Ancient Light

by John Banville

  In the event she managed with an ease and briskness that I had not the experience to appreciate properly at the time. In a cramped room off the kitchen there was a top-loading washing machine with a big metal paddle sticking up through its middle, a stone sink, an ironing board standing tensed and spindly as a mantis, and a metal-framed camp bed that could have doubled as an operating table had it not been so low to the ground. But, come to think of it, was it a bed? It might have been a horsehair mattress thrown on the floor, for I seem to recall cartoon convict stripes and rough ticking that tickled my bare knees. Or am I confusing it with the subsequent mattress on the floor at the Cotter house? Anyway, in this place of lying down we lay down together, on our sides at first and facing each other, still in our clothes, and she pressed herself against me full-length and kissed me on the mouth, hard, and for some reason crossly, or so it seemed to me. Casting up a quick glance sideways past her temple towards the ceiling so high above, I had the panicky sensation of lying among sunken things at the bottom of a deep cistern.

  Above the bed and halfway up the wall there was a single window of frosted glass, and the rain-light coming through was soft and grey and steady, and that and the laundry smell and the smell of some soap or cream that Mrs Gray had used on her face seemed all to be drifting up out of the far past of my infancy. And indeed I did feel like an impossibly overgrown baby, squirming and mewling on top of this matronly, warm woman. For we had progressed, oh, yes, we had made rapid progress. I suspect she had not intended we should do more than lie there for a certain time chaste enough in our clothes, grinding ourselves against each other’s lips and teeth and hip bones, but if so she had not reckoned with a fifteen-year-old boy’s violent single-mindedness. When I had writhed and kicked myself free of trousers and underpants the air was so cool and satiny against my naked skin that I seemed to feel myself break out all over in a foolish smile. Did I still have my socks on? Mrs Gray, putting a hand to my chest to stay my impatience, got to her feet and took off her dress and lifted her slip and slithered out of her underthings, and then, still in her shift, lay down again and suffered me to re-fasten my tentacles around her. She was saying No over and over in my ear now, no no no nooo! though it sounded to me more like low laughter than a plea that I should stop what I was doing.

  And what I did turned out to be so easy, like learning without effort how to swim. Frightening, too, of course, above those unplumbed depths, but far stronger than fear was the sense of having achieved, at last and yet so early on, a triumphant climacteric. No sooner had I finished—yes, I am afraid it was all very quick—and rolled off Mrs Gray on to my back to lie teetering on the very rim of the narrow mattress with one leg flexed while she was wedged against the wall than I began to puff up with pride, even as I laboured for breath. I had the urge to run and tell someone—but whom could I tell? Not my best friend, that was certain. I would have to be content to hug my secret close to me and share it with no one. Though I was young I was old enough to know that in this reticence would lie a form of power, over myself as well as over Mrs Gray.

  If I was in fear, frantically swimming there, what must she have felt? What if there had indeed been a catastrophe at the circus so that the show had to be stopped and Kitty had come running in to tell how the young man on the flying trapeze had lost his grip and plummeted down through the powdery darkness to break his neck in a cloud of sawdust in the dead centre of the ring, only to find her mammy engaged in half-naked and incomprehensible acrobatics with her brother’s laughable friend? I stand in amazement now before the risks that Mrs Gray took. What was she thinking of, how did she dare? Despite the pride of my accomplishment, I had no sense that it was for the sole sake of me that she was willing, more than willing, to put so much at peril. I should say that I did not imagine myself so treasured, I did not think myself so loved. This was not from diffidence or a lack of a sense of my own significance, no, but the very opposite: engrossed in what I felt for myself, I had no measure against which to match what she might feel for me. That was how it was at the start, and how it went on, to the end. That is how it is, when one discovers oneself through another.

  Having had of her what I had most grievously desired I now faced the tricky task of disengaging from her. I do not mean I was not appreciative or that I felt no fondness for her. On the contrary, I was adrift in a daze of tenderness and incredulous gratitude. A grown-up woman of my own mother’s age but otherwise as unlike her as could be, a married woman with children, my best pal’s ma, had taken off her dress and unhooked her suspenders and stepped out of her drawers—white, ample, sensible—and with one stocking still up and the other sagging to the knee had lain down under me with her arms open and let me spill myself into her, and even now had turned on her side again with a fluttery sigh of contentment and pressed her front to my back, her slip bunched around her waist and the fuzz at her lap wiry and warm against my backside, and was caressing my left temple with the pads of her fingers and crooning in my ear what seemed a softly salacious lullaby. How could I not think myself the town’s, the nation’s—the world’s!—most favoured son and lavishly blest boy?

  I still had the taste of her in my mouth. My hands still tingled from a certain cool roughness along her flanks and the outsides of her upper arms. I could still hear her rasping gasps and feel the way that she seemed to be falling and falling out of my arms even as she arched herself violently against me. Yet she was not I, she was wholly another, and young though I was and new to all this, I saw at once, with merciless clarity, the delicate task that I had now of thrusting her back into the world among the countless other things that were not myself. Indeed, I was gone from her already, was already sad and lonely for her, though still clasped in her arms with her warm breath on the back of my neck. I had once seen a pair of dogs locked together after mating, standing end to end and facing away from each other, the hound casting about in a bored and gloomy fashion, the female hanging her head dejectedly, and God forgive me but this was what I could not keep myself from thinking of now, poised like a spring on the edge of that low bed, yearning to be elsewhere and remembering this lavish, astonishing, impossible quarter of an hour of happy toil in the embrace of a woman-sized woman. So young, Alex, so young, and already such a brute!

  At last we got up gropingly and fastened ourselves away into our clothes, bashful now as Adam and Eve in the garden after the apple was eaten. Or no, I was the bashful one. Although I thought I must surely have injured her insides with all my plunging and gouging, she was quite collected, and even seemed preoccupied, thinking perhaps what to make for tea when her family came home from the circus, or, prompted by our surroundings, wondering if my mother would notice telltale stains on my underwear next wash-day. First love, the cynic observes, and afterwards the reckoning.

  I too had my distractions, and wanted for instance to know why there should be a bed, or even a bare mattress, if that was what it was, in the laundry room, but feared it would be indelicate to ask—I never did find out—and perhaps the suspicion crossed my mind that I had not been the first to lie down there with her, though if it did the suspicion was unfounded, I am sure of that, for she was anything but promiscuous, despite all that had just occurred, and all that was yet to occur, between her and me. Also, I was unpleasantly sticky in the region of my groin, and I was hungry, too, as what young chap would not be after such exertions? The rain had stopped a while before but now another shower began to tinkle against the window above the bed, I could see the wind-driven ghostly drops shiver and slide on the greyly misted glass. I thought with what felt like sorrow of the wetted boughs of the cherry trees outside glistening blackly and the bedraggled blossoms falling. Was this what it was to be in love, I asked myself, this sudden plangent gusting in the heart?

  Mrs Gray was fastening a suspender, the hem of her dress lifted high, and I pictured myself falling to my knees in front of her and burying my face between the bare and very white tops of her legs, plum
ped up a little and rounded above the tightness of her stockings. She saw me looking and smiled indulgently. ‘You’re such a nice boy,’ she said, straightening, and giving herself a shimmy from shoulder to knee to settle her garments into line, a thing that, I realised with a qualm of dismay, I had often seen my mother do. Then she reached out a hand and touched my face, cupping her palm along my cheek, and her smile turned troubled and became almost a frown. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ she murmured, with a helpless little laugh, as if in happy amazement at everything. ‘—You’re not even shaving yet!’

  I thought her quite old—she was the same age as my mother, after all. I was not sure what to feel about this. Should I be flattered that a woman of such maturity, a respectable wife and mother, had found me, maculate, ill-barbered and far from fragrant though I was, so overpoweringly desirable that there was nothing for it but to take me to bed while her husband and her children all unknowing were splitting their sides at the antics of Coco the clown or gazing up in anxious admiration as petite Roxanne and her blue-jawed brothers cavorted flat-footedly on the high-wire? Or had I been simply a diversion, a plaything of the moment, to be toyed with by a bored housewife in the dull middle of an ordinary afternoon and then unceremoniously sent packing, while she turned back to the business of being who she really was and forgot all about me and the transfigured creatures we had both seemed to be when she was thrashing in my arms and crying out in ecstasy?

  By the by, I do not fail to notice how persistently the theme of the circus, with its gaud and glitter, has intruded on proceedings here. I suppose it is an apt background to the hectic spectacle Mrs Gray and I had just put on, although our only audience was a washing-machine, an ironing board and a box of Tide, unless of course the goddess and all her starry fays were present, too, unseen.

  I left the house gingerly, drunker than I had been that other time on Billy’s father’s whiskey, my knees as rickety as an old man’s and my face on fire still. The April day that I stepped out into was, of course, transfigured, was all flush and shiver and skimming light, in contrast to the sluggishness of my sated state, and as I moved through it I felt that I was not so much walking as wallowing along, like a big slack balloon. When I got home I avoided my mother, for I was sure the livid marks of a lust so lately, if only temporarily, satisfied would be plainly visible in my burning features, and I went straight to my room and threw myself, fairly threw myself, on the bed and lay on my back with a forearm shielding my shut eyes and replayed on an inner screen, frame by frame, in maniacally slow slow-motion, all that had taken place not an hour past on that other bed, gaped upon in awe and astonishment by a gallery of innocent domestic appliances. Down in the drenched garden a blackbird began to rinse its throat with a cascade of song and as I listened to it hot tears welled in my eyes. ‘O Mrs Gray!’ I cried out softly, ‘O my darling!’ and hugged myself for sweet sorrow, suffering the while from the stabs of a stinging prepuce.

  I had no thought that she and I would ever do again what we had done that day. That it had happened once was hard enough to credit, that it should be repeated was inconceivable. It was essential therefore that every detail be fetched up, verified, catalogued and stored in memory’s lead-lined cabinet. Here, however, I experienced frustration. Pleasure, it turned out, was as difficult to relive as pain would have been. This failure was no doubt part of the price for being shielded from the imagination’s re-enactive powers, for had I been allowed to feel again with the same force, every time I thought of it, all that I had felt as I was bouncing up and down on top of Mrs Gray, I think I should have died. Similarly, of Mrs Gray herself I was unable to call up a satisfactorily clear and coherent image. I could remember her, certainly I could, but only as a series of disparate and dispersed parts, as in one of those old paintings of the Crucifixion in which the implements of torture, the nails and hammer, spear and sponge, are laid out in a close-up and lovingly executed display while off to the side Christ is dying on the cross in blurred anonymity—dear God, forgive me, compounding bawdry with blasphemy as I do. I could see her eyes of wet amber, unnervingly reminiscent of Billy’s, brimming under half-closed lids that throbbed like a moth’s wings; I could see the damp roots of her hair that was drawn back from her forehead, already showing a greying strand or two; I could feel the bulging side of a plump and polished breast lolling against my palm; I could hear her enraptured cries and smell her slightly eggy breath. But the woman herself, the total she, that was what I could not have over again, in my mind. And I, too, even I, there with her, was beyond my own recall, was no more than a pair of clutching arms and spasming legs and a backside frenziedly pumping. This was all a puzzle, and troubled me, for I was not accustomed yet to the chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done, and it would take practice and the resultant familiarity before I could fix her fully in my mind and make her of a piece, in total, and me along with her. But what does it mean when I say in total and of a piece? What was it I retrieved of her but a figment of my own making? This was a greater puzzle, a greater trouble, this enigma of estrangement.

  I did not want to face my mother that day, not solely because I thought my guilt must be writ plain all over me. The fact was, I would not look at any woman, even Ma, in quite the same way ever again. Where before there had been girls and mothers, now there was something that was neither, and I hardly knew what to make of it.

  As I was leaving the house that day Mrs Gray had stopped me on the front-door mat and quizzed me as to the state of my soul. She was herself devout in a hazy sort of way and wished to be assured that I was on good terms with Our Lord and, especially, with his Holy Mother, for whom she had a particular reverence. She was anxious that I should go to confession without delay. It was apparent she had given the matter some consideration—had she been thinking it over when we were still grappling on that improvised bed in the laundry room?—and said now that while certainly I must lose no time in confessing the sin I had just committed, there would be no need to reveal with whom I had committed it. She too would confess, of course, without identifying me. While she was saying these things she was briskly straightening my collar and combing my horrent hair with her fingers as best she could—I might have been Billy being seen off to school! Then she put her hands on my shoulders and held me at arms’ length and looked me up and down with a carefully critical eye. She smiled, and kissed me on the forehead. ‘You’re going to be a handsome fellow,’ she said, ‘do you know that?’ For some reason this compliment, although delivered with an ironical cast, straight away set my blood throbbing again, and had I been more practised, and less worried about the imminent return of the rest of the family, I would have hustled her backwards down the stairs to the laundry room and pulled off her clothes and mine and pushed her on to that pallet-bed or mattress and started all over again. She mistook my suddenly louring aspect for a scowl of resentful scepticism, and said she had truly meant it, that I was good-looking, and that I should be pleased. I could think of no reply, and turned from her in a tumult of emotions and stumbled off swollenly into the rain.

  I did go to confession. The priest I settled on, after much hot-faced agonising in the church’s Saturday-evening gloom, was one I had been to before, many times, a large asthmatic man with stooped shoulders and a doleful air, whose name by happy chance, though perhaps not so happy for him, was Priest, so that he was Father Priest. I worried that he would know me from previous occasions, but the burden I was carrying was such that I felt in need of an ear that I was accustomed to, and that was accustomed to me. Always, when he had slid back the little door behind the grille—I can still hear the abrupt and always startling clack it used to make—he would begin by heaving a heavy sigh of what seemed long-suffering reluctance. This I found reassuring, a token that he was as loath to hear my sins as I was to confess them. I went through the prescribed, singsong list of misdemeanours—lies, bad language, disobedience—before I ventured, my voi
ce sinking to a feathery whisper, on the main, the mortal, matter. The confessional smelt of wax and old varnish and uncleaned serge. Father Priest had listened to my hesitant opening gambit in silence and now let fall another sigh, very mournful-sounding, this time. ‘Impure actions,’ he said. ‘I see. With yourself, or with another, my child?’

  ‘With another, Father.’

  ‘A girl, was it, or a boy?’

  This gave me pause. Impure actions with a boy—what would they consist of? Still, it allowed of what I considered a cunningly evasive answer. ‘Not a boy, Father, no,’ I said.

  Here he fairly pounced. ‘—Your sister?’

  My sister, even if I had one? The collar of my shirt had begun to feel chokingly tight. ‘No, Father, not my sister.’

  ‘Someone else, then. I see. Was it the bare skin you touched, my child?’

  ‘It was, Father.’

  ‘On the leg?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘High up on the leg?’

  ‘Very high up, Father.’

  ‘Ahh.’ There was a huge stealthy shifting—I thought of a horse in a horse-box—as he gathered himself close up to the grille. Despite the wooden wall of the confessional that separated us I felt that we were huddled now almost in each other’s arms in whispered and sweaty colloquy. ‘Go on, my child,’ he murmured.

  I went on. Who knows what garbled version of the thing I tried to fob him off with, but eventually, after much delicate easing aside of fig leaves, he penetrated to the fact that the person with whom I had committed impure actions was a married woman.