Ancient Light

by John Banville

  At last, after all these efforts, I ran out of energy, and turned away from her and folded my arms and glowered into the ragged hedgerow beside which we were parked. Silence erected itself between us like a barrier of glass. Then Mrs Gray stirred, and sighed, and said she would have to go home, that everyone would be wondering where she was, why she was so late. Oh, everyone would, would they? I said, with what was intended to be biting sarcasm. She laid a hand lightly on my arm. I would not unbend. ‘Poor Alex,’ she said cajolingly, and it struck me how seldom she spoke my name, which served to bring on yet a further access of anger and bitter resentment.

  She started up the engine, mashing the gears as always, and reversed the station wagon and turned it in a storm of dust and flying gravel. Only then did we notice the three small boys standing with their bikes on the opposite side of the road, watching us. Mrs Gray spoke a word under her breath, and took her foot off the clutch too quickly and the engine gave a grunt and a heave and died. The dust continued to swirl lazily around us. The boys were homunculoid, grimy-faced, and had scabby knees and hacked-at hair—tinker children, probably, from the camp over by the town dump. They went on looking at us without expression, and there we sat, helplessly absorbing their blank stares, until presently they turned away in what seemed bland disdain and mounted up and rode off down the road at a leisurely glide. Mrs Gray laughed unsteadily. ‘Well, you needn’t worry, so,’ she said, ‘for if those fellows tell on us I won’t be going anywhere, and nor will you, my bucko, unless it’s to the reformatory.’

  But she did go. Until the very last I did not believe she would have the resolve to part from me and leave me to suffer, yet the moment of her going came, and she went. Is it possible for a boy of fifteen to know love’s torments, I mean really to know them? Surely one would have to be fully and bleakly aware of the inevitability of death to experience the true anguish of loss, and to me as I was then the notion that I would one day die was preposterous, hardly to be entertained at all, the stuff of a bad and barely remembered dream. But if it was not actual pain I was experiencing then what was it? In form it was, or felt most like, a sort of pained, general dithering, so that I seemed to have grown old suddenly, old and fussed and infirm. In the week and more that I had to endure before her departure there continued and intensified in me the sense of agitation, of inner vibrating, that had started that day at the side of the road in the station wagon when she first made her announcement of the holiday. It might have been a form of ague, an interior St Vitus’s Dance. Outwardly I must have been much as usual, for no one, not even my mother, appeared to notice anything amiss with me. Inside, however, all was fever and confusion. I felt as one must feel who has been sentenced to death, torn between disbelief and stark dread. Had it never occurred to me that I would have to suffer some kind of separation from her sooner or later, even if only a temporary one? No, it had not. For me, lolling complacently in the lap of Mrs Gray’s opulent, all-embracing love, there was only the present, with no future in view, certainly not a future in which she did not figure. Now the sentence had been passed, the last meal had been eaten, and I was in the tumbril, I could hear its wheels harshing on the cobbles and could see clear the scaffold erected in the dead centre of the square, with its attendant hangwoman awaiting me, in her black hood.

  It was a Saturday morning when they went. Imagine if you will a small-town summer day: flawless blue sky, birds in the branches of the cherry trees, a not unpleasant, sweetish reek of slurry from the pig farms out in the purlieus, the knock and clatter and cry of children at play. And now see me, skulking hunched and harrowed through the innocent, sunlit streets, on the way to meet in all its pitiless magnitude the first great sorrow of my young life. I will say this for suffering, that it lends a solemn weight to things and casts them in a starker, more revealing, light than any they have known hitherto. It expands the spirit, flays off a protective integument and leaves the inner self rawly exposed to the elements, the nerves all bared and singing like harp-strings in the wind. Approaching across the little square I kept my eyes averted from the house until the last minute, not wanting to see the dark-blue sun-blinds drawn in the windows, the note for the milkman screwed into the neck of an empty milk bottle, the front door locked impassively against me. Instead, I pictured in my mind, concentrating fiercely, as though by force of imagination I might make it be so, the battered station wagon, my accommodating, faithful old friend, standing at the kerb as always, and the front door of the house ajar and every window open, and in one of them a penitent Mrs Gray leaning far out and smiling radiantly down at me with welcoming arms flung wide. But then I was there, and had to look, and no station wagon was to be seen, and the house was shut, and my love had gone away and left me standing here in a puddle of grief.

  How did I get through the rest of that day? I drifted, outwardly listless yet all aquiver within. My world yesterday with Mrs Gray in it had the lightness and glossy tension of a freshly inflated party balloon; now, today, with her gone, everything was suddenly slack, and tacky to the touch. Anguish, this constant, unremitting anguish, made me tired, terribly tired, yet I did not know how I might rest. I felt dry all over, dry and hot, as if I had been scorched, and my eyes ached and even my fingernails pained me. I was like one of those big sycamore leaves, resembling parched claws, that scuttled and scratched their way along the pavements, driven by the autumn gusts. What am I saying? It was not autumn, it was summer, there were no dead leaves on the ground. Yet that is what I see, the caducous leaves, and dust-eddies in the gutters, and my suffering self facing into a bitter wind portending the onset of winter.

  Late in the afternoon, however, came the great revelation, followed by the greater resolution. In my wanderings I found myself outside Mr Gray’s glasses shop. I do not think I went there intentionally, although throughout the day I had lingered deliberately in this or that place with which for me my departed darling was associated, such as the tennis courts where I had once seen her play, and the boardworks where we had so fearlessly paraded ourselves and our love. The shop, like its proprietor, was unremarkable. There was a room at the front with a counter and a chair that customers could sit in to admire their new eyewear in a magnifying mirror in a circular silver frame set at a convenient angle on the counter. At the back was a consulting room, I knew, where the walls were fitted with stacks of shallow wooden drawers containing spectacle frames, and there was a machine with two big, round, startled-looking lenses, like the eyes of a robot, that Mr Gray tested his patients’ vision with. To supplement the optical business—remember how few people wore glasses in those days?—Mr Gray sold pricey trinkets and items of cosmetics, and even retorts and test tubes, in various sizes, if I am not mistaken. Looking at these things displayed in the window, I was not in such an extreme of agony that I did not recall Kitty’s birthday present that I still coveted and the thought of which now only added to my suffering and my sense of injury.

  Business must have been slow that afternoon, for Miss Flushing, Mr Gray’s assistant, was standing in the shop doorway with the door open, enjoying the sunlight that had already begun to decline at a sharp angle over the rooftops but that was still strong and dense with heat. Was Miss Flushing smoking a cigarette? No, in those days women did not smoke in public, though bold Mrs Gray sometimes did, sometimes even in the street. Miss Flushing was big-boned and blonde, high at bosom and waist, with prominent and very white teeth that were impressive though somewhat alarming to look at. She gave a sense of all-over fairness and pinkness, and there was always a faint, delicate shine, like that on the inner whorl of a seashell, along the edges of her nostrils and the rims of her slightly starting eyes. She favoured angora cardigans that she must have knitted herself, unless she had a mother who knitted them for her; she kept them tightly buttoned so that they emphasised the impossibly sharp points of her perfectly conical breasts. She was extremely short-sighted, and wore spectacles with lenses as thick as the bottoms of bottles. Is it
not remarkable that Mr Gray, myopic himself, should have hired an assistant whose vision was even worse than his own? Unless she was meant to be a sort of advertisement, an awful warning against the neglect of defective eyesight. She was a kindly if somewhat scattered person, although with slow or indecisive patients she could on occasion be distinctly short. My mother, a mistress of indecision, disliked and disapproved of her, and when once a year she took ten shillings from the petty cash and went to have her eyesight tested she would insist on being received and treated exclusively by Mr Gray, who was, as she often said, smiling wistfully, a lovely man. The notion of my mother submitting herself to the professional attentions of Mr Gray caused in me an unpleasant, even a queasy, sensation. Did they speak of Mrs Gray? Did my mother enquire after her well-being? I imagined the subject coming up, being briefly, tentatively contemplated, then put away carefully like a pair of glasses into their silk-lined case, after which there would be a silence into which my mother would let drop a soft, faint cough.

  I was not acquainted with Miss Flushing, except insofar as everyone in our hardly populous little town could be said to be acquainted, more or less, with everyone else. When I arrived in the street that evening and, seeing her in the doorway, lifted up my chin and knotted my brow into a frown and made to walk past as if I were hurrying on a vital errand elsewhere—it was imperative she should not imagine I was there for any reason to do with the Grays, particularly Mrs Gray—she suddenly spoke to me, to my surprise and even some fright, addressing me by name, which I did not know she knew. I confess that, in my boy’s beady fashion and out of nothing other than a desire for a model against which to compare Mrs Gray’s full-fleshed charms, I had more than once in recent times speculated on how Miss Flushing would look if, somewhere like Cotter’s place some lazy afternoon, she were to be persuaded to take off that fluffy cardigan and the pointy paraphernalia of lace and whalebone underneath it, and I suspect that now when she spoke my name I must have blushed—not, I suppose, that she would have noticed.

  She said the Grays had gone away. I nodded, still frowning, still trying to pretend I was about important business from which she was keeping me. She was peering at me in her short-sighted way, which made her lift her full upper lip a little in the middle and wrinkle her nose. In those big lenses her pale, protuberant eyes were the size and shade of two shrunken gooseberries. ‘They’ve gone to Rossmore,’ she said, ‘for a fortnight. They went this morning.’ I seemed to catch in her tone a note of commiseration. Was she also in some way bereft? Was she too sorrowing, like me, and offering sympathy? The sun was striking down on some polished surface in the shop window and dazzling my already sorrow-dazed eyes. ‘Mr Gray is going to come up to town every day on the train,’ Miss Flushing was saying, smiling out of what I was sure now was a fixed, bright misery. ‘He’ll be working here and going down to them at night.’ Them. ‘It’s not far, on the train,’ she added, and a wobble came into her voice. ‘Not far at all.’

  And then I saw it. Miss Flushing was commiserating not with me but with herself. The sorrow she could not keep from betraying was not on my part, it was on her own. Of course! For she was in love with Mr Gray, at that moment I was suddenly certain of it. And he?—was he in love with her? Were they as Mrs Gray and I were to each other? It would account for so many things—Mr Gray’s other kind of myopia, for instance, that prevented him from seeing what was going on under his nose between his wife and me, which perhaps was not myopia at all, I thought now, but the indifference of one whose affections had been transferred elsewhere. Yes, that was it, it had to be: he did not care if his wife spent her afternoons not shopping as she said she did or playing tennis with her housewife friends—what housewife friends did she have, anyway?—but tumbling top over tail with me at Cotter’s place, because meanwhile he was in the back room here with the shades pulled and the closed sign displayed, busy ridding flushed Miss Flushing of her ugly specs and clingy cardigan and underwired armour plating. Oh, indeed, I saw it all now, and was exultant, and the balloon of life’s possibilities was on the instant full to bursting again and tugging at its tether. And I knew what I would do. Come Monday morning, when Mr Gray was bound for town on the up line I would be on the down, speeding in a welter of steam and sparks towards my beloved, whose lovely limbs were sure to be by then already touched with a first alluring sunny flush. What of my mother, though, and what she would say? Well, what of her? It was the school holidays still, I would make some excuse to be gone for the day; she would not object, she credited my every lie and subterfuge, the poor, dim thing.

  I pause. I am suddenly assailed by a memory of her, my mother, sitting on a beach on a windy bright day in the midst of the remains of a picnic, paper plates and crushed paper cups, bread crusts in a big tin biscuit-box, a banana skin rudely splayed, a bottle with the dregs of milky tea in it sunk at a drunken angle in the sand. She is sitting up straight with her bare mottled legs extended before her, and there is something on her head, a headscarf, or a shapeless cotton hat. Is she at her sewing?—for she wears that abstracted half-smile that she does when she is doing her embroidery. Where is my as yet undead father? I do not see him. He is down at the shallows, it must be, where he often was, paddling, his trousers rolled, his calves and his knobbed ankles on show, greyish-white, the colour of lard. And I, where am I, or what?—an eye suspended in mid-air, a hovering witness only, there and not there? Ah, Mother, how can the past be past and yet still be here, untarnished, gleaming, bright as that tin box? And did you never suspect what your son was up to, never once, throughout that broiling, tumid summer? Surely a mother would not be so blind to the passions of her only child. You said no word, dropped no hint, posed no pointed question. Yet what if you did suspect, what if you did know, and were too appalled, too terrified, to speak, to challenge, to forbid? This possibility troubles me, more, even, than the possibility that everyone knew, all along. So many people I have betrayed in my life, starting with her, the first casualty.

  Would I really go to Rossmore? Countless times throughout that Saturday night and all of Sunday my resolution failed me, then rallied, only to falter and fail again. But go I did, surprising myself. The business of getting away turned out to be simplicity itself—I am sure there is a devil’s apprentice whose special task it is to smooth the way for clandestine lovers. I told my mother, at the demon’s dictation, that Billy Gray had invited me to come down and spend the day with him. Not only was she not suspicious, she was positively pleased, for the Grays were what she called a professional family and therefore a desirable connection for me to have and to cultivate. She gave me the train fare and something extra to buy an ice cream, made sandwiches for me to bring, ironed one of my two good shirts, and even insisted on whitening my plimsolls with pipe-clay. Her fussing infuriated me, of course, in my impatience to be away, but I kept my temper for fear of provoking capricious Fate, which so far had been smiling upon me with such unwonted tolerance.

  Boarding the train, I had a twinge of misgiving that was something mysteriously to do with the smell of coal smoke and the bristly feel of the upholstery of the seats. Was I recalling then, too, my mother at Rossmore? Was I ashamed of having lied to her that morning with such oily ease? It is remarkable how few such pricks of conscience I was prey to in those days—I saved them all up for later, for now—yet in that moment, as the train wheezed and clanked its way out of the station, was it that I was afforded a glimpse of the fiery plain and the burning lake of sorrows, did I hear the cries of doomed lovers rising from the pit? This is a grave sin, my child, Father Priest had said, and surely it was. Well, let damnation come, I did not care. I got up from the seat, accompanied by little jets of ancient dust squirting out of the upholstery, and let the heavy wooden window down on its thick leather strap, and summer with all its promise leapt into my arms.

  I have always liked trains. The old ones were best, of course, their soot-black engines venting bursts of steam and chuffing links of stylise
d white smoke, and the carriages rattling and yawing and the wheels violently clanging—so much might and effort, yet producing such a gay and toy-like effect. And then the way the landscape seemed to rotate like a vast, slow wheel, or to keep opening like a fan, and the telegraph wires dipped and slid, and birds flew past the window backwards, slowly, effortfully, like so many discarded bits of black rag.

  How broad and flat the silence is that spreads along a station platform in summer when the train pulls out. I was the only one who had got off. The fat-necked station master in his peaked cap and navy-blue coat spat on the line and ambled off, that hoop thing he had got from the driver—was it? or from the guard in the guard’s van?—dangling on his shoulder. Parched grass on the far side of the track made ticking noises in the sun. A crow was perched on a post. I went through the little green gate up to the road. Dimly I saw, with a sort of inward undulation like that of a heavy black curtain stirring in a cold wind, how mad a thing it was to have come here like this; but still, no, I did not care, I would not care. I was too far gone to go back, and anyway there would not be an up train for hours. I took out of my pocket the packet of sandwiches my mother had made for me and hurled it across the track into the grass, as a pledge of my commitment, I suppose, of my determination not to be daunted. The crow on the post gave a put-upon squawk and unwrapped its wings of black crape and with a few lazy flaps flew down inexpectantly to investigate. All this had happened before somewhere.