Ancient Light act-3

by John Banville

  The statisticians tell us there is no such thing as coincidence, and I must accept they know what they are talking about. If I were to believe that a certain confluence of events was a special and unique phenomenon outside the ordinary flow of happenstance I would have to accept, as I do not, that there is a transcendent process at work above, or behind, or within, commonplace reality. And yet I ask myself, why not? Why should I not allow of a secret and sly arranger of seemingly chance events? Axel Vander was in Portovenere when my daughter died. This fact, and I take it as a fact, stands before me huge and immovable, like a tree, with all its roots hidden deep in darkness. Why was she there, and why was he?

  Svidrigailov.

  I intended to go, I said now, to Portovenere, and that although I intended taking Dawn Devonport with me, she did not know it yet. I think that was the first time ever I heard Billie Stryker laugh out loud.

  ___

  In former times the only access to those little towns was from the sea, for the hinterland along that coast is formed largely of a chain of mountains the flanks of which plunge at a sharp angle into the bay. Now there is a narrow railway track cut through the rock that runs under many tunnels and affords abrupt, dizzying vistas of steep landscapes and inlets where the sea gleams dully like stippled steel. In winter the light has a bruised quality, and there is salt in the air and the smell of sea-wrack and of diesel fumes from the fishing boats that crowd the tiny harbours. The car that I had hired turned out to be a surly and recalcitrant beast and gave me much trouble and more than one fright on the road as we travelled eastwards from Genoa. Or perhaps the fault was mine, for I was in a state of some agitation—I am not a good traveller, being nervous of foreign parts and a poor linguist besides. As we drove I thought of Mrs Gray and how she would have envied us, down here on this blue coast. At Chiavari we abandoned the car and took the train. I had difficulty with the bags. The train was smelly and the seats were hard. As we chugged along eastwards a rain storm swept down from the mountains and lashed at the carriage windows. Dawn Devonport watched the downpour and spoke out of the depths of the upturned big collar of her coat. ‘So much,’ she said, ‘for the sunny south.’

  From the moment when we stepped on to foreign soil she had been recognised everywhere, despite the headscarf and the enormous sunglasses that she wore; or perhaps it was because of them, they being the unmistakable disguise of a troubled star on the run. This prominence was something I had not anticipated, and although I was a largely disregarded presence at her side or, more often, in her wake, I still felt unnervingly exposed, a chameleon that has lost its adaptive powers. We were due that day at Lerici, where I had booked hotel rooms for us, but she had insisted on seeing the Cinque Terre first, and so here we were, uncertainly astray on this cheerless winter afternoon.

  Dawn Devonport was not as she had been. She was prone to flashes of irritation, and fussed constantly with things, her handbag, her sunglasses, the buttons of her coat, and I had a vivid and unsettling glimpse of what she would be when she was old. She was smoking heavily, too. And she had a new smell, faint yet definite behind the masking smells of perfume and face powder, a flat dry odour as of something that had first gone rank and then become parched and shrivelled. Physically she had taken on a new and starker aspect, which she wore with an air of dull forbearance, like a patient who has been suffering for so long that being in pain has become another mode of living. She had grown thinner, which would have seemed hardly possible, and her arms and her exquisite ankles looked frail and alarmingly breakable.

  I had expected her to resist coming away with me, but in the end, to my surprise and, I confess, faint unease, she needed no persuading. I simply presented her with an itinerary, which she listened to, frowning a little, turning her head to one side as if she had become hard of hearing. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, in her faded green gown. When I finished speaking she looked away, towards the blue mountains, and sighed, which, in the absence of any other, I decided to take as a sign of acquiescence. The resistance, need I say, came from Toby Taggart and Marcy Meriwether. Oh, the noise they made, Toby’s bass rumblings and Marcy shrieking like a parrot down the transatlantic line! All this I ignored, and next day we simply took to the air, Dawn Devonport and I, and flew away.

  It was odd, being with her. It was like being with someone who was not entirely present, not entirely conscious. When I was a very little boy I had a doll, I do not know how I came by it; certainly my mother would not have given me a girl’s toy to play with. I kept it in the attic, hidden under old clothes at the back of a wooden chest. I called it Meg. The attic, where one day years later I was to glimpse the shade of my dead father loitering irresolutely, was easy of access by way of a narrow set of wooden stairs running up along the wall from the landing. My mother stored onions up there, spread out on the floor; I think it was onions, I seem to remember the smell, or maybe it was apples. The doll, that must once have had abundant hair, was bald now, except for a scant blonde fringe at the back of the skull stuck in a clot of glittery yellow gum. It was jointed at the shoulders and the hips but its elbows and knees were rigid, the limbs moulded in a bowed shape so that it seemed to be locked in a desperate embrace with something, its twin, perhaps, that was no longer there. When it was laid on its back it would close its eyes, the lids giving a faint sharp click. I doted on this doll, with a dark and troubling intensity. I spent many a torrid hour dressing it in scraps of rag and then lovingly undressing it again. I performed mock operations on it, too, pretending to remove its tonsils, or, more excitingly, its appendix. These procedures were hotly pleasurable, I did not know why. There was something about the doll’s lightness, its hollowness—it had a loose bit inside it that rattled around like a dried pea—that made me feel protective and at the same time appealed to a nascent streak of erotic cruelty in me. That was how it was with Dawn Devonport, now. She reminded me of Meg, she of the boneless, brittle limbs and clicking eyelids. Like her, Dawn Devonport too seemed hollow and to weigh practically nothing, and to be in my power while yet I was in hers, somehow, alarmingly.

  We got down from the train at random at one of the five towns, I cannot remember which. She walked off rapidly along the platform with her head down and her handbag clutched to her side, like one of those thin intense young women of the nineteen-twenties, in her narrow coat with the big collar, in her seamed stockings, her slender shoes. Meanwhile I was left yet again to struggle behind her lugging our three suitcases, two large ones hers, one small one mine. The rain had stopped but the sky still sagged and was the colour of wetted jute. We ate a late lunch in a deserted restaurant on the harbour. It stood at the head of a slipway where dark waves jostled like so many big metal boxes being tossed about vigorously. Dawn Devonport sat crouched over an untouched plate of seafood with her shoulders hunched, working fretfully at a cigarette that might have been a slip of wood she was whittling with her teeth. I spoke to her, asking her random things—these silences of hers I found unnerving—but she rarely bothered to answer. Already this venture I had embarked on with her seemed more improbable even than the extravaganza of light and shadow that her suicide attempt and our subsequent flight had so severely disrupted and, for all I knew, might have brought to an unfinished, unfinishable and ignominious end. What an ill-assorted pair we must have looked, the obscurely afflicted, stark-faced girl with her scarf and dark glasses, and the grizzled, ageing man sunk in glum unease, sitting there silent in that ill-lit low place above a winter sea, our suitcases leaning against each other in the glass vestibule, waiting for us like a trio of large, obedient and patiently uncomprehending hounds.

  When Lydia heard of my plan to go off with Dawn Devonport she had laughed and given me a disbelieving look, head back and one eyebrow arched, the selfsame look that Cass used to turn on me when I had said something she considered silly or mad. Was I serious, my wife asked. A girl, again, at my age? I replied stiffly that it was not like that, not like that at all, that the trip was intended to be
purely therapeutic and was a charitable act on my part. Saying this, I sounded even to myself like one of Bernard Shaw’s more pompous and tendentious leading asses. Lydia sighed and shook her head. How could I, she asked quietly, as if there were someone who might overhear, how could I take anyone, least of all Dawn Devonport, to that place, of all places in the world? To this I had no reply. It was as if she were accusing me of besmirching Cass’s memory, and I was shocked, for this, you must believe me, was something I had not considered. I said she was welcome to come with us but that only seemed to make things worse, and there was a very long silence, the air vibrating between us, and slowly she lowered her head, her brow darkening ominously, and I felt like a very tiny toreador facing a frighteningly cold and calculating bull. Yet she packed my suitcase for me, just as she used to do in the days when I still went on tour. The task done, she headed off at a haughty slouch to the kitchen. At the door she stopped and turned to me. ‘You won’t bring her back, you know,’ she said, ‘not like this.’ I knew she was not speaking of Dawn Devonport. Her curtain line delivered—not for nothing has she lived all these years with an actor—she went into her lair and shut the door behind her with a thud. Yet I had the conviction, greatly to my consternation, that she found the whole thing more than anything else absurd.

  I had not told Dawn Devonport about Cass—that is, I had not told her that Portovenere was where my daughter died. I had proposed Liguria to her as if I had hit on it by chance, a place in the south where it would be quiet, a place of recuperation, uncrowded and tranquil at this time of year. I suppose it did not matter much to Dawn Devonport where she went, where she was taken. She came away with me in a stupor, as if she were a sleepy child whom I was leading by the arm.

  Abruptly now, there in the restaurant, she spoke, making me jump. ‘I wish you’d call me Stella,’ she said in an angry undertone, through gritted teeth. ‘It’s my name, you know. Stella Stebbings.’ Why was she so irritated all of a sudden? Had I been in a sunnier mood myself I might have taken it as a sign in her of a return to life and vigour. She ground out her cigarette in the plastic ashtray on the table. ‘You don’t know the first thing about me, do you?’ she said. I watched through the window the rollicking waves and, irritated, enquired in a tone of patient and faintly offended mildness what she considered the first thing about her to be. ‘My name,’ she snapped. ‘You could start by learning that. Stella Stebbings. Say it.’ I said it, turning my gaze from the sea and giving her a steady look. All this, the opening skirmishes of a quarrel with a woman, was lamentably familiar, like something known by heart that I had forgotten I knew and that now was coming balefully back, like a noisy play I had played in and that had flopped. She glared at me narrowly with what seemed a venomous contempt, then all at once leaned back in her chair and shrugged one shoulder, as indifferent now as a moment ago she had been furious. ‘You see?’ she said with weary disgust. ‘I don’t know why I bothered trying to do away with myself in the first place. I’m hardly here at all, not even a proper name.’

  Our waiter, an absurdly handsome fellow with the usual aquiline profile and thick black hair slicked back from his forehead, was at the kitchen door at the rear, where the chef had put out his head—chefs in their smeared bibs always look to me like struck-off surgeons—and now they both came forwards, the chef shy and hesitant in the wake of his undauntably cocky colleague. I knew what they were about, having witnessed more or less the same ritual on countless occasions since we had stepped on to Italian soil. They arrived at our table—by now we were the only customers left in the place—and Mario the waiter with a flourish introduced Fabio the chef. Fabio was roly-poly and middle-aged, and had sandy hair, unusual in this land of swarth Lotharios. He was after an autograph, of course. I do not think I had ever before seen an Italian blushing. I waited with interest for Dawn Devonport’s response—not a minute ago she had seemed ready to hit me with her handbag—but of course she is a professional to the tip of her little silver pen, which she produced now and scribbled on the menu that red-faced Fabio had proffered, and handed it back to him with that slow-motion smile she reserves for close-up encounters with her fans. I managed to glimpse the signature, with its two big, looped, opulent Ds like recumbent eyelids. She saw me seeing, and granted me a wry small smile in acknowledgement. Stella Stebbings, indeed. The chef rolled away happily, the precious menu pressed to his soiled front, while smirking Mario struck an attitude and enquired of the diva if she would care perhaps for caffè, while pointedly ignoring me. I suppose they all think I am her manager, or her agent; I doubt they take me for anything more.

  Since it seems that nothing in creation is ever destroyed, only disassembled and dispersed, might not the same be true of individual consciousness? Where when we die does it go to, all that we have been? When I think of those whom I have loved and lost I am as one wandering among eyeless statues in a garden at nightfall. The air about me is murmurous with absences. I am thinking of Mrs Gray’s moist brown eyes flecked with tiny splinters of gold. When we made love they would turn from amber through umber to a turbid shade of bronze. ‘If we had music,’ she used to say at Cotter’s place, ‘if we had music we could dance.’ She sang, herself, all the time, all out of tune, ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, ‘Roses Are Blooming in Picardy’, and something about a skylark, skylark, that she did not know the words of and could only hum, tunelessly off-key. These things that were between us, these and a myriad others, a myriad myriad, these remain of her, but what will become of them when I am gone, I who am their repository and sole preserver?

  ‘I saw something, when I was dead,’ Dawn Devonport said. She had her elbows on the table and was leaning forwards again at a crouch, dabbling with a fingertip among the cold ashes in the ashtray. She was frowning, and did not look at me. Outside the window the afternoon had turned to the colour of ash. ‘I was technically dead for nearly a minute, so they told me—did you know that?’ she said. ‘And I saw something. I suppose I imagined it, though I don’t know how I could be dead and imagine something.’

  Perhaps, I said, it was before she was dead, or afterwards, that she had undergone this experience.

  She nodded, still frowning, not listening. ‘It wasn’t like a dream,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like anything. Does that make sense, something that wasn’t like anything? But that was what it was—I saw something like nothing.’ She examined the ashy tip of her finger and then looked at me with curious dispassion. ‘I’m frightened,’ she said, quite calm and matter-of-fact. ‘I wasn’t before but now I am. That’s strange, isn’t it?’

  As we made our exit the waiter and the chef were at the door, bowing and grinning. Fabio the chef winked at me with a cheery, almost a fraternal, disdain.

  It was late when we arrived at Lerici, suffering still from the sour wine at lunch and then the bad air and the clamour of the train. It had begun to snow, and the sea beyond the low wall of the promenade was a darkling tumult. I tried to make out the lights of Portovenere across the bay but could not for those great flocks of whiteness hosting haphazard in the brumous air. The lamp-lit town straggled ahead of us up a hillside towards the brute bulk of the castello. In the snow-muffled silence the winding, narrow streets had a closed and sombre aspect. There was the sense of everything holding its breath in amazement before the spectacle of this relentless, ghostly falling. The Hotel le Logge was wedged between a little grocery shop and a squat, stuccoed church. The shop was still open, despite the lateness of the hour, a startling, brightly lit windowless box with crowded shelves stacked all the way to the ceiling and at the front a big slanted counter on which were displayed a profusion of damply glistening vegetables and polished fruits. There were crates of mushrooms, cream and tan, and shameless tomatoes, ranks of tufted leeks as thick as my wrist, zucchini the colour of burnished palm leaves, open burlap bags of apples, oranges, Amalfitan lemons. Stepping from the taxi we stopped and looked with incomprehension and a kind of dismay upon thi
s crowding and unseasonal abundance.

  The hotel was old and shabby and, inside, appeared to be of an all-over shade of brown—the carpet had the look of monkey-fur. Along with the usual whiff of drains—it came in wafts, at a fixed interval, as if rising out of ancient, rotting lungs—there was another smell, drily wistful, the smell, it might be, of last summer’s sunshine trapped in corners and in crevices and gone to must. As we entered there was much bowing and beaming before the brisk and imperious advance of Dawn Devonport—public attention always bucks her up, as which of us, in our business, does it not? The high fur collar of her coat made her already thinned face seem thinner and smaller still; the headscarf she had folded in and tucked close to her skull in the style of what’s-her-name in Sunset Boulevard. How she managed to make her way through the lobby’s crepuscular gloom with those sunglasses on I do not know—they are unsettlingly suggestive of an insect’s evilly gleaming, prismatic eyes—but she crossed to the desk ahead of me at a rapid, crisply clicking pace and plonked her handbag down beside the nippled brass bell and took up a sideways pose, presenting her magnificent profile to the already undone fellow behind the counter in his jacket of rusty jet and his frayed white shirt. I wonder if these seemingly effortless effects that she pulls off have to be calculated anew each time, or are they finished and perfected by now, a part of her repertoire, her armoury? You must understand, I felt permanently as abject before the spectacle of her splendour as did the poor chap behind the desk—this absurdity, O heart, O troubled heart.