Ancient Light

by John Banville

  Her real name is Stubbs, or Scrubbs, something unsuitably blunt like that, so it is no wonder that she should have hurried to change it—but why, oh, why Devonport? She is known in the trade, inevitably, as the Casting Couch, though I am surprised these youngsters today should know of such a thing, which surely went out with the Metros, the Goldwyns and the Mayers. She truly is a captivating creature. The only flaw in her loveliness that I can detect is a faint, a very faint, greyish down all over her skin that under the camera seems the tremulous bloom of a peach but that in real life makes her look as grimy as a street-urchin. I hasten to say that I find this hint of the slums exciting in a way that I cannot account for, and were I younger—well, were I younger I should imagine myself capable of all sorts of things and probably end up making a great fool of myself. She came into our midst, where we waited for her in the large and draughty hallway of the house, to a chorus of clearings of male throats—we must have sounded like a colony of bullfrogs at the steamy height of the mating season—and glided at once at a sea-horse’s slight, forwards-leaning incline straight to Toby Taggart, our director, and laid two fingers of one hand on his wrist and did that famous wisp of a smile, glancing blurredly off to the side, and spoke rapidly a breathless word or two meant for him alone to hear.

  You will be surprised to learn that she is a slight person, far slighter, certainly, than she appears on the screen, where she looms in huge brightness with all the magnificence and majesty of Diana of the Three Roads herself. She is impossibly thin, as they all have to be these days—‘Oh, but I don’t eat,’ she told me, with a tinkly laugh, when we broke for lunch and I gallantly offered to fetch her a sandwich—especially on the inner sides of her upper arms, I notice, which are positively concave, with sinews unpleasantly on display under the pallid skin that makes me think, I am sorry to say, of a plucked chicken. It is hard to tell what the rest of her is like, I mean in real life, for of course there is little of her that has not been bared already to public view, particularly in her earliest roles when she was eager to show the jaded mammoths who run her world just what stuff she was made of, but on the big screen all flesh becomes blanded over and made to seem as suave and densely resistant as plastic. She has something of the flapper about her, an impression which I am sure she fosters deliberately. She favours little pointed, high-sided shoes that button up the front, and old-fashioned stockings with seams, and diaphanous, tunic-like dresses inside which her lithe and seemingly weightless body moves, as though independent of any restraint, to its own sinuous, nervy rhythm. Have you noticed that you do not see her hands in close-up? They are another flaw, although I like them, also. They are large, too large certainly for their delicate wrists, and strongly veined, with big-knuckled, spatulate fingers.

  For all the worked-at fragility of the image she presents to her public she has a certain mannish way to her that again is to my liking. She smokes—yes, did you not know?—with burly application, thrusting her face forwards and sideways and dragging on the fag with her lips stuck out, which makes her look as plebeian as any gaffer or grip. She sits with her elbows planted on her knees and holds things, a tea mug, a rolled-up script, in a tight, two-handed grasp, those big knuckles taut and shiny and more like knuckle-dusters than knuckles. Her voice, too, in certain registers, is huskier surely than it should be. I wonder if there is something particular to the movie life that coarsens actresses and hardens their sensibilities, as too much exercising over-develops their muscles. Perhaps that is what makes them so disturbingly attractive to most of the male half of the audience, and probably to half of the female half as well, that impression they give of being a third gender, overmastering and impregnable.

  But that face, ah, that face. I cannot describe it, which is to say I refuse to describe it. Who does not know it, anyway, its every plane and shade and pore? What young man’s fevered dreams has it not gazed out of, or into, grave and grey-eyed, sweetly sad, omnivorously erotic? There is a delicate sprinkle of freckles to either side of the bridge of her nose; they are russet, old gold, dark chocolate; for the screen she hides them under extra-thick applications of slap, but should not, for they are terribly affecting, as we actors say, in their delicate appeal. She is poised and thoroughly self-possessed, as you would imagine, yet I detect, deep down in her, at the very base of her being, a beat of primordial terror, a quivering along the nerves so rapid and faint it hardly registers, the vibration of that fear that everyone in our trade is prone to—and everyone outside it, too, for all I know—the simple, blank, insupportable fear of being found out.

  I liked her from the moment when shambling Toby Taggart took her by the elbow—talk about a contrast!—and steered her to where I was loitering, studiedly inspecting my fingernails, and introduced her to me, her superannuated leading man. As she approached I did not miss the faint frown, half dismay and half appalled amusement, that puckered the flawless patch of pale skin between her eyebrows when she beheld me, nor the infinitesimal grim squaring of the shoulders that she could not keep herself from doing. I was not offended. The script calls for some strenuous grapplings between her and me, which cannot be an appetising prospect for one so lovely, so delicate, so flagrantly young. I do not recall what I said, or stammered, when Toby had introduced us; she, I think, complained of the cold. Toby, mishearing her, surely, gave a big, slow, desperate-seeming laugh, a noise like that of a heavy item of furniture being trundled across an uncarpeted wooden floor. We were all by now in a state of faint hysteria.

  Shaking hands always gives me the shivers, the unwarranted clammy intimacy of it and that awful sense of having something pumped out of one, plus the impossibility of knowing just when to disengage and take back one’s poor, shrinking paw; Dawn Devonport must have had lessons, however, and that veinous hand of hers had hardly touched mine before it was briskly withdrawn—no, not briskly, but in a swiftly sliding caress that slowed for a quarter of a second just as it was letting go, as trapeze artists let go of each other’s fingertips in that languorous and seemingly wistful way when they part in mid-air. She gave me, too, the same sideways-glancing smile that she had given Toby, and stepped back, and a moment later we were all trooping into a high-ceilinged, many-windowed room on the ground floor, stumbling behind the star, the star of stars, like a chain gang in our invisible shackles and treading on each other’s heels.

  The room was entirely done in white, even the floorboards had been gone over with a daubing of what looked like pipe-clay, and there was nothing in it except a couple of dozen cheap-looking, hoop-backed wooden chairs ranged against the four walls, leaving a large bare space in the middle that had a worryingly punitive look to it, as if it were there that the dunces among us, the ones who forgot their lines or tripped over the props, would be made to stand, singled out in our confusion and shame. Three tall, rattly sash windows looked out on the river. Toby Taggart, thinking to put us at our ease, waved a broad square hand and told us we could sit wherever we wished, and as we bumped into each other, all heading in a herd for what looked like the most inconspicuous corner, something that had been there when we were milling outside in the hall, some hint of magical possibilities that we had all felt for a moment, was suddenly gone, and it was dispiritingly as if we were at the end and not the beginning of this fantastical dream-venture. How fragile is this absurd trade in which I have spent my life pretending to be other people, above all pretending not to be myself.

  To start off, Toby said that he would call on the scriptwriter to fill us in on the background to our tale, as he put it. Our tale: so typical of Toby in his poshest mode—you do know his mother was Lady Somebody Somebody, I forget the name, very grand? What a contrast to his actor father, Taggart the Tearaway, which was the yellow press’s delighted label for this larger-than-life, best-loved and worst actor of his generation. As you see, I have been making it my business to gather what facts I can about the principals in whose hothouse company I shall be working in these coming weeks and mo
nths.

  Toby’s mention of the writer set us all to craning like, well, like cranes, for most of us had not realised he was among us. We quickly isolated him, the mysterious Mr Jaybee, lurking alone in a corner and, after we had all fixed on him, looking as alarmed as Miss Muffet on her tuffet when the spider came along. In fact, as I discovered, I had misheard again, and he is not Jaybee but JB, for this is how Axel Vander’s biographer is known to those who have any claim to intimacy with him. Yes, the perpetrator of our script is the same one who wrote the life-story, a thing I had not been aware of until now. He is a somewhat shifty and self-effacing fellow of about my vintage; I had the impression he is ill at ease at finding himself here—probably he considers himself many cuts above mere screenwork. So this is the chap who writes like Walter Pater in a delirium! He hummed and hawed for a bit, while Toby waited on him with a smile of pained benevolence, and at last somehow the teller of our tale got going. He had very little to share with us that was not in the script, but rehearsed a long rigmarole of how he had embarked on his biography of Axel Vander after a fortuitous encounter in Antwerp—birthplace of the real, the ur-Vander, as you will recall if you have been paying attention—with the scholar who claimed to have unmasked the old fraud, the fake Vander, that is. This part itself makes quite a tale. The scholar, an emeritus professor of Post-Punk Studies from the University of Nebraska by the name of Fargo DeWinter—‘No, sir, you are right, the fair town of Fargo ain’t in Nebraska, as so many folk seem to think’—through diligence and application had found and brought to light a number of anti-Semitic articles written by Vander during the war for the collaborationist paper Vlaamsche Gazet. DeWinter confessed to being more amused than shocked by the enormities that Vander was said to have got away with, not merely foul writings in a now defunct newspaper but, if we are to believe it, the murder, or mercy-killing, which no doubt is what the scoundrel himself would have claimed it was, of an ailing and inconvenient spouse. The latter piece of mischief had remained hidden until JB put Billie Stryker on to Vander’s noisome scent and the whole truth came out—not, as JB observed with his sickly smile, that the truth is ever whole or, if it is, that it is likely to come out. These revelations were made too late to harm the egregious Vander, who by then was late himself, but they as good as destroyed his posthumous reputation.

  We worked until midday. I felt giddy and there was a buzzing in my head. The white surfaces everywhere, and the gale outside that made the windows boom in their frames, and the river surging and the cold sunlight glittering on the roiling water, all gave me the sense of taking part in a nautical romp, a piece of amateur theatricals, say, put on aboard a sailing ship, with the crew for cast, the tars got up in shore rig and the cabin boy in flounces. Sandwiches and bottled water had been provided in an upstairs room. I took my paper plate and paper cup into the haven of the bay of one of the big windows and let the light of outdoors bathe my jangled nerves. The higher elevation here afforded a broader, more steeply angled view of the river, and despite the dizziness I kept my gaze fixed on this precipitous waterscape and away from the others milling about the trestle table at my back, where the makeshift lunch was laid out. It will seem absurd, but I always feel shy among a crowd of actors, especially at the start of a production, shy and vaguely menaced, I am not sure how or by what. A cast of actors is in some way more unruly than any other gathering, impatiently awaiting something, a command, a direction, that will give them purpose, will show them their marks, and make them calm. This tendency of mine to hold aloof is I suspect the reason for my reputation as an egoist—an egoist, among actors!—and a cause, in my years of success, for resentment against me. But I was always just as uncertain as the rest of them, gabbling over my lines in my head and shivering from stage-fright. I wonder people could not see that, if not the audience then at least my fellow players, the more perceptive among them.

  The question recurred: why was I there? How was it I had landed this plum part without applying for it, without even an audition? Had I felt one or two of the younger ones among the cast smirking in my direction with a mixture of resentment and mockery? Another reason to turn my back on the lot of them. But, Lord, I did feel the weight of my years. I always suffered worse stage-fright offstage than on.

  I sensed her presence before I glanced to my right to find her standing beside me, facing out, as I was, also with a paper cup clutched in her cupped hands. All women for me have an aura but the Dawn Devonports, scarce as they are, fairly flare. The Invention of the Past, in its movie version, has a dozen characters but really there are only two parts worth speaking of, me as Vander and she as his Cora, and already, as is the way of these things—she is probably no more immune than I am to the envy of others—a bond of sorts had begun to forge itself between us, and we found ourselves quite easy together there, or as easy as two actors standing in each other’s light could hope to be.

  I have known many leading ladies but I had never been thus close up to a real film star before and I had the odd impression of Dawn Devonport as a scaled-down replica of her public self, expertly fashioned and perfectly animate yet lacking some essential spark—duller, slightly dowdier, or just human, I suppose, just ordinarily human—and I did not know if I should feel disappointed, I mean disenchanted. I cannot remember any more of what we talked about on this second encounter than I can of what was said when we were introduced in the hall downstairs. There was something about her, about the combination in her of frailty and faint mannishness, that was a sharp reminder of my daughter. I do not believe I have seen a single film in which Dawn Devonport stars, but it does not matter: her face, with that teasing pout, those depthless, dawn-grey eyes, was as familiar as the face of the moon, and as distant, too. So how, standing there under that tall, light-filled window, would I not be reminded of my lost girl?

  Every aurate woman I have loved in my life, and I use the word loved in its widest sense, has left her impression on me, as the old gods of creation are said to have left their thumbprints on the temples of the men that they fashioned out of mud and turned into us. Just so do I retain a particular trace of each one of my women—for I think of them all as mine still—stamped indelibly on the underside of my memory. I will glimpse in the street a head of wheat-coloured hair retreating among the hurrying crowd, or a slender hand lifted and waving farewell in a certain way; I will hear a phrase of laughter from the far side of a hotel lobby, or just a word spoken with a recognised, warm inflection, and on the instant this or that she will be there, vividly, fleetingly, and my heart like an old dog will scramble up and give a wistful woof. It is not that all the attributes of all these women are lost to me save one, only the one that remains most strongly is most characteristic: is, it would seem, an essence. Mrs Gray, though, despite the years that have elapsed since I last saw her, has stayed with me in her entirety, or as much of an entirety as one may have of a creature not oneself. Somehow I have gathered up all the disparate parts of her, as it is said we shall do with our own remains at the Last Trump, and assembled them into a working model sufficiently complete and life-like for memory’s purposes. It is for this reason that I do not see her in the street, do not find her summoned up in the turn of a stranger’s head, or hear her voice from the midst of an indifferent crowd: being so amply present to me, she does not need to send out fragmentary signals. Or perhaps, in her case, my memory works in a special way. Perhaps it is not memory at all that thinks it holds her fast inside me, but some other faculty altogether.

  Even in those days themselves she was not always my she. When I was in their house and the family was there she was Mr Gray’s wife, or Billy’s mother, or, worse, Kitty’s. If I called for Billy and had to come in and sit down at the kitchen table to wait for him—he really was a tardy soul—Mrs Gray would let her not quite focused gaze slide over me, smiling in a remote fashion, and take up some vague chore as though the sight of me had reminded her of it. She moved more slowly than usual at those times, with an u
nwonted, telltale dreaminess that the others, had they really been others and not her family, would surely have taken suspicious note of. She would pick up something, anything, a teacup, a dishcloth, a butter-smeared knife, and look at it as if it had presented itself to her of its own volition, demanding her attention. After a moment, though, she would set the object down again, with an intensified air of abstractedness. I can see her there at the kitchen table, the thing put back where it had been yet not quite relinquished, her hand still resting lightly on it as if to retain the exact feel of it, the exact texture, while with the fingers of her other hand she twisted and twisted that unruly spring of hair behind her ear.

  And I, what did I do on those occasions, how did I comport myself? I know it will seem fanciful, or just plain tendentious, when I say I believe that it was in those fraught intervals in the Grays’ kitchen that, without knowing it, I took my first, groping steps out on to the boards; nothing like an early clandestine love to teach one the rudiments of the actor’s trade. I knew what was required of me, knew the part I had to play. It was imperative above all to appear innocent to the point of idiocy. With what skill, therefore, did I adopt the protective cover of doltish adolescence and exaggerate the natural awkwardness of a fifteen-year-old, stumbling and mumbling, pretending not to know where to look or what to do with my hands, trotting out inappropriate observations and knocking over the salt cellar or slopping the milk in the milk jug. I even managed, when addressed directly, to make myself blush, not guiltily, of course, but as if out of an agony of shyness. How proud I was of the polish of my performance. Though I am sure I over-acted wildly, I believe neither Billy nor his father noticed that I was acting at all. Kitty, as usual, was the one who worried me, for every so often, in the midst of one of my little pantomimes, I would catch her eyeing me with what seemed a knowing and sardonic glint.