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  Contents

  Francis King

  Dedication

  Part I OMENS

  PETER

  HELEN

  CLARE

  TOBY

  ISABEL

  Part II ACT

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Part III DARKNESS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part IV

  INTERLUDE

  Part V

  ILLUMINATIONS

  Francis King

  Act of Darkness

  Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

  ‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge

  Dedication

  To

  the memory of Alex Kellar

  1905–82

  in gratitude for that rare thing, an act

  of totally disinterested kindness

  Part I

  OMENS

  PETER

  The six-year-old boy, Peter, Pete, Peterkin, Petal, Pet, sprawls on his stomach, chin propped on hands, and stares down at the copy of the Illustrated London News in an attempt to decipher what is written below the photograph of the Indian Army officer whom he has always known as Uncle Jack.

  Uncle Jack, his mother’s brother, was to come and visit them on leave across hundreds of miles of desert and jungle from one side of the continent to the other but then, mysteriously, he never came.

  The child entered the drawing room and the voices of everyone, previously so agitated, fell strangely silent. ‘Take him to his room,’ his father ordered and at once his grandmother rose from the sofa and grasped his hand in hers with a brisk ‘Come along, Peter!’

  Two nights later, unable to sleep and with Clare, the governess, away on her evening off, Peter crept down the stairs and heard his mother’s low, gasping, terrifying sobs coming up from the darkened hall below him. The dining room door creaked open and, crouching now on a step as he peered down through the banisters, he first saw his father, Toby, stiffly erect in a yellow wedge of light, and then heard him ask with that impatience which always honed his voice when one of the family did or said something unpredictable or unwelcome: ‘What is it, Isabel? What’s the matter? Why have you left the table?’

  Then Peter’s half-sister, Helen, was also there, the taffeta over her bony shoulders glistening like mother-of-pearl and one cheekbone, her head turned sideways, glistening above it, and she too began: ‘What is it, mama? What is it?’ Peter always called his mother mummy; but to Helen she was never anything other than mama.

  ‘I suddenly came to think … He might now be …’

  ‘Come. Come!’ Toby’s first ‘ Come’ was tender, his second rough.

  ‘What’s the use, mama? One has to … accept.’

  ‘Yes. One has to accept.’ After that torrent of weeping, the voice was arid. ‘Yes.’

  Peter saw his mother, Isabel, in her black evening dress, the four panels of its skirt picked out in a diamond pattern in jet, move out of the darkness. The back of her right hand was pressed to her right eye as though something painful were lodged in it. Then he saw his father put an arm around her shoulder and gently propel her into the dining room, where the overhead light would be twinkling with a wattage so low from the generator that one could see its fiery filament, where old Mrs Thompson would be seated, her hands resting on the edge of the dining-table while she stared straight ahead of her, and where the two white-coated Indian servants would be standing motionless and silent, waiting to serve the entrée in its silver dish above a spirit-burner.

  ‘When is Uncle Jack coming to visit us?’ he began persistently to ask his mother, remembering the sunburned face with its jutting nose, thick moustache and blue, blank eyes. The face would look down at him, Peter would squirm and scream, as Uncle Jack demanded, his hands everywhere: ‘Are you ticklish then? Are you?’ Isabel, frowning across at them, would eventually exclaim: ‘Oh, do leave him alone, Jack! You’ll only over-excite him,’ in that same voice, dry and sharp, which she would so often use to the governess, Clare.

  ‘Oh … I don’t know. He’s gone away. Far away.’

  At that, his mother would rise from her chair or, if it were night-time, from the edge of his bed, as if she could suddenly no longer bear his proximity to her.

  ‘Gone from India?’

  ‘Yes, gone from India. Oh, you’ve asked me all this before and I’ve told you all this before!’

  Then, one evening, when yet again he put the question, she did not rise from the edge of his bed but instead bunched her lips and bit on them, her head turned away, before she told him: ‘Don’t ask that again. Please. He’s gone forever. He won’t come back.’

  ‘Forever? What does that mean?’ But, strangely, he had known all along that Uncle Jack had gone forever. He knew what it meant.

  ‘He’s gone to … heaven,’ she mumbled in a turbulent mingling of grief at her loss and embarrassment at having to use the ghastly euphemism.

  ‘Heaven?’

  The bull-terrier bitch, which he had always thought of as his, staggered a few steps, sat down with a bewildered look on her face, and then toppled over. Blood trickled out of one of her nostrils. Her sides heaved briefly, caved in. Clare snatched at his hand and tugged at it so hard that it hurt him, as she removed him from the verandah. He knew. He knew all right. He was not surprised.

  Now his mother suddenly enveloped him, going down on her knees by his bed, her white, plump arms around him and her face to his chest. She smelled of lavender, bitter and strong. ‘We’ll see him again,’ she whispered, even more desperate to convince herself than him. ‘One day. Pr
omise.’ He stiffened and then, all at once frantic, began to struggle free, as though this woman, her hair dishevelled and her eyelids inflamed with unshed tears, were clutching at him in a futile effort to save herself from drowning.

  Dead. Death. He knew those words. The gardener and the ‘boy’ who helped him lugged the bitch between them up the winding path and out of sight and then, later that afternoon, his father, Toby, led him up to where the earth, newly thrown up, glistened. ‘She’s there,’ Toby said. ‘She’s sleeping there.’ Toby was unnerved and exasperated when the child began to scream, his mouth wide open and his cheeks scarlet under the dripping branches – he was so jumpy, so sensitive, what would become of him? Then the child pointed. On the earth an immensely fat, blueish-pink worm, like a lump of gristle, wriggled upwards. Silent and rapt, the child stared, stooped, knelt; extended a hand; stroked with a forefinger; then, with a little shudder and gasp, picked up the worm and, head tilted to one side, examined it as it curled impotently first in one direction and then in another. ‘Put that down!’ Toby shouted.

  Dead. Death. He knew the words. He even knew how to spell them. He was good at spelling.

  ‘Why did he go to heaven?’ he now asked. He knew that he must not say dead or death to his mother. To his father, to his grandmother, to Helen or to Clare he might do so.

  ‘Because, because …’ With grave, pitiless curiosity he watched that familiar bunching of the lips and the tears slowly welling along the lower eyelids. ‘ Because … he was tired. He went to sleep. He was tired.’

  ‘Might I go to sleep and also …?’

  ‘Of course not!’ She towered above him, the woman whom he imagined to be getting fat, like the ayah, and whom he did not know to be pregnant. She was angry now, no longer grief-stricken and embarrassed. ‘You’re far too young, far too young.’

  ‘Uncle Jack wasn’t so old. How old was he?’

  ‘Thirty-five, nearly thirty-six.’

  ‘Was he older than you?’

  ‘We were twins. You know we were twins.’

  ‘I never knew.’ And, truly, he hadn’t. But for some reason this made his mother even angrier. ‘Of course you knew!’ she shouted at him, as she shouted at him when, having disobeyed her, he pretended ignorance of what she had told him to do or not to do.

  When next he was riding with Helen, he on the squat pony with the tufty coat of a donkey, and she on the gelding which really was their father’s, he asked her too: ‘ How did Uncle Jack die?’

  Helen hesitated, looking out from her eminence, over the trees to the lake below. Then she shrugged, as though it were a matter of little concern to either of them. ‘ Some kind of fever. I don’t know. He fell ill. Died. Quickly. Like that. No pain.’ Peter always knew when people were lying to him. She was lying.

  … Now the boy, Peter, Pete, Peterkin, Petal, Pet sprawls on his stomach and, with one stubby finger tracing the letters, attempts to read what is printed below the photograph of the dead man whom he loved. There is another photograph, similar to the one before him but larger, on the chimneypiece. Its art nouveau frames makes it appear as if some exotic liana had suddenly solidified to silver while it was wreathing itself about the face staring with blank, blue eyes, two sepia shadows in the photograph, into the ferocious sun above the bowed head of the unseen fellow officer with the Box Brownie in his hands.

  A gust of rain whips the window, disintegrating the fine cobwebs of moisture clinging to it. The boy screws up his eyes – one day he will have to wear glasses, Toby is always saying with that suppressed irritation which his son’s physical shortcomings arouse in him. Clare and Helen have gone out for a walk, in their belted raincoats and the hoods which they pull down low over their foreheads. His father has gone away for two or three days, on one of those journeys which he is always making to one of his farms, businesses or hotels, and his bearer, Muhammed, has gone with him. His grandmother, old Mrs Thompson, sits alone at the window of her bedroom, working, as so often, at some knitting. His mother is resting, as she often rests these days, a white, plump arm behind the luxuriant dark hair uncoiled from its knot and her belly mountainous under the sheet which drapes it. The ayah is also asleep, cross-legged and leaning against the door which opens out from what was once called the playroom and is now called the schoolroom, on to the verandah. From time to time the rain spatters her sari, her bunched, greying hair or her wrinkled face, but she is unaware of it or indifferent to it.

  He reads in puzzlement, then he reads in mounting horror. He cannot make out all the words but he can make out enough of them to know how his uncle died. There was a private soldier who wished to be corporal but the colonel of the regiment denied him his promotion; and so the soldier, a Gurkha, sharpened his kukri and resolved to kill the colonel. The colonel was summoned to a conference in Simla and the soldier, unable to kill him, killed Uncle Jack, the major, instead. The soldier stabbed Uncle Jack in a frenzy, over and over again. He went on stabbing him long after he was dead. Eventually, it took four men to prise open the hand in which the handle of the kukri was grasped so tight that it seemed to be embedded there.

  As the storm now lashes the window, with a din as of gravel hurled against it, the boy reads the stiff, glossy page of a magazine which has spent three weeks in the hold of a liner and three days in a sorting-office in Bombay and three more days on a train before the postman has trudged up the hill with it in his satchel, to be scolded by the bearer because he has let the rain dampen its cover. The boy feels horror rising within him, as in the past he has felt his gorge rise after too rich a meal, until he has screamed out to one of the women of the household: ‘ I’m going to be sick, I’m going to be sick!’ With the horror, there is also fear and, yes, despair, as though the stiff, glossy page contained confirmation of all that he has already believed in his inmost heart and yet has tried not to believe. That’s it, yes, that’s it. That’s how it happens. He stares down, the pupils of his eyes dilated, his nostrils wide and his mouth half-open, as though he were trying to cry out ‘Help me, help me!’ into the gale hammering at the window and had been paralysed in the effort. He has often before looked at pictures in the Illustrated London News and, hard though it has been, has even read some of the captions beneath them. Their Majesties, King George V and Queen Mary, visiting the Star and Garter Home for Incurables … (Skirt, stiffly pleated, all but brushes the ground, toque, parasol). Miss Jean Forbes-Robertson, who will once again this Christmas … (Peter Pan is transfixed, a sombre, huge-eyed moth, against a backcloth of whipped-cream clouds). Champion of the Year at Craft’s … (A pekinese bitch wrinkles her muzzle, feather-duster tail flaunted proudly high).

  ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ The boy sets up a weird keening. He has an over-mastering desire to wet himself, perhaps to do even worse.

  The door behind him opens and there, thrusting her swollen belly before her and a plait of thick, dark hair lying like some furry creature over her left shoulder and arm, stands Isabel, her large teeth gleaming out of the shadows.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ she asks angrily, because he is not allowed in the drawing room unless one of the grown-ups takes or calls him in. Then she sees his face, puckered and white, and the paper, smooth and shiny, on the carpet before him. None of them has yet read that copy of the Illustrated London News, it arrived only that morning. After dinner, she or her mother-in-law or one of the girls will pick it up and, bored, will turn its pages and later her husband, back from one of his farms or businesses or hotels, will demand: irritably: ‘How did you manage to make these pages so grubby?’ He always likes to read every paper or periodical or book before any of them. That is how it should be but that is not how it will be now, because Peter, Pete, Peterkin, Petal, Pet has got in before them. She stares for a moment at this frail, precocious son of hers, her only child, who often seems to her to resemble some plant, sappy and green, forced in the gloom of a potting shed. She stoops and, her Chinese wrap swishing about her, snatches at the magazine which he is now clutching and je
rks it away. At that, he gives a single, piercing scream, as though she had tugged out a kukri embedded in his hand. But tears, not blood, well out and flow, fatter and faster.

  She sees the photograph of the twin brother, with his nail-bitten, nicotine-stained fingers and his thin sinewy torso above long legs, whom she loved almost as a lover and whom she has mourned and is still mourning and will go on mourning almost as a husband. She, too, like the boy, feels horror rising within her; but her horror is not for that deed of frenzy, the knife smashing again and again into the already lifeless body and the blood spurting and the soldier grunting with each successive lunge, since all that has long since grown familiar to her in sleeping and waking nightmares, but rather for the intrusion, as of armed marauders exploding into the room in which she lies cradled alone in her grief, of so many unfeeling eyes staring down, as her son’s feeling ones have been doing, at the photograph and the sensational account beneath it.

  Suddenly she is furious. ‘You shouldn’t be in here! You’re not allowed in here alone! You know that! Where’s that bloody ayah? Ayah!’

  The boy wails as his mother snatches him up in her arms. The drunken Scots doctor of the hill-station has warned her to be careful, she has already lost more than one child, she must not exert herself, she must rest. But she does not think of this.

  The ayah, one cheek with a pleat in it where it has been pressed against the door-jamb, now jogs into the room on her flat, bare feet, her elbows tucked in close to her sides. She stifles a yawn, puts up a hand to tuck a wisp of grey hair into the untidy bun on the nape of her neck.

  ‘What is it, memsahib?’ she asks in Hindustani.

  Isabel scorches and shrivels her with her gaze. ‘Why did you let him come in here? Why don’t you keep an eye on him? Can’t I trust you for a single moment? You know Miss Clare and Miss Helen are out!’ Her Hindustani is fluent.

  The ayah cowers, a hand over her eyes, as though to shield them from a light so brilliant that they can barely look into it. But all Isabel’s attention is now for the boy, whom she is holding above her mountainous belly, his face, warm and wet with tears, pressed into one side of her neck, while his hand clutches at the sheaf of hair over her shoulder. ‘There, there, darling. There, there, Peter, Pete, Peterkin, Petal, Pet.’ She rocks him as though he were still a baby. ‘That’s the trouble of being so clever that you can read absolutely anything at the age of six. There, there!’ He emits a hiccoughing sob. ‘ You had to know sooner or later.’