Dark Places (7 page)

I was toying with the idea of a sudden bilious attack, or a shocking chest pain out of the blue, but others were ahead of me. By the time Ogilvie returned with three gaudy females, it was obvious that green Delany was about to disgrace himself, and Quince had lost control of his consonants. Ogilvie gave them a look that said he guessed, and despised, and glanced at the rest of us challengingly.

These smuggled females were another type altogether. I had not before seen such saucy eyes, such red cheeks and lips, curls of such contrivance, or such compressed melon-globes bursting out of bodices. There was more bare female flesh on show that I had ever seen before, and yet, whereas a mere glimpse of ankle or the soft inner flesh of an arm of those sisters and cousins seemed horribly intimate, the bold flesh of these females seemed no more personal than someone else's shoe.

Ogilvie was the first to disappear into the small room with one of the females; he was not there long, and emerged with a swagger and a wink. I watched the woman with curiosity: she followed him out of the room with a hand down the front of her dress, making an adjustment of some sort, then sat down and drank off her glass of port calmly, only complaining of a broken fingernail and asking for
a top-up
,
dearie.

When Ogilvie had first returned with the females, I had been deeply fearful, and had kept up an animated conversation with Quince in order to be able to appear not to notice that a female with a great deal of chest on display was sitting next to me on the couch. But now Quince had let me down by sliding forward slowly onto the floor, and was now lying there smiling, too far gone to know that Simmonds was using his hip as a footrest; so, with Ogilvie's knowing eyes on me, I was forced to turn to the woman next to me.

This one had a tolerance for drink equal to my own: she had asked me to fill her glass several times while I was deep in conversation with Quince, and apart from an added brilliance of eye, she seemed unchanged. Her cheeks had been no less red earlier, and she had lounged against a cushion with her legs apart under her dress in just the same way.

Unlike all those genteel sisters and cousins, this female did not stand on ceremony. ‘Anyways, I'm Valmai,' she said as if we had been enjoying a long and trusting conversation. ‘I'm Valmai, love, and what do they call you?' What did they call me? They called me Singer, if they wore pants, or Albion if they wore skirts, but I found myself telling those rouged lips, ‘George, call me George.' Valmai gestured with her glass, and when I had refilled it, she drank deeply and then put her face rather close to mine and said, ‘Well, George, tell me somethink fascinating, eh?'

I did not know what she would find fascinating, so I tried her with one of my more grotesque facts. ‘The human body contains twelve pints of blood, and the liver of a well-grown man weighs three and a half pounds,' I told her, and she squealed with horror and delight. ‘Ah, garn! What's me big toe weigh then, tell me that, George?' We both gazed down at her feet, and it was I who boldly said, ‘First the shoe must be removed, Valmai, then I will be able to estimate.' Valmai gave me a gusty laugh smelling of wine. ‘Oh, I'm with you, George, better get me shoe off then, hadn't you?'

So it was that I found myself, purely in a spirit of scientific endeavour, kneeling at Valmai's feet and removing the shoe from the foot. I had trouble with the unaccustomed buckle at first: what was wrong with laces, such as an honest manly boot used? With the shoe off, there was still a barrier in the form of a stocking. From my position below Valmai, I looked up, uncertain what was to be done about the stocking, and found her grinning and nodding with approval. ‘That's right, love,' she cried. ‘Have to get that off too, won't you, love?'

I pulled at the toe end of the thing, then at where it stretched over the ankle, then at where it swelled over Valmai's substantial calf and hesitated at the barrier of skirt. ‘You're a sly one, love, and no mistake!' Valmai shrieked and then to the room at large, in which everyone was now watching us. ‘He's weighing me big toe, ever heard that trick?' Then she thrust her leg out and cried, ‘Go on then, love, better get the stocking off, eh!' Gingerly I folded back the edge of her skirt, bit by bit, miming finicky scientific care. The stocking seemed to go on forever: was the thing one huge garment covering her entire body? Finally the stocking became thicker, and at the next fold of the skirt, flesh was exposed: jelloid pink flesh, dimpled like the surface of a river in flood.

I nearly abandoned the whole thing, but now the room was urging me on with cries of encouragement, so I wrestled with the rubber attachment until it snapped apart. I pulled, but the stocking was still attached and I deduced there was another rubber fastening at the back. Maintaining the expression of solemnity which was so useful, I gestured for Valmai to roll over to expose this second rubber item, and miming the obedient patient she did so, hiking her skirt up so roughly that I was presented not just with thigh, but with a large putty-coloured buttock, pink-striped from the pressure of folds of fabric, and seeming to my fevered face to be radiating heat like a water-bottle.

I turned away from the expanse of flesh before my face, and saw that my companions had formed a circle around Valmai and me, and were winking and making small signs with their hands, and Ogilvie was jerking his sideways towards the door behind which was the bed: there was no going back now. Singer was obliged to put a good face on it, and lead Valmai into the other room, winking and making small signs with his hands at his companions as he went.

But what did you do, exactly, to get the ball rolling? Did you make a little conversation, as you might in a drawing-room, or would they think that was eccentric? Did you undo their clothes—heaven knows where you started with all those hooks-and-eyes and plackets— or would they think that was rude, and slap your hand away? Did you have to kiss them?

I folded my jacket carefully and reminded myself of the pound notes I had given Ogilvie for the services of this woman, and their image restored me. I turned and eyed her boldly: a thing that you bought did not laugh at you.

In the end, I did not let Singer down. When Valmai removed some of her clothes—they seemed to fall away as easily as bark from a tree—and I was able to see the precise shape of what was under all those bodices and draperies, I rose to the occasion. Morrison had been wrong about almost everything: Valmai's
titties
did not hang down to her waist, and the lips
down there
did not hang down to her knees: in fact I could see nothing at all in that direction but a neat triangle of black hair. Once I had a look I could see that her body was simply a lumpy version of my own; I could not quite look her big bold nipples in the eye, but there was nothing that made me want to bring up my dinner.

And when I began—tentatively at first—actually to touch that flesh with my own, I surprised myself by finding it something I wished to do more of. Her flesh was so yielding that I could feel my fingers positively sink in: it felt as if my nails were actually penetrating that thin skin. I could hear the stubble on my cheek grate like sandpaper across her cheek, and when I lay down on top of her, as she suggested in a whisper in my ear, I heard the breath expelled from her chest with my weight.

She began to sigh and breathe heavily into my neck, like someone who had just run up three flights of stairs: it seemed that I must have found the place, for she panted louder, and I penetrated her.

At first I thought Valmai might break under my weight, or burst from my thrusts, but I became bolder as she neither broke nor burst, but whipped me on with sighs loud in my ear, and gusts of sounds which I recognised as words, ‘Yes yes oh yes!' Her appreciation caused me to rise to new heights still, and to be less concerned lest she break or burst: I twisted her arm in its socket, I locked her leg under my own, I grasped her chin and forced her head back into the pillow, and I buried myself in her as far as I could go: still she sighed and breathed ‘Yes yes oh yes' in my ear.

‘Fleshpots!' I exclaimed, like stout Cortez on Darien, as I felt her warm slime around me. ‘Fleshpots!' Even the English language, that I had taken for granted like air all my life, was made vivid in this moment: now I knew what a fleshpot was, and how it felt to be within the warm walls of one, the word made sense as never before. I was joined at this moment to generations of men before me who had made the same discovery, and from now on I, too, could use the word knowing just what it signified, unlike the innocents, who used it carelessly, as if it were nothing more inflammatory than
chair
or
table.

Under my body, Valmai became puny, a person who took up hardly any space, a person whose voice was as insignificant as the rustling of leaves in a tree, a person who only existed as an extension of my own urges. She twisted under me, and gasped more loudly as my chest forced her down further into the bed, and the feeling of her bird-like framework of bones between my powerful hands made me a giant.

When I took hold of both her wrists and pinioned her to the bed, she could do nothing but turn her head from side to side on the pillow and breathe heavily: her physical strength was in no way a match for mine, and I was aware that it was not beyond the bounds of the possible that I could squeeze her hard enough to make her breathing stop entirely.

Now I knew what it was that fuelled the confidence of all the other men I had ever seen, striding and straddling and gesturing, booming out small remarks in loud voices, delivering themselves of opinions on this and that without a qualm of doubt: it was this, feeling a female body writhe like a skewered beetle under one's own!

I felt myself grow huge within Valmai, and I cried out at last to feel myself open like a flower slowly within her. In that long moment of amazement my blood swelled throughout every cell. My being expanded within the shell of Singer and filled all the space so that he and I were truly joined, and there was no hollowness left. When I was returned to myself and the consciousness of lying on the bed, sprawled beside Valmai, who was scratching her scalp with a loud rasping noise, the world and myself seemed for the moment insufferable. ‘Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,' I found myself repeating in my mind. ‘Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.' I watched Valmai get up and put some of her clothes back on: now that I was feeling so weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, the flaccid skin of her belly, and the quivering dimpled flesh of her thighs, seemed like so much dead meat.

‘Come on dearie, George,' Valmai said. ‘Come along, dear, there's work to be done.' She laughed a short laugh, and handed me my trousers, and although I would rather she had not, she watched while I dressed with clumsy fingers: buttons would not go into their holes, sleeves resisted hands being pushed down them. She watched, and helped, but in a way that did not encourage further intimacies. My body was now simply a problem of physics to her: how to get a hand down a tube of sleeve as quickly as possible.

As I entered the other room I was conscious of being the focus of all the eyes: what sort of fist of it had Singer made, I felt them asking themselves. How glad I was to be able to look them all in the eye, and give Ogilvie a triumphant wink! I would have liked Valmai to demonstrate some sort of admiration, but she plumped herself down next to the other female. ‘Look at me blooming stocking, love,' she said, ‘fresh on tonight and laddered to buggery, don't know why I bother.'

Ogilvie went over and ran his hand up and down her leg, making a show of inspecting the damage, and it was not long before Valmai was primping and smiling and calling Ogilvie dearie just as she had me; and not long after the door closed behind them for the second time I could hear her: ‘Yes yes oh yes! Yes yes oh yes!' and a groan from Ogilvie. In this regard at least, Ogilvie's boasts were not hollow.

I sat with my arm expansively along the back of the sofa, considering afresh the question of women. Morrison had evidently been wrong about many things, but he had been right about one: women could never get enough of it. How could they, lacking the wherewithal for that blossoming epiphany? A man could only pity.

Now that I had seen the true, strumpet-face of womanhood, I felt I could begin to understand those other, flutey-voiced unadorned ones who simpered above doilies in Daddy's drawing-room. I saw now with a wonderful clarity that there was no real difference in the ultimate transaction. Only the currency of exchange was different. In the drawing-rooms, the currency was of sighing, and hankering, and it was expected that the parties would do a certain amount of speechifying about love. In the drawing-room trade, the ultimate invoice was the engraved card: Major Such-and-Such (F.R.G. ret'd) and Mrs Such-and-Such request the pleasure of the company of so-and-so on the occasion of the wedding of their daughter. Upstairs at Juliana's there was no such sleight-of-hand: the currency was pound notes pure and simple.

Seven

FATHER DIED in the winter, and by summer he was nothing but a pinch of dust. Nature, the great rationalist, had ensured that the race was in a position to carry on now that Father had produced a son and heir, and Father himself was excess to requirements. All my life I had languished in his shadow, but it was my turn now: Albion Gidley Singer, that seed cold in the ground for so long, had taken a hold of life at last.

I took over Father's chair at the Club, and agreed with old Chapman as he measured me for my mourning that it was a terrible shame, a man in his prime, and what a burden to fall upon my young shoulders. I agreed, and made my face the right lugubrious length for a son in mourning; but my mind was not on dead fathers, but on the fall of a trouser-leg and the roll of a lapel.

Father had considered Chapman's way with the roll of a collar quite the last word in the elegant, but I knew better: things had moved on. ‘Longer in the leg, Mr Chapman, they are wearing them longer now, and the lapel somewhat narrower, please, than the last one you did for me.' But Chapman would not be told: he chuckled in a patronising way and said, ‘Oh dearie me no, Master Singer, Mister Singer I should say. Your father would turn in his grave if he knew I had given you a lapel like a bit of string.'