Ancient Light act-3

by John Banville

  That outwardly blameless promenade along the boardworks—the local name for this construction—constituted, I believe, the most audacious and rashest risk we ever took, aside from the final risk, had we but known it as such, that led precipitately to our ruin. We had come to the harbour and Mrs Gray parked the station wagon on the clinkered verge beside the railway line—the railway ran along the boardworks, a single track, a thing for which our town was noted, and is to this day, for all I know—and we got out, I sulking still and Mrs Gray humming to herself in a pretence of not noticing my surly glare. With one hand she reached quickly behind and plucked the seat of her dress free at the back in that way that every time she did it provoked in me an inward gasp of agonised desire. The air over the sea was still, and the water, high and motionless, had a thin floating of oil from the moored coal-boats, that gave it the look of a sheet of red-hot steel suddenly gone cool, aswirl with iridescent shades of silver-pink and emerald and a lovely lucent brittle blue, shimmery as the sheen on a peacock feather. We were not by any means the only promenaders. There were quite a few couples out, ambling dreamily arm in arm in the late soft glow of the evening’s immemorial sunlight. Perhaps, after all, no one so much as noticed us, or paid us the slightest heed. A guilty heart sees glancing eyes and knowing grins on every side.

  Now, I am sure this is too absurd to have been the case, but on that occasion I recall Mrs Gray, in her short-sleeved summer dress, wearing a pair of pretty gloves made of a reddish-blue net-like material—I can see it—transparent and brittle, with ruffles at the wrist of a darker, purplish shade, and, more absurd still, a matching hat, small and round and flat as a saucer, set slightly off-centre on the crown of her head. Where do I get such fancies from? All she lacks, in this outlandishly demi-mondaine vision of her, is a parasol to twirl, and a pearl-handled lorgnette to peer through. And why not a bustle, into the bargain? Anyway, there we were, young Marcel in unlikely company with bare-armed Odette, pacing side by side along the boardworks, our heels knocking hollowly on the planking and I silently recalling, with arch compassion for a former unformed self, how not so long ago I used to lurk under here with my urchin pals when the tide was out and squint through the gaps between the sleepers in hope of seeing up the skirts of girls walking by above us. Although I would not have thought of touching her in the glare of this public place I could feel across the space between us the thrilling crackle of Mrs Gray’s dismay at her own daring; dismay, but determination, too, to brazen it out. She would not look at anyone we met, and went along as erect and studiedly empty-eyed as a ship’s figurehead, her bosom thrust forwards and her head held aloft. I was at a loss as to what she thought she was up to, parading like this before the town, but there was a side to her that was still and always would be a romping girl.

  I wonder now if secretly and without fully realising it she too yearned to be found out, if that was what this provocative display was for. Perhaps our liaison was all too much for her, as often-times it was for me, and she wished to be forced to have done with it. Need I say, such a possibility would not have entered my head at the time. When it came to girls I was as insecure and self-doubting as any average boy, yet that Mrs Gray should love me I took entirely for granted, as if it were a thing ordained within the natural order of things. Mothers were put on earth to love sons, and although I was not her son Mrs Gray was a mother, so how would she deny me anything, even the innermost secrets of her flesh? That was how I thought, and the thought dictated all my actions, and inactions. She was simply there, and not for a moment to be doubted.

  We stopped by the stern of one of the coal boats to look across to the barrage bank, as it was called, a shapeless hulk of concrete stuck in the middle of the harbour, its original function long forgotten, even to itself, probably. Below the surface, under the slope of the boat’s dirty rump, big greyish fish made desultory weavings, and farther down in the shallow brown water I could dimly see crabs at their stealthy, sideways scuttlings among the stones and sunken beer bottles, the tin cans and tyreless pram wheels. Mrs Gray turned aside. ‘Come on, we’d better go,’ she said, sounding weary now and in a gloom suddenly. What had happened that her mood had turned so swiftly? In all of the time we were together I never knew what was going on in her head, not in any real or empathetic way, and hardly bothered to try to find out. She talked about things, of course, all sorts of things, all the time, but mostly I took it that she was talking to herself, telling herself her own wandering, various and disconnected story. This did not bother me. Her ramblings and ruminations and the odd breathless flight of wonderment I regarded as no more than the preliminaries I had to put up with before getting her into the back seat of that pachydermous old station wagon or on to the lumpy mattress on Cotter’s littered floor.

  When we had got into the car she did not start the engine at once but sat watching through the windscreen the couples still passing to and fro in the deepening twilight. I do not see those net gloves now, or that silly hat. Surely I invented them, out of an impulse of frivolity; the Lady Memory has her moments of playfulness. Mrs Gray sat with her back pressed against the seat, her arms extended and her hands clamped beside each other on the top of the steering wheel. Have I spoken of her arms? They were plump though delicately shaped, with a little whorled notch under each elbow and curving in a nicely swept arc to the wrist, reminding me happily of those indian clubs we used to exercise with in the school yard on Saturday mornings. They were lightly freckled on the backs, and the undersides were fish-scale blue and wonderfully cool and silky to the touch, with delicate striations of violet veins along which I liked to slide the tip of my tongue, following them all the way to where they abruptly sank from sight in the dampish hollow of her elbow, one of the numerous ways I had of making her shiver and twitch and moan for mercy, for she was delightfully ticklish.

  I laid an urging hand on her thigh, being eager to depart, but she took no notice. ‘Isn’t it peculiar,’ she said, in a tone of dreamy wonderment, still gazing through the windscreen, ‘how permanent people seem? As if they’ll always be here, the same ones, walking up and down.’

  I thought for some reason of that swaying column of steam from the kettle in the kitchen, and of Mr Gray setting down his untouched glass of whiskey on the table in his infinitely weary way. Then I wondered if there might still be time and enough left of the long day’s light for Mrs Gray to drive me to Cotter’s place and let me lie down on top of her and assuage for a little while my so fierce, tender and inveterate need of her and her inexhaustibly desirable flesh.

  ___

  Dawn Devonport, I have learned, has also suffered a bereavement, far more recent than mine. A little over a month ago her father died, of an unheralded heart attack, at the age of fifty-something. She told me of this last evening, at the end of the day’s filming, as we walked together in the open air behind the studio where we are working this week. She had come out to smoke the fifth of the six cigarettes that she claims are her daily ration—why six, I wonder. She says she does not like to let the cast and crew see her smoking, though obviously I am an exception, being already a stand-in, as I suspect, for the father who so recently absconded from her life. We were both suffering somewhat in the aftermath of a scene of brutal passion we had spent the afternoon doing and redoing—nine long takes before Toby Taggart grudgingly consented to be satisfied; did I say film-acting was easy?—and the chill air of late autumn, smelling of smoke and tinged with bronze behind far trees, was a balm for our throbbing brows. To be made to feign love-making before the camera was fraught enough, but to have had to follow the act with a mock blow of my fist between her small, bared and shockingly defenceless breasts—Axel Vander, as least as JB has written him, is decidedly not a nice man—had left me dry-mouthed and shaking. As we paced the strip of unconvinced grass under the high, windowless, gunmetal-grey back wall of the studio she spoke of her father in brief rapid bursts, drawing hard on her cigarette and expelling puffs of smoke like cartoon speech-bubbles in whic
h exclamations of sorrow and anger and incredulity had yet to be inscribed. Dad was a taxi driver, a jolly fellow, it seems, never sick a day in his life until his arteries, all clogged up after forty years of forty a day—she looked at the cigarette in her fingers and gave a sour laugh—had shut off the valves one October morning and let the engine cough and die.

  It turns out that it was Dad, dear old Dad, who lumbered her with the name Dawn Devonport. He dreamed it up for her when she was a ten-year-old hoofer and landed the part of First Fairy in a West End panto. Why she stuck with the name I do not know. An excess of filial devotion, perhaps. The abrupt manner in which the old cabbie sped off while she stood at the kerb, desperately signalling, had left her puzzled and cross, as if before anything else his death had been a dereliction of duty. She too, it seems, like Lydia and me, feels she has not so much lost as been eluded by a loved one. I could see she has not learned yet how to mourn—but does one ever learn that hard lesson?—and when we stepped away from the set on our way outside and in the sudden gloom beyond the lights she stumbled on one of those malignant fat black cables that turn a studio floor into a snake-pit and she grasped my wrist for support, I felt all along the bones of her strong, mannish hands the tremors of her inner distress.

  Speaking of distress, I was tempted to tell her the singular thing that Billie Stryker has told me, which is that Axel Vander, the very he, was in Italy, and not only in Italy but in Liguria, and not only in Liguria but in the vicinity of Portovenere, on or about, as a policeman would say, giving evidence in the witness box, on or about the date of my daughter’s death. I do not know what to think about this. Really, I would prefer not to think about it at all.

  It is a strange business, movie-making, stranger than I expected it would be, and yet in an odd way familiar, too. Others had warned me of the necessarily disjointed, fragmentary nature of the process, but what surprises me is the effect that this has on my sense of myself. I feel that not only my actor self but my self self is made into a thing of fragments and disjointure, not only in the brief intervals when I am before the camera but even when I have stepped out of my role—my part—and reassumed my real, my supposedly real, identity. Not that I ever imagined myself either a product or a preserver of the unities: I have lived enough and reflected enough to acknowledge the incoherence and manifold nature of what used to be considered the individual self. Any day of the week I leave my house and in the street the very air becomes a forest of bristling blades that slice me imperceptibly into multiple versions of the singularity that indoors I presented myself as being and, indeed, was taken for. This experience before the camera, though, this sense of being not one but many—my name is Legion!—has an added dimension, for the many are not units, but segments, rather. So, being in a film is strange, and at the same time not strange at all; it is an intensification, a diversification, of the known, a concentration upon the ramifying self; and all this is interesting, and confusing, and thrilling and unsettling.

  I tried last evening to speak about all this to Dawn Devonport, but she only laughed. She agreed it is disorienting at first—‘You lose track of everything’—but assured me that in time I shall get used to it. I think she did not fully grasp what I meant. As I have said, I feel I know already the otherwhere that I have found myself in, and all that is different is the intensity of the experience, the particularity of it. Dawn Devonport dropped her half-smoked cigarette in the grass and trod on it with the heel of her sensible black leather shoe—she was in costume as Cora, the nun-like young woman who gives herself to Axel Vander as a Christian martyr would give herself to an old but ravenous lion—and glanced at me sidelong with the shadow of a smile that seemed at once kindly and slyly mocking. ‘We have to live, you know,’ she said. ‘This is not life—my dad could have told you that.’ What can she have meant? There is a touch of the sibyl to Dawn Devonport. But then, does not every woman, to my enchanted eye, possess something of the prophetess?

  She stopped at one point in our pacing and turned and asked if I had told Billie Stryker about my daughter. I said that I had; that, indeed, I had surprised myself by blurting it all out the first day when Billie came to the house and sat with me so taciturnly in my crow’s-nest in the attic. She smiled, and gave her head a deprecating shake. ‘That Toby,’ she said. I asked her what she meant. We walked on. Her costume was thin and she had only a light cardigan thrown over her shoulders and I worried that she would be cold, and offered her my jacket, which she declined. It was well known, she said, that Toby’s tactic when he was about to work with an actor new to him was to send in Billie Stryker to do a preliminary recce and come back with some choice bit of intimate information, preferably of a shameful or tragic nature, to be studied and stored away carefully and brought out again when and if needed, like an X-ray plate. Billie had a knack, she said, of luring people into confessing things without their being aware of what they were confessing to; it was a knack that Toby Taggart valued highly and made frequent use of. I recalled Marcy Meriwether announcing Billie Stryker the scout, and her hoarse laughter coming along the line to me all the way from sunny Carver City, and I felt slow-witted and foolish, not for the first or, I imagine, the last time, in this blended, garishly lit dream that Dawn Devonport and the rest of us are sleepwalking through together. So that is what Billie Stryker is, not so much a scout as a plain snoop. Surprisingly—at least it surprises me—I do not seem to mind that I was duped.

  Speaking of dreams, I had one of my wilder ones last night; it has just come back to me this moment. It seems to demand being recounted in all its questionable detail; certain dreams have that quality. This one would require a rhapsode to do it justice. I shall try my best. I was in a house on a riverbank. It was an old house, tall and rickety, with an impossibly steep-pitched roof and crooked chimneys—a sort of gingerbread cottage out of a fairy tale, quaint yet sinister, or sinister because quaint, as is the way in fairy tales. I had been lodging there, on some sort of working holiday, I think, along with a group of other people, family, or friends, or both, although none of them was to be seen, and now we were leaving. I was upstairs, packing, in a small room with a big window open wide and looking out to a view of the river below. The sunshine outside was peculiar, a thin, pervasive, lemony element, like a very fine liquid, and it was impossible to tell from it what time of day it might be, morning, midday or eve. I did know that we were running late—a train or something would be leaving soon—and I was anxious, and clumsy in my haste to fit all my things, of which there were impossibly many, into the two or three hopelessly small suitcases standing open on the narrow bed. There must have been a chronic drought in the region, for the river, which I could see would not be wide or deep even in times of flood, was a shallow bed of sticky, light-grey mud. Busy though I was with the packing I was also on the look-out for something, although I did not know what, and I kept leaning far back, while going on with the packing, to scan the view outside the window. Glancing out now I realised that what I had taken for the trunk of a dead tree lying athwart the riverbed and slimed all over with glistening mud was in fact a living creature, a thing like a crocodile only not quite, or more than, a crocodile; I could see its great jaws moving and its ancient eyelids opening and closing slowly with what seemed a great effort. Probably it had been washed down in a flood that had preceded the drought and become lodged there in that morass, helpless and dying. Was this the thing I had been watching for? I felt anguish and annoyance in equal measure, anguish for the afflicted creature and annoyance that I would have to deal with it somehow, help to rescue it, or direct that it be put out of its misery. Yet it did not seem to be in pain, or even in much distress; indeed, it seemed quite calm and resigned—indifferent, almost. Maybe it had not been washed up here, maybe it was some mud-dwelling creature which the churnings of the recent flood as it passed by had exposed to view and which when the waters came back would sink again into its old, lightless, submerged world. I went down, my feet, in what felt like a deep-sea diver’
s leaden boots, thumping clumsily on the narrow stairs, and emerged into that strange, aqueous sunlight. At the riverbank I found that the thing had extricated itself from the mud and had turned into a darkly lovely young woman—even in the dream this transformation seemed hackneyed and altogether too easy, a thing that intensified my annoyance and anxious impatience: those suitcases were still not filled and here I was being diverted from my task by a piece of trumpery masquerading as magic. There she was, however, this girl from the deep, seated on a real log on a bank of springy green turf, wearing a haughty and petulant expression, her clasped hands resting on one knee and her shining, long dark hair falling over her shoulders and down her very straight back. It seemed I should know her or at least know who she was. She was got up elaborately in the style of a gypsy, or a chieftainess of old, all bangles and beads and swathes of heavy, shimmering cloth in dramatic hues of emerald and golden oatmeal and rich burgundy. She was waiting impatiently and in some irritation for me to do something for her, to perform some service the need of which she resented. As happens in dreams, I both knew and did not know the nature of this task, and did not at all like the prospect of performing it, whatever it was. Have I mentioned that in the dream I was very young, hardly more than a lad, though burdened beyond my years with cares and responsibilities, the packing, for instance, left unfinished in that high room the square open window of which I could look up at now, and where the timeless, pallid sunlight was streaming in? The shutters thrown back against the wall on either side were made of what looked like rush matting, a feature I noticed particularly and one that was of an inexplicable significance. I was aware of being in danger of falling in love on the spot, instantly, with this girl, this imperious princess, but I knew that if I did I would be destroyed, or at least put through great pains, and besides, there was so much I had to do, much too much, to allow of so frivolous a surrender. Now the dream began to lose focus and grew hazy, or does so at least in my recollection of it. The location had suddenly moved inside the house, into a cramped room with tiny square windows with deep and shadowed embrasures. Another girl had materialised, the princess’s friend, or companion, older than both of us, brisk and businesslike and somehow coercive, whose coercions the princess resisted, and so did I, and who in the end lost patience with us and thrust her fists into the very deep pockets of her very long coat and went off in very high dudgeon. Left alone with the dark-haired beauty, I tried to kiss her, in a perfunctory way—I was still worrying about those half-stuffed suitcases upstairs, agape like the mouths of chicks in a nest and overflowing untidily—but she rebuffed me in a matchingly offhand fashion. Who can she have been, whom did she represent? Dawn Devonport is the obvious candidate, yet I think not. Billie Stryker, oneirically slimmed down and beautified? Hardly. My Lydia, daughter of the desert of old? Hmm. But wait—I know. She was Cora, Axel Vander’s girl, of course; not Dawn Devonport’s portrayal of her, which if I am honest I consider superficial so far, but as I see her in my imagination, strange and estranged, difficult, proud and lost. The end of the dream, as I retain it, was a wavering, a vaguening, as the enchanting girl—I have called her a princess but only for convenience, for she was certainly a commoner, though of an uncommon kind—departed from me along the barren river’s bank, not striding but as if sustained on air, moving away soundlessly and yet at the same time somehow returning to me. This phenomenon continued for some time, this impossible, simultaneous coming and going, departing and returning, until my sleeping mind could bear it all no longer and everything went slack and slowly sank, into the unregistering darkness.