Ancient Light act-3

by John Banville

  I had arranged to meet Billie Stryker by the canal. How I love the archaic sunlight of these late-autumn afternoons. Low on the horizon there were scrapings of cloud like bits of crinkled gold leaf and the sky higher up was a layering of bands of clay-white, peach, pale green, all this reflected as a vaguely mottled mauve wash on the motionless and brimming surface of the canal. I still had that agitated sensation, that electrical seething in the blood, that had started up in me at Dawn Devonport’s bedside. I had not felt like this for a very long time. It was the kind of feeling I remembered from when I was young and everything was new and the future limitless, a state of fearful and exalted waiting like that into which, all those years ago, Mrs Gray had stepped, crooning distractedly under her breath and twisting that recalcitrant curl behind her ear. What was it today that had tapped me on the shoulder with its tuning fork? Was it the past, again, or the future?

  Billie Stryker was in her accustomed rig-out of jeans and worn running shoes, the lace of one undone and straggling, and a short, shiny black leather jacket over a too-small white vest that was moulded like a second skin around her bosom and over the two puffy pillows of flesh into which her stomach above her belt was bisected by a deep, median wrinkle. Her hair, since I had seen her a couple of days before, had been dyed orange and violently cropped, by her own hand, I judged, and bristled in stubby clumps as if her skull were studded all over with tufted darts. She seems to derive a vengeful satisfaction from cultivating her unloveliness, pampering and primping it as another would her beauty. It is sad how she mistreats herself; I should have thought her horrible husband could be depended on to do that for her effectively enough. Over these past weeks of plodding and repetitious make-believe I have come to appreciate her for her stolid practicality, her doggedness and disenchanted resolve.

  That husband. I find him a peculiarly unappetising specimen. He is tall and thin, with many concavities, as if slices had been taken off him at flanks, stomach, chest; he has a pin-head and a mouthful of rotting teeth; his grin is more like a snarl. When he looks about him the things his eye falls on seem to quail under his tainting glance. Early on he took to hanging about the set, so that Toby Taggart, soft-hearted as ever, felt compelled to find odd jobs for him. I would have had him seen off the premises, with threats, if necessary. I do not know what he does for a living otherwise—Billie is evasive on this as on so much else—but he gives an impression of constant busyness, of significant doings about to begin, of grand projects that at a word from him will get under way. I am sceptical. I think he lives on his wits, or on Billie’s, which are bound to be sharper. He gets himself up like a workman, in bleached-out dungarees and collarless shirts and boots with rubber soles an inch thick; also he keeps himself very dusty, even his hair, and when he sits down he does so at a weary sprawl, an ankle crossed on a narrow knee and an arm hooked over the back of his chair, as if he had finished a punishingly long stint of work and had stopped now briefly for a well-earned break. I confess I am a little afraid of him. He surely hit poor Billie and I can easily see him swinging a fist at me. Why does she stay with him? Futile question. Why does anyone do anything.

  I said to Billie now that I wanted her to track down Mrs Gray for me. I said I did not doubt she would succeed. Nor do I. A pair of swans approached upon the water, a pen and her mate, surely, for are they not a monogamous species? We stopped to watch them as they came. Swans in their outlandish and grubby gorgeousness always seem to me to be keeping up a nonchalant front behind which really they are cowering in a torment of self-consciousness and doubt. These two were skilled dissemblers, and gave us a speculative stare, saw our hands were empty of crusts, and sailed onwards with a show of cool disdain.

  Billie, tactful as ever, did not enquire as to why I should be suddenly so eager to trace this woman from my past. It is hard to guess what Billie’s opinion is on any matter. To talk to her is like dropping stones into a deep well; the response that comes back is long-delayed and muted. She has the wariness of a person much put-upon and menaced—that husband again—and before speaking seems to turn over every word carefully and examine it from all sides, testing its potential to displease and provoke. But she must have wondered. I told her Mrs Gray would be old by now or possibly no longer living. I said only that she had been my best friend’s mother and that I had not seen her or heard anything of her for nigh-on half a century. What I did not say, what I emphatically did not say, was why I wished to find her again. And why did I?—why do I? Nostalgia? Whim? Because I am getting old and the past has begun to seem more vivid than the present? No, something more urgent is driving me, though I do not know what it is. I imagine Billie told herself that my age allowed of quixotic self-indulgence, and that if I was prepared to pay her good money to trace some old biddy from my young days she would be a fool herself to question my foolishness. Did she guess my doings with Mrs Gray involved what I had heard her at other times refer to scornfully as hanky-panky? Perhaps she did, and was embarrassed for me, fond old codger that I must appear in her eyes, and that I appear, indeed, in my own. What would she have thought if she knew what thoughts I was thinking about that stricken girl lying in her hospital bed as we spoke? Hanky-panky, indeed.

  We walked on. Moorhens now, a hissing stand of reeds, and still those little gold clouds.

  Our daughter’s death was made so much the worse for her mother and me by being, to us, a mystery, complete and sealed; to us, though not, I hope, to her. I do not say we were surprised. How could we have been surprised, given the chaotic state of Cass’s inner life? In the months before she died, when she was abroad, an image of her had been appearing to me, a sort of ghost-in-waiting, in daytime dreams that were not dreams. You knew what she was going to do! Lydia had cried at me when Cass was dead. You knew and never said! Did I know, and should I have been able to foresee what she intended, haunted by her living presence as I was? Was it that, in those ghostly visitations, she was sending me somehow a warning signal from the future? Was Lydia right, could I have done something to save her? These questions prey upon me, yet I fear not as heavily as surely they should; ten years of unrelenting interrogation would wear down even the stubbornest devotee of an absconded spirit. And I am tired, so tired.

  What was I saying?

  Cass’s presence in Liguria

  Cass’s presence in Liguria was the first link in the mysterious chain that dragged her to her death on those bleak rocks at Portovenere. What or who was in Liguria for her? In search of an answer, a clue to an answer, I used to pore for hours over her papers, creased and blotted wads of foolscap sheets scratched all over in her minuscule hand—I have them somewhere still—that she left behind her in the room in that foul little hotel in Portovenere that I shall never forget, at the top of the cobbled street from where we could see the ugly tower of the church of San Pietro, the very height she had flung herself from. I wanted to believe that what looked like the frantic scribblings of a mind at its last extremity were really an elaborately encoded message meant for me, and for me alone. And there were places indeed where she seemed to be addressing me directly. In the end, however, wish as I might, I had to accept that it was not me she was speaking to but someone other, my surrogate, perhaps, shadowy and elusive. For there was another presence detectable in those pages, or better say a palpable absence, the shade of a shade, whom she addressed only and always under the name of Svidrigailov.

  Flung herself. Why do I say she flung herself from that place? Perhaps she let herself drop as lightly as a feather. Perhaps she seemed to herself to be drifting down to death.

  ‘She was pregnant, my daughter, when she died,’ I said.

  Billie took this without comment, and only frowned, protruding a pink and shiny lower lip. These frowns of hers give her the look of a vexed cherub.

  The sky was fading and a chilly dusk was coming on, and I suggested we should stop at a pub to have a drink. This was unusual, for me—I could not remember the last time I had been inside a public house. We went to
a place on a corner by one of the canal bridges. Brown walls, stained carpet, a huge television set above the bar with the sound turned down and sportsmen in garish jerseys sprinting and shoving and signalling in relentless dumbshow. There were the usual afternoon men with their pints and racing papers, two or three spivvish young fellows in suits, and the inevitable pair of gaffers sitting opposite each other at a tiny table, smeared whiskey glasses at hand, and sunk in an immemorial silence. Billie looked about with sour disdain. She has a certain hauteur, I have noticed it before. She is, I think, something of a puritan, and secretly considers herself a cut above the rest of us, an undercover agent who knows all our secrets and is privy to our tawdriest sins. She has been a researcher for too long. Her tipple, it turned out, is a splash of gin drowned in a big glass of orange crush and further neutralised by a hefty shovelful of groaning ice cubes. I began to tell her, nursing a thimbleful of tepid port, which I am sure she thought a sissy’s drink, how Billy Gray and I in time discovered that we preferred gin to his father’s whiskey. It was as well, since the bottle we had been winkling out of the cocktail cabinet had over the weeks become so watered down that the whiskey was almost colourless. Gin, quicksilver and demure, now seemed to us altogether more sophisticated and dangerous than whiskey’s rough gold. In the immediate aftermath of my first frolic in the laundry room with Mrs Gray I had been in deep dread of encountering Billy, thinking he was the one, more than my mother, more than his sister, even, who would detect straight off the scarlet sign of guilt that must be blazoned on my brow. But of course he noticed nothing. Yet when he came and leaned down to pour another inch of gin into my glass and I saw the pale patch on the crown of his head the size of a sixpence where his hair whorled, a sense of uncanniness swept over me so that I almost shivered, and I shrank back from him, and held my breath for fear of catching his smell and recognising in it a trace of his mother’s. I tried not to look into the brown depths of those eyes, or dwell on those unnervingly moist pink lips. I felt that suddenly I did not know him, or, worse, that through knowing his mother, in all senses of the word, ancient and modern, I knew him also and all too intimately. So I sat there on his sofa in front of the flickering telly and gulped my gin and squirmed in secret and exquisite shame.

  I told Billie Stryker that I would be going away for a time. To this also she offered no response. She really is an incommunicative young woman. Is there something I am missing? There usually is. I said that when I went I would be taking Dawn Devonport with me. I said I was counting on her to break the news of this to Toby Taggart. Neither of his leads would be available for work for a week, at least. At this, Billie smiled. She likes a bit of trouble, does Billie, a bit of strife. I imagine it makes her feel less isolated in her own domestic disorders. She asked where it was I was going. Italy, I told her. Ah, Italy, she said, as if it were her second home.

  A trip to Italy, as it happens, was prominent on the list of things that Mrs Gray had longed for and felt she should have by right. Her dream was to set out from one of those fancy Riviera towns, Nice or Cannes or somesuch, and motor along the coast all the way down to Rome to see the Vatican, and have an audience with the Pope, and sit on the Spanish Steps, and throw coins in the Trevi Fountain. She also desired a mink coat to wear to Mass on Sundays, a smart new car to replace the battered old station wagon—‘that jalopy!’—and a red-brick house with a bay window on the Avenue de Picardy in the posher end of town. Her social ambitions were high. She wished her husband were something more than a lowly optician—he had wanted to be a proper doctor but his family had been unable, or unwilling, to pay the college fees—and she was determined that Billy and his sister would do well. Doing well was her aim in everything, giving the neighbours one in the eye, making the town—‘this dump!’—sit up and take notice. She liked to daydream aloud, as we lay in each other’s arms on the floor of our tumbledown love nest in the woods. What an imagination she had! And while she was elaborating these fantasies of bowling along that azure coast in an open sports car swathed in furs with her husband the famous brain surgeon at her side, I would divert myself by pinching her breasts to make the nipples go fat and hard—and these, mark you, were the paps that had given my friend Billy suck!—or running my lips along that pinkly inflamed, serrated track the elastic of her half-slip had imprinted on her tender tummy. She dreamed of a life of romance, and what she got was me, a boy with blackheads and bad teeth and, as she often laughingly lamented, only one thing on his mind.

  She never seemed so young as when she was weaving these happy fantasies of success and moneyed opulence. It is strange to think that I was less than half as young as she while she was not much more than half the age that I am now. The mechanism of my memory has difficulty grappling with these disparities, yet at the time, after the initial shock of that rainy afternoon in the laundry room, I began to take it all blandly for granted, her age, my youth, the unlikeliness of our love, everything. To me, at fifteen, the most implausible thing had only to take place more than once to become the norm. The real puzzle is what she thought and felt. I cannot recall her ever acknowledging, aloud, the disproportion and incongruity of our—I still do not know quite what to call it; our love affair, I suppose I must say, though it rings falsely to my ear. People in the stories in the magazines that Mrs Gray read, or characters in the films that she went to see on Friday nights, they had affairs; for me, as for her, what we did together was far more simple, far more elemental, far more—if I may employ such a word in this context—childish, than the adulterous doings of adults. Perhaps that is what she accomplished for herself through me, a return to childhood, not the childhood of dolls and hair ribbons, however, but of swollen excitements, of sweaty fumblings and happy dirt. For my goodness but she could be on occasion a naughty girl.

  There was a river in our wood, a secret, brown, meandering stream that seemed to have got diverted into this bosky glade on the way to somewhere far more important. In those days I had a deep regard for water, a reverence, even, and would still if it were not so grimly associated in my mind with Cass’s death. Water is one of those things that are everywhere present—air, the sky, light and darkness, these are others—that nonetheless strike me as uncanny. Mrs Gray and I were very fond of our little river, stream, brook, freshet, whatever to call it. At a particular spot it made a loop around a clump of alder trees, I think they were alders. The water was deep there and moved so slowly it might not have been moving at all were it not for the small telltale eddies that formed on the surface, formed and dissolved and formed again. There were trout sometimes, speckled wraiths barely to be made out near the bottom, poised in stillness against the current yet so quick when they took fright that they would give a quiver and seem to vanish on the spot. We spent happy hours together there, my love and I, in the balmiest days of that summer, in the cool shadows under those stunted and excitable trees. Mrs Gray liked to wade in the water, the depths of which were the same glossy shade of brown as her eyes. Venturing out gingerly from the bank, watching for sharp stones on the bottom, with that self-forgetting smile and her skirts lifted to her hips, she was Rembrandt’s Saskia, sunk to the shins in her own world of umber and gold. One day it was so hot that she took her dress off altogether, pulled it over her head and threw it back for me to catch. She had been wearing nothing underneath, and advanced now naked out into the middle of the stream and stood there, up to her waist, her arms outstretched on either side, happily patting the surface of the water with her palms and humming—did I mention that she was an inveterate hummer, even though she had not a note of music in her head? The sun through the alder leaves scattered her about with flickering gold coins—my Danaë!—and the hollows of her shoulders and the undersides of her breasts glimmered with reflected, swaying lights. Impelled by the madness of the moment—what if some rambler from the town had chanced upon the scene?—I waded in after her, in my khaki shorts and shirt. She watched me coming towards her, my elbows sawing and neck thrust out, and gave me that look from u
nder her eyelashes that I liked to imagine she reserved for me alone, her chin tucked in and her lips compressed in a thin upturned impish arc, and I dived, down into the brown water, my shorts suddenly a sodden weight and my shirt clutching with breathtaking coldness at my chest, and managed to flip over on to my back—at that age, my God, I was as agile as one of those speckled trout!—and reached my hands around her bottom and pulled her to me and got my face between her thighs that at first resisted and then went shudderingly slack, and pressed my fish-mouth to her nether lips that were chill and oysterish on the outside and hot within, and a cold shock of water went up my nose and gave me an instant ache between my eyes, and I had to let go of her and flounder to the surface, flailing and gasping, but triumphant, too—oh, yes, every advantage I got of her represented a nasty, miniature victory for my self-esteem and sense of lordship over her. Once out of the water we scampered back to Cotter’s place, I with her dress in my arms and she naked still, a birch-pale dryad flickering ahead of me through the sunlight and shadows of the wood. I can still feel, as I felt when presently we threw ourselves panting on to our makeshift bed, the rough texture of her goosefleshed arms, and can smell, too, the excitingly stale tang of river-water on her skin, and taste the lingering, brackish chill between her thighs.

  Ah, days of play, days of—dare I say it?—days of innocence.

  ‘Did she tell you why she did it?’ Billie asked.

  She was perched before me on a high wooden stool with her tubular thighs in those tight jeans splayed and her glass held in both hands between her knees. I was confused for a moment, my mind having been off doing bold things with Mrs Gray, and thought she was referring to Cass. No, I said, no, of course not, I had no inkling why she did it, how could I? She gave me one of her balefully deprecating looks—she has a way of making her eyes seem to bulge that is distinctly unnerving—and I realised it was Dawn Devonport she meant. To cover up for my mistake I looked away, frowning, and fiddled with my glass of port. I said, sounding rather prim to my own ears, that I was sure it had been a mistake and that Dawn Devonport had not meant to do it. Billie, seeming to lose interest, only gave a grunt and glanced idly about the bar. I studied her puffy profile, and as I did so I had briefly a vertiginous sensation, as if I had been brought up short at the very lip of a high sheer cliff. It is a feeling I have sometimes when I look, I mean really look, at other people, which I do not often do, which no one does, often, I expect. It is linked in a mysterious way with the feeling that used to come over me occasionally on stage, the feeling of falling somehow into the character I was playing, literally falling, as one might trip and pitch forwards on one’s face, and losing all sense of my other, unacting, self.