Ancient Light act-3

by John Banville

  ___

  When my daughter was a little girl she suffered from insomnia, especially in the weeks around midsummer, and sometimes, in desperation, mine and hers, late in those white nights I would bundle her in a blanket into the car and take her for drives northwards along the back roads by the coast, for we were still living by the sea then. She enjoyed these jaunts; even if they did not make her sleep they induced in her a drowsy calm; she said it felt funny to be in the car in her pyjamas, as if she were asleep after all and travelling in a dream. Years later, when she was a young woman, she and I spent a Sunday afternoon retracing our old route up that coastline. We did not acknowledge to each other the sentimental implications of the journey, and I made no mention of the past—one had to be careful of what one said to Cass—but when we got out on that winding road I think she no less than I was remembering those nocturnal drives and the dreamlike sensation of gliding through the greyish darkness, with the dunes beside us and the sea beyond them a line of shining mercury under a horizon so high it seemed it must be a mirage.

  There is a place, quite far north, I do not know what it is called, where the road narrows and runs for some way beside cliffs. They are not very high cliffs, but they are high enough and sheer enough to be dangerous, and there are yellow warning notices at intervals all the way along. That Sunday, Cass made me stop the car and get out and walk with her on the clifftop. I was unwilling, having always been afraid of heights, but it would not have done to refuse my daughter so simple a request. It was late spring, or early summer, and the day was brilliant under a scoured sky, with a warm blast of wind coming in off the sea and the sting of iodine in the salt-laden air. I took scant interest in the sparkling scene, however. The look of the swaying waters far below and of the waves gnashing at the rocks was making me nauseous, though I kept up as brave a front as I could manage. Sea birds at eye-level and no more than a few yards away from us hung almost motionless on the updraughts, their wings trembling, their screeches sounding like derisive taunts. After some way the narrow path grew narrower still and made an abrupt descent. Now there was a steep bank of clay and loose stones on one side and nothing on the other save sky and the growling sea. I felt giddier than ever, and went along in a dreadful funk, leaning in towards the bank on my left and away from the windy blue abyss to the right. We should have gone in file, the way was so narrow and the going so treacherous, but Cass insisted on walking beside me, on the very edge of the path, with her arm locked in mine. I marvelled at her lack of fear, and was even starting to feel resentful of her insouciance, for by now my own fright was such that I was sweating and I had begun to tremble. Gradually it became apparent, however, that Cass too was terrified, perhaps more terrified than I was, hearing the wooing wind crooning to her and feeling the emptiness plucking at her coat and the long fall that was only the tiniest sidestep away opening its arms to her so invitingly. She was a lifelong dabbler in death, was my Cass—no, she was more, she was a connoisseur. Striding along that cliff-edge was for her, I am sure, a sip of the deepest, most darksome, brew, the richest vintage. As she held on tight to my arm I could feel the fear thrumming in her, the thrill of terror twitching along her nerves, and I realised that, perhaps because of her fear, I was no longer afraid, and so we went on briskly, father and daughter, and which of the two of us was sustaining the other it was impossible to say.

  If she had jumped that day, would she have taken me with her? That would have been a thing, the pair of us plummeting down, feet first, arm in arm, through the bright, blue air.

  The private hospital to which they rushed the comatose Dawn Devonport—by helicopter, no less—stands in handsome grounds, amid a broad sea of closely barbered, unreal-looking grass. A creamy-white and many-windowed cube, it looks like nothing so much as an old-style ocean-going luxury liner viewed head-on, complete with big flag whipping importantly in the breeze and air-conditioning vents that might be smoke-stacks. Since childhood I have secretly entertained the idea of hospitals as places of romantic enchantment, an idea which no number of drear visits and more than a few brief but unpleasant stays have managed to disabuse me of entirely. I trace this fancy to an autumn afternoon when I was five or six and my father took me on the bar of his bicycle to the Fort Mountain outside our town, where we sat in the bracken on a steep slope eating bread-and-butter sandwiches and drinking milk from a lemonade bottle that had been corked with a screw of greaseproof paper. The TB hospital loomed high up behind us, cream-coloured also, and also many-windowed, on the unseen terraces of which I imagined neat rows of pale girls and neurasthenic young men, too refined and fastidious to live, reclining on extended deckchairs under bright-red blankets, drowsing and fitfully dreaming. Even the smell of a hospital suggests to me an exotically pristine world where specialists in white coats and sterile masks move silently among narrow beds overhung with phials feeding priceless ichor drip by drip into the veins of fallen moguls and, yes, afflicted film stars.

  It was pills Dawn Devonport took, a whole bottle of them. Pills are, I note, the preferred choice among our profession, I wonder why. There is a question as to the seriousness of her intention. But an entire bottle, that is impressive. What did I feel? Dread, confusion, a certain numbness, a certain annoyance, too. It was as if I had been strolling unconcernedly along an unfamiliar, pleasant street when suddenly a door had been flung open and I had been seized by the scruff and hauled unceremoniously not into a strange place but a place that I knew all too well and had thought I would never be made to enter again; an awful place.

  When I first walked into the hospital room—crept, would be a better word—and saw this hitherto so vivid young woman lying there still and gaunt my heart gave a gulp, for I thought that what they had told me must be mistaken and that she had succeeded in what she had set out to do and that this was her corpse, laid out ready for the embalmers. Then she gave me an even greater start by opening her eyes and smiling—yes, she smiled, with what at first seemed to me pleasure and genuine warmth! I did not know whether to take this for a good sign or a bad. Had she lost her reason to desperation and despair, to be lying there in a hospital bed smiling like that? Looking closer I saw, however, that it was less a smile than a grimace of embarrassment. And in fact that was the first thing she said, struggling to sit up, that she felt embarrassed and disgraced, and she put out a trembling hand for me to take. Her skin was hot, as if she were running a fever. I set up her pillows for her and she lay back on them with a groan of anger against herself. I noted the plastic name-tag around her wrist, and read the name on it. How tiny she looked, tiny and hollowed out, propped there weightless-seeming as a fledgling fallen from the nest, her enormous eyes starting from her head and her hair lank and drawn back and her sharp bones pressing into the shoulders of the washed-out, drab-green hospital gown. Those big hands of hers appeared bigger than ever, the fingers stubbier. There were flakes of dried grey stuff at the corners of her mouth. What turbulent depths had she leaned out over, what windy abyss had called to her?

  ‘I know,’ she said ruefully. ‘I look like my mother did on her deathbed.’

  I had not been at all sure that I should come. Did I know her well enough to be here? In such circumstances, where cheated death lingers rancorously, there is a code of etiquette more iron-bound than any that applies outside, in the realm of the living. Yet how could I not have come? Had we not achieved an intimacy, not only in front of the camera but away from it, too, that went far beyond mere acting? Had we not shared our losses, she and I? She knew about Cass, I knew about her father. Yet there was the question whether precisely this knowledge would hover between us like a troublesome, doubled ghost, and strike us mute.

  What did I say to her? Cannot think: mumbled some trite condolence, no doubt. What would I have said to my daughter if she had somehow survived those slimed, rust-coloured rocks at the foot of that headland at Portovenere?

  I drew a plastic chair to the bedside and sat down, leaning forwards with my forearms on my knees and
my hands clasped; I must have looked a father-confessor to the life. One thing I was certain of: if Dawn Devonport mentioned Cass I would get up from that chair without a word and walk out. Around us the many noises of the hospital were joined together in a medleyed hum, and the air in the overheated room had the texture of warm damp cotton. Through the window on the far side of the bed I could see the mountains, distant and faint, and, closer in, an extensive building site with cranes and mechanical diggers and many foreshortened workmen in helmets and yellow safety-jackets clambering about in the rubble. It does not know how heartless it is, the workaday world.

  Dawn Devonport had withdrawn the hand that she had briefly given me and it lay now limp at her side, pallid as the sheet on which it rested. The name on the plastic identity bracelet was not hers, I mean the name that was printed there was not Dawn Devonport. She saw me looking and smiled again, grimly. ‘That’s me,’ she said in a Cockney voice, ‘my real name, Stella Stebbings. Bit of a tongue-twister, ain’t it?’

  At noon a maid had discovered her in the bedroom of her hotel suite at Ostentation Towers, the curtains drawn and she sprawled halfway out of a disordered bed with foam on her lips and the empty pill bottle clasped in her fist. I could see the scene, blocked out in classic fashion, under, of course, in my vision of it, the suggestion of a proscenium arch, or in this case, I suppose, within the rectangle of a sombrely glowing screen. She did not know why she had done it, she said, reaching out her hand again and fixing it on my clasped fists, as it was broad enough to do—they must be her father’s hands she has. She supposed, she said, that she had acted on impulse, yet how could that be, she wanted to know, when it had taken such an effort to swallow all those pills? They were a very mild dose, otherwise she would certainly be dead, the doctor had assured her of it. He was an Indian, the doctor, mild-mannered and with such a sweet smile. He had seen her as Pauline Powers in the remake of Bitter Harvest. That had been one of her father’s favourite pictures, the original version, though, with Flame Domingo playing Pauline. It was her father who had encouraged her to be a film actress. He had been so proud to see his daughter’s name in lights, the very name he had dreamed up for her when she was a fleet-footed prodigy in cellophane wings and a tutu. The shell of her hand tightened over both of mine, and I unclasped my fingers and turned up one of my hands and felt her palm hot against mine, and as if this touch between us were scalding she snatched her hand away again and sat forwards, making a tent of her knees, and looked out of the window, a moist sheen on her forehead and her hair hooked behind her ears and that penumbral down on her skin all aglow and her eyes lit with a fevered gleam. Sitting there like that, so erect and stark with her profile etched against the light, she had the look of a primitive figure carved from ivory. I imagined tracing the line of her jaw with a fingertip, imagined placing my lips against the side of her smooth, shadowed throat. She was Cora, Vander’s girl, and I was Vander: she the damaged beauty, I the beast. We had been acting their savage love for weeks now: how could we not in some way be them? She began to weep, the big glistening tears making grey splashes on the sheet. I pressed her hand. She should go away, I told her, in a voice thick with an emotion I was too moved to try to identify—she should have Toby Taggart call a week-long, a month-long halt to the filming and get away from everything altogether. She was not listening. The far-off mountains were blue, like motionless pale smoke. My lost girl, Vander calls her in the script. My lost girl.

  Careful.

  In the end we had not much to say to each other—should I have given her a stern talking-to, should I have urged her to cheer up and look on the bright side of things?—and after a short while I left, saying I would come again tomorrow. She was still far away in herself or in those far blue hills and I think she hardly noticed my going.

  In the corridor I encountered Toby Taggart, loitering uneasily, fidgeting and biting his nails and looking more than ever like a wounded ruminant. ‘Of course,’ he burst out straight off, ‘you’ll think I’m only worried about the shoot.’ Then he looked abashed and set to nibbling again violently at a thumbnail. I could see he was putting off going in to see his fallen star. I told him of how when she had woken up she had smiled at me. He took this with a look of large surprise and, I thought, a trace of reprehension, though whether it was Dawn Devonport’s hardly appropriate smile or my telling him about it that he deplored I could not say. To distract myself in my shaken state—I had a fizzing sensation all over, as if a strong electric current were passing along my nerves—I was thinking what a vast and complicated contraption a hospital is. An endless stream of people kept walking past us, to and fro, nurses in white shoes with squeaky rubber soles, doctors with dangling stethoscopes, dressing-gowned patients cautiously inching along and keeping close to the walls, and those indeterminate busy folk in green smocks, either surgeons or orderlies, I can never tell which. Toby was watching me but when I caught his eye he looked aside quickly. I imagine he was thinking of Cass, who had succeeded where Dawn Devonport had failed. Was he thinking too, guiltily, of how he had sent Billie Stryker to lure her story out of me? He has never let on that he knows about Cass, has never once so much as mentioned her name in my presence. He is a wily fellow, despite the impression he likes to give of being a shambler and dim.

  There was a long rectangular window beside us affording a broad view of roofs and sky and those ubiquitous mountains. In the middle distance, among the chimney pots, the November sunlight had picked out something shiny, a sliver of window-glass or a steel cowling, and the thing kept glinting and winking at me with what seemed, in the circumstances, a callous levity. Just to be saying something I asked Toby what he would do now about the film. He shrugged and looked vexed. He said he had not yet told the studio what had happened. There was a great deal of footage already in the can, he would work on that, but of course there was the ending still to be shot. We both nodded, both pursed our lips, both frowned. In the ending as it is written Vander’s girl Cora drowns herself. ‘What do you think?’ Toby asked cautiously and still without looking at me. ‘Should we change it?’

  An ancient fellow in a wheelchair was bowled past, white-haired, soldierly, one eye bandaged and the other furiously staring. The wheels of the wheelchair made a smoothly pleasant, viscous whispering on the rubber floor tiles.

  My daughter, I said, used to make jokes about killing herself.

  Toby nodded absently, as if he were only half listening. ‘It’s a shame,’ he said. I do not know if he was speaking of Cass or of Dawn Devonport. Both, perhaps. I agreed that, yes, it was a shame. He only nodded again. I imagine he was still brooding on that ending. It was a tricky problem for him. Yes, suicide, even if only the attempt of it, does make for awkwardness.

  When I got home I went into the living room, to the telephone extension there, and, pausing only to make sure that Lydia was nowhere in earshot, called Billie Stryker and asked if she would come and meet me, straight away. Billie at first sounded unwilling. There was a racket going on behind her; she said it was the television set but I suspect it was that unspeakable husband of hers, berating her—I am sure I recognised the combination of menace and whine that is his characteristic tone. At one point she put her hand over the receiver and shouted angrily at someone, which must have been him. Have I mentioned him before? A frightful fellow—Billie retains even yet a sallow trace of the black eye she had when I first met her. There were more raised voices and again she had to cover the receiver, but in the end, in a hurried whisper, she said that she would come, and hung up.

  I tiptoed out to the hall again, listening still for Lydia, and took my hat and coat and gloves and slipped out of the house again as nimble and soft of step as a cat-burglar. In my heart I have always fancied myself a bit of a cad.

  It occurs to me that of all the women I have known in my life I know Lydia the least. This is a thought to stop me in my tracks. Can it be the case? Can I have lived all these years with an enigma?—an enigma of my making? Perhaps it is only
that, having been for so long in such close proximity to her, I feel I should know her to an extent that is not to be achieved, not by us, that is, not by human beings. Or is it just that I can no longer see her properly, in a proper perspective? Or that we have walked so far together that she has become merged with me, as the shadow of a man walking towards a street light gradually merges with him until it is no longer to be seen? I do not know what she thinks. I used to think I knew, but no more. And how should I? I do not know what anyone thinks; I hardly know what I think myself. Yes, that is it, perhaps, that she has become a part of me, a part of what is the greatest of all my enigmas, namely, myself. We do not fight, any more. We used to have seismic fights, violent, hours-long eruptions that would leave us both shaking, I ashen-faced and Lydia mute and outraged, the tears of fury and frustration spilling down her cheeks like runnels of transparent lava. Cass’s death conferred, I think, a false weight, a false seriousness upon us and our life together. It was as if our daughter by her going had left us some grand task which was beyond our powers but which we kept on aspiring to fulfil, and the constant effort goaded us repeatedly into rage and conflict. The task I suppose was no more and no less than that of continuing to mourn her, without stint or complaint, as fiercely as we had in the first days after she was gone, as we had for weeks, for months, for years, even. To do otherwise, to weaken, to lay down the burden for the merest moment, would be to lose her with a finality that would have seemed more final than death itself. And thus we went on, scratching and tearing at each other, so the tears would not cease nor our ardour grow cool, until we had exhausted ourselves, or got too old, and called an unwilling truce that nowadays is disturbed by no more than an occasional, brief and half-hearted exchange of small-arms fire. So that, I suppose, is why I think I do not know her, have ceased to know her. Quarrelling, for us, was intimacy.