Ancient Light act-3

by John Banville

  It had not occurred to us, in the golden glare of that long-lasted summer, that sooner or later we would have to look for somewhere more resistant to the elements than the old house in the woods. Already there was an autumnal crispness in the air, especially in the late afternoons when the sun had declined sharply from the zenith, and now with the rains it was chillier still—‘We’ll soon be doing it in our overcoats,’ Mrs Gray said gloomily—and the floorboards and the walls were giving off a dispiriting odour of damp and rot. Then came the thunder-clap. ‘Well, that,’ Mrs Gray declared, her voice shaking and the raindrops dripping from her fingertips, ‘that puts the tin hat on it.’ But where else were we to find shelter? Desperate speculation. I even toyed with the thought of requisitioning one of the disused rooms under the attic in my mother’s house; we could come through the back garden, I said eagerly, seeing us there already, and in by the back door and up the back stairs from the scullery and no one would be the wiser. Mrs Gray only looked at me. All right then, I said sulkily, did she have a better suggestion?

  As it turned out, we need not have worried. I mean, we should have worried, but not about finding a new place for ourselves. That day, even before the last grumbles of thunder had settled and ceased, Mrs Gray in her fright was off, scampering in the rain along the track through the streaming wood, with her shoes in her hand and her cardigan pulled over her head for an ineffective hood, and was in the station wagon and had the engine started and was moving off before I caught up and scrambled in beside her. By now we were both thoroughly soaked. And where were we going? The rain was battering on the metal roof and dishfuls of it were sloshing back and forth across the windscreen before the valiantly labouring wipers. Mrs Gray, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel, drove with her face thrust forwards, the whites of her eyes glinting starkly and her nostrils flared in fright. ‘We’ll go home,’ she said, thinking aloud, ‘there’s no one there, we’ll be all right.’ The window beside me was awash, and quavering trees, glassy-green in that electric light, loomed in it an instant and were gone, as if felled by our passing. The sun, improbably, was managing to shine somewhere, and the washes of rain on the windscreen now were all fire and liquid sparks. ‘Yes,’ Mrs Gray said again, nodding rapidly to herself, ‘yes, we’ll go home.’

  And home we went—to her home, that is. As we were drawing into the square there was an almost audible swish and the rain stopped on the instant, as if a silver bead curtain had been drawn peremptorily aside, and the drenched sunlight crept forwards, to re-stake its shaky claim on the cherry trees and the sparkling gravel under them and the pavements that had already started to steam. The air in the house felt damp and had a wan, greyish odour, and the light in the rooms seemed uncertain, and there was an uncertain hush, as if the furniture had been up to something, some dance or romp that had stopped on the instant when we entered. Mrs Gray left me in the kitchen and went off and came back a minute later having changed into a woollen dressing-gown that was too big for her—was it Mr Gray’s?—and under which, it was plainly apparent, to my avid eye, at least, that she was naked. ‘You smell like a sheep,’ she said cheerfully, and led me down—yes!—led me down to the laundry room.

  I have a suspicion she did not remember our previous encounter there. That is to say I do not think it occurred to her to remember it, on this occasion. Is it possible? For me this narrow room with the oddly lofty ceiling and the single window set high up in the wall was a holy site, a sort of sacristy where a hallowed memory was stored, whereas for her I suppose it had reverted to being just the place where she did the family’s washing. The low bed, or mattress, I noticed at once, was no longer there, under the window. Who had removed it, and why? But then, who had put it there in the first place?

  Mrs Gray, humming, took a towel to my wet hair. She said she did not know what to do about my clothes. Would I wear one of Billy’s shirts? Or no, she said, frowning, perhaps that would not be a good idea. But what would my mother say, she wondered, if I came home soaked to the skin? She did not seem to have noticed that, under cover of the towel she was so vigorously applying to my head—how many times in her life had she dried a child’s hair?—I had been edging ever closer to her, and now I reached out blindly and seized her by the hips. She laughed, and took a step backwards. I followed, and this time got my hands inside the dressing-gown. Her skin was still slightly damp, and slightly chilled, too, which somehow made her seem all the more thoroughly, thrillingly naked. ‘Stop that!’ she said, laughing again, and again stepped back. I was out from under the towel, and she made a wad of it and pushed it at my chest in a half-hearted attempt to fend me off. She could go back no farther now for her shoulder-blades were against the wall. The belted gown was agape at the top where I had been fumbling at it, and the skirts of it too were parted, baring her bare legs to their tops, so that for a moment she was the Kayser Bondor lady to the life, as provocatively dishevelled as the original was composed. I put my hands on her shoulders. The broad groove between her breasts had a silvery sheen. She began to say something, and stopped, and then—it was the strangest thing—then I saw us there, actually saw us, as if I were standing in the doorway looking into the room, saw me hunched against her, canted a little to the left with my right shoulder lifted, saw the shirt wet between my shoulder-blades and the seat of my wet trousers sagging, saw my hands on her, and one of her glossy knees flexed, and her face paling above my left shoulder and her eyes staring.

  She pushed me aside. Of all the things that were about to start happening, I think that push, the shock of it, although it was not violent or even ungentle, is the thing I have remembered of that day with the keenest clarity, the acutest anguish. Thus must the puppet feel when the puppeteer lets the strings fall from his fingers and ducks out of the booth, whistling. It was as if in that instant she had sloughed a self, the self I knew, and stepped past me as a stranger.

  Who was it that was standing in the doorway? Yes, yes, I need not tell you, you know already who it was. The lank plaits, the thick specs, the knock-knees. She was wearing one of those dresses that little girls wore then, vaguely Alpine, dotted all over with tiny flowers, pleated, and with a crimpled, elasticated front to the bodice. In her hand she was holding something, I do not remember what—a fiery sword, perhaps. Marge was there too, her fat friend from the birthday party, the one who took a shine to me, but I paid her scant heed. They just stood, the two of them, looking at us, with curiosity, it seemed, more than anything else, then turned aside, not hurriedly, but in that dull blank way that spectators turn aside from the scene of an accident when the ambulance has driven off. I heard their clumsy school shoes clattering on the wooden steps up to the kitchen. Did I hear Kitty snicker? Mrs Gray went to the doorway and put her head into the corridor, but did not call out to her daughter, did not say anything, and after a moment came back again, into the room, to me. She was frowning, and nibbling at her lower lip. She looked as if she had misplaced something and were trying hard to think where she might have left it. What did I do? Did I speak? I remember her looking at me for a second as if puzzled, then smiling, distractedly, and putting a hand to my cheek. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘you should go home now.’ It was so strange, the simple, utter, incontestable finality of it. It was like the end of an orchestral performance. All that had held us suspended and rapt for so long, all that violent energy, that tension and concentration, all that glorious clamour, suddenly in that moment stopped, leaving nothing but a fading gleam of sound upon the air. I did not think to protest, to plead or weep or shout, but did as she bade me and stepped past her meekly without a word, and went home.

  What happened after that happened with bewildering swiftness and dispatch. By evening Mrs Gray had fled. I heard—from whom?—that she had gone back to the town where she and Mr Gray had come from, to the grand boulevards and the worldly sophisticates about which and whom she had so liked to tease me. It must have been where she was born, for she was staying there in the care of her mother, it was said. The new
s that Mrs Gray had a mother was so amazing as to divert me for a moment from my anguish. She had never mentioned a mother to me, unless she did and I was not listening; it is possible, but I do not think even I would have been that inattentive. I tried to picture this fabulous personage and saw an immensely aged version of Mrs Gray herself, wrinkled, stooped and for some reason blind, leaning at a wicket fence in a sunlit cottage garden profuse with summer flora, smiling in sad forgiveness and holding out her hands in that vaguely beseeching way that blind people do, welcoming home her disgraced and penitent daughter. So strange, so strange even now to think of a previous Mrs Gray—no, she would have been a Mrs someone else. That is another thing I never knew, my maiden’s maiden name.

  The next day, auctioneer’s signs sprouted on the front of the house in the square, and in the window of the shop in the Haymarket, too, and Miss Flushing’s nostrils and the rims of her eyes were redder than ever. Do I recall the station wagon pulling out of the square packed with household things, and Mr Gray and Billy and Billy’s sister crowded together in the front seat, that seat on which Mrs Gray and I had so often bounced together as on an enchanted trampoline, Mr Gray looking pained but with his jaw juttingly set, like Gary Fonda in The Grapes of Noon? Surely I am inventing again, as so often.

  Yet come to think of it their going cannot have been that precipitate, for days were to pass, a week, even, or more than a week, before I had my final encounter with Billy Gray. In my memory the seasons have shifted yet again, for although it was still September I see our confrontation acted out in raw winter weather. The place was called the Forge, near the square where the Grays lived; a blacksmith must have worked there, long ago. The surroundings were appropriate, for the Forge was always associated for me, and still is, with a nameless disquiet. Yet it was an unremarkable enough place, where a hill road leading up to the square broadened and turned in an odd, lopsided way, and another, narrower road, little used, led off at a sharp angle into the countryside. Where this road started there was an overhang of heavy dark trees, underneath which was a well, or not a well, but a broad-mouthed metal pipe protruding from the wall, through which poured a constant flow of water, smooth and shiny as moulded zinc and thick as a man’s upper arm, that plunged into a mossed-over concrete trough that was always full yet never overflowed. I used to wonder where so much water could be coming from, for it did not slacken off even in the driest months of summer, and was, I thought, uncanny in its unrelenting dedication to its one, monotonous task. And where did it go to, the water? Must have run off underground into the Sow River—can that really have been its name?—a meagre dirty stream that ran along a culvert at the foot of the hill. What do they matter, these details? Who cares where the water came from or went to, or what the season was or how the sky looked or whether the wind was blowing—who cares? Yet someone must—someone has to. Me, I suppose.

  Billy was walking up the hill and I was walking down. I cannot say why I was there or where I was coming from. I must have been in the square, even though I distinctly recall making every effort to avoid the sight of that cardboard For Sale sign displayed outside Mrs Gray’s bedroom window like a flag on a plague ship. I might have crossed to the other side of the road, or Billy might have, but neither of us did. My memory, with its lamentable fondness for the pathetic fallacy, sets a raw wind skirmishing about us, and there are dead leaves, of course, scraping along the pavements, and those dark trees shake and sway. Details again, you see, always details, exact and impossible. Yet I have not remembered what Billy said to me, except that he called me a dirty fucking bastard and suchlike, but I do see his tears, and hear his sobs of rage and shame and bitter sorrow. He tried to hit me, too, wildly swinging those sheaf-gatherer’s arms of his, while I retreated in little skips and hops, bent halfway over backwards like a contortionist. And I, what did I say? Did I attempt to apologise, did I try to explain myself and my base betrayal of our friendship? What explanation could I have offered? I felt peculiarly detached from the moment. It was as if what was happening were something that was being shown to me, a particularly violent sequence from a morality play, illustrating the inevitable consequence of Unchastity, Lust and Lewdness. Yet at the same time, and I know it will provoke jeers of contempt and disbelief when I say it, at the same time I had never felt such care, such compassion, such tenderness—such, yes, such love for Billy as I felt there on that hill road, with him flailing and sobbing and me bobbing backwards, ducking and weaving, and the cold wind blowing and the dead leaves scrabbling and that thick skein of water crashing and crashing into its depthless trough. If I had thought he would allow it, I believe I would have embraced him. What was enacted there, in cries of pain and wildly aimed blows, was, I suppose, some version, for me, of the parting scene that had not played itself out between me and Mrs Gray, so that I welcomed even this poor simulacrum of what had been withheld and what I so piercingly missed.

  In the days immediately following Mrs Gray’s flight I think what I felt most strongly was fear. I found myself abandoned and astray in a place that was alien to me, a place I had not known existed, and in which I suspected I had not the experience or the fortitude necessary to survive without suffering grave damage. This was grown-up territory, where I should not have to be. Who would rescue me, who would follow and find me and lead me back to be again among the scenes and the safety I had known before that bewitched summer? I clung to my mother as I had not done since I was an infant. I should say that although I thought it impossible for her not to have heard the scandalous news of Mrs Gray and me—it might have been put about by a town crier, such was the instantaneity and volume of the gossip as it flew from street corner to church gate to kitchen nook and back again—she uttered not a single word about it, to me, and surely not to anyone else. Perhaps she also was afraid, perhaps for her also it was a strange and terrifying territory my salacious doings had landed her in.

  Oh, but what a good son I was now, attentive, grave, studious, dutiful far beyond the call of duty. How prompt I was to run a household errand for my mother, with what patience and sympathy did I listen to her complaints, her grievances, her denunciations of our lodgers’ laziness, venality and neglect of personal hygiene. It was all a sham, of course. If Mrs Gray had bethought herself and come back as suddenly as she had gone, a thing that seemed to me not at all impossible, I would have flung myself upon her with all the old ardour, the old recklessness. For it was not discovery and disgrace, not the town’s gossips or my mother’s unspoken accusations, that made me tremble with fear. What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it; that, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean. Or rather say a Theseus, abandoned on Naxos while Ariadne hastened off about her uncaring business.

  What was striking too was the silence that I felt around me. The town was humming with talk and I was the only one nobody spoke to. I welcomed Billy’s onslaught that day in the Forge, for it made a noise, at least, and was aimed at me, uniquely. There will have been those in the town who were genuinely shocked and scandalised, but those too who will have secretly envied Mrs Gray and me, the one lot not necessarily exclusive of the other. And everyone, to be sure, must have been vastly entertained, even those few who might have sympathised with us, disgraced, bereft and wounded as we were. I fully expected Father Priest to come calling again, this time to recommend that I be incarcerated among the Trappists on some sheep-flecked mountainside in remotest Alpland, but even he kept his distance, and his peace. Perhaps he was embarrassed. Perhaps, I ask myself uneasily, they were all embarrassed, even as they rubbed their hands in relish at the scandal? I would have preferred them to be outraged. It would have seemed more—what shall I say?—more respectful of the great thing Mrs Gray and I had made between us and that was now no more.

  I waited, confidently at first but then with deepening bitterness, for
Mrs Gray to send me something, a word, a valediction from afar, but nothing came. How would she have communicated with me? She could hardly have sent a letter through the post to me, to my mother’s house. But wait—how did we communicate before, when our affair was still going on? There was a telephone in the overflowing cubby-hole beside the kitchen that my mother called her office, it was an antiquated model with a handle at the side that had to be cranked to get a connection to the operator, but I would never have called Mrs Gray on it, and she would never have dreamed of calling me, for apart from anything else the operator always listened in, she could be heard on the line, making curious shiftings and excited, mousy scrabblings. We must have left notes for each other somewhere, at Cotter’s place, maybe—but no, Mrs Gray did not go there alone, she was afraid of the woods, and on those occasions when by chance she got there before me I would find her cowering anxiously in the doorway and on the point of flight. So how did we manage? I do not know. Another unsolved mystery, among the many mysteries. There was an occasion when through some mix-up she did not come when she was supposed to, and I waited for her through an agonised afternoon, increasingly convinced that she would appear no more, that she was lost to me for ever. That was the single occasion I can recall when the lines of communication between us broke down—but what lines were they, and where were they laid?