Darkness Visible (28 page)

Ruth shook her head, smiling. Sim spread his hands in the gesture unconsciously imitated from his grandfather.

“But I want you to come! I
wish
you’d come! You’ve never objected to making a fool of yourself with me before!”

She said nothing but went on smiling. Sim passed a hand over his baldness.

“You always admired Stanhope—”

“Nonsense!”

“Well—women did—”

“I’m not ‘women’.”

“But I do wish you’d come. Is it too late in the evening?”

Silence again.

“Is it Pedigree?”

“Go along, dear. Have a good time.”

“That’s hardly—”

“Well. A successful meeting.”

“Edwina’s coming.”

“Has she said so?”

“Edwin’s asking her.”

“Give her my love if she’s there.”

It was a week after the first meeting, and the curious man’s free afternoon again. What canvassing Sim had been able to do had produced no result—three refusals and one ‘might come’ which clearly covered the intention not to. Sim thought ruefully that perhaps it might be worth sending a notice of the demise of the Philosophical Society to be inserted in the
Greenfield
Advertiser
among the births and deaths. He was still working out the wording of the notice when he reached the hall of Sprawson’s. Edwin was standing on the bottom step of his stairs.

“Where’s Ruth?”

“Where’s Edwina?”

Then there was another silence. Sim broke it.

“Pedigree.”

“I know.”

“It’s Pedigree. He’s why they won’t come. Not even Ruth.”

“Oh yes. Yes. Edwina would have come in any other circumstances you know.”

“So would Ruth.”

“She’s really a deeply liberal person you know. Only Pedigree—”

“Ruth’s the most truly charitable person I know. Charity in its true sense, Greek sense.”

“Of course. It was the business over the babies in prams you know. The cruelty to the young mothers. The deliberate psychological torture. She felt so deeply. She said once she’d have castrated him with her own hands if she’d caught him in flagrante delicto.”

“She didn’t say flagrante delicto!”

“She said assaulting a child. Pushing a pram away with a baby in it can be construed as an assault.”

“I thought she meant—”

“Oh no. She wouldn’t talk about that would she? I mean she’s widely and deeply experienced but there are some things—”

“I remember when she talked about castrating, Ruth agreed with her. Warmly.”

Edwin glanced at his watch.

“They’re a little late. Shall we go on?”

“After you.”

Softly they descended the steps and trod, almost on tiptoe, down the garden path and into the courtyard under the stables. Edwin switched on the light at the bottom of the stairs; and there was a sudden, startled movement in the room at their heads. Sim expected to see Pedigree after all, when he got to the upper level, but it was Sophy, standing by the divan on which she had been sitting and looking, he thought at once, white and strained. But Edwin went straight into action.

“My dear Sophy what a pleasure! How are you? Sitting in the dark? But I’m so sorry—oh dear! Your father you see, he told us we could—”

The girl put her hand up to the curls at the back of her head then
took it away again. She was wearing the white sweatshirt with
BUY ME
stencilled on the front and really, thought Sim, nothing else under it, nothing else whatever, so that—

“We’ll go away Sophy dear. Your father must have made a mistake. He told us we could have the room for a meeting of—but how silly! I mean it sounds silly and of course you wouldn’t want—”

Then they were all three silent and standing. The single, naked bulb made a black shadow under each nose. Even Sophy looked monstrous, huge, black eye-hollows and the Hitlerian moustache of shadow caught by the light under her nostrils. Sweatshirt, jeans, flip-flops; and surely, some sort of cap? A knitted cap back there, hidden by the curls.

She glanced away from them at shopping bags, plastic ones, leaning against each other on the end of the divan. She touched her hair again, licked her lips and then looked back at Edwin.

“Meeting? You said something about a meeting—”

“Just a silly mistake. Your father, my dear. Sim, d’you think he was pulling our legs? ‘Putting us on’ I think you’d say, Sophy, according to my latest information. But you’ve come home to stay, of course. We’ll go to the hall and intercept the others.”

“Oh no! No! Daddy didn’t make a mistake. I’m just going, you see. I’d turned out the light. You can have the place and welcome. Look—just a moment—”

Quickly she moved about the room, switched on a table lamp under the dormer, a table lamp with a pink and bobbled shade. She flicked off the single, naked bulb and the hideous shadows were wiped from her face to be replaced by a rosy and upward glow; and she glowed at them both.

“There! My goodness me! That dreadful top light! Toni used to call it—But I’m glad to see you! It’ll be one of your meetings won’t it? Make yourselves at home.”

“Aren’t you taking your, your shopping bags?”

“Those? Oh no! I’m leaving everything! Oh yes indeed! You’ve no idea. I shan’t want any of the stores tonight. Too boring. Just let me put the things out of the way for you—”

Astonished, Sim stared at her face in its rosy glow and could not believe that the smile owed everything to the lamp. She was highly excited—and there, flash from an eye as if it were phosphorescent—and she seemed full of, full of purpose. At once
his mind jumped to the usual, dreary conclusion. Sex, of course. An assignation. Interrupted. The really courteous thing, the understanding thing would be to—

But Edwin was talking.

“Au revoir then Sophy dear. Let us see something of you won’t you? Or let us hear of you.”

“Oh yes. My goodness me.”

She had got her shoulder bag and slung it; was sidling round them.

“Remember me to Mrs Bell won’t you? And Mrs Goodchild?”

Glow of a smile and then the girl gone away down the stairs, rosy glow left behind, suggestive and empty. They heard the door out to the towpath open, then close. Sim cleared his throat, sank into one of the chairs by the table and looked round him.

“I suppose they call this Brothel Pink.”

“I hadn’t heard. No.”

Edwin sat down too. They were silent for a while. Sim inspected the cardboard box that lay beneath the other dormer. It was full of tinned food, as far as he could see. There was a coil of rope on it.

Edwin had seen it too.

“She must have been going camping. I hope we haven’t—”

“Of course not. She has a young man you know. In fact—”

“Edwina’s seen her with two young men. At different times, I mean.”

“I saw one. Oldish, I thought, for her.”

“Edwina said she thought he had a married look about him. The other one she said was younger, much more suitable she said. I mean Edwina’s the last person in the world to spread scandal but she said she couldn’t help noticing it going on under her nose.”

“Dreary. It makes me feel dreary.”

“You are such a moral old thing, Sim! Moralistic.”

“It makes me feel dreary because I’m not young and with two young men. Well. Two young women.”

Then there was silence again. Glancing at Edwin, Sim saw how the feminine lamp was providing him with a delicacy and smiling mouth that he had not got. Perhaps for me too. Here we are, dreary, and with smiles painted on our faces, waiting for—waiting, waiting, waiting. Like the man said.

“They’re very late.”

Edwin spoke absently.

“‘Having if off’ they call it nowadays.”

He looked quickly back at Sim and perhaps there was a little more intensity under the glow.

“I mean one hears these things. The boys, you see, and then, one reads—”

“‘Getting laid’. Is that American?”

“Incredible isn’t it, what you hear? Even on the box!”

Silence again. Then—

“Edwin—we’ll need another chair. Four of us.”

“There were four chairs last time. Where is it?”

Edwin got up and wandered round the room, peering into corners as if the fourth chair had become not absent but merely less visible and could be seen if you looked closely.

“This used to be their toy-cupboard. I remember when Edwina and I came to tea they showed us every doll—extraordinary the names they had and the stories about them—you know, Sim, there’s genius in those girls. Creativity. I don’t just mean intelligence. Real, precious creativity. I wonder if their dolls—”

He reached out and opened the cupboard door.

“How very odd!”

“What’s odd about keeping dolls in a cupboard?”

“Nothing. But—”

The fourth chair was placed in the centre of the cupboard, facing outward. There were lengths of rope attached to it, to the back and to the legs. Each rope had had the end carefully fused to stop it unravelling.

“Well!”

Edwin shut the door again, came back, laid hold of the table.

“Help me, Sim, please. We’ll have to use the divan for the fourth man. Though I must say it won’t seem quite, quite seancelike, will it? Takes me right back to the dolls’ tea party. I told you about it didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“But heaven only knows what she was doing with a chair like that and ropes and things.”

“Edwin.”

“Yes?”

“Listen carefully. Before the others come. We’ve stumbled on something, you see. We’ve no business to have seen that chair.”

“What harm—”

“Listen. It’s sex. Don’t you understand? Bondage. Sexual games, private and, and shaming.”

“Good God!”

“Before the others come. It’s the least I—we—can do. We, you and I must never never never let on, never by the faintest breath—Remember how startled she was when we switched the light on and then when she saw who we were—she was there in the dark, waiting for someone or perhaps getting things ready for someone—and now she’s gone away thinking,
Oh
God
I
hope
to
God
they
don’t
ever
think
to
open
that
cupboard
—”

“Good God!”

“So we must never—”

“Oh but I wouldn’t—except to Edwina of course!”

“I mean after all—there but for the grace of God—I mean. After all, we all, I mean.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean.”

Then there was silence in the rosy room for a long, long time. Sim was not thinking about the meeting at all, or the seance, which was what it would be better called. He was thinking about the way in which circumstances could seem to imitate the intuitive understanding that so many people claimed to have and so many others denied was possible. Here, in the rosy light, with the shut cupboard, a few sticks and twists of artificial fibre had betrayed the secret as clearly as if they had spelt it out in print; so that two men, not by a mystic perception but by the warmth of imagination had come simply to a knowledge they were not intended to have and ought not to have. The man who looked too old for Sophy, and the brothel light—His mind dived into the explanation of it all, glamorous and acrid, so fierce an imagination he caught his breath at the scent and stink of it—

“God help us all.”

“Yes. All.”

More silence. At last Edwin spoke, diffidently, almost.

“They’re a long, long time.”

“Pedigree won’t come without him.”

“He won’t come without Pedigree.”

“What shall we do? Ring the school?”

“We couldn’t get hold of him. And I have a feeling he’ll be here any minute.”

“It’s too bad. They might have told us, if—”

“We gave our word.”

“Wait for an hour, say. Then go.”

Edwin reached down and slipped off his shoes. He climbed onto the divan and crossed his legs. He held his arms close to his sides, then extended the forearms, palms upward. He closed his eyes and did a great deal of breathing.

Sim sat and thought to himself. It was all the place, just that and nothing else, the place so often imagined, then found, with its silence but also with its dust and dirt and stink; and now seen to have the brothel image added, the pink lights and bobbled femininity—and at the end, like something out of the furtive book in his desk, the perverted chair.

I know it all, he thought, right to the bitter end.

Yet there was, after all, a certain sad satisfaction, and even a quivering of salt lust by association in this death of an old imagination. They had to grow up, lose the light of their exquisite childhood. They had to go under the harrow like everyone else; and doubtless at the moment it was subsumed under
having
a
good
time
or
being
with
it
or
being
into
sex,
into
bondage.
Heaven lies round us in our infancy.

Edwin honked suddenly. Glancing across at him, Sim saw him jerk his head back up. Edwin had meditated himself asleep then woken himself with his own snore. That reduced everything, too. He felt, in the wake of Edwin’s snore, an overwhelming sense of futility. He tried to imagine some deep, significant spiritual drama, some contrivance, some plot that would include them both and be designed solely for the purpose of rescuing Pedigree from his hell; and then had to admit to himself that the whole affair was about Sim the ageing bookseller or no one.

Everything was all right after all, just ordinary. Nothing would happen. It was as usual a matter of living among a whole heap of beliefs, first-class, second-class, third-class, and so on, right through to the blank wall of his daily indifference and ignorance.

Nine o’clock.

“He won’t come now, Edwin. Let’s go.”

Matthew Septimus Windrove had the best of all reasons for not coming. He had mended the tyre slowly and methodically. Then with what for him was an unusual saving of time and energy he
had carried the bike over his shoulder to the garages so that he could blow the tyre up in a few seconds with the air pump. But he could not find Mr French to explain to him. He found the garage doors open, which was strange; and he went through to the back of the garages, wondering why Mr French had not turned the lights on. As he moved to the door of the office that opened out of the garage at the back, a man stole round a car and hit him hard on the back of the head with a heavy spanner. He did not even feel himself fall. The man dragged him like a sack into the office and pushed him under the table. Then he returned to his work, which was the placement of a heavy box against the wall of the garage where it backed on to the bookstore. Not long after, the bomb went off. It destroyed the wall, brought down the watertank over the bookstore and broke open the upper face of the nearer petrol tank. The water ran into the burning tank, and instead of putting out the flames, sank down and pushed the petrol up. The burning petrol flooded out in a blazing tide as the fire alarms went off.