Dark Places (5 page)

Like cleaved to like here, as elsewhere in nature, and dull Singer found himself settled within the dull group. There was MacDonald, no gadfly he, but a solemn young man in the year above me, who felt strongly about grammar, even at pimply seventeen getting himself in a state like some old blunderbuss with a red face and whiskers over the decline of the subjunctive. There was Gillespie: Gillespie was the other fat boy at school, and we had often been paired off in those atrocious pantings over paddocks. We hardly loved each other for being together in affliction, but it meant that we gravitated towards each other now. There was Parsons, who collected coins, and who liked you to turn out your change-pocket so he could check your half-pennies for the one that was worth two hundred pounds; and there was Singer, who could tell you the names of the countries in the world in alphabetical order.

There was a young lady who seemed less flighty than the other giggling voiles and muslins: she seemed a serious type of person, and like me did not join in any of the banter. Like me, this cousin of a sister, or sister of a cousin, sat on the outskirts. On her face I recognised the same expression as on my own: haughtiness alternating with too eager a desire to please. This Winifred was a girl who came out with things abruptly, in a jerky way that sounded as if she were picking a fight, and she did not smile much: but I could see that like me she was simply stern with fear.

It was this young lady with whom I was teamed—others had seen how we were two peas from the same awkward pod—to play at some idiot game of shuttlecock and battledore. She did not warm to me for the fact that I was thought a suitable partner: we exchanged a remark or two, but her eyes were elsewhere as she spoke; her eyes were on Davis on the other side of the net, tossing back his forelock and turning from face to smiling face. He was surrounded by all the laughing ones, the ones who somehow had been born knowing how to
fit in
, and here on the other side of the net, awkward Winifred and I exchanged remarks on how long it was since we had played this game, how out of practice we were, and how all the best players seemed to be on the other side.

In the spirit of being a good sport I leapt and lunged as enthusiastically as I could, and played one or two good shots. When I missed an easy one, flapping at the air in a way that must have looked ridiculous, I turned to Winifred with a rueful laugh—Albion proving himself a good loser—and hoped for a friendly gesture. But Winifred did not respond with any kind of warmth. Instead she turned to me and in her most piercing and irritable voice said, ‘What do you think this is, Bush Week, and you're the sap!' Before I could quite believe what I had heard, the rotten little feathered object came back over the net and struck me on the head—and Winifred laughed! Laughed at me, so that the spotty girls and the cross-eyed dolt, and all the sparkling beauties on the other side of the net, and Davis grinning away winningly—they all laughed with her, and I froze within, and burned without, with mortification. Desperation made me force out a hoarse laugh myself—a strained
ho ho
through stiff lips—so that I would not look even more ridiculous for taking myself seriously; but how I loathed them all at that moment! Afterwards, over tea and more of those hateful little explosive biscuits, our hostess, the girl most often and most charmingly at Davis' side, came up and put her hand on my arm. ‘You must not mind that we laughed, Albion, I know you are a good sport, and it is all in fun, you know.' I was stung all over again that she could think I cared. ‘Oh that!' I exclaimed. ‘Oh, I had forgotten that, it was nothing,' and I heard my voice over-loud among the teacups.

It was not long before Winifred and I found ourselves teamed again with a dozen others patting a flabby ball about on the lawn, with a dispiriting collection of warped tennis-racquets and split hockey sticks. The ball came my way and I whacked it with my hockey stick (whose ruptured handle had already driven splinters into my palm) and watched it wobble crookedly over towards Winifred. She was well-placed to send the thing between the two tomato stakes that were our goal, and I saw her tongue come out between her lips and her cross frown deepen as she took careful aim with her ravelled tennis-racquet; squeezing that tongue between her teeth as if to bite it off, she took a great swipe at the ball, missed and staggered. A groan went up from our team, a groan and laugh mixed, and Winifred looked around rather wildly at everyone, and it was in that moment, in which her face was naked, that I said, loud enough for her to hear, but not loud enough for everyone, ‘Is this Bush Week, Winifred, and you the sap?' Well, it was just a joke: one was supposed to take it in good part, and be a good sport, and see the funny side of it, and so on, but Winifred did not. Winifred shot me a look of desperation and loathing, a look like a physical blow. As I watched her fling away her silly ruined racquet, and walk stiffly off the lawn up to the house, I had to recognise that I had still not got the hang of these social exchanges.

I could see I had badly misjudged: Winifred did not ever look at me or speak to me again, and even the other young ladies seemed to look askance, and the young men seemed to watch me rather carefully, as if I might bite; I despaired, for it was clear now that just when I thought I had got the hang of this game, I had got it most deeply wrong.

Five

THE SIGN up above the door of the business,
Singer & Son
,
Stationers
, was like a reproach to me: for the eye that knew, such as my own, was conscious of the space after the word
son
, and before the comma, which Father had instructed to be left, in the hope of one day adding another ‘s'.

Entering by the ponderous front door, that swung closed behind us, cutting off the light and noise of the street, Father and I were entombed immediately in the aspidistra dimness of a tiled hallway with various appropriate dark-brown paintings on the wall, swallowed up in a stuffiness of rugs and furniture-polish. I had to grin and shake hands with various employees, and did not like the smiles they gave me, at once patronising and meeching, and the way I had to stand there then beside Father, tongue-tied as they spoke in figures and abbreviations I did not understand, ungracious when at last they turned to me with some well-meaning—too transparently well-meaning—question about school, or worst of all, some jovial remark about following in my father's footsteps.

The large face of Rundle had been known to me since I had first come here in short pants with Father. He had always seemed an old man in my eyes: he was someone it was impossible to imagine young. On my first piping-voiced visits to the business, Rundle was already a stooping coarse-pored personage who remarked wearyingly on how I had shot up, and how someone should put a brick on my head. ‘Thank the Lord for Rundle,' Father would say when he was in a rare man-to-man mood. ‘He has kept the business from going under more than once, Albion, though naturally I would never worry your mother with such things.'

Rundle was a man with a large sagging face like a dog's, who wore lumpy tweedy clothes with a suggestion of matted fur about them. His chin was cushioned around with a crescent of fat, but it was not happy fat: his was the awkward bulk of an anxious man, a worrier whose ambition would never rise above being someone else's right-hand man. He was an old-fashioned faithful sort of Fido, proud of being invited to dinner once a year by his employer, and ignorant of the laughter at the expense of his manner of grasping a knife, and of his yellow-charmeuse-swaddled wife, when they left. When called on to inspect a ledger and to point out some detail or other to Father, he would fumble at his handkerchief-pocket and draw out a pincenez that perched on the end of his thick nose—no one could take seriously a man who wore such things!—and when he put the ledger down on a desk, in order to run a finger down a list of figures and stop at some significant one, the dog's toenail of his forefinger nail was hideously apparent: a brown curved piece of striated horn instead of a pale fingernail with a pink half-moon. Had he caught it in a mangle in infancy, or had he been born that way, and did his thick clothes conceal other hideous abnormalities?

The silence in Father's office, when I was installed in a corner with a humbug and a book, while Father and Rundle went over the figures together, had always oppressed me: my ears hummed, my heart beat too fast, and my palms grew cold at the thought of stepping into Father's shoes eventually, and spending a lifetime here.

Sitting on the hard chair in the corner, while Father and Rundle mumbled away together, I tried to remember who I was. Privately I knew myself to be nothing more than a wisp of unhappiness floating through space. But I reminded myself that in the eyes of the world I was Albion Gidley Singer, son of George Augustus Singer, the prominent and respected man of business. Albion Gidley Singer, I reminded myself, had a definite existence as a conscientious though mediocre student, an adequate medium bowler, and a custodian of a fact or two about almost any subject you could care to name. I ran through a few, like a consoling prayer: the four longest rivers in the world are the Nile, the Amazon, the Yangtze and the Niger; Reykjavik is the capital of Iceland; there are twenty-six bones in the human foot.

I was a large lad now, who made the banister shake when I leaned on it, and these days over the leg of mutton the future of Albion Gidley Singer was often discussed. He would be going up to the University before long, and then, naturally, would go into the business under Father.

It was a comfort more consoling than Mother's fairy-cakes to have Father pass the newspaper across the table to me in the mornings. ‘Here, Albion,' he would say, ‘this will interest you,' and I would stare at the smudged coarse lettering and pretend to be so engrossed that Father would not query me on what I was reading, or make comments that would require an intelligent answer. At least I knew that, no matter what penetrating and intelligent questions Kristabel might ask, the newspaper would not be passed to her.

At such times I turned to my old friends, my facts, and occasionally I was able to produce a rare one that would cause Father to look at me with something like approval, though tempered with considerable surprise, and say, ‘My word, Albion, you are a dark horse!' It was my greatest fear that Father would discover that the accumulation of facts was all I had: my great bank of facts was my capital, on which I drew larger and larger drafts, withdrawing and recklessly spending those hard-won facts.

However bogus I felt my new manliness to be, it seemed that it fooled Father. It was possible, too, that he wished to be fooled; or perhaps he hoped that clothes would succeed in manufacturing a man where one of the top schools, and every advantage, had not. In any case, it was a fact that I had crossed some frontier or other now: I had entered the section of life where fathers discussed the news with their sons, and took them to their tailor's to be fitted for their first adult suit of clothes.

‘Chapman is a bit of an old woman,' Father warned me, on the ferry on the way to my first fitting, and I had no idea what he meant, but naturally was not so foolish as to ask. ‘If the truth were known he should have retired years ago, but he would not know what to do with himself, I imagine.' Father guffawed, and I imitated him in a subdued way, feeling my palms clammy at having Father speak to me in such a natural way, quite as if I were another man, seeming to forget for the moment that I was his disappointing only son.

‘Now, Albion,' Father said, and glanced around as if to check that no one was close enough to hear. The deckhand, a sharp-faced lad of my own age, stared back from along the deck, and I imagined how this wiry and competent person would despise the soft-handed youth standing there with his prosperous father, a person who could at last parse any sentence from Gibbon, construe any lines of Virgil, but could not have coiled a rope and dropped it neatly round a bollard to save his life.

Father lowered his voice, and moved a little closer. Generally, he was a father who kept his distance, so I felt almost embraced by his nearness now. ‘There are one or two things you should know, now that you are coming on to manhood,' he said. Father had never spoken to me about anything of a bodily nature, but I was sure that he was about to speak to me now about the peculiarities my body was troubling me with in the most private of ways. Perhaps he would even clarify the mysterious little chats we had had at school from the housemaster on the subject of Purity. I felt a moment's panic, for I was not ready for any such initiation: the impressive husk of Albion Gidley Singer might have appeared ready, but I myself was not. And why had he chosen here and now, on the ferry, virtually in public, and with this knowing-looking lad, with his coil of filthy rope, staring at us?

But Father had no more wish than I to wax intimate on the subject of the body. As the foam sizzled away from the side of the ferry, he instructed me on the number of buttons a gentleman has on his jacket, the quantity of cuff that a gentleman must show, and the vulgarity of cuff-buttons, which no gentleman would ever wear. ‘You may have my own silver cuff-links, Albion, until we can provide you with your own, they are the ones my own father gave me when I came of age.' He demonstrated on his own suit of clothes the fact that a gentleman never does up the bottom button of his waistcoat, and never fails to do up all the rest. ‘Now, when Chapman is fitting you, Albion, it is a courtesy to stand quite still, and to make a little chat. A tailor is not the same as a shop-assistant, and will be treated by a gentleman with a certain respect.'

We were nearing the Quay now: the note of the engines changed to a deeper throb. Father drew out his gold double-hunter and checked the time, but absently, and as he put it away I felt myself grow even more self-conscious, for I could see he had something more taxing to say, which would require both of us to be at our most wooden and gentlemanly. ‘Chapman will ask you, Albion, how you dress.' Father paused here, and coughed, and I felt every pore of my body congest and grow hot with the idea of stripping off (which was what this must mean) before Father, and before Chapman, and had not Father said that Chapman was a woman? I would have to stand shivering before them all, a shameful exhibit of nakedness covered by nothing but goose-pimples, and everyone would see all I had.