Dark Places (21 page)

Then there were the children, also satisfactory enough, at least at a distance. For the longest time, Rundle had insisted on calling them my
pigeon pair
, until I had pointed out that pigeons were paired in order for them to copulate. He had not used the phrase again.

At seven, my daughter was a clumsy fat girl, bursting at the seams with herself: her skin was taut with the amount of Lilian packed within it. Her legs were solid tubes of flesh, her fingers bulged, her very ears seemed fat. When she walked up the stairs the pictures trembled on the walls, and when she plumped herself down in her chair at the breakfast table I could hear the snapping of wicker.

John sat over his plate like a toad, staring glassily with a strand of dribble still hanging from his chin, He was never going to amount to much. He sat in his little chair, goggling, his eyes set in pink flesh like a pet mouse's, stunned by the faces and talk around him. I could see none of myself in him. I had kept hope alive as long as I could, but now I had to face the fact that John was never going to grow out of being as puny as a bit of string. He was his mother's child, with his knobby knees, his plaintive little squeak of a voice, his large moist eyes that went into a panic at any little thing. Any dog, for example, even Kristabel's dreadful little lapdog, threw him into a state of hysteria, and it was always his mother he ran to, hiding in her skirts, and if I tried to prise him off her, and make him stretch out his hand for the dog to smell, and stand up straight like a man to look the dog in the eye, he set up a wailing as if I was poking him with needles.

I wondered at how different John was from the Albion Gidley Singer the world knew. He was like the other Albion made flesh: I might bury my weaknesses and fears beneath layers of manliness, but here it all was sprouting back up again in the form of my son, a buried weed sending up a sickly but obstinate shoot. I saw men look at me and look at John, and when they smiled at John it seemed to me there was something patronising there for me:
Poor old Singer
,
he seems right enough
,
but you only have to look at the boy to see the real story.
Had I been as bad as this when I was a boy? I could remember Father's impatience with me, heard myself using the same tone and the same words with John, and knew that, much as I hated the thought, John was the self out of which the splendid edifice of Albion Gidley Singer had created himself.

Lilian took a gigantic forkful of kidney; her cheeks puffed and bulged as she worked on the mass of food in her mouth, and as she did so she wriggled and gestured, her eyes winked and rolled: it could be seen that Lilian wished to speak. She forced the food into submission with her powerful jaws and swallowed like a snake gulping down a hen, and on a spray of kidney-fragments shouted, ‘Father, what is a gentleman?' She watched me minutely, waiting for an answer. ‘A gentleman is a man such as myself,' I answered, but she did not seem satisfied, and went on staring at the reflection of herself across the table. ‘Do not stare, Lilian, it is rude to stare,' Norah told her, and tapped her thick wrist, and her small eves slid away from mine at last, and she fingered a smear on the front of her pinafore.

But she was like a moth drawn back to a flame: her eyes crept back to my face. ‘Father,' she said in a wheedling way, and I said, ‘What is it, Lilian, speak up,' briskly, because I did not want my daughter to become a wheedler. ‘Can I be a gentleman too, Father?' she asked. I heard Norah laugh in an indulgent way, but there was a quality of startle in her laugh, as if she had longed for the same thing in her most private heart. ‘No, Lilian, I am afraid that girls cannot be gentlemen,' I said, and smirked across at her.

‘Why not, Father?' she insisted. ‘Why not?' Her curiosity was becoming repellant with eager spittle, but she did not realise, and looked at me brightly—
questioning is the mark of intelligence
, I had once told her, and she had taken me literally—and rushed on, her voice growing louder. ‘Is it because of titty-bags, Father?' and, in case I did not know what a
titty-bag
was, she pointed with her grubby finger at Norah's chest. ‘Those, Father, gentlemen never have those, do they?'

Norah made little gestures with her fingers at her from the end of the table, and creased her face into shapes that were supposed to make Lilian drop this line of enquiry. But I believed in calling a spade a spade, or, as in this case, a
titty-bag.
I chuckled in the way I had heard fathers chuckle at the drolleries of their children, and announced, ‘No, Lilian, but here is a fact that will interest you: the human titty-bag, or breast, is equipped with the same erectile tissue as the male organ of generation.' This gave rise to an associated fact in my mind, and I went on, over Norah's pipings of ‘Albion! Please!' from the end of the table. ‘Furthermore, the organ of generation of the stallion, Lilian'—how splendidly those two words rang together! —‘is over two feet long, and perfectly humanoid in form.'

Norah had few weapons, but those few she had, she used to the hilt. As so often before, she silenced her husband not by logic, or wit, or even by an appeal—it was some years now since Norah had tried the appeal—but by ringing the bell for Alma. We watched in silence as Alma chipped a cup, slopped the milk, and upset John's abandoned porridge-bowl, trying to get it all onto the tray with the master and mistress watching. I could hear her breathing loud in the silence; Alma was not a person who could be said to rise to an occasion.

Lilian seemed to have lost interest in titty-bags now, and got down from her chair. ‘May I be excused, Father?' she remembered to say, but did not remember to wait for an answer, and began to march up and down the verandah. Her feet thwacked down at each step so that her fat cheeks shook and the railing trembled.

Norah turned in her chair to watch her. ‘She has told me that she is being you,' she told me, when she stamps her feet like that,' and she watched me as if for a weakness. But my face was a good one for giving nothing away. ‘Yes, Norah,' I said without lifting my eyes from the newspaper. ‘She has told me too,' although in fact this was the first I had heard of it.

Women had always been the mysterious other, but Lilian was no other. Embedded within that gross casing of flesh, blurred but unmistakable, were my own features. As Rundle, that master of the wearying repetition, exclaimed whenever he saw her, she was
a chip off the old block
, and he was right for once: she was myself in miniature. Already the flesh of her heavy cheeks was beginning to form into magisterial grooves beside her nose, and it was all too easy to imagine her with a moustache.

Norah thought she understood all about the way my daughter took after me.
Oh
,
she is a real little echo
,
such a funny thing to see
, I had heard her gushing to Kristabel, and Kristabel had nodded, and looked hard at Lilian. ‘Yes,' she agreed. ‘She is very like Albion was as a boy,' but she gave Lilian a particularly warm and personal smile as she spoke, as if to say she forgave her, and added, ‘But you know, Lilian, your father was never as good at his Kings and Queens of England as you are, he always got muddled when he got to William and Mary,' and Lilian smiled back into her aunt's eyes.

Our resemblance was nothing so demeaning as
funny:
this was just Norah's way of belittling what she could not share. She tried to pretend that it was merely something rather quaint that Lilian should be a tiny feminised version of myself: something on the surface, a matter of mere noses and chins, and play-acting at ways of walking and talking. She could not begin to imagine the way we felt ourselves slide in and out of each other's beings, gazing into the distorting mirror of each other. That was something private between a father and his daughter, which no prying wife could have any part of.

But how could Norah be expected to guess at anything other than surfaces? She was content with the surface of her daughter— forever tweaking and pulling, the way Mother had done with Kristabel—as she was content with the surface of her husband.

It was me that Lilian adored. She could not respect her mother— what child of brains could respect a person with as much character as a glass of tap-water? I had listened to them speaking together at times when they did not know I was near, and was surprised to hear Lilian's gentleness with her mother, the soothing fibs, the reassuring but meaningless stream of small phrases: it was for all the world as though Lilian were the parent, and Norah the tetchy child.

With me, Lilian was not gentle. With me, she was invigorated by opposition: our minds wrestled in the best kind of intimacy. Give a fact to Norah, and it would disappear without trace, like a stone dropped into the sea. But offer a fact to my daughter and it would come back polished and warmed by challenge. What Norah had from Lilian was the gentleness of pity: what I had was the ferocity of love.

‘Family men are on the increase,' I stated in my clear fact-voice when we were all seated again, and Lilian was gouging the flesh out of a boiled egg. ‘There are thirty percent more family men than there were five years ago, and the number is rising by one-half of a percentile point per annum.' This was a good fact, and I chewed on a large rubbery piece of kidney while my family absorbed it.

My daughter watched me with small calculating eyes over her champing mouth, and finally spoke. ‘So, Father, there must be thirty percent more family women too.' She knew that an exchange of facts was what I loved best of all, and watched with a bright eager look as I prepared to parry and thrust another one at her. ‘Ah, but Lilian,' I crowed, ‘you are not in possession of all the facts. The fact is, women lack will, and do not live. Family women die out. Family men live to grand ages.'

Lilian looked at her plate, Norah shifted and coughed, John ground away obliviously at a crust. ‘The average age of death of a family man is sixty-eight,' I strode on, and no one would have tried to disagree. ‘Whereas women lack will, and have an average age of only sixty-four and a half.' My daughter watched me with admiring eyes, and I heaped facts upon her like caresses.

John had continued to champ blankly through all this, and champed still. When I exclaimed at him, ‘Stop that din, John, and let me hear the months of the year!' he stared in a fright and swallowed with a terrible gulping. ‘Yes, Father,' he said, because he knew better than to be silent when spoken to by his father, but was completely stumped by the months of the year. ‘October, June, Friday,' he suggested at random. I could see Lilian itching to tell him: she squirmed against her chair, longing to rattle off the months of the year, and steal a little more approval from her father, while John sat staring at the tablecloth, his narrow white face blank with stupidity, and I seethed and frothed within.

‘Oh look,' exclaimed Norah, in the special sweet little piping voice she used to talk about sweet little piping things. ‘Look at the sweet little sparrows, look, they want to join us for breakfast. Look, Lilian!' Lilian glanced over at the sparrows without interest, but Norah was determined; her voice grew more shrill as she insisted on her little bit of whimsy, and tried to make Lilian join her in it. ‘Look, Lilian, do you think that big one is the Daddy? And that one with the bright little eyes must be the Mummy, Lilian, look!' In her own velvety way, Norah could hector, every bit as well as I could myself.

But Lilian was too much her father's daughter to have any interest in this kind of twaddle. My heart swelled with pride as I heard her say in a flat, matter-of-fact way, ‘Yes, Mother, and the Daddy has just done number two on the step.' Norah's head drew back into its neck and her coaxing smile congealed; but now Lilian was interested. ‘Oh look, Mother,' she cried eagerly. ‘Look, a dead one!' She sprang up from her chair, and ran down the steps, scattering birds before her. A moment later she ran back up, holding something that she laid next to Norah's plate. ‘Look, Mother,' she cried. ‘Look, it is dead.' The fledgling she had carried up to the terrace was nothing more than a slack grey sac, with a small beak hopelessly ajar on air, tiny dead claws clenched, dead enough for ants to be investigating the jelly of its eye. ‘Look, Mother,' she shouted enthusiastically. ‘The skin is so thin you can see its guts, look!'

Poor old Norah, with her silly little rose-blossom prettiness about everything: she had nothing to tell Lilian about dead birds and their guts. ‘Dear,' she said faintly, a hanky at the ready at her mouth, ‘young ladies try not to think about such things.' She appealed to me. ‘Albion, will you get rid of it, please?'

God is said to note the death of every sparrow, but I myself would note the death of this particular one. ‘I disagree, Norah,' I said. ‘Even young ladies should know the brute facts of nature. Putting your head in the sand is a coward's way.'

I turned to Lilian, who was now poking at the flabby corpse with a piece of twig. ‘Regard, Lilian, how wonderful are the ways of Nature: in that nest a sparrow hatched more chicks than she could feed, and here we see Nature's iron law being acted out.' Lilian nodded and flipped the thing over with her twig so that it quivered as if alive. ‘The fact of the matter, Lilian, is that the world only needs a finite number of sparrows, and this particular sparrow exceeded that number.'

She nodded. ‘Yes, Father, I see.' Her eyes were fixed on mine as if physically sucking in the wisdom I had for her, and under her admiring gaze I warmed to the occasion. ‘It is a well-known fact, Lilian, that a sparrow eats three times its body weight each day. Imagine, Lilian, if you ate three times your own body weight each day!'

Ah, my gigantic daughter blinked at that, and suddenly smiled at me. ‘Oh, but Father, I probably do!' With a sidelong look at Norah, she said, ‘Father, you know the scalpel you gave me for the frogs, can I cut this up with it?' Norah was beginning, ‘Absolutely not, Lilian,' but I rode her down with my orator's voice. ‘Splendid idea, Lilian, but do it soon or it will start to smell.'