment. I laid down my pen and decided that more research was needed: the facts had to be all at my fingertips, and then the writing-out would be a simple enough affair.

Such thoughts did something to still the agitation in my heart, but were not enough. I was still conscious of the fact that Norah, tending to the children, would always be a part of them, and of their children, and their children's children, and so on into eternity:
Mother
, an image graven on every heart. When Norah's being winked out, she would live on in the beings she had created. In bringing forth flesh from her own flesh, Norah had succeeded in locking me more tightly than ever into solitude. I felt something like panic: Norah, my own wife, had rendered me more hollow than ever.

Before we were wed, I had had some idea that a wife might, over time, look into the being of a husband, and would come to love what she saw there. But Norah had never attempted to look into my being: she had always been happy to take me at face value, and see only the Albion she wished to see.
You are such a strong silent type
,
Albion
, she would cry teasingly, or,
Oh Albion
,
how kind you are
,
how handsome
,
how this
,
how that!

I had been happy enough in the beginning for her to adore the manufactured Albion Gidley Singer, although there had been times when I had felt stifled by so much adoration. But now that the children filled her life, adoration had got a bit thin on the ground, and my hidden self ached with invisibility like something toxic.

‘Norah,' I wanted to say, wanted to beg, to plead even, ‘look'; I wanted somehow to say, ‘this is the person I am, Norah, look into my heart and take me in.' But I did not know of any words a man might be able to use, to ask for what he needed, and I stayed silent.

Norah was replete, now, and she began to turn away from the husband who was becoming a shadowy figure to her. When I began to finger her upper arm in a way which she and I both knew to signal an approach towards other more intimate parts of her body, she drew herself away in the chair and turned her face away. More and more often she took refuge behind headaches and indispositions, and quoted the doctor at me—did I imagine her smugness?—who had, she said, told her most particularly to avoid any type of
amative excitement.
‘Albion dearest,' she said in a flat way, ‘I feel I must conserve my strength, for the sake of my milk,' or, ‘the children have quite worn me out,' or, ‘I must just make sure Cook has got Lilian's arrowroot mould right this time.'

I would hold myself with even more than my usual uprightness as I left the room after such a rebuff, and yet I found the word
slinking
coming into my mind, and the humiliating image of a cur kicked away from a bitch on heat. ‘But Norah,' I cried out in my heart, ‘it is not just a body I want: I want, I need, I beg you for something more than that,' but if she did not know, there was no point in telling her.

Norah was managing to make malingering into an art-form. She lay for days on end on her chaise-longue with the blinds lowered, sucking on cachous, with her various tonics ranged beside her on the table. I was exasperated by her endless little ladylike indispositions, and the fact that I was forced to pander to them because of what everyone referred to delicately as her
troubles.

And finally I tired of the game: a man could not be forever wrestling open the door that should have been standing hospitably open at all times. She had cried
No
,
no Albion!
once too often. I knew she meant
yes
, but that lewd and teasing wife of mine, who had never given me the satisfaction of admitting she enjoyed it (but why else did her nipples grow hard like my own organ, why else did she writhe and cry out?), could be taken at her word and go without. She would be the loser, not I.

In fact, I could hardly remember now why I had wished to try to rouse Norah to passion: how had I ever found her tantalising as she lay fending me off, so that I had steamed and fumed over her until she had cried out? She was as attractive to me now as a clod of dirt. I looked at her, down-turned of mouth, sallow of complexion, altogether without charm.

Her voice alone was enough to irritate me now, a voice at once plaintive and triumphant: the voice of a person who has won, but in an underhand way. It sometimes crossed my mind, as I was forced to fetch a cushion, or ring for tea, or bring her her embroidery from the next room, that Norah was wearing the pants now in our household, exerting the tyrannical power of the weak. Sometimes I looked at her face, which had grown strangely swarthy since she had given birth to John, and wondered if she was even growing a moustache to go with the pants.

It was a victory for Norah, but I was determined it should not be a defeat for myself. In my more clear-headed moments I recognised that this was Nature's law. Norah's enticement had done its job now: there was no need of further enticement on her part, or further fever on mine, because we had reproduced ourselves: the race, as represented by Albion and Norah Singer, was now in a position to continue.

Was this why Norah's adoration had faded and gone mouldy? Did she think I was expendable now? In her eyes, was I no more than the sum of my sperm?

What she did not realise—what no woman can realise, perhaps— is that Nature operates with a considerable margin for error. She equips the male of the species with a compulsion that exceeds the strict requirements of the case. The world was full of normal women who longed for just such a man as myself: it was nothing more than the safety-net with which Nature provides herself.

Sixteen

AT THE END of a certain narrow laneway in a certain part of town, there was a house where I was always made welcome. In this house a certain Mrs Smith sat near the door to open it to anyone who happened to knock, and behind Mrs Smith, Agnes and Una sat in the front room, cosy and frightful with wallpaper and pampas grass.

‘I will just be out for a little, Norah,' I would say, and leave a space in which she could look at the clock, look at the darkness of the night beyond the curtains, and ask, ‘Why Albion, wherever are you going at this hour?' I had my answers ready. ‘Oh, I am just going to pay a visit to some friends, Norah,' I would say, slightly emphasising the
pay
, and would stare at her until the penny dropped and she would look away. But she never asked, never once. She yawned, she stretched herself, she glanced at the clock, but all she said was, ‘Well, I will turn in, Albion, I will see you in the morning.'

‘Oh, Mr Smith!' exclaimed Mrs Smith (it was a house full of Smiths, this one). ‘Is it to be Agnes tonight, or will it be Una?' Mrs Smith was positively oily in her welcome. ‘Have a look, Mr Smith, and let me know.' Over the time I had been visiting this house, Agnes and Una had undergone several changes as to colour of eyes and shape of mouth, but Agnes and Una were always spry little fillies, marble as to shoulder, and melon as to breasts, and Mr Smith had never failed to be satisfied by them.

Agnes and Una exclaimed over me, and patted my arm, and laughed at nothing very much as they ushered me along the hall past the artisic prints. ‘Dear Mr Smith,' they cooed. ‘Such a pleasure to see you again, Mr Smith,' they clucked.