IN THE DARK
A NOVEL
DEBORAH MOGGACH
When the lights come on, dark secrets will be revealed …
South London, 1916. Eithne Clay runs a ramshackle boarding house while her husband is off at war. She and her young son struggle to bring the comforts of home to a cast of characters even the war effort doesn’t want, including a cynical veteran swayed by Communist propaganda and an old woman who eats everything in sight, despite her broken dentures. Life is difficult enough when Eithne learns that her husband is dead.
Everything is transformed with the arrival of butcher Neville Turk, a handsome and burly ladies’ man, who brings some much-needed excitement to Eithne’s life—and some much-needed nourishment to the boarders. The house bursts to life with electricity—real and metaphorical—and the previously underfed residents chow down on fatty lamb chops. But what darkness will be revealed in this newly lit world?
The passionate tale of war and desire by the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Tulip Fever and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, In the Dark is a historical novel to treasure, full of rich characters you’ll hate to leave behind when the story ends.
By the same author
You Must be Sisters
Close to Home
A Quiet Drink
Hot Water Man
Porky
To Have and To Hold
Driving in the Dark
Smile and Other Stories
Stolen
The Stand-In
The Ex-Wives
Changing Babies
Seesaw
Close Relations
Tulip Fever
Final Demand
Heartbreak Hotel
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
(first published as These Foolish Things)
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact
[email protected],
or write us at the address above.
Copyright © Deborah Moggach 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-1295-9
Contents
By the same author
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
To the memory of my grandmother, Helen, and her first
husband Tommy, who was killed in action in 1918.
Prologue
1916
The lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
Sir Edward Grey, 1914
It was a dank day in March when the telegram came. Ralph, who was fourteen, was sitting in his bedroom looking at the bust enlargement pictures. Such was his absorption that he heard nothing, neither the dog barking nor the doorbell jangling, downstairs in the hall.
He had retrieved the magazine from beneath his mattress, where he kept it hidden from his mother and Winnie, the only people who would possibly come into his room when he wasn’t there. Mr Boyce Argyle, who lived on the top floor, had given it to him. Ralph had a deep admiration for Boycie, who was eighteen years old and something of a dandy. By day he was an upholsterer but at night he became a man about town, issuing forth in his canary-yellow waistcoat and returning smelling of cigars. There was nothing about women that Boycie didn’t know and he had given Ralph some tips for the future, along with the magazine. Ralph had had it in his possession for some months now. His shame at its possible discovery made him blush at unpredictable moments – a meeting on the stairs with one of the lodgers on their way to the bathroom; a glance from some passerby in the street. They must know what he had been doing; it must be written on his face.
How I Enlarged My Bust Six Inches in Thirty Days. The advertisement showed a sequence of pictures: the same woman, whose expressionless face gave no sign of the miracle she was experiencing. Her chest, flat in the left-hand picture, swelled as she was repeated across the page. It swelled as if inflated by an invisible pump. I had tried Pills, Massage, Wooden Cups, and Various Advertised Preparations Without the Slightest Results. Such was its size in the final image that were she real the woman would surely topple over; her bodice strained at its bulk. With what pity must every man look at every woman who presents to him a flat chest – a chest like his own. Can such a woman inspire in a man those feelings and emotions which can only be inspired by a real and true woman, a woman with a beautiful well-rounded bust?
Every few minutes the window panes rattled as a train passed; Ralph’s room was at the back of the house, and overshadowed by the massive brick viaduct that carried the railway to London Bridge Station. The sounds of normal life however seemed very far away.
Even the dog seemed to know that Ralph was engaged in a shameful activity. The appearance of the magazine had prompted Brutus to slink out of the room and go downstairs, presumably to join Ralph’s mother who was in the parlour. Though something of a relief, this deepened Ralph’s sense of mortification; since his father had gone, the dog had attached himself to Ralph, padding around behind him and sleeping beside his bed. Their mutual comfort had been a sustaining bond over the past two years. But the dog knew, as Ralph’s mother must surely know. They knew that upstairs in his bedroom, the doors to his mother’s room firmly closed, Ralph was experiencing the same warmth in his private parts that he had first felt at the age of ten, when looking at a picture of the sinking Titanic.
A beautiful, well-rounded bust. As the woman gazed at Ralph, it dawned on him with dismay that she bore a distinct resemblance to his mother. The same handsome hauteur, the same challenging stare – indeed, she wore a remarkably similar blouse. And though it didn’t bear thinking about, his mother too was possessed of an ample chest. Ralph couldn’t have helped noticing this; it was not as if he especially looked. Her figure was there for everyone to see. But one night, when he was ill, she had bent over him in her nightdress and he had seen the two globes that by day had been united as a chest; he had glimpsed the mysterious darkness of the valley between them, the most secret place on earth, and the most forbidden.
So Ralph didn’t hear the doorbell, or Brutus barking. When the news of his father’s death arrived, he was thinking of his mother’s bosom.
*
Nor did Winnie, the maid, answer the bell. She was downstairs in the kitchen, mixing suet, and her hands were greasy. Besides, her mistress was upstairs in the parlour, which was nearer the front door. Mrs Clay was labouring over the accounts. Winnie could sense the stillness, the concentration, through the floorboards. They creaked when Mrs Clay rose to collect some papers from the sideboard,
and creaked again when she returned to her chair. Winnie could almost hear the dog shifting and sighing as he adjusted his position at his mistress’s feet. Winnie’s sense was finely tuned; it was the skill she needed to survive in this world. She could tell, before knocking on a door, the mood within. The house, the five floors of it, thrummed with its human cargo.
Mrs Clay had a good head for figures. In fact, even when her husband was at home she had organised the household finances, Mr Clay being something of a dreamer. A dear man, Winnie thought, but disconnected from the realities of life. However, for better or worse he had brought home a wage. Now he was gone to the war and money was short. Over the past months Winnie had grown closer to her mistress – not intimates, Mrs Clay didn’t encourage that, but they had established a kind of solidarity. The charwoman had left, to work in the munitions factory in the Gray’s Inn Road, and that had meant that Winnie and Mrs Clay had to do all the housework themselves, with the help of the boy. Winnie suspected that her mistress had hoped for better things in life but the war had put paid to that, as it had to so many things. So they cooked and cleaned for the lodgers, trudging up and down the four flights of stairs; they waged their own battle against the soot that, even with the windows closed, fell noiselessly, speckling the surfaces minutes after they had been polished. Winnie was a country girl, she had had no idea of this enemy’s stealth.
The trains made it worse. They belched out smoke which fell into every crevice and settled on the curtains like black fur. Though travelling by train was a thrilling thing, the railway did wreak havoc in a neighbourhood. Palmerston Road had been built as a street of terraced houses for the well-to-do. However, a few years later the railway line had been built; it sliced through it, demolishing its middle section, amputating the houses on either side and plunging the street into permanent twilight. Mr Clay, who knew about history, had told Winnie this. Soon after it happened the houses had fallen into disrepair; they had been divided up into lodgings whose inhabitants struggled to retain their respectability. And now conditions were worsening. The war, which they thought would soon be over, showed no signs of coming to an end. In fact news was arriving of U-boats sinking British ships, merchant ships importing food; butter and sugar were already short and people talked of rationing.
Winnie, however, had troubles of her own. Though loyal to Mrs Clay, on that particular afternoon she spared little thought for the housekeeping problems. Nor, indeed, for the vast and incomprehensible momentum of war. Archie was outside, whistling. How could Winnie possibly go to the door with her tormentor loitering in the street?
Winnie’s usual view of passers-by was of their nether regions. She saw this through two sets of bars – the stout bars of the kitchen window and beyond them the railings. She didn’t have time to be curious and, secure in her cage, seldom speculated about the upper halves of those who passed. The only legs that materialised into human beings belonged to the people with whom she was on familiar terms – the delivery men, who carried their parcels or heaved their goods down the steps and into her domain.
Some of the familiar faces had gone – Gyles, the young lad from the greengrocer’s; the faintly threatening man who delivered the fish and whose name Winnie had never caught. They had disappeared, like so many men, and been replaced by younger boys.
One of these new arrivals was Archie, who had taken up a position at Mr Turk’s butcher’s shop on the Southwark High Road, where Mrs Clay had an account. Archie was seventeen years old but small for his age – a ginger-haired, wiry boy with a grin that lit up his face. He had taken to lingering for a cup of tea and a macaroon. When she asked if Mr Turk would be angry he shrugged; ‘He can jump in the lake.’ His cheek made Winnie laugh. ‘Heard the one about the elephant and the Chinaman?’ he asked, with a wink. How lumbering were her slow wits, compared to his battery of jokes! Winnie started to wait for the sounds of his arrival – his faint whistling, the clatter of his bicycle as he flung it against the railings. She darted to the mirror and tidied her hair. As the weeks passed a shy hope flickered in her breast. Surely he couldn’t be sitting down in every kitchen he visited? Her heart thumped when she walked to the shop, to place Mrs Clay’s order. It thumped in the hope that it might be Archie serving behind the counter, that she might glimpse him in the back room amongst the carcasses.
How could she have been so foolish? After the shock of what happened, the shock that sent her reeling, she realised how stupid she had been even to entertain the idea that somebody could form an attachment to her. Could even find her tolerable. At Sunday School she had learnt the Bible story, how Eve saw she was naked and was ashamed. She too had been blind, before she bit the apple.
So Winnie didn’t go upstairs. She went into the scullery and washed her big red hands under the tap. Wiping them on her apron, she returned to the kitchen where the prunes waited to be chopped.
By now she had forgotten about the doorbell. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realised that Archie’s whistling had stopped. He would have left, to play football. That was why he was loitering outside in the first place. It was nothing to do with Winnie, of course – it happened to be his half-day and he met his friends in Palmerston Road. They would move off, shuffling and shoving, to kick a ball around in the long dark tunnel of the railway arch.
Winnie, however, didn’t feel relieved. The house was too silent. Ralph, who read books, had told her that in some foreign country people hung crickets in cages outside their front doors, to warn them of burglars. Crickets sang all the time, that was why; it was only when a stranger approached that they fell silent.
Winnie stood still, as alert as an animal sensing danger. Then she rushed to the door, drew its bolt, pushed it open and ran up the area steps. The street was empty. At one end, from the cavern of the arch, came the echoing whoops of the football game. At the other end, far in the distance, a telegram woman, on her bicycle, turned the corner and disappeared.
*
No sunlight penetrated the parlour where Eithne Clay sat, struggling over her accounts. The room faced north, with heavy drapes at the window; a half-lowered blind and gauzy netting veiled its occupants from passers-by. The wallpaper was a pattern of brown upon ochre, darkened by age and the smoke from countless lodgers’ cigarettes. The massive mahogany sideboard, inherited from the previous tenants, sucked into its bulk any remaining light. When Eithne and her husband took over the lease he had planned to redecorate the room but when he considered the disruption – where would everybody eat? – a certain lassitude set in. That was Paul, through and through. His head was filled with dreams and schemes that seldom came to anything, because sooner or later something else would take his fancy and they quietly expired.
His latest enthusiasm had been snail-shell-collecting. The summer before war broke out he had taken the train to Box Hill, with Ralph and the dog, and come home with a bag of snail shells. The calcium in a chalk soil, he said, produced shells of the most delicate colours. Eithne had been in a sulk that Sunday, and hadn’t accompanied them. She had long since forgotten the reason for her miff – no doubt some task he had left undone. What she did remember was her husband’s boyish excitement on his return. The wonder of the shells! However closely you examined them, none was the same. Each a tiny miracle of creation, each so beautiful, with chocolate stripes against palest lemon, with black stripes against terracotta. Eithne should have been charmed but in truth she was exasperated. Where did snails get you? There was something of the amateur about her husband, he should have been born into the gentry which had a long tradition of useless hobbies. The brutal realities of life seemed to evade him.
These papers, spread over the table – they were the brutal realities. Paul, away in France, had no idea of their problems. She gave no hint of them in her letters for he must surely have other matters on his mind. At present his regiment was stationed near the Marne river, which was somewhere in northern France, planning an offensive. His letters, however, were relentlessly cheerful in tone: We
gave Fritz a pretty good bump this time! A rat, rifling through my kitbag, resembled Ralph exploring his Christmas stocking.
On occasion Eithne felt that the hardships at home were at least equal to those suffered by the men who might be fighting for their country but who were removed from its daily grind. Theirs was a life freed of the responsibilities that beleaguered her as she sat there, her head in her hands, gazing at the papers spread over the tablecloth. Tea had risen to two shillings and twopence and was in short supply; butter was one shilling and tenpence a pound. There were nine mouths to feed and most of her lodgers had hearty appetites – Mrs O’Malley, though eighty years old and crippled with arthritis, always cleaned her plate and even swabbed it with bread like a Continental. There was money owing to the tradespeople and now Mr Boyce Argyle had been given his call-up papers and would soon be gone. How was his rent to be paid? Then there was the matter of the Spooners, on the top floor. They already owed three pounds fifteen shillings in arrears but in their circumstances Eithne hardly had the heart to demand it. She wasn’t made of stone.
In fact she was a woman of strong emotions and could love with a passion. For her son she felt such a fierce and protective ardour that the very sight of him, his frail neck rising out of his manly suit, his large ears, could bring tears to her eyes. Nobody had warned her of this; it seemed to be one of the many surprises that women had to discover for themselves. Motherhood unravelled a woman. However strong she might seem to the outside world, a son had her in his thrall.
And the feeling was mutual. Ralph loved her deeply and in the absence of his father was doing his best to look after her. They were very close, during this time. The dog followed Ralph around and Ralph followed his mother. When she flung herself in the armchair, exhausted at the end of the day, he sat on the arm and stroked her brow. He was too old now to be put to bed; they found themselves retiring at the same time and, lying in their adjoining rooms, murmured sleepily to each other through the interconnecting doors. He was her solace, and she his.