The Lake of Darkness Read Free Page A

a storm trooper’scoat. He fastened the belt. “Must be the best thing you ever got,” he said.
    She was ecstatic with pleasure. “I’ll mend the lining for you!”
    “You’ve had a busy day,” he said. The coat was too big for the room. With every movement he made he was in danger of knocking over little glass vases, Toby jugs, china dogs, pebbles, shells, and bunches of dried flowers in chutney jars. He took the coat off carefully, with reverence almost, to please Lena. The green bird began to sing, shrill and sweet, pretending it was a canary. “What did you do this afternoon?”
    “Mrs. Urban came.”
    “Well!”
    “She came in her new car, a green one. The kind of green that has silver all mixed up in it.”
    Finn nodded. He knew what she meant.
    “She brought me those chocolates and she stayed for tea. She made the tea. Last time she came was before you put up the wall and made my bedroom.”
    “Did she like it?”
    “Oh, yes!” Her eyes were full of love, shining with it. “She
loved
it. She said it was so compact.”
    “Well, well,” said Finn, and then he said, “Ask the pendulum something for me. Ask it if I’m going to have a good year.”
    Lena held up the string. She addressed the pendulum in a whisper, like someone talking to a child in a dark room. The glass bead began to swing, then to revolve clockwise at high speed.
    “Look!“ Lena cried. ”Look at that! Look what a wonderful year you’ll have. Your twenty-seventh, three times three times three. The pendulum never lies.”

II
    On the broad gravelled frontage of the Urbans’ house were drawn up the Urbans’ three cars, the black Rover, the metallic-green Vauxhall, and the white Triumph. In the drawing room sat the Urbans drinking sherry, oloroso for Margaret, amontillado for Walter, and Tio Pepe for Martin. There was something of the Three Bears about them, though Baby Bear, in the shape of twenty-eight-year-old Martin was no longer a resident of Copley Avenue, Alexandra Park, and Goldilocks had yet to appear.
    Invariably on Thursday evenings Martin was there for dinner. He went home with his father from the office just round the corner. They had the sherry, two glasses each, for they were creatures of habit, and had dinner and watched television while Mrs. Urban did her patchwork. Since she had taken it up the year before as menopausal therapy she seemed to be perpetually accompanied by clusters of small floral hexagons. Patchwork was beginning to take over the house in Copley Avenue, chiefly in the form of cushion covers and bedspreads. She stitched away calmly or with suppressed, energy, and her son found himself watching her while his father discoursed with animation on a favourite subject of his, Capital Transfer Tax.
    Martin had a piece of news to impart. Though in possession of it for some days, he had postponed telling it and his feelings about it were now mixed. Natural elation was mingled with unease and caution. He even felt very slightly sick as one does before an examination or an important interview.
    Margaret Urban held out her glass for a refill. She was a big, statuesque, heavy-browed woman who resembled Leighton’s painting of Clytemnestra. When she had sipped her sherry, she snipped off a piece of thread and held up for the inspection of her husband and son a long strip of joined-together red and purple hexagons. This had the effect of temporarily silencing Walter Urban, and Martin, murmuring that that was a new colour combination, he hadn’t seen anything like that before, prepared his opening words. He rehearsed them under his breath as his mother, with the artist’s sigh of dissatisfaction, rolled up the patchwork, jumped rather heavily to her feet and made for the door, bent on attending to her casserole.
    “Mother,” said Martin, “wait here a minute. I’ve got something to tell you both.”
    Now that the time had come, he brought it out baldly, perhaps clumsily. They looked at him in silence, a calm,