Ancient Light act-3

by John Banville

  Why, I asked Dawn Devonport—we are still pacing that insulted strip of grass behind the studio—why does Toby Taggart employ Billie Stryker to nose out the secret weaknesses and sorrows of his players? I knew the answer, of course, so why did I ask? ‘To have what he thinks will be power over us,’ she said, and laughed. ‘He imagines he is Svengali—don’t they all?’

  It will seem odd, perhaps, but I did not think badly of Toby for this, no more than I did of Billie Stryker. He is a professional, as am I; in other words we are cannibals, the pair of us, and would eat our young for the sake of a scene. I cannot help but like him. He is large and ill-assembled, built on the lines of a buffalo, with absurdly tiny feet and skinny legs and a broad chest and broader shoulders and a shaggy mop of mahogany-coloured curls from under which shine out those glossy sad brown eyes of his, pleading love and forbearance. His name is Tobias—yes, I asked him—it is a family tradition on his mother’s side, from her father the duke back through the centuries to an originary Tobias the Terrible who fought at Hastings and is said to have cradled the mortally wounded King Harold in his armoured arm. This last is the kind of dusty heirloom that Toby loves to bring out proudly from the vault of the family’s past for us to admire. He is a sentimentalist and a patriot of the old school and cannot understand my disregard for the deeds of doughty ancestors. I explained to him that I have no ancestors to speak of, only a motley line of petty tradesmen and near-peasants who never swung an axe in battle or comforted a king with an arrow in his eye. I would say that Toby is an anachronism in the movie world if I thought there was anyone in it who is not—look at me, for heaven’s sake. How he agonises on the set. Are we all happy in our parts? Is he being true to the spirit of JB’s wonderful script? Is the studio’s money being well spent? Will audiences understand what we are attempting? There he stands, always to the right and a little behind the cameraman, amid a clutter of wiring and those mysterious long black boxes with reinforced metal corners that are strewn at random about the floor, in his big brown jumper and ragged jeans, nibbling at his nails like a squirrel at a nut, as if he were trying to get at the elusive essence of himself, and worrying, worrying. The crew adore him and are fiercely protective, flexing their biceps and glowering at anyone seeming to offer the slightest slight. There is something saintly about him. No, not saintly, not quite. I know, I know what it is he reminds me of: one of those prelates the Church militant used to produce, muscular but soft, big-hearted, privy to the world’s cesspit of sin yet ever undaunted, not for a moment doubting that this chaotic phantasmagoria into which he must sink himself each day will in the end be redeemed and turned into a paradisal vision of light and grace and resplendently cavorting souls.

  I can hardly believe it—we are already in the final week of filming. They move so fast, the movies.

  ___

  How pleased and proud Mrs Gray would be if she could see me on the set, her boy made good. She was something of an aficionado—aficionada?—of the cinema, though she called it the pictures. On almost every Friday night the Gray family would get dressed up and proceed, parents in front and the children two paces behind, to the Alhambra Kino, a barn-like converted music-hall that stood on a blind corner halfway along the Main Street. Here they sat four abreast in the one-and-sixpennies, the best seats in the house, to view the latest offerings from Parametro, from Warner-Goldwyn-Fox, from Gauling or Eamont Studios. What shall we say of the lost picture palaces of our youth? The Alhambra, despite the spits on the wooden floor and the fug of fag smoke in the dirty air, was for me a place of deep erotic suggestion. I admired especially the magnificent scarlet curtain, with its softly curved fluting and delicate gold frills, which put me in mind, inevitably, of the Kayser Bondor lady in her pleated frock and lacy petticoat. It did not rise, this curtain, as it would surely have done in music-hall times, but parted in the middle and drew back on either side with a hushed, silken swish, while the house-lights slowly dimmed and the louts down in the fourpenny seats set to whistling like cockatoos and made a jungle drumming on the floorboards with their cleated heels.

  On a couple of successive Friday nights that spring, and inadvisedly, as I would too late discover—the thing turned out nothing less than a torture—I wheedled a florin out of my mother and went to the Alhambra myself, not to see the film but to spy on the Grays. Now, this required some nice timing and careful placement. For instance, if I was to avoid being spotted, it was imperative for me not to go in before the lights went down at the start of the show, and to slip out before they went up again at the close so as not to be trapped by the National Anthem. I could picture Mrs Gray’s alarmed and furious glare, or Billy’s slow grin of surprise, could see Kitty jumping up in her seat to point me out with delighted malevolence, while her father fumbled under the seat in search of his umbrella. And what about the interval between the ads and the main feature, when the lamps were turned on to show us the magical apparition of the ice-cream girl posed in a spot in front of the curtain with her little tray hitched under her starched bosom? Just how far down in a cinema seat was it possible to slide? I arrived too late the first time, so that the place was nearly full and the only seat I could find was six rows behind the Grays, from where I had a maddeningly intermittent view of the back of what I took for Mrs Gray’s head but which turned out to be, inexplicably, the bald pate of a fat old fellow with a large and shinily ripe boil on the back of his neck. The next time was better; that is, I had a better view but experienced even worse frustration and torment. And not much of a better view, either. I got a seat two rows in front of the Grays but over at the far end of the aisle, so that to glimpse Mrs Gray at all I had to keep twisting my head sideways and back, as if my shirt collar were too tight, or as if I were suffering from some affliction that made me twitch and turn every thirty seconds or so.

  How terrible it was to witness Mrs Gray caught up in such innocent enjoyment—the innocence more than the enjoyment was what was terrible, to me. She sat there, canted backwards a little, her face lifted in dreamy ecstasy to the screen and her lips parted in a smile that kept trying to achieve itself but never quite succeeded, lost as she was in blissful forgetfulness, of self, of surroundings, and, most piercingly, of me. The twitchy light from the screen sliding over her face made it seem that she was being slapped, repeatedly, lasciviously, with a grey silk glove. The way in which I was seeing her, snatching a moving series of images by repeatedly turning my head quickly to the side, was a clumsy version of the process going on inside the clackety projector up in its little room behind us. Despite my covert manoeuvres had she spotted me come in? Did she know I was there and had decided to ignore me and not let me spoil her fun? If so she gave no sign of it, and afterwards I was too ashamed to ask, for how could I admit to such despicable peeping-tommery? For her husband at her side, for Billy, for his sister, I had no eyes at all—let them see me, I did not care now—fixed as I was on her, on her, on her, until my neighbour but one, a burly chap in a tight suit, with a shiny quiff and smelling strongly of hair-oil, leaned across his girlfriend and assured me in a confiding undertone that if I did not stop that jerking and lepping he would put my front teeth down my fucking throat for me.

  My beloved’s taste in film was broad, though there were exclusions. Musicals she did not like, having no ear for a tune, as she admitted. Nor did she care for the plangent, plunging love stories that were still so popular then, the women all shoulder-pads and lipstick and the men either craven or treacherous or both—‘sloppy stuff,’ she would say with dismissive scorn, pursing her mouth and giving it a Betty Huttonish twist. Action was what she craved. She loved war pictures, with lots of explosions and German soldiers in square helmets being fired straight up into the air like mortar shells amid fountains of flying masonry. Westerns were her favourites, though, or Cowboys-and-Indians, as she would have it. She believed in it all, the noble-hearted gunslinger and the cowpuncher in his chaps, the ginghamed schoolmarm, the bedizened saloon girl who is no better than she should
be but who could break a whiskey bottle over a bushwhacker’s head without pausing in the midst of a sentimental ditty. Nor was it enough for her merely to see a picture: she had to replay the entire thing over again afterwards. I was her ideal auditor for these recountings of what in her version of them were impossibly convoluted plots, with multiple side turnings and back-trackings and a wild confusion of half-remembered names and wholly forgotten motives. I was happy to listen, or pretend to, so long as she consented to lie in my embrace in the back seat of the station wagon or on the mattress in Cotter’s place, she going on with her retold tale, trying to sort out who dry-gulched whom or which bit of the bulge the Jerries failed to breach, while I poked at and played with her various warm and, by her, temporarily disregarded parts. She had a cinematic lexicon all of her own. In Westerns the hero was always the Chap and the heroine the Girl, no matter what age the actors were. If she forgot a character’s name she would replace it with an attribute—‘and then Beardy-face grabbed the gun and plugged Wall-eye’—sometimes achieving a weird poetical or picturesque resonance, as in Lonesome Kid, or Barroom Belle or, my favourite, the Dirty Doc.

  I speculate now that all these detailed rehashings were at least in part a ruse by which she secured some respite from my urgent requirement that she lie down and let me do to her what I never tired of doing. She was Scheherazade and Penelope rolled into one, weaving and unweaving endlessly her tales from the movies. I had read somewhere, or had been told by someone in school—there was a boy, I think his name was Hynes, who knew the most amazing things—that after coition the human male will have regenerated his juices and be capable of full erection after just fifteen minutes. It was a proposition I was keen to test. I do not recall that I succeeded, but certainly I went at it with application. And yet for all that, always, at the back of my mind, there was the suspicion that my efforts, and redoubled efforts, were not as welcome to Mrs Gray as they might be or as she repeatedly assured me they were. I have a notion that all men worry that all women do not really care for the physical manifestations of love, and only acquiesce to them so as to indulge us, their overgrown, needful, insatiate infants. Hence the unwavering hold over us of the myth of the nymphomaniac, that fabulous creature more elusive than the unicorn or the unicorn’s lady, which, once found, would allay our deepest fears. There were moments when, fastened to her breast or rootling about in her lap, I would chance to glance up and catch her smiling down on me with a fond benevolence that was nothing less, and nothing more, than maternal. At times too she was as impatient with me as any mother would be of her endlessly importuning child—‘Get off me!’ she would grunt, and tumble me aside and sit up scowling crossly, looking for her clothes. Always I could get her to lie down again, though, simply by touching the tip of my tongue to the chocolate-brown mole between her shoulder-blades or walking two fingers up the soft, fishbelly-white inner side of her arm. Then she would shiver, and turn to me with something that was more than a sigh and less than a moan, her eyes closed and her eyelids fluttering, and offer me helplessly her open hot slack mouth to kiss. She was never so desirable to me as in such moments of reluctant surrender. Those eyelids in particular I loved, carven shells of veined, translucent marble, always cool, always deliciously damp when I touched my lips to them. The milky backs of her knees too were peculiarly cherishable. I even prized the shiny mother-of-pearl stretch-marks on her belly.

  Did I appreciate these things then as I appreciate them now, or am I only luxuriating in them in retrospect? Could a boy of fifteen have been possessed of my old roué’s discriminating and hungry eye? Mrs Gray taught me many lessons, the first and most precious of which was to forgive another human being for being human. I was a boy and therefore had in my mind’s eye the platonically perfect girl, a creature bland as a manikin that did not sweat or go to the lavatory, that was docile, adoring and fabulously compliant. Mrs Gray was as unlike this fantasy as could be. She only had to do her laugh, a high whinny in the sinuses with a deep diaphragm note underneath, to send that lifeless dummy flying in tatters from my head. It was not a smooth substitution, the actual woman for the imagined ideal. In the early days I found Mrs Gray’s fleshliness itself disconcerting, at certain moments, in certain postures. Remember, up to then my knowledge of the female form had been confined to the Kayser Bondor lady’s legs and the bud-like breasts that Hettie Hickey had let me fondle in the Alhambra’s smoky darkness years before. Though Mrs Gray was not all that much more imposing in stature than Hettie, at times she seemed to me, in our early days, at least, a giantess looming over me, a figure of unassailable erotic power.

  Yet she was thoroughly, inescapably, at times dismayingly, human, with all a human creature’s frailties and failings. One day we were tussling on the floor in Cotter’s place—she was dressed and had been attempting to leave but I had got hold of her and made her plump back down on the mattress with my hand under her behind—when she inadvertently released into my palm an abrupt soft fart. Its single note was followed by a terrible silence, such as there would be after a pistol shot or the first rumble of an earthquake. It was, of course, for me a great shock. I was still at an age when although I knew that in matters peristaltic the sexes are identical I could blithely deny to myself that it was so. A fart, however, was incontrovertible. In the aftermath of this one Mrs Gray drew away from me quickly with a heave of the shoulders. ‘Now look,’ she said angrily, ‘now look what you made me do, yanking at me like that as if I was a tinker’s trollop or something.’ The injustice of this left me speechless. When she turned back, though, and saw my look of outrage, she gave a spluttering laugh and pushed me hard in the chest and demanded to know, still laughing, if I was not thoroughly ashamed of myself. As so often, it was her laughter that saved the moment, and in time, far from being repelled by the thought of that fundamental report she had let go, I felt privileged, as though she had invited me to be with her in a place where no one before me had ever been permitted.

  The fact is, she spoiled most other females for me. Girls like Hettie Hickey were nothing to me now, their meagre breasts and boyish hips, their knock-knees, their plaits and pony-tails—all this I discounted, I who had known the opulence of a grown-up woman, the feel of her full flesh straining inside the strictures of her clothing, the hot fatness of her lips when they went pulpy from passion, the cool moist touch of her slightly pitted cheek when she laid it against my belly. As well as fleshliness she possessed too a quality of lightness, of grace, that not the daintiest slip of a girl could match. Her colours, for me, were grey, naturally, but a particular lilac-grey, and umber, and rose, and another tint, hard to name—dark tea? bruised honeysuckle?—to be glimpsed in her most secret places, along the fringes of her nether lips and in the aureole of the pursed little star occluded within the crevice of her bum.

  And she was, for me, unique. I did not know where in the human scale to place her. Not really a woman, like my mother, and certainly not like the girls of my acquaintance, she was, as I think I have already said, of a gender all to herself. At the same time, of course, she was womanhood in its essence, the very standard by which, consciously or otherwise, I measured all the women who came after her in my life; all, that is, save one. And what would Cass have made of her? How would it have been if Mrs Gray and not Lydia had been my daughter’s mother? The question fills me with alarm and consternation yet since it is posed I must entertain it. Remarkable how the idlest piece of speculation can seem to invert everything in and for an instant. It is as if the world had turned around somehow in a half-circle and shown itself to me from an unfamiliar angle, and I am plunged at once into what feels like happy grief. My two lost loves—is that why I—? Oh, Cass—

  That was Billie Stryker just now calling on the telephone, telling me Dawn Devonport tried to kill herself. And failed, it seems.

  Part II