The Lake of Darkness (2 page)

There was no plug on its lead. It was dirty and the coiled element had some kind of black grease or oil on it. Finn brought it down the steps and set about attaching a 13-amp plug to it. When this was plugged in, however, nothing happened. Never mind. Mending something like that was child’s play to him.

The time had come to check up on her. He didn’t want her coming home because she was starting a cold or her boss had decided to take the afternoon off. She had been unwise enough to tell him where she worked that time he had been in to mend the pipe, just as she had also told him she always took a bath the minute she got in from work. Finn never forgot information of that sort. He looked up the
number in the phone book and dialled it. When he had asked for her and been put through to some extension and asked to hold and at last had heard her voice, he replaced the receiver.

An old, long-disused gas pipe ran up the kitchen from behind the fridge into the loft. This Finn intended to utilize. He cut a section out of it about six inches from the floor. Then he returned to the loft, this time with a 100-watt light bulb on the end of a long lead. He soon found the other end of the gas pipe and proceeded to cut off its sealed end. While he worked he reflected on the cowardice of human beings, their fears, their reserve.

Finn had a sense of humour of a kind, though it was far from that perception of irony and incongruities which usually goes by the name, and he had been amused that Kaiafas, in all their dealings, had never directly told him what he wanted doing. It was left to Finn to understand.

“Feen,” Kaiafas had said, “I am at my wits… end. I say to her, ‘Madam, I give you five thousand pounds, five thousand, madam, to quit my house.’ ‘Please,’ I say, ‘I say please on my knees.’ What does she say? That it is a pity I ever come away from Cyprus.”

“Well,” said Finn. “Well, well.” It was a frequent rejoinder with him.

A look of ineffable slyness and greed came into Kaiafas’ face. Finn had already guessed what he was after. He had done jobs for Kaiafas and others before, the kind of thing a professional hit man does in the course of his work, though nothing of this magnitude.

“So I think to myself,” said Kaiafas, “I make no more offer to you, madam, I give you no five thousand pounds. I give it to my friend Feen instead.”

That had been all. Finn wasn’t, in any case, the sort of person to invite confidences. He had merely nodded and said, “Well, well,” and Kaiafas had fetched him another
pineapple juice, handing over the key to the top flat. And now the first instalment of his fee had come …

He had inserted a length of electric flex into the pipe from the loft end, its frayed tips protruding ever so little from the cut-out section behind the fridge but apparent only to a very acute observer. The other end of the flex reached as far as the trap-door and with a further two yards to spare. Finn was more or less satisfied. Once he might have done the deed without all this paraphernalia of wires and gas pipe and trap-door, without clumsy manual effort. He looked back wistfully to his early teens, his puberty, now a dozen years past, when his very presence in a house had been enough to begin a wild
poltergeist
activity. It was with a yearning nostalgia that he remembered it, as another man might recall a juvenile love-bricks flying through windows, pictures falling from the walls, a great stone out of the garden which no one could lift suddenly appearing in the middle of Queenie’s living-room carpet. The power had gone with the loss of his innocence, or perhaps with the hashish which a boy at school had got him on to. Finn never smoked now, not even tobacco, and he drank no alcohol. It wasn’t worth it if you meant to become an adept, a man of power, a master.

He checked that in the electric point behind the fridge there was a spare socket. A certain amount of the black fluffy dirt which always seems to coat the inside of lofts had fallen into the bath. Finn cleaned it with the rags he carried with him until its rose-pink surface looked just as it had done when he arrived. He replaced the aluminium steps in the cupboard and put the electric ring into a plastic carrier bag. It had been a long day’s work for every minute of which Kaiafas was paying him handsomely.

The Frazers would return at any moment. That was of no importance provided Finn was out of Anne Blake’s flat. He closed her front door behind him. By now it was dark but Finn put no lights on. One of the skills in which he was
training himself was that of seeing more adequately in the dark.

The air was strangely clear for so mild an evening, the yellow and white lights sparkling, dimming a pale and lustreless moon. As Finn started the van he saw Mrs. lonides, dark, squat, dressed as always in black, cross the street and open the gate of the house he had just left. He drove down Dartmouth Park Hill, taking his place patiently in the traffic queueing at the lights by the tube.

The house where Finn lived was a merchant’s mansion that had fallen on evil days almost from the first, and the first was a long time ago now. He climbed up through the house, up a wider staircase than the one in Modena Road. Music came from behind doors, and voices and cooking smells and the smell of cannabis smoked in a little white-clay pipe. He passed the door of his own room and went on up. At the top he knocked once at the first door and passed without waiting into the room.

It was a room, not a flat, though a large one, and it had been partitioned off into small sections-living room, bedroom, kitchen. Finn had put up two of the partitions himself. You entered by way of the kitchen, which was a miracle of shelving and the stowing of things on top of other things and of squeezing a quart into a pint pot. In the living room, nine feet by eight, where a thousand little knick-knacks of great worth and beauty to their owner were displayed upon surfaces and walls, where a gas fire burned, where a small green bird sat silent in a cage, was Lena consulting the pendulum.

“Well,” said Finn, going up to her and taking her free hand. They never kissed. She smiled at him, a sweet vague smile as if she couldn’t quite see him or was seeing something beyond him. He sat down beside her.

Finn could do nothing with the pendulum, but Lena had great ability with it just as she had with the divining rod. This was very likely one of the consequences of what those
people at the hospital called her schizophrenia. The pendulum was a glass bead suspended on a piece of cotton, and when Lena put it above her right hand it revolved clockwise and when she put it above her left hand it revolved widdershins. She had long since asked it to give her signs for yes and no, and she had noted these particular oscillations. The pendulum had just answered yes to some question which hadn’t been revealed to Finn, and Lena sighed.

She was old to be his mother, a thin, transparent creature like a dead leaf or a shell that has been worn away by the action of the sea. Finn thought sometimes that he could see the light through her. Her eyes were like his but milder, and her hair which had been as fair as his had reverted to its original whiteness. She dressed herself from the many second-hand clothes shops in which the district abounded and derived as intense a pleasure from buying in them as a Hampstead woman might in South Molton Street. Mostly she was happy, though there were moments of terror. She believed herself to be a reincarnation of Madame Blavatsky, which the hospital had seized upon as a case-book delusion. Finn thought it was probably true.

“Did you buy anything today?” he said.

She hesitated. Her dawning smile was mischievous. It was as if she had a secret she could no longer keep to herself and she exclaimed with shining eyes, “It’s your birthday!”

Finn nodded.

“Did you think I’d forgotten? I
couldn’t.”
She was suddenly shy and she clasped her hands over the pendulum, looking down at them. “There’s something for you in that bag.”

“Well, well,” said Finn.

In the bag was a leather coat, black, long, double-breasted, shabby, scuffed, and lined with rotting silk. Finn put it on.

“Well,” he said. “Well!” It was like a storm trooper’s
coat. He fastened the belt. “Must be the best thing you ever got,” he said.

She was ecstatic with pleasure. “I’ll mend the lining for you!”

“You’ve had a busy day,” he said. The coat was too big for the room. With every movement he made he was in danger of knocking over little glass vases, Toby jugs, china dogs, pebbles, shells, and bunches of dried flowers in chutney jars. He took the coat off carefully, with reverence almost, to please Lena. The green bird began to sing, shrill and sweet, pretending it was a canary. “What did you do this afternoon?”

“Mrs. Urban came.”

“Well!”

“She came in her new car, a green one. The kind of green that has silver all mixed up in it.”

Finn nodded. He knew what she meant.

“She brought me those chocolates and she stayed for tea. She made the tea. Last time she came was before you put up the wall and made my bedroom.”

“Did she like it?”

“Oh, yes!” Her eyes were full of love, shining with it. “She
loved
it. She said it was so compact.”

“Well, well,” said Finn, and then he said, “Ask the pendulum something for me. Ask it if I’m going to have a good year.”

Lena held up the string. She addressed the pendulum in a whisper, like someone talking to a child in a dark room. The glass bead began to swing, then to revolve clockwise at high speed.

“Look!“ Lena cried. ”Look at that! Look what a wonderful year you’ll have. Your twenty-seventh, three times three times three. The pendulum never lies.”

On the broad gravelled frontage of the Urbans’ house were drawn up the Urbans’ three cars, the black Rover, the metallic-green Vauxhall, and the white Triumph. In the drawing room sat the Urbans drinking sherry, oloroso for Margaret, amontillado for Walter, and Tio Pepe for Martin. There was something of the Three Bears about them, though Baby Bear, in the shape of twenty-eight-year-old Martin was no longer a resident of Copley Avenue, Alexandra Park, and Goldilocks had yet to appear.

Invariably on Thursday evenings Martin was there for dinner. He went home with his father from the office just round the corner. They had the sherry, two glasses each, for they were creatures of habit, and had dinner and watched television while Mrs. Urban did her patchwork. Since she had taken it up the year before as menopausal therapy she seemed to be perpetually accompanied by clusters of small floral hexagons. Patchwork was beginning to take over the house in Copley Avenue, chiefly in the form of cushion covers and bedspreads. She stitched away calmly or with suppressed, energy, and her son found himself watching her while his father discoursed with animation on a favourite subject of his, Capital Transfer Tax.

Martin had a piece of news to impart. Though in possession of it for some days, he had postponed telling it and his feelings about it were now mixed. Natural elation was mingled with unease and caution. He even felt very slightly sick as one does before an examination or an important interview.

Margaret Urban held out her glass for a refill. She was a big, statuesque, heavy-browed woman who resembled Leighton’s painting of Clytemnestra. When she had sipped her sherry, she snipped off a piece of thread and held up for the inspection of her husband and son a long strip of joined-together red and purple hexagons. This had the effect of temporarily silencing Walter Urban, and Martin, murmuring that that was a new colour combination, he hadn’t seen anything like that before, prepared his opening words. He rehearsed them under his breath as his mother, with the artist’s sigh of dissatisfaction, rolled up the patchwork, jumped rather heavily to her feet and made for the door, bent on attending to her casserole.

“Mother,” said Martin, “wait here a minute. I’ve got something to tell you both.”

Now that the time had come, he brought it out baldly, perhaps clumsily. They looked at him in silence, a calm, slightly stunned silence into which gratification gradually crept. Mrs. Urban took her hand from the door and came slowly back, her eyebrows rising and disappearing into her thick, blue-rinsed fringe.

Martin laughed awkwardly. “I can’t quite believe it myself yet.”

“I thought you were going to tell us you were getting married,” said his mother.

“Married? Me? Whatever made you think that?”

“Oh, I don’t know, it’s the sort of thing one does think of. We didn’t even know you did the football pools, did we, Walter? Exactly how much did you say you’d, won?”

“A hundred and four thousand, seven hundred and fifty-four pounds, forty-six pence.”

“A hundred and four thousand pounds! I mean, you can’t have been doing the pools very long. You weren’t doing them when you lived here.”

“I’ve been doing them for five weeks,” said Martin.

“And you’ve won a hundred and four thousand pounds!
Well, a hundred and five really. Don’t you think that’s absolutely amazing, Walter?”

A slow smile was spreading itself across Walter Urban’s handsome, though somewhat labrador-like, face. He loved it, the consideration of how to make it multiply, how (with subtle and refined legality) to keep it from the coffers of the Inland Revenue, and he loved the pure beauty of it as an abstraction on paper rather than as notes in a wallet. The smile grew to beaming proportions.

“I think this calls for some sort of congratulation, Martin. Yes, many congratulations. What a dark horse you are! Even these days a hundred thousand is a large sum of money, a very
respectable
sum of money. We’ve still got that bottle of Piper-Heidsieck from our anniversary, Margaret. Shall we open it? Wins of this kind are free of tax, of course, but we shall have to think carefully about investing it so that you don’t pay all your interest away to the Inland Revenue. Still, if a couple of accountants can’t work it out, who can?”

“Go and get the champagne, Walter.”

“Whatever you do, don’t think of paying off the mortgage on your flat. Remember that tax relief on the interest on your mortgage repayments is a concession of H. M. Government, of which a single man in your position would be mad not to take advantage.”