Ancient Light act-3

by John Banville

  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.

  ‘Did you put yourself inside her?’ he asked.

  ‘I did, Father,’ I answered, and heard myself swallow.

  To be precise, it was she who had done the putting in, since I was so excited and clumsy, but I judged that a scruple I could pass over.

  There followed a lengthy, heavy-breathing silence at the end of which Father Priest cleared his throat and huddled closer still. ‘My son,’ he said warmly, his big head in three-quarters profile filling the dim square of mesh, ‘this is a grave sin, a very grave sin.’

  He had much else to say, on the sanctity of the marriage bed, and our bodies being temples of the Holy Ghost, and how each sin of the flesh that we commit drives the nails anew into Our Saviour’s hands and the spear into his side, but I hardly listened, so thoroughly anointed was I with the cool salve of absolution. When I had promised never to do wrong again and the priest had blessed me I went up and knelt before the high altar to say my penance, head bowed and hands clasped, glowing inside with piety and sweet relief—what a thing it was to be young and freshly shriven!—but presently, to my horror, a tiny scarlet devil came and perched on my left shoulder and began to whisper in my ear a lurid and anatomically exact review of what Mrs Gray and I had done together that day on that low bed. How the red eye of the sanctuary lamp glared at me, how shocked and pained seemed the faces of the plaster saints in their niches all about! I was supposed to know that if I were to die at that moment I would go straight to Hell not only for having done such vile deeds but for entertaining such vile recollections of them in these hallowed surroundings, but the little devil’s voice was so insinuating and the things he said so sweet—somehow his account was more detailed and more compelling than any rehearsal I had so far been capable of—that I could not keep myself from attending to him, and in the end I had to break off my prayers and hurry from the place and skulk away in the gathering dusk.

  On the following Monday when I came home from school my mother met me in the hall in a state of high agitation. One look at her stark face and her under-lip trembling with anger told me that I was in trouble. Father Priest had called, in person! On a weekday, in the middle of the afternoon, while she was doing the household accounts, there he was, without warning, stooping in the front doorway with his hat in his hand, and there had been no choice but to put him in the back parlour, that even the lodgers were not permitted to enter, and to make tea for him. I knew of course that he had come to talk about me in light of the things I had told him. I was as much scandalised as frightened—what about the much vaunted seal of the confessional?—and tears of outraged injury sprang to my eyes. What, my mother demanded, had I been up to? I shook my head and showed her my innocent palms, while in my mind I saw Mrs Gray, shoeless and her feet bleeding and her hair all shorn, being driven through the streets of the town by a posse of outraged, cudgel-wielding mothers shrieking vengeful abuse.

  I was marched into the kitchen, the place where all domestic crises were tackled, and where now it quickly became clear that my mother did not care what it was I had done, and was only angry at me for being the cause of Father Priest’s breaking in upon the tranquillity of a lodgerless afternoon while she was at her sums. My mother had no time for the clergy, and not much, I suspect, for the God they represented either. She was if anything a pagan, without realising it, and all her devotions were directed towards the lesser figures of the pantheon, St Anthony, for instance, restorer of lost objects, and the gentle St Francis, and, most favoured of all, St Catherine of Siena, virgin, diplomatist and exultant stigmatic whose wounds, unaccountably, were invisible to mortal eyes. ‘I couldn’t get rid of him,’ she said indignantly, ‘sitting there at the table slurping his tea and talking about the Christian Brothers.’ At first she had been at a loss and could not grasp his import. He had spoken of the wonderful facilities on offer at the Christian Brothers’ seminaries, the verdant playing fields and Olympic-standard swimming pools, the hearty and nutritious meals that would build strong bones and bulging muscles, not to mention, of course, the matchless wealth of learning that would be dinned into a lad as quick and receptive as he had no doubt a son of hers was bound to be. At last she had understood, and was outraged.

  ‘A vocation, to the Christian Brothers!’ she said with bitter scorn. ‘—Not even the priesthood!’

  So I was safe, my sin undisclosed, and never again would I go for confession to Father Priest, or to anyone else, for that day marked the onset of my apostasy.

  ___

  The material, as Marcy Meriwether called it—making it for some reason sound, to my ear, like the leftovers from a post-mortem—arrived today, by special delivery, all the way from the far sunny side of America. Such a fuss attached to its coming! A clatter of hoofs and a fanfare on the post-horn would not have been out of place. The courier, who bore himself like a Balkan war criminal, with a shaved head and dressed all in shiny black and wearing what looked like commando boots laced halfway up his shins, was not content to ring the bell but immediately set to pounding on the door with his fist. He refused to hand over the big padded envelope to Lydia, insisting that it could only be received by the named recipient, in person. Even when I ventured down from my attic roost, summoned exasperatedly by Lydia, he demanded that I produce photographic identification of myself. I thought this supererogatory at the least, but he was not to be moved—obviously his notion of himself and his duties is crazily deluded—and in the end I fetched my passport, which he pored over for fully half a minute, breathing hard down his nostrils, then for the other half scanned my face with a doubting eye. So cowed was I by his unwarranted truculence that I think my hand shook as I signed my name to the form on his clipboard. I suppose I shall have to get used to this kind of thing, I mean special deliveries and dealing with thugs, if I am going to be a film star.

  I tried to open the envelope by tearing at it with my nails but it was sealed into an impenetrable plastic sheath, and I had to take it into the kitchen and put it on the table and go at it with the breadknife, while Lydia looked on in amusement. When I got it open at last a sheaf of papers gushed out of it and spilled across the tabletop. There were newspaper cuttings and offprints of magazine essays and lengthy book reviews in small print by people I have vaguely heard of, with striking and often difficult names—Deleuze, Baudrillard, Irigaray and, for some reason my favourite, Paul de Man—all of them considering and for the most part taking violent issue with the work and opinions of Axel Vander.

  So he was a literary figure, this Vander, a critic and a teacher and, it is clear, a gleeful stirrer-up of controversies. Hardly an obvious subject for a major motion picture, I would have thought. I have spent the morning at my desk wading through what his opponents and detractors had to say of him—he seems to have had few friends—but I did not succeed in making much headway. Vander’s is the kind of arcane and coded specialism—the word deconstruction crops up frequently—that my daughter Cass would have known all about. Along with the loose leaves there came not a film script but, instead, a thick volume, The Invention of the Past—so
that is where they got their title—which with commendable cheek proclaims itself to be the unauthorised biography of Axel Vander. I put it aside for later consideration. I shall have to take a very deep breath before plunging into that muddied well of facts and, I have no doubt, fictions, since all biographies are necessarily if unintentionally mendacious. He seems a slippery specimen, this Vander—whose name, by the way, looks very like an anagram, to me. Also, it is faintly familiar, and I wonder if Cass might indeed have spoken to me of him.

  In the evening Marcy Meriwether called yet again—I imagine the telephone, from years of usage, grafted into her hand, like Orpheus’s lyre—to make sure that the material had arrived. She tells me she is also sending a person to see me, one of her scouts, as she describes him. He is called Billy Striker. An odd name, but at least it breaks the tiresomely alliterative series of Marcy Meriwether and Toby Taggart and Dawn Devonport—yes, Dawn Devonport: did I mention that I am to play opposite her in The Invention of the Past? You are impressed. I confess the prospect of working with such a lustrous star is alarming. I shall surely shrivel up in the glare of her celebrity.

  To take my mind off these unsettlingly exciting matters I have been doodling in the margin here, making a small calculation. That first tryst with Mrs Gray, under the aegis of the ironing board, took place one week before her birthday, which fell, and still falls, if she is living still, on the last day of April. That means that our whatever-to-call-it—affair? infatuation? reckless frolic?—endured in all for just short of five months, or one hundred and fifty-four days and nights, to be exact. Or, no, there were only one hundred and fifty-three nights, since by the night of the last day she was gone from me for ever. Not, for that matter, that we had any nights together, not a single one or even part of one, for where would we, could we, have spent it? It is true I daydreamed of the Grays all going away together to stay somewhere overnight and of Mrs Gray sneaking back and letting me into the house and leading me upstairs to her bedroom and keeping me passionately engaged there until rosy-fingered dawn came creeping under the window-blind to rouse us. It was the kind of fantasy with which I beguiled many a vacant interval away from my darling. A fantasy, of course, for aside from the nice difficulty Mrs Gray would have had in getting free of her family there was the question of what my mother would have said when she discovered my bed unslept in, not to mention Mr Gray and what he would have done should he have got suspicious and hurried home and walked in on his wife and her under-age lover energetically defiling the marriage bed. Or what if they all came back together, Mr Gray and Billy and Billy’s sister, and found us at it? I pictured them standing in the bedroom doorway in a lurid wedge of light from the landing, Mr Gray in the middle with Billy on one side and Kitty on the other, all three clutching tightly to each other’s hands and gazing in slack-jawed stupefaction at the guilty lovers, surprised in their stew of shame, untangling themselves hastily from what would be their last lubricious embrace.

  At the start, the back seat of the Grays’ old station wagon—it was the colour of elephant-hide, I can see it clear—or even the front seat on those occasions when my desire would brook no delay, was a commodious enough bower of bliss for a daemon lover and her lad. I do not say it was comfortable, but what is comfort to a boy when his blood is up? It was on that last day of April that we next met, although I did not know it was her birthday until she told me. Had I been more observant and less impatient to get going on the main business I might have noticed how quiet she was, how thoughtful, how gently sad, even, in contrast to her briskness and gaiety that other, first, time when we had lain down together. Then she told me what day it was, and said she was feeling her age, and gave a great sigh. ‘Thirty-five,’ she said, ‘—think of that!’

  The station wagon was parked up the same woodland track where we had stopped that other evening, and she lay asprawl on the back seat, head and shoulders propped awkwardly against a folded picnic-blanket, with her dress pulled up to her armpits and me lying over her, spent for the moment, my left hand paddling in the sopping hot hollow between her thighs. The evening sun was weakly shining but it was raining, too, and big drops from the overhanging trees were plopping in tinny-sounding syncopation on the metal roof above us. She lit a cigarette—she favoured Sweet Afton, in their nice custard-coloured packet—and when I asked her for one she widened her eyes in feigned shock and said certainly not, and then blew smoke in my face and laughed.

  She was not a native of our town—have I said that?—and neither was her husband. They had come from somewhere else, when they were married first and before Billy was born, and Mr Gray had leased a premises on the corner of the Haymarket and set up his spectacle shop there. The circumstances of her other, ordinary, life, her life away from the two of us and what we were to and in each other, composed a subject I found by turns boring and sorely painful, and when she spoke of them, as she often did, I would give an impatient sigh and attempt to steer her on to other things, to steer her into other things. Lying in her arms like this I could make myself forget that she was Mr Gray’s wife, or Billy’s mother—I could even forget the cat-like Kitty—and did not wish to be reminded that she had a family firmly in place and that I was, despite all, an interloper.

  The town where the Grays had come from—I cannot remember where it was, if I ever bothered to ask—was much bigger and grander than ours, or so she insisted. She liked to tease me by describing its broad streets and fine shops and wealthy suburbs; the people, too, she said, were worldly and polished, not like the people here, where she felt trapped and bitterly discontent. Trapped? Discontent? When she had me? She saw my look and leaned forwards and took my face between her hands and drew me to her and kissed me, breathing laughter and smoke into my mouth. ‘I never got a better birthday present,’ she whispered huskily. ‘My lovely boy!’

  Her lovely boy. I do think she thought of me, or made herself think of me, as somehow a sort of long-lost son, a prodigal delightfully returned, feral from his sojourn among the swine and in need of her womanly, indeed matronly, attentions to soothe and civilise him. She indulged me, of course, indulged me beyond an adolescent’s maddest imaginings, but she kept a monitoring eye on me, too. She made me promise to bathe more often and more thoroughly and to brush my teeth regularly. I was to wear a clean pair of socks every day, and to ask my mother, though without rousing her suspicions, to buy me some presentable underwear. One afternoon at Cotter’s place she produced a suede folder tied in the middle with a leather thong and unwrapped it and laid it out on the mattress to reveal a gleaming set of barber’s implements, pairs of scissors and a straight razor and tortoise-shell combs and gleaming silver shears with a superimposed double set of tiny and very sharp teeth. The thing was a sort of older sibling of the manicure set Billy had given me for Christmas. She had once done a hairdressing course, she told me, and at home she cut everyone’s hair, even her own. Despite my whines of complaint—how was I to explain this to my mother?—she made me sit on an old cane chair in the sunny doorway and went at my tussocky mop with professional dispatch, singing to herself while she worked. When she was done she let me see myself in the miniature mirror of her powder compact; I looked like Billy. As to my mother, by the way, I need not have worried, for in her usual foggy way she did not even notice my unexplained shorn hair—that was my mother, all over.

  I remember suddenly where these things came from, the manicure set and the barber’s tool-kit and probably that compact, too: Mr Gray sold them, in his shop, of course!—how could I forget? So they were got at cost price. The thought of my beloved as a cheapskate is something of a let-down, I must say. How harshly I judge her, even yet.

  But no, no, she was generosity itself; I have said that already and I say it again. Certainly she granted me full freedom of her body, that opulent pleasure garden where I sipped and sucked, dazed as a bumble-bee in full-blown summer. Elsewhere there were limits, though, beyond which I was forbidden to stray. For instance, I could talk all I liked about Billy, m
ake fun of him, if I wished, betray his secrets—to these tales told of her suddenly strangered son she listened with unblinking attention as though I were a traveller of old returned with news from fabulous Cathay—but of her delicate Kitty no scathing mention was permitted, or, especially, of her pathetically short-sighted husband. Need I say this made me itch to pour mockery and scorn upon them both in her hearing, though I did not, since I knew what was good for me. Oh, yes, I knew what was good for me, all right.

  Looking back now I am surprised at how little I learned about her and her life. Is it that I was not listening? For certainly she loved to talk. There were times when I suspected that a sudden intensification of passion on her part—a rake of her nails across my shoulder-blades, a hot word panted in my ear—was merely a manoeuvre to make me have done more quickly so that she might lie back and set to chatting at her blissful ease. Her mind was littered with all sorts of odds and ends of arcane and curious information, gleaned from her wide reading in Tit-Bits and the ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not!’ column in the newspapers. She knew about the dance that bees do when they are harvesting honey. She could tell me what the scribes of old made their ink from. One afternoon at Cotter’s place with the sun angling down on us through a high-up cracked pane she explained to me the principle of a householder’s right to ancient light—the sky must be visible at the top of a window viewed from the base of the opposite wall, if memory serves—for she had once worked as a clerk in the offices of a company of chartered surveyors. She knew the definition of mortmain, could rattle off the signs of the Zodiac in their order. What are glacé cherries made from? Seaweed! What is the longest word that can be typed on the top row of the keys of a typewriter? Typewriter! ‘You didn’t know that, did you, smarty-pants?’ she would cry, and laugh for delight, and dig me in the ribs with her elbow. But of herself, of what the popular psychologists would have called her inner life, what things did she tell me? Gone, all gone.