Dark Places (6 page)

‘Yes, Albion, left or right, you must have happened to notice, do you dress to left or right?' I felt myself consumed with redness now, totally befuddled: had I somehow been getting dressed wrongly all these years? My mind was blocked, Father was staring, waiting for an answer, and I was failing the first test of my manhood.

But Father laughed, a great harsh laugh that made the deckhand stare. ‘By Jove, Albion, I did not know either at your age, and my own father, your grandfather, let me go to the tailor's not knowing, and I was all of a flummox.' Was his look at my scarlet face ironic? ‘It makes me laugh to remember, but it was far from funny then, by Jove!' He laughed again: Father was seldom seen to laugh, and I watched the way his eyes became positively oriental as he did so, and how large and yellow, like a horse's, his teeth were.

To my relief, Chapman turned out not to be literally an old woman. He was a hunched and wizened dark man, horribly like a monkey, and there were large knobs on the knuckles of his hands such as I had not seen before, and coarse white hairs curling out of his ear-holes. He was clumsy with the pins and tape-measures, so that Dingle, the assistant who hovered close at hand, had to rescue various piles and tins of things several times. Chapman limped a little as he walked, making a great show of wincing at each step, his spectacles continually slid down his nose and had to be poked back up with a forefinger, and readjusted with regard to the bendy ear-pieces—generally he seemed even to the eye of one who had never before seen a tailor at work to be unnaturally slow and awkward, and forgetful as he shuffled through tissue paper and samples of dark cloth—‘Now this was the one, was it not, Master Singer? Or was it the stripe now?'

Father knew the right courtesies with which to fill the occasion, and Chapman replied at considerable length: ‘Oh thanking you Mr Singer sir, the arthuritis is a great trial to me now, but I cannot complain, thanking you sir,' then going on to enumerate a great number of complaints of a more or less embarrassingly physical nature, so that I blushed as he sighed into my shoulder, chalking me up.

A gentleman's club, like a gentleman's tailor, was something that was passed down from a gentleman's father, and once we had been released from Chapman's establishment, Father turned to me with over-loud heartiness and said, ‘Lunch at the Club, eh, Albion? High time you knew your way around there.'

Everything in the dining-room seemed misted with the steam of a thousand roasts of beef and Gurney puddings, and there was an almost visible thickness in the air, that made every sound significant: the clink of two spoons on the other side of the room, as the elderly waiter helped someone to brussels sprouts, was an enormous sound, and when someone behind us lit a match for his cigar, the ripping sound almost made me choke on my custard.

In such a hushed and amplifying atmosphere, surrounded by solitary men chewing their way through three courses, it was even more difficult than usual to speak to Father, and all my resolutions— how I would get off on a fresh footing with him, being forthright and man-to-man—wilted, and I was reduced to churlish monosyllables and platitudes, trying to pitch my voice in this dense silence so that it did not ring around the room.

Yes, I agreed with Father, who was trying to do the right thing by his tongue-tied son, I was looking forward to finishing with school, and yes, a few years at the University would stand a man in good stead in any walk of life. How could I, in this greasy hush, punctuated with explosions of silverware, have shared with Father any of my uncertainties?

After lunch we withdrew, like the other gentlemen whose capacious stomachs were labouring to digest it all, to the Reading Room, full of serious men of commerce reading the business news as conscientiously as if taking medicine. Father and I sat down together and Father immediately turned to the stocks and shares page. I tried, but found myself surreptitiously turning back to the less serious pages, the ones in which tight-rope walkers plunged to their deaths, midgets took to Great Danes with carving knives, and babies' faces were discovered to have been gnawed by rats while they slept.

We sat firm in our leather chairs, which discouraged squirming or too much gesturing because of the rude way they tended to squeak and creak, and Father delivered himself of one or two pieces of advice.

‘The race is to the swift, Albion,' Father said, and I was surprised to hear him wax poetic. I could see he was in a philosophical mood, and I would have liked to rise to the occasion, but could think of nothing more stimulating to say than, ‘Yes, Father,' adding to make me seem more involved, ‘I have often thought the same thing.'

Father gave me a look that was not one of admiration, and went on. ‘The fact is,' he said, and I admired his authoritative way with a fact, ‘that it is a fool's dream to seek equality in the affairs of men where there is none in nature,' and I nodded and murmured into my whisky-and-water, my mind quite blank of responses. Away from Father, I could at times come out with a rotund phrase or two myself, and hold my own in a conversation, and I was determined to come out with something or other now: I could not forever be the gormless son!

‘It is a law of nature that the weak go under,' I said, and was pretty sure this was the right kind of thing, but I made the mistake of accompanying my words with a gesture appropriate to the going-under of the weak, that made the leather of the chair give out an unfortunate noise. Father glanced at me sharply, and an old gentleman with a monocle rattled his paper and cleared his throat, and Father said in a quelling sort of way, ‘Indeed, Albion. Shall we go?'

Father was silent on the ferry on the way back, as if so much fatherly heartiness had wearied him, but as we neared the wharf close to home, and stood up to get off, he tweaked the front of my Norfolk jacket, holding me at arm's length as if weighing my worth. ‘Yes, Albion,' he said. ‘Yes, I am sure we will not know you when Chapman has finished with you.'

I was cast down all over again at the note of hope in Father's voice as he spoke of not knowing me. But I knew that no matter how beautifully Chapman cut and pinned, and no matter how scrupulous I was in the matter of waistcoat-buttons and cuff-links, I would never truly become that unrecognisable Albion he hoped for, the Albion who would have been made into a man.

Mother's fairy-cakes began to make me gag now: the thick cream was sickening to me, the sugary mouthfuls unmanly and unmanning. ‘No thank you, Mother,' I began to say to her offerings, peevishly, petulantly. ‘No, really, Mother, I do not want them.' Mother's soft brow creased. ‘Are you ill, Albion dearest?' she asked, and bent over me, all lavender and concern. ‘No, Mother, I am not ill!' I almost shouted. I could not have said what it was that caused my monstrous impatience with lavender and fairy-cakes, but I wanted to strike this soft jelly of a person, my mother with her weak feminine shape, bending over me solicitously as if I was still an infant.

‘Show me your tongue, Albion,' Mother said now, in a firmer tone, and sitting back as if she had seen in my eyes the thought that I wished to hit her. ‘Come, Albion, do not be obstinate.' I stuck out my tongue rudely at her and she looked at it briefly without comment. ‘Very well, Albion,' she said, and sighed, folding the fairy-cakes into their bag again. ‘Good night, dear boy.'

There were no more fairy-cakes, and after a while, repelled by my chilliness and the way I drew myself away in the bed, there was no longer even a goodnight kiss: there was just her wistful smile, and a gesture of her pale hand over my head, and a smoothing of the counterpane over my feet.

Poor Mother! I was a man now, one who could speak man-to-man with my impatient father, I was no longer a child to be coddled and indulged with babyish sweet things. My mouth watered for the cakes, but I despised them too: they were woman's fare, children's fare, and must be put behind me now that I was a man. And that poor mother of mine: she was nothing but a spineless wisp who had to realise that her son no longer belonged to her.

Six

AT THE UNIVERSITY I was a young man in tweed doing his best to be like the others. I was determined to make a fresh start here: the young blades at the University had never seen me blunder on the lawns of Pymble, or sit tongue-tied with Father. With them I could act the man I wished to be, and perhaps if I acted the part for long enough, the act would become self.

I was realistic enough to know that social ease was never going to come naturally to me, but I was sure that being a man was something that could simply be learned, like canasta or waltzing: it was just a matter of acquiring a series of manners and a series of jokes.

I looked around me at the other men in my social circle: Davis was out of reach as a model for me, having too many natural advantages—that hank of hair, that face like a Greek god's, that winning smile—which I could not hope to emulate. But there was an Ogilvie whom I thought might be useful to me. When you peeled away his verve, he did not have any remarkable qualities. His ears stuck out of the side of his head, he was only just on the right side of being short, and his face was not the face of any Greek god. Yet Ogilvie was always the centre of things, always had a witticism ready, and just the right anecdote up his sleeve, was the man everyone wanted to join them.

More conscientiously than I studied Descartes and Milton, I studied just how Ogilvie did it. It did not take me long to notice that Ogilvie never gave anyone the benefit of a few interesting facts, and dignity did not seem to be something he worried over-much about. He had a way of hitching up his pants which I admired, and practised in front of my cheval-glass, and a laugh which did not involve the whole face, which I tried out on my own features. I parted my hair on the side the way Ogilvie did, and took up cigarettes so that I could stand as he did, lounging against something through a screen of smoke, and was even able to go one better when I discovered cigars.

On the subject of the witticism, I decided that forward planning was the thing. I made a note of a few good jokes that I thought I could manage, and spent many hours in front of my mirror, telling myself the one about the Irishman and the glass of water in a way that might strike others as amusing, or at least normal. I watched Ogilvie at the Empire, seeing the way he did not become sleepy and obtuse after a glass or two the way I did; so in my room at College I downed wine like medicine, training myself to become someone who could take his liquor.

I accepted that the thing would never come naturally to me, but as I got better at it the encouraging notion occurred to me that all these breezy young blades were no more breezy and easy within themselves than I was: it was more than possible that we were all just scraping our shells against each other.

When I felt myself ready, I made sure that Ogilvie's group discovered that Singer, although not possessed of any great sparkle with an anecdote, could hold his own; and even better, that he was not stingy about calling for another bottle from his own pocket, or hosting a luncheon at Fort's. At length Singer succeeded in becoming a part—admittedly a somewhat shadowy and peripheral part—of this circle, which devoted itself to pranks of various kinds, and to entertainments.

And what entertainments! There were banquets upstairs in the private rooms of Juliana's, where the cigar-smoke hung in a cloud below the gilt ceiling and the bottles kept arriving while various entertainments were performed before us. There were more intimate parties of cards and whisky, in the college rooms of the bolder men, where we had to tiptoe out in the early hours onto crisp lawns without waking porters; oh yes, I was there, the education of Albion Gidley Singer was progressing apace.

There was a particular evening, upstairs at Juliana's. It was an evening unclear in its precise shape, when many bottles of wine were opened and the cigar-smoke hung blue under the ceiling, and Ogilvie had done his imitation of a lady with a poodle better than I had ever seen it. I raised my glass in dozens of toasts, drained it again and again, confident after all my practice in my own room that I would not disgrace myself.

No: Singer, for all his residual awkwardness when stone-cold sober, was a stayer when it came to liquor, and I could see that they thought me much improved by a drop or two. When I rattled off an alphabetical list of the capital cities of the world, then in clockwise order the mountains of Europe, Ogilvie raised his glass to me solemnly, and Burgess actually laughed, not in an unkind way, but with drunken wonder. Under such approval, Singer blossomed. I was even bold enough to try the one about the blind man and the fish-shop: ‘So he tips his hat and says, Good morning, ladies!' and there was general laughter. I caught glances between my companions that meant, ‘Singer is not such a dull dog after all,' and I felt that at last I was making progress with this business of being sociable.

As the hour grew later, and the pile of empty bottles grew higher, the talk turned to females. I was the only one who did not join in their various boasts, though I tried to look as if it might be modesty that was keeping me silent, and I joined in admiration at exploits even when I was not one hundred percent sure just what one was supposed to admire.

Burgess boasted of three in a night, but Ogilvie laughed him to scorn and maintained that he had done six in three hours—
virgins at that
, he kept crying,
bona fide virgins
,
every one!
Before long they seemed to run out of figures, and Ogilvie began to talk of the real thing, of smuggling one or two females in, and was opening and closing a door which revealed and concealed, revealed and concealed, a bed, placed there for the convenience of parties of young bucks like ourselves. Ogilvie winked and grinned with fearful animation, and we all stared past him at the bed appearing and disappearing in a vertiginous way.

I felt myself growing sober with dread: beyond every hurdle there seemed always to be another. Ogilvie extracted pound notes from each of us and left in search of females, and I boldly called for a few more bottles. The mood had changed now. The room was quieter as each man appeared to be deep in thought, having to rouse himself to join in a bit of dispirited chat about what a young ruffian Ogilvie was. Delany began to swig down wine as if it were water, and Quince, who was not much of a drinker, took a huge tot of whisky at one gulp.