Dark Places (33 page)

But I would wait, I promised myself, wait until the sounds became extreme, wait until the exact animal moment was upon them: yes, then, in the full flight of the uncontrollable urge, when my daughter's eyes were closed, her mouth open, her face turgid, when Duncan was groaning and humping, his eyes rolling, his jaw slack—yes, it was in that moment of the most extreme
flagrant delectation
that I would step in between them and rip them apart like a pair of dogs.

I would not shout, oh no, I myself would not join the beasts: no, I would be the man of perfect control, simply directing my daughter back home, by main force if necessary. Duncan I would deal with through the proper channels. I foresaw with pleasure the meeting with his parents. Shamed and small, they would hunch in their chairs while with my legs apart on the hearthrug, I would let them know that the police and the University authorities would be notified.
I do not see that I have any choice in the matter
, I would say blandly, and enjoyed in my mind how that would sound.

Yes, I would have to be prepared to wait—but how long? I got out my watch and stared at its face. It trembled, and the glass shot a ray of sun painfully into my eyes. I gripped it so hard my knuckles went white around it, for I was a rational man, simply wishing to measure time in a rational way for a rational purpose. I had not planned to become emotional in any way, or to feel the world going grey around my eyes, or to see the watch in my hand trembling as I gripped it: I was a man simply doing what any rational man would be doing under the circumstances.

I stared at the watch, trying to remember how the human species measured the time it might take a male and female to begin the process of coupling.
I will wait exactly five minutes
, I told myself, being systematic about the thing, but I could not seem to remember where the long hand had been when I had first looked, and was it a minute that I had been standing here, or an hour and a minute, or had the watch in fact stopped entirely?

Eventually, I became aware of a line of large white birds perched near me on a branch staring rapaciously, as if I might be a juicy grub; various insects came out from hiding and filled the air with a ragged drone, and above me leaves shivered together secretively. I moved cautiously on: not cautiously enough, however, to prevent all those peering birds bursting up from their branch with a sound like applause that made me cower. When things were quiet again, I tiptoed, as far as a man can tiptoe through tangled grass and crisp tubes of fallen bark, towards the place where I had seen the flashes of garments. As I worked my way down, I came forward in little flurries, so the sound of my crackling and popping and swishing might sound like bursts of wind, or the snap of waves: I positively tangoed down the hill. With infinite caution, I took up position behind a thick-boled tree. My face felt enormous, preparing itself like a plate to receive the sight before me, as I peered around the trunk.

The sea, that heaving mother! It was playing cupid for them, or pimp. Lilian and Duncan were sitting below me on a rock shelf, their bare feet dangling in the water, with shoes, socks, stockings, bookbag, sprawled abandoned on the ground behind them. Small waves slapped and pounced at rocks, gulls wheeled and rudely screamed, and the shadow of the trees lay dark on the water. There was a patch of damp sand, garnished with blackened seaweed. There were various rocks among which waves slapped and jerked, and there were three beady-eyed gulls standing on a rock cocking their heads expectantly at the humans, shifting from foot to rubbery foot, ruffling their wings, pecking briefly into their armpits. The sleeve of Duncan's abandoned jacket flapped spasmodically against a bush like a taunt. A gull pecked experimentally at a tube of sock, a butterfly danced around the bookbag and was gone.

I was close enough to see the buttons down the back of my daughter's dress, like her spine made visible, and the tortoiseshell combs slithering out of her hair. I could see her fling out a hand with a gesture I recognised as one of my own, and Duncan in his shirtsleeves tilted back his head and laughed so that I could see his throat convulse. But the mumble of the sea snatched their words away from me. I strained until my ears felt as if out on stalks, but every time a word might have been audible, it was smothered by a wave shattering on a rock, a gull opening its beak with a creaking sound, or the wind whipping the leaves above me into a frenzy. The thing was as if calculated to tease.

Now Lilian was lying back against a boulder with her throat offered up to the lowering sun. Her posture suggested that at any moment she would unbutton her blouse and expose her virginal
titty-bags
, and suck this lad in to fill the void between her thighs. And what sort of travesty of a male was this Duncan? Would not a normal man have taken Lilian up by now on the invitation she was so obviously offering? A cackling mad laugh from him reached me behind my tree, and I wondered if he was really all there. Any proper man would some time ago have progressed from mere talk and convulsing throats to more definite sorts of activities. What more did the fool need, could he not recognise a come-hither-and-do-with-me-what-you-will when he saw it? What was he waiting for, an engraved card?

Thanks to her father's position—her father's pounds in the bank, to be exact—Lilian could have had her pick of the boys. She could have chosen some red-blooded young hearty with a boyhood of team spirit behind him and a sinecure with Daddy ahead, someone who could listen with the proper show of respect as a prospective father-in-law set him straight on a few things. But no, she had chosen this one! Why, she could have snapped him between her jaws and downed him without so much as belching.

At the moment it seemed they were doing nothing more inflammatory than talk. But Lilian was no innocent, and even Duncan, dim though he was, had to know that this was not the right way to go about things. They simply talked; but better than most, I knew where talking could lead. I was prepared to wait further: unless, it occurred to me now, I had waited too long back there by the rock, staring at my watch, and had already missed what I had come for!

I was stuck behind my tree now, committed to outwaiting and outwitting them, but less and less sure as the time went by that my moment would ever come. Ants crawled over my boots, the sun bored into the back of my skull, my eyes began to smart from watching, not wanting to blink in case I missed the thing that I was more and more determined to witness.

I was a patient man, but that day would have been too much for any man. As hours wore on, and more and more time was invested in this situation, it became less and less feasible to give up. Even at the risk of throwing good time after bad, I was going to stay here until I was satisfied. I shifted from foot to foot, squatted, finally sat gingerly with my bottom on a tuft of grass. Insects taunted me, lizards crept out of cracks and inspected me unblinkingly, thirst and hunger would have brought a weaker man to his knees: but Albion Gidley Singer with his blood up was a force to be reckoned with.

When they had had enough of talking, they scrambled down and paddled in the shallows, picking things off rocks and showing them to each other, and when they had done that for long enough they came back to their bags and unwrapped sandwiches. When the gulls came they threw them crusts, and when they had done that they sat and talked some more; then Duncan stood up and in a thin reedy voice that cracked and went into squeaks from trying too hard, began to recite something, no doubt the famous poetry of which he was not ashamed.

I could have told him from my own experience that a voice out-of-doors can easily sound insignificant, and become raucous trying to make an impression on such a superfluity of untrammelled air. I could have warned him that there was usually some side-show or other going on, of things tweeting or carolling from trees, or buzzing and shrilling out of the grass: even wind in leaves made a lot of noise when a person had to speak over it. Generally, the human voice was not a match for Nature, and Duncan made a pretty poor fist of his recital. However, Lilian stared up at him, and clapped whenever he stopped, so that he went on far longer than anyone reciting poetry should. I could see his earnest Adam's apple bobbing up and down, but could not hear more than the occasional single word, and gave thanks to the sounds of Nature for this small mercy.

Then Lilian sprang to her feet in a decisive way, crumbs scattering about her, and a fist thumped within my chest. Now! Now! They were going to do it now, at last! Duncan swivelled to watch her, and his hands went to his neck, loosening his tie. I almost shouted at him in my impatience and exasperation:
It is not your neck she is interested in
,
man
,
forget about your tie!

But she only stooped to pick up her bookbag, cheap-looking in the sunlight with its embossed gold initials and fleur-de-lys, and took out a book. With a grunt I could hear from where I stood, she levered herself up onto a flat slab of rock and took up a pose with the book open in her hand. I recognised the book: it was a volume of the splendid tooled-leather Encyclopedia I myself had given her years ago, the Encyclopedia she had intended to learn by heart, the Encyclopedia that had brought a glow of pride to a father's heart as his daughter had filled the dining-room with her voice, shouting page after page.

‘Take a moment to consider the following fact,' she called out, so ringingly that birds fell silent and the bush strained to listen. ‘It is a well-established fact that the female of the species is deadlier than the male.' She stopped and lifted a finger admonishingly in the air. ‘Consider the following further fact: with admirable economy, the female mantis eats the head of the male while they are copulating.' Duncan let out a sound that was either a laugh, or the sound of a man with an ant in his underpants. There was nothing amusing that I could see, and Lilian pressed on. ‘The removal of the head is thought to eliminate inhibitory centres from the male; moreover he provides a useful source of nourishment.' She glanced down at Duncan: he was enraptured, staring up with his mouth ajar, rocking backwards and forwards hugging himself. ‘In the next case,' she went on, holding up a second finger, ‘let us take the fact of the male tiger slug, whose organ of generation emerges from his ear.' She continued, but I heard no more, in the strangeness of what was happening: before my eyes, my daughter had become someone else altogether.

I knew this person was my daughter, because it was wearing the muslin I had paid for only that week, and those were certainly the two-tone shoes from Fielding's that Norah had thought vulgar, and wanted her to return; and that was the face that I recognised from the years of family life. It was definitely my daughter, but it was not a daughter I had ever known. This face was not the artless enthusiastic face of the child who had watched her father's mouth, admiring the streams of facts it produced. This was not the clever little girl putting her hands together, setting her feet at an angle, and rattling off
The Parts of the Body in Alphabetical Order
for the pleasure of her proud father. This was not the person I had known for so many years around the meal-tables of family life, sitting like a lump of cheese over her food, staring across the damask at her father with unblinking self-possession, as she tried to match him fact for fact!

That Lilian I had known had always been a person who was far too big. She had spent her childhood wearing out chairs, her adolescence being told to suck her stomach in. She had blushed, and tried, and gone red in the face and ashamed, trying to make herself smaller than she was. But now she was like something heroic in bronze, up on her rock. A breeze swept the hair away from her broad forehead and pressed the clothes against her body so that hair and clothes seemed mere accidents, ephemera that had nothing to do with the majestic bulk of her. When she flung out a hand to emphasise something, palm up, elbow down, there was grandeur in it, and her smile said that she knew she was grand.

Her voice swam effortlessly through all this air. This was the voice of someone who was fully in charge of her own being. There was authority in it, but not argument: it was powerful, but not overbearing. It was a voice that did not have to strain or posture: it went on in its own way, but it made you want to listen. A hospitable silence received that voice: birds sat listening on their branches, insects paused in their eating and procreating long enough to hear her out; and Duncan might have come to laugh, but he stayed to listen.

With her voice swelling out through the trees, her majestic thighs thrusting out against the skirt, her monumental shoulders bearing her up and that enormous depth of bosom swelling with words: at this moment she was not too big. At this moment she was exactly the right size.

By contrast, I was shrunken behind the tree, dwarfed by her as by a force of Nature. The thing was, if she was the right size, then it followed by a matter of simple logic that I was too small.
But it is only Lilian
, I told myself blindly.
Only my daughter Lilian
,
flesh of my flesh.
What could there be to be afraid of ?
She cannot possibly harm you
, I told myself.

I found my own mouth taking on an authoritative sort of shape to utter words.
Silence
,
Lilian
,
it is I
,
your father!
I would call out, and the spell would be broken. She would shrink to her proper size, I would puff up to mine, and we would be again a male and female in proper relation. But somehow I could not make any sound come, and before I could frame the precisely right words, and gather breath for the task, she had closed the book and was stepping down from the rock.

It was a long way down for a woman of her size, but Duncan was there, holding up his hand, taking her weight as she lowered herself. She did not let go of his hand, even after she had got down, but listened to something Duncan was whispering in her ear that made her smile so her teeth gleamed.