Laughter in the Dark (2 page)

Certainly it was incredible—the more so as in all the nine years of his married life he had curbed himself, had never, never—“As a matter of fact,” he thought, “I ought to tell Elisabeth about it; or just go away with her for a little while; or see a psychoanalyst; or else …”

No, you can’t take a pistol and plug a girl you don’t even know, simply because she attracts you.

A
LBINUS
had never been very lucky in affairs of the heart. Although he was good-looking, in a quiet well-bred way, he somehow failed to derive any practical benefit from his appeal to women—for there was decidedly something very appealing about his pleasant smile and the mild blue eyes which bulged a little when he was thinking hard (and as he had a slowish mind this occurred more often than it should). He was a good talker, with just that very slight hesitation in his speech, the best part of a stammer, which lends fresh charm to the stalest sentence. Last but not least (for he lived in a smug German world) he had been left a soundly invested fortune by his father; yet, still, romance had a trick of becoming flat when it came his way.

In his student days he had had a tedious liaison of the heavyweight variety with a sad elderly lady who later, during the War, had sent out to
him at the front purple socks, tickly woollies and enormous passionate letters written at top speed in a wild illegible hand on parchment paper. Then there had been that affair with the Herr Professor’s wife met on the Rhine; she was pretty, when viewed at a certain angle and in a certain light, but so cold and coy that he soon gave her up. Finally, in Berlin, just before his marriage, there had been a lean dreary woman with a homely face who used to come every Saturday night and was wont to relate all her past in detail, repeating the same damned thing over and over again, sighing wearily in his embraces and always rounding off with the one French phrase she knew: “
C’est la vie
.” Blunders, gropings, disappointment; surely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination. And alongside of these feeble romances there had been hundreds of girls of whom he had dreamed but whom he had never got to know; they had just slid past him, leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing quite impossible to capture.

He married, but, though he loved Elisabeth after a manner, she failed to give him the thrill
for which he had grown weary with longing. She was the daughter of a well-known theatrical manager, a willowy, wispy, fair-haired girl with colorless eyes and pathetic little pimples just above that kind of small nose which English lady novelists call “retroussée” (note the second “e” added for safety). Her skin was so delicate that the least touch left a pink spot on it, slow to fade.

He married her because it just happened so. A trip to the mountains in her company, plus her fat brother and a remarkably athletic female cousin who, thank God, finally sprained an ankle in Pontresina, was chiefly responsible for their union. There was something so dainty, so airy about Elisabeth, and she had such a good-natured laugh. They were married in Munich in order to escape the onslaught of their many Berlin acquaintances. The chestnuts were in full bloom. A much treasured cigarette case was lost in a forgotten garden. One of the waiters at the hotel could speak seven languages. Elisabeth proved to have a tender little scar—the result of appendicitis.

She was a clinging little soul, docile and gentle. Her love was of the lily variety; but now and then it burst into flame and at such times Albinus was deluded into thinking that he had no need of any other love-mate.

When she became pregnant her eyes took on a vacant expression of contentment, as if she were contemplating that new inner world of hers; her careless walk changed to a careful waddle and she would greedily devour handfuls of snow which she hurriedly scooped up when no one was looking. Albinus did his best to look after her; took her out on long slow strolls; saw that she went to bed early and that household things with awkward corners were gentle to her when she moved about; but at night he dreamed of coming across a young girl lying asprawl on a hot lonely beach and in that dream a sudden fear would seize him of being caught by his wife. In the morning Elisabeth considered her swollen body in the wardrobe mirror and smiled a satisfied and mysterious smile. Then one day she was taken to a nursing home and Albinus lived for three weeks alone. He did not know what to do with himself; took a good deal of brandy; was tortured by two dark thoughts, each of a different kind of darkness: one was that his wife might die, and the other that if only he had a little more pluck he might find a friendly girl and bring her back to his empty bedroom.

Would the child ever be born? Albinus walked up and down the long, whitewashed, white-enameled passage with that nightmare
palm in a pot at the top of the stairs; he hated it, hated the hopeless whiteness of the place and the ruddy-cheeked rustling hospital nurses with white-winged heads who kept trying to drive him away. At length the assistant surgeon emerged and said gloomily: “Well, it’s all over.” Before Albinus’ eyes there appeared a fine dark rain like the flickering of some very old film (1910, a brisk jerky funeral procession with legs moving too fast). He rushed into the sickroom. Elisabeth had been happily delivered of a daughter.

The baby was at first red and wrinkled like a toy balloon on its decline. Soon, however, her face smoothed out and after a year she began to speak. Now, at the age of eight, she was far less voluble, for she had inherited her mother’s reserved nature. Her gaiety, too, was like her mother’s—a singular unobtrusive gaiety. It was just a quiet delight in one’s own existence with a faint note of humorous surprise at being alive at all—yes, that was the tenor of it: mortal gaiety.

And throughout all these years Albinus remained faithful, with the duality of his feelings puzzling him a good deal. He felt that he loved his wife sincerely, tenderly—as much in fact as he was capable of loving a human being; and
he was perfectly frank with her in everything except that secret foolish craving, that dream, that lust burning a hole in his life. She read all the letters which he wrote or received, liked to know the details of his business—especially those connected with the handling of old somber pictures, amid the cracks of which could be detected the white croup of a horse or a dusky smile. They had some very delightful trips abroad, and many beautifully soft evenings at home when he sat with her on the balcony high above the blue streets with the wires and chimneys drawn in Indian ink across the sunset, and reflected that he was really happy beyond his deserts.

One evening (a week before the talk about Axel Rex) he noticed on the way to a café where he had a business appointment that his watch was running amok (it was not the first time either) and that he had a full hour, a free gift to be used in some way. It was of course absurd to go back home to the other end of the town, yet neither did he feel disposed to sit and wait: the sight of other men with girl friends always upset him. He strolled about aimlessly and came to a small cinema the lights of which shed a scarlet sheen over the snow. He glanced at the poster (which portrayed a man looking up at a
window framing a child in a nightshirt), hesitated—and bought a ticket.

Hardly had he entered the velvety darkness when the oval beam of an electric torch glided toward him (as usually happens) and no less swiftly and smoothly led him down the dark and gently sloping gangway. Just as the light fell on the ticket in his hand, Albinus saw the girl’s inclined face and then, as he walked behind her, he dimly distinguished her very slight figure and the even swiftness of her dispassionate movements. Whilst shuffling into his seat he looked up at her and saw again the limpid gleam of her eye as it chanced to catch the light and the melting outline of a cheek which looked as though it were painted by a great artist against a rich dark background. There was nothing very much out of the common about all this: such things had happened to him before and he knew that it was unwise to dwell upon it. She moved away and was lost in the darkness and he suddenly felt bored and sad. He had come in at the end of a film: a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun. There was no interest whatever in watching happenings which he could not understand since he had not yet seen their beginning.

In the pause as soon as the lights were turned
on he noticed her again: she was standing at the exit next to a horribly purple curtain which she had just drawn to one side, and the outgoing people were surging past her. She was holding one hand in the pocket of her short embroidered apron and her black frock fitted her very tightly about the arms and bosom. He stared at her face almost in dread. It was a pale, sulky, painfully beautiful face. He guessed her age to be about eighteen.

Then, when the place had almost emptied and fresh people began to shuffle sideways along the rows, she passed to and fro, quite near to him several times; but he turned away because it hurt to look and because he could not help remembering how many times beauty—or what he called beauty—had passed him by and vanished.

For another half hour he sat in the darkness, his prominent eyes fixed on the screen. Then he rose and walked away. She drew the curtain aside for him with a slight clatter of wooden rings.

“Oh, but I will have one more look,” thought Albinus miserably.

It seemed to him that her lips twitched a little. She let the curtain fall.

Albinus stepped into a blood-red puddle; the
snow was melting, the night was damp, with the fast colors of street lights all running and dissolving. “Argus”—good name for a cinema.

After three days he could ignore the memory of her no longer. He felt ridiculously excited as he entered the place once more—again in the middle of something. All was exactly as it had been the first time: the gliding torch, the long Luini-esque eyes, the swift walk in the darkness, the pretty movement of her black-sleeved arm as she clicked the curtain to one side. “Any normal man would know what to do,” thought Albinus. A car was spinning down a smooth road with hairpin turns between cliff and abyss.

As he left, he tried to catch her eye, but failed. There was a steady downpour outside and the pavement glowed crimson.

Had he not gone there that second time he might perhaps have been able to forget this ghost of an adventure, but now it was too late. He went there a third time firmly resolved to smile at her—and what a desperate leer it would have been, had he achieved it. As it was, his heart thumped so that he missed his chance.

And the next day Paul came to dinner, they discussed the Rex affair, little Irma gobbled up her chocolate cream and Elisabeth asked her usual questions.

“Just dropped from the moon?” he asked, and then tried to make up for his nastiness by a belated titter.

After dinner he sat by his wife’s side on the broad sofa, pecked at her with little kisses while she looked at gowns and things in a women’s magazine, and dully he thought to himself:

“Damn it all, I’m happy, what more do I need? That creature gliding about in the dark.… Like to crush her beautiful throat. Well, she is dead anyway, since I shan’t go there any more.”

S
HE
was called Margot Peters. Her father was a house-porter who had been badly shellshocked in the War: his gray head jerked unceasingly as if in constant confirmation of grievance and woe, and he fell into a violent passion on the slightest provocation. Her mother was still youngish, but rather battered too—a coarse callous woman whose red palm was a perfect cornucopia of blows. Her head was generally tied up in a kerchief to keep the dust from her hair during work, but after her great Saturday clean-up—which was mainly effected by means of a vacuum cleaner ingeniously connected to the lift—she dressed herself up and sallied forth to pay visits. She was unpopular with the tenants on account of her insolence and the vicious way she had of ordering people to wipe their feet on the mat. The Staircase was the main idol of her existence—not as a symbol of glorious ascension,
but as a thing to be kept nicely polished, so that her worst nightmare (after too generous a helping of potatoes and sauerkraut) was a flight of white steps with the black trace of a boot first right, then left, then right again and so on—up to the top landing. A poor woman indeed, and no object for derision.

Otto, Margot’s brother, was three years her senior. He worked in a bicycle factory, despised his father’s tame republicanism, held forth on politics in the neighboring pub and declared as he banged his fist on the table: “The first thing a man must have is a full belly.” This was his guiding principle—and quite a sound one too.

As a child Margot went to school, and there she had her ears boxed rather less frequently than at home. A kitten’s commonest movement is a soft little jump coming in sudden series; hers was a sharp raising of her left elbow to protect her face. In spite of all, she grew up into a bright and high-spirited girl. When only eight she joined with much gusto in the screaming, scraping games of football which schoolboys played in the middle of the street using a rubber ball the size of an orange. At ten she learned to ride her brother’s bicycle. Bare-armed, with black pigtails flying, she scorched up and down the pavement; then halted with one foot resting
on the curbstone, pensively. At twelve she became less boisterous. Those were the days when she liked nothing better than to stand at the door and chatter in undertones with the coalman’s daughter, exchanging views upon the women who visited one of the lodgers, and discussing passing hats. Once she found on the staircase a shabby handbag containing a small cake of almond soap with a thin curved hair adhering to it, and half-a-dozen very queer photos. On another occasion the redhaired boy who always used to trip her up at play kissed her on the nape of the neck. Then one night she had a fit of hysterics, for which she got a dousing of cold water followed by a sound wallop.