Dark Places (29 page)

That Duncan was a fool in flannels: the racquet stuck out awkwardly from the end of his arm, and balls fell out of his hands before he could toss them up in the air for a serve. This was contemptible, but what seemed worse to me as that he did not mind. ‘Oh, what a duffer I am!' he exclaimed and laughed, missing another easy ball from Lilian with a wild swing that made him stagger. ‘Could we try using a football, and I might have half a chance!' he called out, and I thought it was a pretty feeble joke, but Lilian laughed fit to burst. He floundered, and ran after balls he had no hope of hitting, and I was embarrassed for him.

I sat up in the umpire's chair calling out, ‘Fault, fault,' time and again; or, when the miracle happened and he got the ball over the net, ‘Out!' He took it all with a silly smile, but Lilian took his part, and protested when a ball was close to the line, ‘No, Father, I saw it, it was in, it was definitely in!' I did not wish to argue with her in front of guests, but sang out, ‘The umpire's decision is final, those are the rules.' Lilian called up, ‘But Father,' her face unpleasantly red from running to Duncan's wild balls and laughing, ‘we must give the poor fellow a chance, and turn a blind eye now and then, or there will be no game!' From my height, the top of my daughter's head was odiously pointed, ugly under the sun where the hair lay flat on her skull. And what an idiotic idea! If winning was not the point of playing a game, what point could there possibly be?

Just the same, I could sympathise with Lilian. No woman should win a game so resoundingly against a man: it is not a good thing for a woman to show a man up, even a man as foolish as Duncan. I softened at this proof that my daughter had, after all, some sense of the proper. But although in defending Duncan she was upholding the dignity of one male, she was undermining the authority of another, and that could not be allowed.

‘If you go on disagreeing with the umpire, Lilian, he will have to leave,' I warned, for I had no wish to look ridiculous, perched up there umpiring nonsense. Lilian looked up at me, squinting into the sun so I could not see her expression, and I thought she might argue, but she returned to play. At the next ball I called again, ‘Out!' My voice was crisp: it was a pleasure to hear it cutting out so cleanly across the court. But Lilian was beneath me again, calling up, ‘No, Father, I assure you it was definitely in, there is no possible doubt about it, I must disagree with you.'

She stood there squat and foreshortened, obviously prepared to make difficulties with me all day. ‘Very well,' I said in a pointedly quiet way, and climbed down from the chair. ‘Very well, Lilian, then you must do without an umpire.' I walked off the court without looking back, sure they would call out and ask me to return. But Lilian was too obstinate, and Duncan too ineffectual, and was in any case a guest, and no doubt reluctant to take the initiative. I did not give Lilian the pleasure of seeing me hesitate as I entered the house, but walked into the cool, blinded for a moment in the deep shadow of the hall.

A voice came from the darkness, the voice of my invisible wife. ‘That was a very quick game, Albion, to be finished already,' and as we stood in the dimness and I saw my wife's shape in the doorway I said, ‘Lilian must learn, Norah, that rules must be obeyed, and that a game without rules is simply nonsense.' But in the silence after I had spoken we heard the hollow mocking sound of a tennis ball hitting one racquet, then another, backwards and forwards, and then the thin silly sound of people laughing out-of-doors.

Later, when everyone was reassembling for more tea and cake, I did not want to be close to Lilian and Duncan. Lilian was more fat and freckled than I could believe, and her stringy mouse-coloured hair was loosening itself in wild strands around her face. I saw with distaste that there were large circles of sweat beneath her arms: surely this perspiring person could be no daughter of mine! She stood swinging her racquet between two fingers so it bounced on her knee in its muslin; she smiled and wiped the hair and perspiration off her face, and stood much too close to Duncan, who probably had no more wish than I did to be too close to such an overexerted female.

Although, when I looked, I saw that he too was showing the signs of vigorous movement in the hot sun: he panted and grinned not unlike a large well-intentioned dog. It would hardly have surprised me if he had begun licking things with a thick rough tongue.

Duncan brought her a cup of tea, and perched on the arm of her chair, and they sniggered together over an album of postcards. What a sweaty animal warmth emanated from them!

Deep in the armchair, Lilian pointed to something, laughing up at Duncan, inviting him to laugh with her. I did not care for it. Hers was the sort of smile that might—in another woman, in another set of circumstances—have been an invitation. I made a mental note to take her aside at some point and tell her a thing or two about smiles, their temperature and duration, or she would find herself being misunderstood.

A cup of tea was inserted into my hand and I accepted it, though I waved away the pikelets thrust into my face by some silly woman bursting out of royal-blue watered-silk. I knew a pikelet could be trusted not to explode into a thousand fragments around your boots, but I had long ago made it a policy never to eat on social occasions. She billed and cooed at me about what a splendid place I had here, and what a lovely sight the young folk made, and my word just look at the blue of that jacaranda out the window: all these mothers had an inexhaustible store of platitudes to keep the shallow river of chatter tinkling along.

When I looked again, the corner where my daughter had been was empty. The album of postcards was lying open, abandoned on the table like something broken.

‘And where is Lilian?' I asked, in what I had intended to be the most casual of enquiries, but I saw mothers turn, and realised that I might perhaps be bellowing. One of them, a withered-up affair in drooping navy that showed the chicken-flesh of her upper chest, spoke up loudly, as if on a stage, and said, ‘She may just be powdering her nose at the minute, Mr Singer,' and she actually winked at me. How dare they, these dough-like women, these pimping mothers, how dare they mock me, making a female conspiracy out of every little thing?

I sauntered away to find Lilian. I had not outlaid good money for her to hide away powdering her nose when she ought to be getting down to business like the rest of them. But I came across John before I found Lilian: his head was down and he was coming out of the middle of a bush. When he saw me, it looked as though he would have liked to retreat back into the bush, but it had closed behind him like a valve.

‘Where is your sister, John?' I asked. There was not much male shoulder-to-shoulder comradeliness in our household, but finally I got out of him that she was in the shrubbery. ‘By herself ?' I wanted to know, and John thought, and said, ‘I am not sure, Father,' in his toneless way, unable to decide whether Lilian would get into greater trouble if she was there alone or with someone else.

I made myself very silent and slipped through the shrubbery, until my eye was caught by a flutter of white under the trees beyond the tennis-court. Over there, hidden from everyone, Lilian was jumping up and down, trying to catch a feather. In the tumid green of this space, with bushes crowding in all around, and the trees as dense as thatch overhead, the little feather was uncannily white. Laughing Lilian sprang in an inefficient way, so that the feather eluded her, buoying itself up on the currents of air she was producing. She was laughing so much that even from where I stood, I could see her fine pointed teeth, and how she was rosy and sparkling from her efforts. She leaped and bounced, and her hem flounced around her thighs and her bosom jumped up and down as if with a life of its own.

I watched, and was about to call out when I saw that Lilian was not alone under the tree. The young man called Duncan stood there, the stripes of his blazer lurid in the syrupy shade, staring at her with his mouth hanging open.

She called out something to him and he went over to her; as they stood still together, looking up, the feather wafted down between them and with one decisive movement he had it caught in his hand. He handed it to her and she stroked her cheek with it, looking up at him. Her pink mouth grimaced and stretched, smiling and pushing words out at him, playing with the feather in her hands. I could not hear, but I could see the fluid shapes that her mouth was making.

‘Lilian!' I called, rather louder than I had intended. They jumped when I spoke, and stepped back from each other, which made me realise just how closely together they had been standing; Duncan hung his head, but Lilian stared pertly at me, still caressing her cheek with the feather.

‘Lilian, you are being remiss about your duties as hostess,' I called out, but I could hear how my voice sounded puny in this vaulted green space, how lisping all those sibilants sounded. ‘Come along, Lilian, if you please,' I said in a lower and less shrill voice, and waited until they passed in front of me. ‘And give me that rubbish,' I told Lilian, taking the feather from her hand. ‘You are not a child any longer, Lilian, kindly take a grip on yourself.' As I walked along behind her huge white bottom working up and down against its muslin, I could not stop my mouth forming a smile so wide I could feel the air cool on my teeth, at the idea of Lilian taking a grip on herself.

Twenty-Six

THE HERDING OF FACTS into my brain had been my consolation for many years now. That void at the heart of things shrank away in the face of so many facts brought to heel, and a man could find a way to go on, while he told his facts over to himself and devised new kinds of colour-coding, new ways of cross-referencing, and new combinations of the alphabet.

My facts had long since overflowed my study, had taken over the spare bedroom entirely, and were still expanding. What was happening brought on a sense of vertigo: I was making the discovery that there was simply no way to get a grip on facts, no matter what a man did.

It was not that facts resisted me. On the contrary, they clustered eagerly around me, each fact splitting off more and more facts from itself, each split-off fact branching out into sub-facts of sub-facts, and sub-sub-facts of sub-facts. Every moment created its own fact needing to be recorded, but the recording of the moment itself was another fact needing to be recorded, and the recording of the recording was yet another fact, and so on dizzyingly, sickeningly, into the void of infinity. There was no way to keep up, no matter how fast you went, but if you stopped, the thing would overwhelm you: I was like a man holding back the tide with his bare hands.

It takes a man of powerful will to hold back the tide with his bare hands, and I had to apply myself to it pretty fully. For a time the figures of my children and my wife receded into pinpricks in the distance, the operations of my house were of no importance to me: even Rundle with his ledgers was just a shadow mouthing at me while I got on with trying to get a grip on the ocean.

I triumphed at last: that is all that matters, and all that needs to be said. It was a fact, though, that while I had these other concerns on my mind, my control over the operations of family life had been for a time less than absolute, and when I was again in a position to take up the reins of the Family Man, things had undergone a subtle shift.

My jaw was as authoritative as ever and my boots rang out as satisfyingly on the planks of my house. My wife still gave tea-parties for ladies, though the Fallen Girls had gone, and been replaced by something to do with a notebook and a stopwatch that involved hours sitting on the terrace. John was now a young man whose pimples alone indicated that some change was occurring in his chemistry as he inched towards manhood; and my daughter was now a huge girl who had exceeded all expectations in her exams, and had started at the University.

But things were crumbling from within in a way I could not seem to arrest. Norah looked all right to the naked eye, but she was coming apart at the seams. She was such a thin sort of person now that I found myself checking on the ground for her shadow.

I picked up her notebook one morning as she sat alone at the breakfast table on the terrace waiting for the rest of the family, to see what it was she was getting up to: but what she was getting up to was nothing more revealing than page after page of numbers, column after column of figures.

‘Oh Albion, it is my researches,' she said, and fumbled with her pearls, watching the book in my hand as if I might be about to eat it. ‘My researches, Albion, which I am conducting with my stopwatch.' And there it was, Norah's stopwatch warm in her hand, custodian of every passing second.

I experienced a pang of loss, of hatred and envy. Not only did my spineless wife have—or had once had—the power of life and death, but she had now also usurped the fact to end all facts, the fact of time itself. It crossed my mind that this assembling of facts was a kind of parody of my own beautifully catalogued battery of information, arrayed floor to ceiling in my study, and now entirely under my control once again. But it was hard to believe that Norah had the brains for parody.

I snorted and laughed a nasty laugh. ‘And what researches are you conducting, exactly, Norah?' She shook in the blast of my voice, and I went on, so that my loss and hatred began to recede in so much authoritative sound. I reminded myself that Norah could conduct no researches of much significance from the wicker chair in the shade where she spent her days, while I was a man who daily breasted the world, and who—it would be any day now—would sit down and assemble all his researches into something definitive.

But Norah recovered, raised her head and looked into my face. I knew, having seen it under all expressions in my mirror, how very daunting a face it could be, but nevertheless she said strongly, ‘I am researching the times of the ferries, Albion. When the wind is from the nor'east they are one-and-a-half times faster.' She lost faith then, and could not look any more at my face, which I could feel stone-like and unwelcoming. ‘And other things too,' she said vaguely. ‘Other researches of various kinds.' She had one last spark of pride: ‘Of a confidential nature,' she said, trying to be bold, but I laughed in her face and saw her shrink.