Dark Places (9 page)

It all boiled down to brains, and women did not, biologically speaking, need any. Women needed to entice, for otherwise the race would not continue, so they were supplied with various mechanisms of enticement: pink lips, fleshy bulges, and a thousand bolstering ways with a man. They needed to sit still while eggs swelled within them, so they were equipped with a disinclination for exertion, a weakness of ankle, and a fear of soiling themselves. How wondrous were the ways of nature! It was almost enough to make a man believe in a higher power.

As a male, it was my role to compete with other males. That way, the superior male won the superior female, and produced superior offspring to continue the species. In making a few enquiries among my books on how other species managed things, I discovered a most wonderful Aladdin's cave of facts. I took out subscriptions to various journals of a scientific nature, and read in considerable detail about deer, and seagulls, and ferrets, and even slugs and fruit-flies. The story was always the same. Male deer clashed antlers together, male bower-birds brought gifts, pea-cocks flaunted their tails, male slugs spun enticing tendrils of slime: in every single case I studied, all this flamboyant behaviour was nothing more than the mechanism by which the fit prospered, and the weak went under.

The human species was not equipped with antlers, or colourful tails, or even enticing slime. Our particular branch of the species did not even have spears to fling at each other. But like any other species, our own had its ruthless rituals of selection: it was just a matter of recognising them for what they were.

If we had had antlers, I would have made sure mine were the biggest; if we had had spears, I would have made sure I learned how to throw mine the furthest. Things being as they were, I looked around me, took stock of the realities as a rational man does, and armed myself with a supply of romantic novels. The behaviour set out in these books was, clearly, the enticing slime of
homo sapiens
in the nicer suburbs of Sydney, Australia, in the last years of the nineteenth century.

Absorbing these books like so much nourishment, and cataloguing them on my shelves along with the scientific journals, I made many encouraging discoveries. First among them was the fact that a human male did not need to be witty, or wise, or good at telling amusing anecdotes or making snappy banter. On the contrary, reading between the lines of these books, it was quite clear that nothing more was expected of him than an interesting silence. Ideally, this silence was coupled with an unspecified sense of a mysterious and troubling past, but the great thing about a silence was that it could be eloquent of such things without actually telling any lies. I myself, for example, was not blessed with an interesting past, but I could certainly cultivate the kind of silence that suggested one.

The only other things a male seemed to need was a set of eyes that could
burn
when necessary, and a voice that could
tremble with passion
at the right moment, but could be relied on not to do so otherwise. I thought I could probably manage a bit of eye-burning, and I could probably go as far as getting a shake going in my voice at the right moment. The thing was basically all about something called
depth
, and the naturally stern folds of my face gave me a certain aptitude for
depth.

Once I got the hang of all this, I turned out to be quite a success with the ladies. The trick was not to allow the manner to slip, even for a moment: the price of success was to banish self-doubt. It got boring behind all that dull silent
depth
, but it was worth a little boredom. ‘Oh Mr Singer,' they cooed and clucked now, and their small weak hands fluttered around me as if to alight on some part of my clothing. Clusters of them no longer faded away when I approached, and my facts came into their own at last. Now that I was stern with them, and not trying to curry favour, they listened to my facts with their eyes rapturous, exclaiming,
Fancy! Who would have thought! Goodness me! And what about snakes
,
Albion
,
how do they go about it?
They drank in my facts, and encouraged me with their nods and smiles, and watched me sideways out of their shallow eyes.

I enjoyed the way they waited for me to turn and look at them: I learned the pleasure of letting them wait, and learned that the longer they waited the more fascinated they became. I was no longer Albion the outsider, Albion the awkward one, Albion the pitiable. I was like a grub freshly out of my chrysalis, gloriously arrayed in my new-hatched
depth.

As a man who prided himself on a scientific approach, I read considerably about the whole matter of marriage. I read with some alarm that men who marry too young become
partially bald
,
dim of sight
,
and lose all elasticity of limb within a few years.
But as a man well into his twenties, I did not think my strength would be drained by the duties of marriage. I also read that the rich are qualified for marriage before the poor
on account of the superiority of their diet
, and approved of this logic. This seemed, in fact, to imply a certain responsibility to reproduce on those of us who were blessed with Nature's bounty. Otherwise there was a danger of the race being swamped by the inferior stock of the others, who leapt recklessly into marriage and produced more of themselves with the thoughtless zeal of hamsters.

I was struck, too, by the book in which I read that a husband and wife should differ from each other: ‘The man of studious habits should marry a woman of spirit rather than erudition, or the union will increase the monotony of his existence, which it would be well for his health and spirits to correct by a little conjugal excitement.' Again, this seemed to me entirely logical: any offspring of mine would be equipped with plenty of brains, so that what they gained from their mother should be other qualities which I knew myself to lack.

Moreover, I was looking for a woman physically complementary to myself. The books agreed that, to make what is a ‘handsome couple', the female should be some three inches shorter than the male, and this was no problem, since I was taller than all the women I knew. Her thighs should be voluminous, and according to one rather technical book,
the cellular tissue
,
and the plumpness connected with it
,
should obliterate all distinct projection of muscles.
I thought of poor old Kristabel, who appeared to have no cellular tissue or plumpness at all, and who had always appeared to be all distinct projection of muscle, not to mention angularity of bone. However, Kristabel was not my problem. My problem was to choose, from all the sisters of friends, all the cousins of sisters, all the friends of sisters' cousins, which female would make the most appropriate complement to myself.

It was the age of emancipation, and women, those ridiculous preaching dogs, felt it necessary to impress me. ‘I do not wish to be impressed,' I could have told them, ‘I wish to be charmed,' but they would not have listened, even if I had spoken. ‘Ruskin, Mr Singer,' a skinny librarian said, pursuing me at one of the tennis parties. ‘Do you not agree that Ruskin goes a little too far?' The skinny librarian, whose eyes were too bright for my taste, her mouth too eager to smile at me, leaned her chin on her hand and gazed into my eyes over the lemonade. With clever sparkling kinds of women like this one, I knew I would always be anxious.

Others knew better than to try to impress. There was a yellow voile called Betty, and there was a mauve voile called Norah, and one afternoon I found myself deep in someone's Daddy's Turramurra shrubbery with them both. All the other voiles and all the other boaters had been absorbed by this greenery: here where we found ourselves there was nothing to see but leaves and each other's eyes, nothing to hear but breath coming rather quickly, from laughing and hurrying. ‘Close your eyes, Albion, quick, and we will hide,' one of them exclaimed, and obediently I closed my eyes. ‘Up to fifty now, Albion, no cheating!' I counted aloud, rather conscious of my fine voice ringing out across the shrubbery, and almost forgot to stop at fifty.

But when I did stop, there was a great secretive silence which made my boomed numbers seem silly. It was quiet enough now for me to hear a beetle crepitate across some dried leaves near my foot, and my own blood beating in my ears. I made myself stop breathing for a moment but when I drew air in again I found that I was panting.

There was a fair spread of shrubbery: I had a feeling of it stretching away around me and found myself turning around one: around in this clear patch and seeing only similar bushes before me. Had there been a tree, and a person up it, how they would have laughed to see me revolving in my little clearing! When I called out into the silence—‘Coming ready or not!'—my voice came back at me in a thin mocking way, a voice all on its own, speaking to nothing but leaves and twigs.

How easily I was still reduced to nothing, even after all that work on my depth! My depth was only a veneer: beneath lay all the old poisonous despairs. For now, hearing nothing but my own breath in my nostrils, I was stricken by doubt. It was all too easy to imagine the voiles already back in the house, covering with their hands the pink interiors of their mouths as they told how Albion—how well I could imagine the way they would drawl my name in a witty sort of way— had stood like an obedient pup and was still out there in the shrubbery, and might go on seeking till nightfall unless someone stopped him. For a moment I felt myself tumescent with rage, strangling within my collar. For a moment I felt again that gripe across my chest, squeezing out the air, and the breath grew stringy in my throat.

In the nick of time there was a flash of colour behind a shrub, a titter muffled by leaves, and sounds of feet between bushes. In an instant I was restored, a man once again, a man alone in a shrubbery with two women, and everyone knew what that meant. In an instant my depth fitted itself back over my void, and the gripe loosened its hold on my chest. ‘Albion! Albion!' I heard one of them call teasingly. All at once, the afternoon was full of eyes watching me, and only pretending to hide.

It was the yellow that I caught first, crouching in a halfhearted way behind an oleander. She cried out, and covered her eyes with her hands as if to become invisible. ‘Oh Albion, you have found me!' she cried on a sort of sigh. ‘You must claim me, you know,' she said as I stood with my hands dangling, and came close so there was no mistaking that I was supposed to kiss her. But I took too long about it: should I approach on the left or the right, should the left arm go around the right shoulder, should the right leg take the weight, ought one to be aiming for lip or cheek? She was off before I had time to make my approach.

She vanished behind the bushes again, and when I set off in pursuit, I came across the mauve, caught in a cul-de-sac of bushes. This time I knew to claim her quickly. The right arm went round the left shoulder, the left leg took the weight, and you went straight for the lips, because of course it was part of the game that she turned her head at the last minute and all you got was a bit of left cheek.

Then, of course, the yellow sulked and pouted in a pretty way, so we played the game again, and again—left arm around right side, left arm around right hip, both arms together on shoulders, both arms together round waist, both hands together round hips, lip to left cheek, lip to right cheek, lip to nose, and—finally—lip to lip. Altogether, it turned out to be a very successful afternoon in the shrubbery.

As the weeks went by, the mauve one, Norah, began to seem an appropriate sort of person. She was pretty, of course: Albion Gidley Singer was not going to attach himself to any Plain Jane. But unlike some of the others, her prettiness was not a matter of skinny little wrists, and thin little waists; it was not a matter of little nothings of feet, and a neck a man could snap off in his hand.

It could be seen that Norah strived for this flimsy effect, with artfully placed bits of lace, a cunning arrangement of tucks and gores, and a little quivering pair of ear-rings that distracted the eye from a neck as sturdy as a fence-post. Norah had learnt how to create a flutter about her person, a cloudiness of heaped hair, and a soft fragrance made up of lavender-water and laughing; she could hand a teacup like a jewel, and fill any awkward silence with a bit of rhubarb about
the days drawing in
or
the days drawing out.

But like me, Norah was a sham. A man on the lookout for a bit of substance could see that there was more to Norah then met the eye. She was not a big person, but she seemed to be substance all the way through. From behind, in particular, she was a person to be reckoned with. Her waist was as fragile as was proper in a young lady offering herself as available, but her bottom, as far as could be judged under the layers of taffeta, was a pretty substantial piece of work. If a man took notice of that bottom, I was pretty sure he would not be disappointed. She might be a sham, but her sham complemented my own: she aped the fragile as I aped the solid.

It was Norah's silliness that charmed me most, and her lack of guile: she was as transparent as a window-pane. ‘Oh Albion, what is it you see in me?' she asked earnestly, and it was no coquette's ruse: she really wanted to know. ‘You are so clever and distinguished, Albion, and I could never understand Gibbon, and never got past the second book on the piano.' All this was true: she never attempted repartee, never tried to best me on a fact, and her jokes were as laborious as an army marching across a plain. But what she did not realise, and I was certainly not going to be the one to tell her, was that a man does not look for the same qualities in his wife as he looks for in himself.

So Norah was the woman I chose in the end. Choosing was no anguish to me, and if it had not been Norah, it could just as well have been Betty or May or Violet. It amused me to think that women saw themselves as different from each other, when I knew them to be nearly as interchangeable as the bricks in a wall. I walked through the city and watched them frowning into the windows where dresses and shoes were displayed, I strolled through the shops where whole afternoons were consumed in matching ribbon to silk, or choosing the right shade of eau-de-Nil in gloves. The women in black behind the counters took it all gravely, holding things up to the light; sometimes one would even come out from behind the counter like a priest descending from an altar, to take a piece of ribbon or a scrap of
toile de soie
out into the daylight of the street. She might come back shaking her head like a doctor with a mournful diagnosis, and everyone at the counter would be serious and silent for a time, until someone wondered if the blue would, after all, be preferable.