Dark Places
P
RAISE FOR
K
ATE
G
RENVILLE AND
Dark Places
âA ventriloqual tour de force.'
Sydney Morning Herald
âAn eloquent, angry and humane novel. A very fine, albeit terrifying, writer.'
Irish Times
âA brilliantly realised fleshing-out of a man so alienated from himself that he must practise his face in front of a mirror.'
Seattle Times
âMesmerising. Grenville's edgy, unblinking prose is arresting, and Albion's misogyny, philandering and violence result in a genuinely disturbing read.'
Publishers Weekly
âA masterful portrait of a sexual monster.'
The Province
, Vancouver
â
Dark Places
rises to heights of obsessive and propulsive power.'
Australian
âCarefully thought-through and passionately imagined.'
Independent
, UK
âControversial, painful...powerful.'
Booklist
, US
âThe ambition behind it is met at almost every point by Grenville's talent: unmistakable voice, solid intelligence, beautiful sharp language.'
Sunday Age
Kate Grenville is one of Australia's finest writers. Her early works, which include
Lilian's Story
,
Dark Places
and
Joan Makes History
, have become modern classics and are admired by critics and readers around the world. Her 1992 novel,
The Idea of Perfection
, was a bestseller and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Britain's most valuable literary award.
In 2006 Kate Grenville was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the NSW Premier's Literary Award for
The Secret River
, and the novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The Lieutenant
is Kate's latest novel and was published in October 2008 to critical acclaim.
Kate Grenville's website:
www.kategrenville.com
includes an account of the writing of
Dark Places
and notes for readers' groups.
DARK
PLACES
DARK
PLACES
KATE
GRENVILLE
AUTHOR OF
The Secret River
AND
The Lieutenant
The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William St
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au
www.kategrenville.com
Copyright © Kate Grenville 1994
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published 1994 by Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia
First published by The Text Publishing Company in 2008
This edition published 2009
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed and bound by Griffin Press
Design by W. H. Chong
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Dark places / Kate Grenville.
ISBN 9781921520259 (pbk.)
Self-esteem--Fiction. Family--Fiction.
A823.3
Also by Kate Grenville:
N
OVELS
Lilian's Story
Dreamhouse
Joan Makes History
The Idea of Perfection
The Secret River
The Lieutenant
S
HORT
S
TORIES
Bearded Ladies
N
ON-FICTION
The Writing Book
Making Stories
Writing from Start to Finish
Searching for the Secret River
My thanks to the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Fellowship which assisted the writing of this book.
Parts of this book appeared, in slightly different form, in the
Sydney Morning Herald
, the
Bulletin
,
Scripsi
and
Picador New Writing I.
All the characters in this novel are fictional. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is unintended.
For Isobel
Contents
THIS IS ALBION GIDLEY SINGER at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest: you have to begin somewhere, and such is the nature of this intractable universe that the only thing you can start with is yourself. If I am nothing else, I am at least a link in the endless chain of proof which stretches back to a time when Albion Gidley Singer cannot even be imagined.
Mirrors show me a tall man with a splendid head, and a mouth that would never weaken. That person in the mirror has been so many solid things. He has always been a gentleman, and in addition he has been a son, a husband, and a father. He has been a customer in shops where long yellow gloves were laid out before him on glass, he has been a drinker on sawdust, and in the hushed leathery air of the best clubs. He has been a man in plus-fours, a man in a wing collar, a man in a nightshirt, a man in a striped bathing-suit. He has even been a praying man, staring at the dust between his knees and looking forward to lunch. He has been all these things with exceptional completeness, and has convinced the world, and himself.
I move from room to empty room in my house, inspecting the objects that I own. In the muffled air of the closed drawing-room I grasp a poker and hear it rattle against the grate; in the entrance hall, where no one enters now, I feel the marble of the hall-stand cold against my palm; in the gleaming dining-room I grasp the Dresden shepherd on the sideboard, and find the flute in his silly pink hand snapping off between my fingers: but these things remain strangers to me.
That dining-room is all chairs now, drawn up tightly against the table with the spindles grinning at me. Now that there is no one to sit in them, those chairs are multiplying, and the blank sheen of the table fills the entire room.
This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, locked in behind his mahogany, filling the silence around himself with the busy squeak of the nib across the paper. I will begin where I always like to begin, with a fact. Once upon a time, there was a man and his daughter, and all was well. There was a man and his daughter, that was a definite fact, and nothing a man need be ashamed of. I have never been ashamed of any fact, and I am not a mumbler: I like the way my face vibrates with the resonance of my voice as I declare a fact, and my chest swells. My voice fills the room completely, corner to corner and up to the ceiling like a smell.
I am in danger of becoming irrational. At any moment I will begin tittering. Grip yourself, Albion. Tell the story.
I WAS ONCE long ago a fat boy, and in the privacy of the bath I investigated my rolls and folds with interest. âIt is all muscle,' Father said. âDo not slouch, Albion, muscle is nothing to be ashamed of,' and I said nothing, for if Father wished to have a son of muscle, I would do my best to please him.
I knew I was a disappointment to Father. He was a man of unbending lip, his fob-watch never far from his hand: stern reminders of how I must one day fill his shoes were never far from his lips, although he made no secret of his inability to imagine me doing so.
âAlbion,' my father said, âyou must never forget that God is watching you. You are never unobserved.' Every tree, every fence and ditch, every soft sky above darkened houses, watched. God and layabouts watched from every corner. I was Albion Gidley Singer, son of George Augustus Singer, and had a position to maintain under so many eyes.
But who was Albion Gidley Singer?
He was a boy who learned early on how to tie his own bootlaces and not to cry when he spilled his milk. He was a boy who was always big for his age, a boy who had learned to call his father
Sir
, and his mother
Mama
, he was a boy who stood when any of his elders entered the room, who doffed his cap when speaking to a lady, who learned how to conceal the various sounds and discharges of his body, and to lie down with a camphor cloth when the asthma came on; he was a boy who learned to say thank you to servants in just the right way, and to put the sixpence in the plate at Communion, and say his prayers for the poor people. He was a boy who knew all this: his various skills and knowledges armoured him so that life could never flummox him.
But Albion Gidley Singer was also a large and cumbersome suit of armour wheeled around the world, made to speak and smile and shake hands, by some other, very much punier person within: some ant-like being who did not know anything at all, an embattled and lonely atom whose existence seemed suspected by no one.
The only comfort in the existence of that microscopic Albion Gidley Singer was the certainty of facts. In bleakness of spirit, and in the confusion and panic of those times when the breath could not be forced in and out of my chest, a fact was a rock to cling to. As other boys collected stamps, my joy was in the accumulation of facts: I cherished and polished my collection, poring over
The Golden Treasury of Knowledge
,
Incredible But True
, and
Every Boy's Encyclopedia
until I ran at the mouth with greed for facts.
What a wealth of facts were in the world! When I was dispirited, or confused by my sister Kristabel's long green eyes and way of making me feel clumsy, facts were my best friends: in the uncertainties of childhood, facts alone could be depended on never to change, never to betray, and never to lose their charms.
How it comforted me to know that the average human skin measures seventeen square feet, that there are forty-nine thousand words in the English language, that a single pair of rabbits can produce three hundred and twenty-four more rabbits in the space of a year, and that a man can live for a hundred and thirty-three days without food but only forty-one without water!
Before I knew better, and reluctantly abandoned the scheme, it had been my hope to know every fact in the world by the time I died. This did not seem to me impossible: even the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
held a finite number of facts. I envied those who had lived before meâancient Greeks, for example, who seemed to know almost nothing, and who could therefore easily digest the entire store of facts in existence.
But I began to see that there was one fact I would never know: the fact of myself. I watched myself in mirrors, and saw how broad of shoulder, deep of chest, imposing of height I was, how utterly solid within all my fat, or muscle: I was a well-built young fellow, and anyone looking at me would have been sure I was as solid as I looked. They could not know that for all my massiveness, I was as insubstantial as a dandelion: and for all my appearance of strength, I could be reduced at any moment to a failed pair of bellows wheezing and squeaking.
I did a lot of watching of myself, and told my reflection its name: âYou are Albion Gidley Singer, you were born on the twelfth of January eighteen seventy-five, you have brown eyes and a mole under your fourth rib, you live at Rosecroft, 7 Palmer Street, Bayview, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, the Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Galaxy, the Universe.'