Dark Places (2 page)

This did not help: the reflection in the glass was unmoved, but the speck within was thrown into turmoil by the thought of all those stars, and the spaces between them that made the human brain reel to measure. There seemed no way to attach any kind of fact to that speck: the fact of its existence—the fact of myself—could be deduced only from my reflection in others.

From Mother, for example. She brought comfort to my hollowness, filling it slyly every night. ‘Here, Albion,' that lavender-fragrant mother would say, and bring a bag of fairy-cakes from behind her back. ‘I know these are my boy's favourites.' I sat up in bed, watching her over my nose as it moved, set in motion by my chewing jaws. She watched every mouthful, and sighed when I had used a wet finger to pick up the last grains of sugar in the bottom of the bag. ‘Sweet dreams, darling,' she murmured, ‘the night-light will keep the ghosts away,' and she tucked me in as I lay down, queasy from such an engorgement of cake taken too quickly late at night.

Mother was something I never seemed to get quite enough of, delicious but unsubstantial like those cakes she offered, for it was borne in on me early that a manly sort of boy does not wish to spend time with his soft mother. I read and reread the thick pages of the
Boys' Own Annual
, over
Chums
and
Ripping Yarns
, soaking this knowledge into my pores like a stain. I could not have pointed to the page where I learned this, but it was very clear: females did not feature in the world of boys except, now and again, as objects to be rescued.

I knew that the correct sort of behaviour for a manly young chap was winning blue-striped marbles from other lads, poking cats with sticks, and swashbuckling around with a wooden sword. Boys shouted each other down, boys jeered if you gave them a chance, boys could not wait to tell you what a
dill
you were, what a
thick-head
, how
yellow
, and how you
couldn't run for nuts.

Mothers, on the other hand, did not wish to engage in any kind of bold action: they were people always sitting down, with a bit of tatting in their hand or a silver teapot, and soothing phrases always on their lips:
Never mind
,
not to worry
,
it is not as bad as it seems.
Mothers were people who spent their time in the company of other women, and if sons wished to be near their mothers it seemed it could happen only in those private moments when the world had its back turned. But oh, there were times when I longed to be spared all that marble-winning, all the cat-poking, and all that swashbuckling, all that puffing-up of yourself like a frog, to impress the others with how big you were, how fierce, how fearless.

No one needed to tell me that Mother's cakes were one of the things that were not to be spoken of to the other boys. No one needed to tell me—somehow it seemed I was born with the knowledge— that they would mock. Had Mother ever said, ‘Do not tell your father, Albion,' as she handed me cakes, or had I always known this was a secret between us? Those cakes were the currency of the love between us: sweet but flimsy, a private transaction of which the evidence soon vanished.

When Father was present, Mother suppressed her sighs as well as her smiles, and only watched when Father prodded me in the chest and exclaimed, ‘No mollycoddling for you, Albion. I will not have you malingering, it is just a matter of will-power.' So I straightened up and tried to please by being board-like in erectness and blankness of feature, and kept my eyes on the middle distance, concentrating on keeping the breaths steady in and out of my chest, and on not letting Father see that his poking of me made me want to cough.

I certainly had no wish to be a cissy, in spite of that longing to feel Mother's arms around me now and then. Father said, ‘No cosseting, Angelica, the boy will become a
milquetoaste
!' and Mother would agree, ‘I would not dream of it, George,' but later there would be a bag of cream puffs, or bull's-eyes, and her soft eyes watching while I ate.

Then there was my sister. Had we been a pair of brothers, Kristabel and I might have got on, for we were alike, but as it was she could not forgive me. I was the boy, so I was sent away to one of the top schools, and was given the benefit of Greek and Algebra, and I would be groomed for the business, later on.

Because she was a girl, Greek and Algebra were kept from Kristabel, and she did not have to master anything more baffling than a little polite French chit-chat, a few Kings and Queens, and a tuneful tinkling on the piano. Perverse as she was, she did not see her good fortune. ‘Why does he get to do all the interesting things?' she would demand loudly of Mother. ‘I am better at sums than he is, any day of the week,' and she sulked for all that Greek and Algebra, and did not believe when I told her she would not want to have anything to do with it. She envied me, and was sure she could have done better than I. ‘Say something in Greek, Albion, go on,' she would say, and sneer when I tried.

Mother did not seem able to warm to her eldest, that skinny girl with her scrawny freckled arms and bumpy elbows, who had nearly killed her in coming into the world so reluctant and awkward. ‘Just look at the state of you,' she exclaimed, and tweaked and tugged at Kristabel's skirts. ‘And what in Heaven's name have you done with your hair?' Mother and Kristabel spent long hours with Morgan the dressmaker (Kristabel surly, standing sullen while they circled her with pins), and she made her lie in darkened rooms with slices of lemon all over her face and arms, and walk around with books balanced on her head.

But Kristabel remained all sharp angles, rough elbows, lumpy-knuckled hands: her skirt always hung awry on her angular hips: she remained unalterably plain, and so much lemon seemed to make her freckles darker than ever. All Mother's labour and worry—hurrying home from a tea-party with a new kind of poultice that Mrs Adams swore by, to try on freckles, or a flesh-increasing diet recommended by Mrs Phipps, and all the calling to the kitchen for bowls of cucumber and oatmeal, or the yolks of four eggs in stout—poor Mother: after all this, her daughter was as bony and freckled as ever. Into the bargain she was now sulky, sullen, grizzling: ‘Let me be, Mother, it is just the way I am made, it cannot be helped.' There was never a soft look for her poor mother, or a smile.

Although so plain, skinny, and short, she never had a day's illness, and could run and climb and jump with nothing worse to show for it than a red face and wild hair.
Just breathe
,
Albion
, she would say.
Look
,
like this
, and would demonstrate with her own fleshless chest how to breathe.

But Kristabel, for all her inadequacies, was a female, and shared with Mother the underworld of women, from which I was forever excluded. What were those secrets they shared, Mother and Kristabel, murmuring away on the corner of the verandah, that made them fall silent when they saw me? ‘Some things are just between us girls,' Mother might murmur, and wink at Kristabel. ‘We girls must be allowed our little secrets. Mustn't we, Kristabel dear?'

They seemed to think they had some sort of superiority to me with their women's vapours. For no visible reason, without being feverish, or wheezing, there were days when Kristabel would not play tennis, would not even walk, would do nothing but lie on the chaise-longue saying,
I am a little indisposed
,
Albion
,
just at the minute.
She would whisper to Mother, and disappear mysteriously below-stairs with some little bundle in her hand. They made me feel frumpish and stupid, with their secret knowing glances at each other—
We know
,
but he does not
. I was made tiny by their freemasonry of femaleness.

To spoil Kristabel's poise, then, was a necessary relief. She might be as smug as a coiled cat, but I could cause her complacency to crumble, oh yes indeed! The calm and pallor of my skinny sister could always be transformed by her brother Albion, and Albion could deduce the certainty of his existence from his sister's frenzies under his fingers.

‘Albion,' she shrieked throughout our childhood, ‘Albion, let me go!' She was a wanton one, with a red mouth full of teeth gasping for me, and her eyes lost in flesh when she cried out. ‘No! No, Albion, or I will tell!' She loved nothing more than my hands tickling her, under the pinafore, into her ribs, under her arms, her belly. ‘Albion, stop, I cannot bear it!' she shrieked, and I heard the passion in her voice that made a lie of her words, and I would not have thought of stopping until the tears ran down her red blotched face, and her voice became reedy. Sated, crazed with pleasure, she sat doubled up over her crumpled pinafore, breathing hard, hunched over on her own pleasure.

‘You love it, Kits,' I whispered into her hot red ear. ‘You love it more than anything.' Kristabel would shake her head—‘No, no, no'—and I would laugh at her game of pretending to hate it, and tickle more if I had energy to spare. She, the wanton, gasping and crying out, arching and writhing under my hands: it was her pleasantry to tell me it was no pleasure.

Two

THERE WAS A particular smell of school that made my heart sink and my brain go slow as soon as I smelled it, of many boys packed together, of chalk, of forgotten food in the backs of desks: a smell of extinguishment. It was one of the top schools, as we were forever being reminded, and our fathers paid some of the top fees, but I could not seem to
make the most of my advantages
, as I was always being urged to do.

How I envied the less blessed boys, at the despised government school: they said
haitch
when they meant
aitch
, and grasped their dinner-forks like spears. But they were not sent away three times a year to live among cold-eyed strangers. No amount of grammar, no number of gentlemanly ways with knife and fork, could be worth the dormitory, the chilly sharp edges on everything, the bells cutting the day up into bits, and the way there was no escape, for day after dreary day.

Poor Mother did her best: in the holidays I gorged, and her cakes followed me to school: thick fruitcakes with paper around them, that I hoarded in my locker, and gobbled under the gaze of other boys whose mothers did not think to send them cake, and who did not warm to me more because I received cakes from home, even on those occasions when I handed slices out all round: they took the cake, but I was still Albion whom no one liked much.

Father, although such a slapper of shoulders, and such a mocking poker of fat, believed that a boy should not be kept short, so there were plenty of humbugs and cream buns from the sweetshop across from the headmaster's house. It was a comfort, among such a smell of chalk and of too many years of boiled potatoes in the air, to cram my mouth full of something sweet and crunch it, so that I could not hear the shouts and cries of boys developing team spirit out in the playground, and could imagine myself somewhere else altogether, somewhere warmer and lavender-scented. They were like a promise that home was still there, and that I would be returning to it before too long.

The masters were mostly dust-coloured ageless men billowing along briskly in tattered gowns of which they were proud, with a vague way with boys such as myself who were neither bad nor good, neither quick nor slow, but simply the pudding-face in the third row, who could never remember how to find a square root no matter how many times he was told.

There was another type of master, but I feared them even more than the ablative-construing and square-root querying ones: these were robust young ones, who had been seniors themselves only a few years before, who bullied us around outside, devising from week to week another way of making us stumble across paddocks, sweating our way over fences and down the sides of gullies, and generally suffering in various manly ways.

These dreadful cross-country torments were considered suitable for the boys with
chests
, and so was a little slow cricket, but we were let off the worst of it, and did not have to mill around in mud trying to kick a slimy ball. But we still had to stand watching the ones who did, and pretend enthusiasm, and were despised as well, for being
girly
, not up to any rough-and-tumble.

Nights were the worst; the days were not much fun, but at least no one gave you time to think, or to feel. I lay in my bed, hearing Chester Junior snuffling in his sleep beside me, and some other boy having a dream about his dog: ‘Fetch! Go fetch, Blackie!'

I lay under the coarse cold sheet, with no possibility of arms around me, and felt a fear like no other, a fear that squeezed cold tears out from under my tight-shut eyelids. ‘I cannot bear it, I cannot,' I tried to tell that fear, but it would not leave me, but froze my heart with its emptiness, left me sucked dry and shivering, a dead leaf in the wind. I lay very still and tried to resist that nagging fear, like a flow of cold water, that was never far from me, the fear that this was what life was, for ever and ever until you died: being locked up within yourself, all alone, having to pretend all the time, every minute, that you were absolutely perfectly all right.

In fact, I was far from being all right. I was ashamed of my large-knuckled red hands, ashamed of the way my voice was by turns squeaky and rumbling, ashamed of the blemishes on my face which no amount of scrubbing seemed to remove: I loathed my coarse boy's body and my coarse boy's clumsiness.

More than anything that could be seen, though, I was ashamed of certain alarming mysteries of which I dared speak to no one. What were those dreams from which I awoke stifling and gasping, with my nightshirt strangely soiled? And what went on within my trousers at times, so that they were caused to bulge out as if there were a grapefruit in there?

I knew that I knew nothing, but there were other boys, bold boys with cold eyes, who knew. There was Morrison, for example. He was a boy none of us would have invited home for the holidays, for he tended to say
anythink
when excited, and it was rumoured that his father had made his pile in tallow. It was obvious that Morrison had not had as sheltered an upbringing as the rest of us: Morrison was one of the knowing type of boy.