Ancient Light

by John Banville

  She said she was sorry she had been so long away. Kitty had not wanted to go to bed, and Billy had been out somewhere with his friends and she had felt she must wait for him to come back. His friends, I thought, oh, yes, his new friends that he had lost no time in making. She began to tell me about an old man staying at the hotel who haunted the beach all day spying on girls changing into their swimsuits. As she spoke she made large, hooping gestures with the cigarette, as if it were a stick of chalk and the air a blackboard, and laughed whinnyingly down her nose, seeming not to have a worry in the world, which annoyed me, of course. She still had her window open and as we sped through the moonlit landscape the night kept snapping up at her elbow, and her hair shivered in the wind and the stuff of her dress at her shoulder rippled and slapped. I told her how I had met Billy, and his friends. I had been saving up that piece of news. She was silent for a long time, thinking. Then she shrugged, and said he had been out all day, that she had hardly seen him since morning. I was not interested in any of this. I asked if we might stop somewhere, by the side of the road, or up a lane. She looked at me sidelong and shook her head, pretending to be shocked. ‘Do you ever,’ she asked, ‘think of anything else?’ But she did stop.

  Later, when we got to town, she drew up at the far end of my street. The house, I saw, was dark. My mother must have gone to bed, after all—what should I think of that? Mrs Gray said I had better go in, yet I lingered. Beyond the windscreen the moonlight was carving the street into a jumble of sharp-edged cubes and cones, and everything seemed covered in a thin, smooth coating of silver-grey dust. Another shooting star, and then another. Mrs Gray was silent now. Was she thinking of her children? Was she wondering what she would say to her husband when she returned, what explanation she would offer for her absence? Would he be waiting up for her, sitting in the dark on the glassed-in veranda, drumming his fingers, his spectacle lenses shining accusingly? At length she sighed and drew herself up in the seat with a weary wriggle, and patted me on the knee and said again that it was very late and that I should go in. She did not kiss me goodnight. I said I would come down to Rossmore another day, but she made a line of her lips and gave her head a quick small shake, keeping her eyes on the windscreen. I had not meant it, anyway, I knew I would not go there again and spend another day like the one that had just passed. She waited until I was halfway along the street before driving off. I stopped and turned and watched the twin jewels of the station wagon’s rear lights dwindle and fade. I was recalling how she had looked when she saw me walking towards her up Station Road, how she had started in panic and dismay, and how after a second her eyes had taken on that narrow, calculating look. Was that how it would be again one day, one final day, her eyes cold and her face set against me, against all my begging and bawling, against my bitterest tears? Was that how it would be, in the end?

  But what, you will be asking, what happened, what transpired, as Mrs Gray would have said, on that night in Lerici after my encounter in the snowbound hotel with the mysterious man from the pampas? For surely, you will say, surely something happened. After all, was it not the stuff of the sweaty fantasies of my boyhood to have all unbidden in my bed a creature such as Dawn Devonport, a star in need of succour, a goddess in want of tender tending? Was a time, after boyhood days were done, when in such circumstances I would have known exactly what to do and would not have hesitated for a second. Not that I was ever really a womaniser, even in the days of my hot youth and vigour, despite what certain people will say. An actress in distress, though, I could never resist. Tours especially saw brisk nocturnal activity, for the rooms were cold and the beds lonely in those cheerless digs and fleabag hotels where our little troupes used to put up, establishments that were dispiritingly familiar for me, son of the boarding-house that I was. In the febrile aftermath of the night’s show, often it would take no more than a wounding notice in an early edition to cause a girl still with dabs of greasepaint behind her earlobes to come tumbling in tears into my arms. I was known for my soft touch. Lydia was aware of these chance collisions, or at least she guessed at them, I know that. Did she stray, too, when I was off gallivanting? And if she did, what do I feel about it, now? I press upon the place that should smart and nothing returns. Yet I adored once, and was myself adored. Such a long time ago, all that, I might be speaking of a lost antiquity. Ah, Lydia.

  Dawn Devonport, I have to tell you, is a snorer. I hope she will not mind my revealing this unflattering fact. It will not harm her, I am sure—we prefer our deities to display a human flaw or two. Anyway, I like to listen to a woman snore; I find it soothing. Lying there in the dark with that sonorous rhythm going on beside me I feel I am out on a calm sea at night, being borne along in a little skiff and gently rocked from side to side; a buried recollection of the amniotic voyage, perhaps. That night, when at last I slipped back into my room, the street-light outside was still shedding a soiled glow in the window and the snow was still steadily falling. Have you ever thought how odd a thing it is that all hotel rooms are bedrooms? Even in suites, even in the grandest of them, the other rooms are just anterooms to the inner sanctum where the bed stands in all its smug and canopied majesty, like nothing so much as a sacrificial altar. In mine, now, Dawn Devonport still lay sleeping. I contemplated my choices. What was it to be, a few uncomfortable hours—by now it was very late and first light could not be far off—huddled in my clothes on that rush-bottomed Van Gogh chair, or reclining with a crick in my neck on the equally uninviting sofa? I looked at the chair, I looked at the sofa. The former seemed to shrink under my gaze, while the latter was pressed against the wall opposite the bed with its back up and its padded arms braced to the floor, regarding me through the gloom with an air of smouldering suspicion. I note how more and more I feel my presence resented by supposedly inanimate objects. Perhaps it is the kindly world’s way, by making me increasingly unwelcome among its furniture, of easing me towards the final door, the one through which I shall presently be seen out for the last time.

  In the end I opted to risk the bed. I padded softly around the side of it, and out of habit took off my watch and set it down on the little glass-topped table there. The clink that it made, of metal on glass, brought suddenly back to me all those nighttime vigils spent beside Cass’s sick-bed when she was little, the unquiet darkness and the staled air, and the child felled there and seeming not to sleep but to be away in some half-tormented trance. Slipping soundlessly out of my shoes, but still dressed, with even my jacket buttons demurely done, and without drawing back the covers, I lay down, very cautiously—though even so a few springs deep in the mattress twanged, in jubilant derision, so it sounded—and stretched out on my back beside the sleeping woman and folded my hands on my breast. She stirred and snuffled a bit but did not wake. If she had woken, and turned to see me there, what a fright she would have got, thinking that surely a corpse all neatly parcelled in its funeral suit had been laid out beside her while she slept. She was resting on her side, facing away from me. Against the backdrop of the dimly illumined window the high curve of her hip might have been the outline of a graceful hill seen at a distance in the darkness against a sallowly lit sky; I have always admired this view of the female form, at once monumental and homely. Her snores made a delicate rattling in the passages of her nostrils. Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead. I wondered what Dawn Devonport might be dreaming of, although I have the theory, based on no grounds whatever, that snoring precludes dreaming. For my part I was in that state of late-night hallucinated wakefulness that makes the very notion of sleep seem preposterous, yet presently I felt myself to be suddenly stepping off a footpath and missing my step, and I came to with a jolt that made the bed recoil, and realised I had drifted into a sort of sleep, after all.

  Dawn Devonport too had woken. She was as she had been before, lying on her side, and did not move, but she had stopped snoring and her stillness was that of one awake and intently att
ending. She was so still I thought she might be rigid with fear—it was entirely possible that she did not remember how she had come to be here, in someone else’s bed, in the middle of the night, with that ghastly light in the window and the snow falling outside. Discreetly I cleared my throat. Should I slide from the bed and slip out of the room and take myself off downstairs again—Señor Sorrán might still be in the bar, broaching another bottle of Argentinian red—so that she might think I had been only the figment of a dream and thus reassured drift back into sleep? I was juggling these alternatives, none of them persuasive, when I felt the bed begin to tremble, or quake, in a way I could not at first account for. Then I understood the cause. Dawn Devonport was weeping, muffling violent sobs and making hardly a sound. I was shocked, and my hands on my breast clutched at each other in a spasm of fright. The sound of a woman sobbing to herself in the darkness is a terrible thing. What was I to do? How was I to console her—was I required to console her? Was anything at all to be asked of me? I was trying to recall the words of a silly little ditty that I used to sing with Cass when she was small, something about lying in bed on one’s back and getting tears in one’s ears—how Cass used to laugh—and in the extremity of the moment I think I too would have begun to weep had Dawn Devonport not reared up suddenly, giving the sheet and the blanket a mighty yank, and fairly flung herself from the bed with a wordless exclamation of what seemed anger and run from the room, leaving the door wide open behind her.

  I switched on the lamp and sat up, blinking, and swung my legs over the side of the bed and set my stockinged feet on the floor. Weariness settled all at once on my bowed shoulders, like the weight of all that snow outside, or of the night itself, the great dome of darkness all above me. My feet were cold. I wriggled them into their shoes, and leaned forwards, but then just stayed leaning there, my arms hanging, incapable even of doing up the laces. There are moments, infrequent though marked, when it seems that by some tiny shift or lapse in time I have become misplaced, have outstripped or lagged behind myself. It is not that I think myself lost, or astray, or even that it is inappropriate to be where I am. It is just that somehow I am in a place, I mean a place in time—what an odd way language has of putting things—at which I have not arrived of my own volition. And for that moment I am helpless, so much so that I imagine I will not be able to move on to the next place, or go back to the place where I was before—that I will not be able to stir at all, but will have to remain there, sunk in perplexity, mured in this incomprehensible fermata. But always, of course, the moment passes, as it passed now, and I got myself to my feet and shuffled in my unlaced shoes to the door Dawn Devonport had left open, and shut it, and returned and switched off the lamp, and lay down again, still in my clothes, with my tie still knotted, and passed at once into blessed oblivion, as if a panel had opened in the night’s wall and I had been slid on a slab into the dark and shut away there.

  We never did make the crossing to Portovenere, Dawn Devonport and I. Perhaps I had never intended that we should. We might have gone, there was nothing to stop us—unless it was everything, of course—for despite the winter storms the ferries were operating and the roads were open. She, it turned out, had known all along that it was in the little port across the bay that my daughter died—she had heard it from Billie Stryker, I imagine, or Toby Taggart, for it was no secret, after all. She did not ask why I had chosen not to tell her myself, why I had pretended to have picked our destination at random. I expect she thought I had a plan, a programme, a scheme of my own, one that she might as well go along with, for want of better. Perhaps she did not think anything at all, just let herself be taken away, as if she had no choice and were glad of it. ‘Keats died here,’ she said, ‘didn’t he, drown or something?’ We were walking on the front below the hotel in our overcoats and mufflers. No, I told her, that was Shelley. She paid no attention. ‘I’m like him, like Keats,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at the turbulent horizon. ‘I’m living a posthumous existence—isn’t that what he said of himself somewhere?’ She laughed briefly, seeming pleased with herself.

  It was morning, and the disturbances and interrupted sleep of the night before had left me in a chafed and shaky state, and I felt as raw as a freshly peeled stick. Dawn Devonport on the other hand was preternaturally calm, not to say dazed. The hospital must have given her tranquillisers to take with her on the trip—her doctor, the nice Indian, had not wanted her to come at all—and she was remote and slightly bleared, and looked on everything around her with a sceptical expression, as if she were sure it had all been got up to deceive her. Every so often her attention would focus and she would peer at her watch, narrowing her eyes and frowning, as if something momentous that had been meant to happen were being inexplicably delayed. I told her of my encounter with Fedrigo Sorrán, although I was not sure that in my tired and travel-fevered state I had not dreamed him, or invented him, and indeed I still have doubts. In the hotel that morning there had been no sign of him, and I was convinced he was no longer staying there, if he had been there at all, in the first place. Of her coming to my room, of our chaste concumbence, of her tears and her subsequent abrupt and violent exit, we did not speak. Today we were like a pair of strangers who had met in a dockside bar the night before and gone on board together in tipsy good-fellowship, and now the vessel had sailed, and we were hungover, and the voyage was still all grimly ahead of us.

  He had been on his way back from Leghorn, I told her, when his boat sank in a storm. She looked at me. ‘Shelley,’ I said. His friend Edward Williams was with him, and a boy whose name I could not recall. Their boat was named the Ariel. Some say the poet scuttled it himself. He was writing The Triumph of Life. She was no longer looking at me and I was not sure that she was listening. We stopped and stood and gazed across the bay. Portovenere was over there. We might indeed have been on the stern of a ship, steaming steadily away from what was meant to have been our destination. The sea was high and vehemently blue, and I could just make out a bustle of white water at the foot of that distant promontory.

  ‘What was she doing there, your daughter?’ Dawn Devonport asked. ‘Why there?’

  Why indeed?

  We walked on. Amazingly, impossibly, last night’s snowfall was entirely gone, as if the stage designer had decided it had been ill-advised and had ordered it to be swept away and replaced with a few minimalist puddles of muddy slush. The sky was hard and pale as glass, and in the limpid sunlight the little town above us was sharply etched against the hillside, a confused arrangement of angled planes in shades of yellow ochre, gesso white, parched pink. Dawn Devonport, her hands plunged in the pockets of her calf-length, fur-trimmed coat, paced beside me over the flagstones with her head down. She was in full disguise, with those enormous sunglasses and a big fur hat. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘when I did it, or tried to—when I took the pills, I mean—I thought I was going to a place I would know, a place where I’d be welcomed.’ She had some difficulty with the words, as if her tongue were thick and hard to manage. ‘I thought I was going home.’

  Yes, I said, or to America, like Svidrigailov, before he put the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

  She said she was cold. We went to a café on the harbour front and she drank hot chocolate, crouched at the little round table and clutching the cup in both of those big hands of hers. An odd thing about those little cafés in the south is that they seem, to me, anyway, to have been something else originally, apothecary shops, or small offices, or even domestic living rooms, that had been gradually and as if unintentionally adapted to this new use. There is something about the counters, so high and narrow, and the way the tiny tables and the chairs are crammed in, that lends the place a makeshift, improvised look. The staff, too, bored and laconic, have a transitory air, as though they had been drafted in temporarily to fill a shortage and are irritably eager to get away and take up again whatever far more interesting pursuit it was they had been engaged in previously. And s
ee all those flyers and playbills around the cash register, the postcards and signed photographs and scraps of messages stuck in the frame of the mirror behind the bar, that make the fat proprietor there—bald head with greasy grey strands draped over it, a scrunched-up moustache, a big gold ring on his fat little finger—look like a booking agent of some variety ensconced at his desk among the scraps and memorabilia of his trade.

  You won’t bring her back, you know, Lydia said, not like this. And of course she was right. Not like this, nor any other way.

  Who, Dawn Devonport wanted to know, frowning and concentrating, who was Svidrigailov? That was, I told her again, patiently, the name my daughter gave to the person she had come here with, whose child she was carrying. Through the glass door of the café I could see, far out on the bay, a sleek white craft, low in the stern and high in the prow, shouldering its way over the purple swell and seeming as if it would take to the sky at any moment, a magic ship, breasting the air. Dawn Devonport was lighting a cigarette with a hand that trembled. I told her what Billie Stryker had told me, that Axel Vander had been here or hereabouts at the same time as my daughter. She only nodded; perhaps she knew it already, perhaps Billie Stryker had told her that, too. She took off her sunglasses and folded them and put them on the table beside her cup. ‘And now we’re here, you and I,’ she said, ‘where the poet drowned himself.’