Darkness Visible (19 page)

“You said ‘Weird’.”

All things flowed together. Power filled her.

“You talked about guards round this place and about tapes. But we’re in a special time. They come, you see. It’s not that they can’t see us. It’s that they don’t. Why when I was small—It’s the tangle untangling, sorting itself, slipping and sliding. You must be simple. That’s the real thing.”

“I’m beginning to realize you’re an oddball. Not sure we ought to go on. There are things I just don’t—”

“We’ll go on. You’ll see.”

“Not if I say no. I’m in charge.”

“Of course, dear.”

“I’ll go exactly as far as things are—possible. When we reach the impossible we’ll stop. Understand?”

She gave him an especially brilliant smile which he kissed in a protective kind of way. He took her hand and they walked down the wire in silence. Lovers out walking.

The Copper Kettle was empty except for its fake eighteenth-century furniture and fake horse-brasses. Here they sat, viewed indifferently by a cretinous girl, and waited for Fido. He came breathlessly. Gerry played up, acting out sparks of at first amused jealousy; and then, she saw, putting a little more than acting into it. Fido was soon barking. He had brought some photographs with him. One showed him receiving a medal on a rostrum. Sophy saw to her surprise that he had not won the event but come third. Encouraged by her intense interest in his activities he took a sheaf of photographs out of his breast pocket and exposed them to her. Here was Fido, all gleaming muscle and sinew and lifting weights. Here was Fido rock-climbing and suspended, grinning over a hideous gulf. Here was Fido at the trampoline, caught upside-down in mid-air. When Sophy admitted provocatively that she had some small doubt as to the importance of all these activities, Fido simply didn’t understand her. Did she mean it was dangerous? A girl might well feel that—

Sophy took her cue.

“Oh but it
must
be terribly dangerous!”

Fido meditated.

“Took a tumble rock-climbing.”

Gerry spoke nastily from the place where they were ignoring him.

“Wasn’t that when you fell on your head?”

Fido responded with a precise catalogue of his injuries. Sophy broke in, hoping to conceal her giggles.

“Oh but it’s not fair! Why can’t we—?”

Gerry gave a positive guffaw.

“You! Christ!”

But Fido was already pointing out those areas of sport in which he thought female participation was allowable.

“And croquet,” said Gerry. “Don’t forget croquet.”

Fido said he wouldn’t; and gave Sophy a conquering look from his expanded pupils. After tea he walked them some way to the bus that would take them to Gerry’s car. They received a pressing invitation from him to return; and the fact that it was directed wholly at Gerry was the only false thing about it.

Sophy kissed Fido goodbye so that he barked again and she willed her scent into him. When at last they were alone in the car, Gerry looked at her, half in anger, half in admiration.

“You were half-way up his flies. Christ!”

“He might be useful. He might even come in with us.”

“Don’t be wet, dear thing. You may be fatal but you can’t do miracles.”

“Why not?”

“Think you’re something out of history, don’t you?”

“I don’t know any history.”

Gerry revved the engine viciously.

“Don’t need to. Whore’s instinct.”

He was silent after that and she considered his point of view. It was, she saw, peculiarly male. Here was Gerry—who would quite calmly suggest she should keep them both by using men and had been serious about it, she was certain—getting worked up by her approach to ridiculous Fido. Brooding on this she found it all rooted in men’s need to see. Possible customers were faceless. But Gerry knew Fido.

Two days later they had a letter from Fido repeating his
invitation. Gerry was all for ignoring it, they must have been out of their minds. When Sophy said she had to think, she saw Gerry take this as meaning, “I want to do nothing.” He patted her, got pilled up and went off with Bill to arrange a job. Sophy rang Fido from a callbox. She said she didn’t think she and Gerry should come down. Interrogated insistently by Fido she admitted she had thought they weren’t easy together and Gerry had been, well, not difficult but thoughtful. She couldn’t bear the idea of breaking up an old friendship that way. No! For her part she would have liked nothing better. In fact—

She refused to be drawn on the fact. But then she heard along the miles of wire how Fido barked as a brilliant idea came to him. He invited her to a meeting in South London where she could watch him lift weights and afterwards they could discuss the situation.

The weight-lifting competition, in which Fido won his section, struck her as so funny that that side of it was almost compensation for the pervading smell. Afterwards Fido, breathing quickly, conveyed to her that he found her exceptionally desirable. She waited for the pass; and it was an invitation to come to the school on parents’ day. Sophy, who had expected a straightforward proposition, found this as comic as weight-lifting.

“I’m not a parent.”

He explained it was the day when parents saw how agile he had made their little men. She allowed herself to be persuaded and began to suspect that the actual proposition when it came might be a moral one. Married—to a weight-lifter! Fido obviously thought that Gerry once out of sight would be out of mind as well. She listened as he, with a kind of egotistical innocence, displayed his life before her—his grandmother’s money, and that line out to the royals on which he placed such weight, intimating that one day he might be able to present her to them, or to one of them, if she agreed to come.

“Mind,” he said. “I’m not promising anything. I can only present you if I’m commanded.”

So she went to parents’ day, conspicuously inconspicuous in a cotton dress and straw hat. No royals were present and this cast a profound gloom over Fido, only lightened by a word or two with Lord Mountstephen, and the Marquis of Fordingbridge. Sophy inspected Fido’s bedsitter and found that it resembled an annexe
to the gym except for the rows of photographs. She knew now that any idea of getting Fido in with them would be pointless. It was not that he would find it wrong. He would find it dangerous in a way that did not apply to rock-climbing. It would not be his scene. Nor was there any future for his girlfriend or wife. Fido’s offer of companionship and sex would be limited to what was unavoidable between the competitions. The sex would be a quick use of the body, healthy when taken in moderation. The only other use he had for a woman was as an audience for his physical perfection. Most masculine of men—how narrow his hips, how tucked in behind him the hard rondures of his bum! How wide his shoulders and glossy his skin!—He had all the narcissism of a woman or a pretty boy. He enjoyed the beauty of his flesh more than Sophy enjoyed the beauty of hers. She knew all this, even while he put his arms round her, and the school drum-and-fife band made noises on the playing fields outside the window and the summery parents drifted round the various exhibitions. Nevertheless, she let him have her on his narrow, bachelor bed, and the exercise was only a little less boring than resisting him. But he had yet another surprise for her, announcing when he had finished that they were engaged. On the way back to London it seemed to her more and more incredible that these valuable children should be so freely available to inspection once you had joined the peculiar club that surrounded them. But she thought to herself—it’s simple—I’m inside!

Daisy’s bloke came out of jail so Bill had to move on quick. He came to tell them all about it so the three of them held a council of war in Gerry’s unkempt, uncleaned room that they called his flat. The last job had been a flop—much danger and little money. The two men were inclined to listen to Sophy if only for the sake of a little harmless fantasy. But when she began to describe the school and suggest routes, Gerry patted her as if she were a child herself.

“Sophy, like I said, they’ll have gadgets you just wouldn’t believe. For example. You walk along a path. A chopper with a gadget could follow you half an hour after you passed just by the bit of warmth where you’d walked. If you hid in a wood they could spot you by the lovely warmth, yum, yum, of your body. On the screen you’d look like a fire.”

“He’s right, see? You got to be careful.”

“Let’s plan a smack at a bank, old soul. That’s dicing with death, but not
absolument
daft.”

“But this is new, don’t you see? And who cares about gadgets? Once we’d got him—Fido showed me the layout. I can find out anything we want.
Anything.
That’s—power. He introduced me to the headmaster’s wife. You see, Daddy’s fearsomely well thought of, the last of the Mohicans and all that—last of his family, I mean Bill, never mind. And after all, I mean—chess!”

“None of them would tell you everything, Miss. There’s always something. He wouldn’t even know.”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself, old thing. Covering fire. Think you’re in the clear, then paff! All fall down. Besides—wrong league.”

“Look, Gerry. It’s new. That’s why it’ll work. We—me and  ’Toinette, my sister Toni—we did their tests. You think too highly of people’s intelligence. They aren’t you know. They’re mostly the ones who fail or score about a hundred. We did the tests without trying. Well, I know what an asset we’ve got with me inside. We’ll need more people, more information—I’ll get it. We’ll need weapons, explosives perhaps, we’ll need safe places to hide ourselves or him. This place? Maybe—and the stables and the old barge. There’s a cupboard, an old loo—”

“We’d need a safe way of getting out ourselves—Christ!”

“Fuck me, sorry Miss.”

She reached for the transistor. It was no longer Winnie’s ancient machine. This one fitted easily into the palm of her hand. She switched it on and voices from some other life filled the room.

Yes.
It’s
a
black
one.
Moving
your
way.
Over.

Gerry laughed.

“You don’t suppose they’d use a channel you could get at with that thing?”

It’s not ridiculous, she thought. Why am I so certain I am not being ridiculous? Under her arm the flat voices were talking at intervals.
Yes,
if
you
say
so.
No,
I
said
it’s
a
black
one.
Perhaps they were not police. Perhaps—what? Inside a radio and out there in infinite space that included the world there was audible mystery and confusion, infinite confusion. She moved the control, destroying the voices, passed through music, a talk, a quiz, a burst of laughter, some foreign languages, loud, then faint. And she moved the control back and found the point between all stations;
and immediately in the uncleaned room which seemed always to smell of drains and food, and to be organized, or disorganized round an unmade bed—the very light from the window seeming dusty and dim as if the whole world were no more than an annexe to the room—immediately there came the voice of the darkness between the stars, between the galaxies, the toneless voice of the great skein unravelling and lying slack; and she knew why the whole thing would be simple, a tiny part of the last slackness.

Running-down. Dark.

A voice came back faintly on the verge of the hissing.
I
couldn’t
get
the
number.
I
said
it’s
a
black
one.

A
wave of happiness and delight went over and through her.

“It’s going to be simple.”

“Who says so?”

“Think.”

It was a triumph of the will. As if a hand was on them the two men began to discuss the operation they so plainly did not believe in. They began to isolate problems and put them aside unsolved. Sophy thought of the school as she knew it and the people there. She became indifferent to the ineffectual and random kind of suggestions that they tossed from one to the other. She heard nothing of what they said but the tone, understanding by it how they felt themselves to be pawing at a steel wall that surrounded such a centre of the privileged and valuable. In the end they came to a full stop. Bill went off at last. Gerry got the whisky out of the drawer in which he had hidden it. They drank bit by bit as they undressed and then had sex, Sophy absently.

“Your mind’s not on your work.”

“Have you noticed, Gerry, how through this thing we understand each other more?”

“No I haven’t.”

“Well. We’re closer.”

Then there was a time in which he convulsed and gasped and grabbed and groaned and she waited for it to be over. She patted his back and ruffled his hair in a companionable sort of way.

He grunted into her shoulder.

“Can’t be closer than two-in-a-bed.”

“I said ‘understand’.”

“Do we?”

“Well. I understand you.”

He purred.

“Tell me about myself, doctor.”

“Why should I?”

“It’s this recurrent nightmare I have, doctor—may I call you Sigmund?—about a disgusting wench—”

“I wonder. I’m sure you don’t dream, Gerry. You daydream about money, you lovely man. Masses of money.”

“My oh my. I ought to beat you up to satisfy the neighbours. But remember, by the way, that I’m in command.”

“You?”

“Well fo’ lan’s sake honey chile! Sleep time.”

“No.”

“Insatiable.”

“Not that, it’s the school. It’s those questions—”

“Dead end.”

She said nothing for a while, thinking how easily he gave up and how he must be pushed.

“I shall go back.”

He rolled over on his back, stretched, yawned.

“Sophy, pet. Are you getting a thing about him?”

“Fido? My God, he’s such a bore! Only after the three of us talked about it, I can see how much I’ll have to find out. That’s all.”

“Remember whose doggie you are.”

“Wuff wuff O my God. Still—if he ever got me into bed it would be out of sheer boredom. Premarital sex.”