Dark Places (30 page)

‘Well, Norah,' I exclaimed in a woundingly jovial way, ‘may you have every success with your researches. Every success, and do let me know when they are published.' I turned my back on her there folded into her chair with the silly silver stopwatch in her hand. I could feign heartiness, but I was dismayed: always watery, my wife was now in some way slipping through my fingers.

Then there were the children. They sat up straight at the table, and had been taught how to
keep the ball rolling
in family conversation over dinner. But in a way I could not quite put my finger on, the sedate family dinner, with all faces turned to the head of the household sitting at the top of the table, was being eaten away silently and invisibly from within.

When we met around the dinner-table now, Lilian would not look me in the eye, and there was something I did not like happening with the muscles around her mouth. She watched me sideways, her mouth wry.

And there was John, sniggering with Lilian instead of paying attention to questions his father might put to him. John had recently taken up the tuba. He sat for hours in his room now within the embrace of its brass coils, filling the house with a hoarse hooting that he must have known was maddening to anyone engaged in important researches. The tuba seemed to have gone dangerously to his head. He did not always listen to me as attentively as I would have liked: and now, down at the end of the table, he exchanged glances with Lilian in a sly sort of way, as if they were sharing a joke at my expense. When he shook out his napkin and it flew out of his hand onto the floor, both of them actually laughed aloud.

I was not to be made a fool of at my own board, under my own roof. Ah, Lilian, my daughter, you glanced at my head at the end of the table, so substantial with facts and its own magnificence, and you did not find me beloved, although you did not fear me either. Perhaps, worst of all, you found me only ridiculous.

I dated the beginning of the rot to the day of the beggar in the street: some faith in the solidity of the world dropped away from me then, the day my daughter turned her back on me.

The sight of a beggar in a torn jacket, with the sole of his boot flapping, and three days' growth on his chin, with his eyes screwed up in a dirty face and a clumsily lettered sign,
Blind
, around his neck, was not calculated to stir any pity in me. A man such as myself could see at a glance that the fellow was a fraud. I had to work hard for my living: why should this man simply sit on a street corner and have it handed to him on a platter, or to be precise, in a dented tin cup?

I pointed him out to Lilian, who was travelling in with me on the ferry. ‘Look at that fraud, Lilian, will you? Perhaps we should tell him that the genuine blind do not screw their eyes up like that: how can the light hurt their eyes? They cannot see the light!' and I was preparing to have a moment's enjoyment with my daughter on the subject of this beggar.

A tram crashed past at that moment, and when Lilian said nothing I thought perhaps she had not heard. ‘What do you think, Lilian, will I tell him, or will you?' But when I glanced at her I saw that her lips were so tightly compressed she had a crone's wrinkles around her mouth, and I saw that her eyes were full with a woman's quick tears, and glittered dangerously in her face as she glanced again at the beggar, his shaking hand holding his tin cup.

I was not going to allow any daughter of mine to get away with tight-lipped silence: she would agree with me, or have the courage of her convictions and speak out! ‘Well, Lilian, what do you think? Did you hear what I said?'

I thought I heard her say, ‘Father, how can you?' and when I turned to see what she meant, she turned her eyes, bulbous with tears, on me, and cried in a theatrical way, ‘Have you no pity at all, Father?'

Her face was red with feeling; her nose shone repulsively, and the tears threatened to spill down her thick cheeks. She had never looked quite so much like a side of beef. But unlike Norah, who at least knew what was proper, Lilian did not have the decency to turn her face away or conceal it behind a handkerchief. I had never before seen Lilian do the trembling-lip feminine thing on me: she had never copied her mother, in going all to jelly when I challenged her. But now she was proving herself just another silly female, and not even one with a dainty lace hanky up her sleeve.

‘That man is without a doubt richer than I am, Lilian,' I told her. ‘Mark my words, a Rolls-Royce will pick him up at the end of the day and take him to Vaucluse. Take it from me, Lilian: your pity is wasted.'

She did not give me the courtesy of a reply. She did not even look at me, but reached into her handbag and gave the man five shillings—five shillings, mind you, not a threepence or a sixpence, but five whole shillings hard-earned by her father!—and walked on without waiting to see if I was beside her.

Oh charity, thy name is Self ! Lilian, gone all damp and defiant, thought she was a fine soul. We walked a block in silence, and I saw that Lilian was determined not to be the first to speak. Further, it was obvious that by this means she was expressing disapproval, or even distaste, at my last remark: she was attempting to rebuke me. Meanwhile, the charlatan we had just witnessed was no doubt laughing up his sleeve at how he had duped the young lady in the mauve, the one with the fine-looking father.

‘Lilian,' I said, without rancour, ‘Lilian,' I said sweetly, ‘Lilian, let me ask you a question, if you would be so kind.' Lilian stopped. ‘Yes, Father?' she said, oh, she was at her mildest, but I saw a glint in her eye, a glint that said,
I am finer of spirit than you
, and I was going to crush that glint. ‘Lilian, I am curious, you must just tell me why you gave to that man back there: I ask purely as a matter of interest, you understand.'

Lilian grew more deeply flushed than ever. ‘Heavens, Father,' she cried, ‘have you no feelings?' But I would not be baited, I would not deviate. ‘I am probably the best judge of my feelings, Lilian,' I said in my driest way, ‘but be that as it may, I would like you to think, and to answer.' Lilian thought: it was visibly apparent, from the corrugations on her brow, that thinking was taking place. At last she came up with an answer, but in a somewhat bewildered way, as if she was already against her will seeing the trap I had laid. ‘I gave because I have everything, and he, poor wretch, has nothing, and I could just as easily be in his position as mine.' This was no answer, to my mind, and I persisted, ‘But you have not answered the question: what, precisely, made you give to him?' This time Lilian did not stop and think: she should have given the matter a moment's consideration! ‘Well, Father,' she said loudly, ‘if you must know, I gave so that he can eat a square meal, and pay for some kind of bed, and that means I can sleep easier in my own.'

Ah! For the sake of the nice symmetry of phrase, Lilian had completely delivered herself into my hands. I could become silky now, and soft, for I had her cornered. ‘So, Lilian, you gave in order to make yourself feel better, you are saying?' I did not bother to pause and watch her flummox and bluster: I went straight on, wishing to screw her humiliation into her. ‘Lilian, you have just proved that charity is simply another form of commerce. The commodity bought is no less pleasurable for being intangible: it is that inner satisfaction as you walk along with your purse a little lighter. Altruism is really just another type of self-interest, Lilian.'

She had condemned herself from her own mouth. And yet she would not yield. Her chin set tightly under her face, her mouth went thin, and her eyes stared coldly at me as she came at me with her do-gooder's nonsense. ‘Father, your logic is faultless, but nevertheless you are in the wrong. It is surely better to be moved by another human in distress, and help him, than to argue your way out of lifting a finger.' She did not look at me, but adjusted her hat as if her righteousness had caused it to lift off her head, and walked off ahead of me towards her tram without looking back. I was left with the choice of hastening, positively running, after her, or watching her grow small in the distance.

Watching her grow small in the distance was very much the preferable of these courses of action, but I was taken aback by the whole experience. How dare she? How dare she try to make out that I was her moral inferior, and waltz off before I could catch my breath to prove how wrong she was?

And now here they were, being disruptive down at the bottom of the table. ‘John!' I called, and saw them both straighten up quickly, and the silly hysteria drain out of their faces. ‘John, I am speaking to you, kindly do me the courtesy of listening!' I said, hearing my mouth smack around the words in a satisfying way, and I saw his Adam's apple rise up his throat. ‘Yes, Father,' he mumbled. How I would have loved him to be a manly boy who could look me in the eye! How I would have welcomed a few facts from him, no matter how wrong! But this boy shrank into his clothes and hunched over his plate as if to get right into it: his resistance to me was palpable, like a magnetic field around his body.

I was determined, though, and was prepared to seize that jaw in my hands and force speech out of his mouth if necessary. ‘John, how long is the Amazon?' I asked, because answers can be demanded of questions, and I was determined to make him speak to me. ‘How long is the Amazon?' I cried at his deaf, closed face, and saw him flinch. ‘Come, John,' I said, more mildly. ‘Come, John, if you do not know, I will tell you.' John shot a look at me and I made my face bland and welcoming. ‘I do not know, Father,' he whispered at last. ‘I do not know.' He closed his face again then and thought he would have to say no more, but I was determined that my son would speak to me. ‘Then guess, John,' I said, and tapped the table beside my plate. ‘Guess, boy!'

Oh, what a desperately feeble boy he was. He stared at me blankly, and when he saw I would not give up, he said, One hundred miles, sir?' and I snorted, but I would not let him off so lightly. ‘Guess again, John,' I cried, and kept him guessing, one number after another, and saying, ‘No, guess again,' in triumph, until Alma came in with the vegetables, and made a distraction with her clattering and breathing, and asking people whether they was wanting the potato or the carrot. I was sick of the frog-like clammy boy stuck to his chair with hopeless numbers coming out of his mouth, and said in my authoritative way, ‘The Amazon, John, is three thousand nine hundred and fifty-three miles long from source to mouth.' The lavishness of it made me smile. ‘By Jove, John, you were far off the mark!'

When Alma had left us in peace at last, it was time to turn to my daughter and deal with her. I laughed a little, the more to disarm her, and remarked mildly, ‘Lilian, did you know that by the age of sixty a average woman is a dead seed pod? The oldest woman ever recorded as having given birth was fifty-seven years and 129 days old.'

Lilian stared and John coughed his mealy-mouthed cough, but I would not be swerved. ‘By contrast, Lilian, and John, you should pay attention to this, a man at seventy, even seventy-five, is still full of animal spirit.'
And sperm
, I would have liked to shout in triumph, but I heard Alma coming up the stairs from the kitchen again and was afraid such a robust word might make her drop the water-jug, and my rhetoric was parching me.

But Lilian watched me down the length of the table, and waited until Alma was in the room, creaking over to the sideboard with the jug. Then my daughter spoke. ‘Also sperm, Father,' she said loudly, and Alma rattled something tremulously behind me. ‘A man of seventy is still full of sperm, Father, that is a fact.' I saw that my daughter was attempting to make me foolish, having the last word on this sperm business, and being brazen about it in front of the servant.

My laugh shook my water-glass. ‘Since you are interested in these things, Lilian, let me share an intriguing fact with you on the subject of the male organ.' Alma snatched up the empty gravy-boat and left the room, Lilian stared at me in a glassy sceptical way I wished to galvanise, Norah hem-hemmed at me from the other end of the table, and John stared at his napkin-ring and ground away with his molars at a piece of food: a boy more like a cow was hard to imagine. ‘Something that may interest you, Lilian, is that the sexual entrance in the female pig is normally sealed shut. Pigs love mud, as you know, so Nature has ensured that the reproductive cavity does not fill with mud and putrefy.' Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed Norah bring her hanky up to her mouth. ‘Now this would present a difficulty for the male of the species when servicing the sow, and Nature has come up with an efficient solution. The organ of generation of the male pig is curved, and as sharp as a knife. What he does is to more or less slice his way into his sow.'

My daughter looked most like me when she frowned as she was doing now. A flush rose up her neck into her face, but she did not flinch. Her own flesh was safe at this moment pressed against, in the first instance, Mark Foy's best pure silk cami-knickers, and then against Hordern Bros' figured muslin, and then against the cut velvet of Ball Bros, Upholsterers. But behind her stony face she must be imagining how it might feel to have a man cut her open.

My obstinate daughter did not recoil. But with terrible choking sounds John was stumbling out from his chair and a hand to his mouth was running in a jerky way from the room. Norah rose and flung her napkin on the table like someone throwing down a gauntlet. ‘Really, Albion!' she exclaimed, but coward that she was, she would not challenge me more precisely than that. She knew that I would have my answer ready: ‘Do not blame me, Norah, for the facts of life! Would you rather have your children live with their heads in the sand?'

So Norah said nothing, and Lilian and I were left alone in the room, glaring at each other. At last she looked away, and in a voice that started off hoarse, so that she had to cough to clear her throat, said, ‘I shall ring for Alma to clear away, shall I, Father?'