Ancient Light act-3

by John Banville

  Billie Stryker telephoned. I have come to fear these calls. She tells me there is someone I should speak to. I thought she said this person was a nun and I assumed I had misheard. I really must have my hearing seen to. My hearing, seen to—ha! There it is again, language playing with itself.

  I have begun to look at Billie under a new light. Languishing for so long in the shadow of my inattention she seemed herself a shadow. But she too has her aura. She is, after all, the link between so many of the figures that most closely concern me—Mrs Gray, my daughter, even Axel Vander. I ask myself if she might be more than merely a link, if she is, rather, in some way a co-ordinator. Co-ordinator? Odd word. I do not know what I mean, but I seem to mean something. I used to think, long ago, that despite all the evidence I was the one in charge of my own life. To be, I told myself, is to act. I missed the vital pun, though. Now I realise that always I have been acted upon, by unacknowledged forces, hidden coercions. Billie is the latest in that line of dramaturgs who have guided from behind the scenes the poor production that I am, or am taken to be. Now what new twist of the plot has she uncovered?

  The Convent of Our Sacred Mother stands on a bleak rise above a windy confluence where three ways meet. Here we are in the suburbs, yet I felt as though I had ventured on to a trackless wilderness. Do not mistake me—I am fond of spots like this, bleak and seemingly characterless, if that is the word, fond, I mean. Yes, give me an unconsidered corner any day over your verdant vales, your sparkling, majestic peaks. My scenic detours will lead you down littered streets where washing hangs from windows and slippered old parties with their dentures out stand in front doorways watching you. There will be slinking dogs going about their business, and children with dirt-smeared faces playing behind barbed wire on waste ground under a charred sky. Young men will put their heads far back and flare their nostrils and stare truculently, and girls in high heels and piled-up hairstyles will preen and flounce, pretending not to be aware of you, and screech at each other with the voices of parrots; it is always the girls who know there is an elsewhere, you can see them yearning for it. There are dustbin smells, and smells of mouldering plaster and rotting mattresses. You do not want to be here yet there is something here that speaks to you, something uneasily half remembered, half imagined; something that is you and not-you, a portent out of the past.

  Why would the canny Sisters build their mother house—their mother house!—on such a spot? Maybe the building, painted mantle-blue and many-windowed, as commodious as one of Heaven’s promised mansions, was designed originally for some other purpose, was a barracks, maybe, or maybe a madhouse. The sky seemed impossibly low this day, the bellied clouds as if resting on the ranks of chimney pots and the rooks skimming down in deep, long arcs on to the wind-polished grass, seeming pressed upon by the weight of that sky and steering themselves by the ragged tips of their wings.

  Sister Catherine was a brisk little body with a smoker’s cough. I would not have taken her for a nun at all. Her hair, grizzled like mine but cut shorter, was uncovered, and her habit, such as it was, square-cut from grey serge, looked to me like the kind of outfit that librarians and businessmen’s dowdy secretaries used to wear in my young days. When exactly was it that nuns stopped dressing the part? One must go far to the south, nowadays, to the Latin lands, to find the true original: the heavy black skirts to the ground, the hood and wimple, the big wooden rosary slung about the non-existent waist. This person’s legs were bare, her ankles thick. Strain though I might I could not see in her a likeness of her mother. She was home, she told me, on vacation, her word, from the mission fields abroad. At once I pictured a vast sandy tract under a white and pitiless sun, all scattered about with skulls and bleached bones and bits of glass and glittering metal lashed with thongs to painted sticks. She is a doctor as well as a nun—I remembered that coveted microscope. Her accent has a New World edge. She chain-smokes, Lucky Camels being her brand. She still wears those thick-lensed specs; they might have been from her father’s shop. I told her that Catherine was, had been, my daughter’s name. ‘Called Kitty, too, like me?’ she asked. No, I said: Cass.

  There was an inner cloister where we walked, a stone-flagged, arcaded corridor around four sides of a gravelled courtyard with an open sky above. On the gravel there were palms growing in tall Ali Baba pots, and a trellis trailing some variety of winter-flowering climber with a pallid and despondent bloom. Despite my overcoat I was cold, but Sister Catherine, as I suppose I must go on calling her, in her thin grey cardigan, seemed not to notice the raw air and the wind’s insidious, icy fingers.

  It seems I was mistaken about everything. Nobody knew about her mother and me. She had told no one what she had seen in the laundry room that day. She was lighting a cigarette, and had her hands cupped around a match, and now she looked up at me sideways with a glint of the Kitty of old, scornful and amused. Why, she asked, had I imagined that everyone knew? But I thought, I said in bewilderment, I thought the town was rife with talk of how her mother and I had carried on so disgracefully throughout that summer. She shook her head, detaching a flake of tobacco from her lip. But her father, I said, had she not told him? ‘What—Daddy?’ she said, spluttering on a mouthful of smoke. ‘He’d have been the last one I would tell. And even if I had told him he wouldn’t have believed me—in his eyes Mumser could do no wrong.’ Mumser? ‘That’s what we called her, Billy and I. Don’t you remember anything?’ Evidently not.

  We walked on. The wind moaned among the stone arcades. I was suffering the same constraint that used to take hold of me in the old days in face of Kitty’s mockery and sly merriment. And how peculiar it felt, being here with her, after all these years, this tough little person giving off puffs of smoke like an old-fashioned steam train and shaking her head in happy wonderment at my ignorance, my deludedness. They used to say she was delicate; obviously they were wrong. Even if, she was saying, even if it had been proved to her father that for months his wife had been up to monkey business with a boy of—what age had I been then, anyway?—he would have done nothing about it, for he loved Mumser so desperately and held her in such helpless awe that he would have let her get away with anything. Saying these things, she displayed no rancour against me, the me of now or the me of then. She did not even seem to feel I had done wrong. I, on the other hand, was in a sweat of shame and embarrassment. Monkey business.

  But Marge, I said, stopping short as I suddenly remembered, her friend Marge, what about her? Well, she said, stopping too, what about her? Surely, I said, she would have told what she had seen. She frowned, peering up at me as though I had lost my senses. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Marge wasn’t there.’ This I could not take in at all. I had seen them in the doorway of the laundry room, I remembered it distinctly, the two of them standing there, Kitty in her pigtails and her round glasses and lardy Marge breathing through her mouth, both staring in that dull and slightly puzzled way, like a pair of putti who had lighted by mistake upon a crucifixion scene. But no, the nun said firmly, no, I was wrong, Marge was not there, it had been she alone at the open door.

  We had come to a corner of the rectangular courtyard where there was an unglazed arched narrow window, an arrow-loop, or loop-hole, I think it is called, affording a view down the hillside to where those three roads converged. We could see cramped housing estates with serried roofs, and parked cars like so many coloured beetles, and gardens, and television masts, and mushrooming water-towers. The wind was streaming steadily through the stone slit, forceful and cold as a cascade of water, and we stopped and leaned into the deep embrasure to get the unexpectedly fresh feel of it on our faces. Sister Catherine—no, Kitty, I shall call her Kitty, it feels unnatural not to—Kitty was shielding her cigarette in her fist and still smiling to herself in bemusement at the enormity of my misconceptions, my misrememberings. Yes, she said again cheerily, I was wrong about everything, everything. The day that she happened upon us in the laundry room was not the day that Mrs Gray left to go back to her mother
, that was a month later, more than a month, and Mr Gray had not shut the shop and put the house up for sale until long afterwards, at Christmas time. By then her mother, who had been ill throughout that summer, our summer, hers and mine, was failing fast; everyone had been surprised that she had held on for so long. ‘Because of you, probably,’ Kitty said, tapping a finger on the sleeve of my coat, ‘if that’s any comfort to you.’ I put my face close up to the narrow window and looked down into that populous vale. So many, so many of the living!

  She had been mortally sick for a long time, my Mrs Gray, and I without an inkling. The child who had died had torn something in her insides when it was being born, and in that fissure the mad cells gathered and bided until their hour came. ‘Endometrial carcinoma,’ Kitty said. ‘Brr’—she gave herself a shake—‘to be a doctor is to know too much.’ Her mother died, she said, on the last day of that year. By then my heart had healed, and I had turned sixteen, and was about other business. ‘She was cold, all the time, that September,’ Kitty said, ‘though remember how hot it was? Every morning Pa would build a fire for her and she would sit in front of it all day wrapped in a blanket, looking into the flames.’ She gave a sort of soft little angry laugh through her nostrils and shook her head. ‘She was waiting for you, I think,’ she said, shooting me a glance. ‘But you never came.’

  We turned and walked back across the courtyard. I told her how Billy had flung himself at me in the Forge that day, shouting and weeping and swinging his fists. Yes, Kitty said, she had told him, he was the only one she had told. She had felt she had owed it to him. I did not ask why. Now we were pacing again under the arcades, our footsteps sharp on the flagstones. ‘Will you look at those,’ she said, stopping, and pointing with her cigarette, ‘those palms. What sort of a thing are they, to have here?’ Billy died three years ago, of something in the brain, an aneurysm, she supposed. She had not seen him for a long time, had hardly known him any more. Her father outlived him by a year—‘Imagine that!’ Now they were all gone, and she was the last of the line, and the name would die with her. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘the world will hardly lack for Grays.’

  I would have liked to ask her why she became a nun. Does she believe it all, I wonder, the crib and the cross, the miraculous birth, sacrifice, redemption and resurrection? If so, in her version of things, Cass is eternally alive, Cass, and Mrs Gray, and Mr Gray, and Billy, and my mother and my father, and everyone else’s father and mother, back through all the generations, even unto Eden. But that is not the only possible or highest heaven. Among the wonders that Fedrigo Sorrán told me of that snowy night in Lerici was the theory of the many worlds. Some savants hold that there is a multiplicity of universes, all present, all simultaneously going on, wherein everything that might happen does happen. Just as on Kitty’s thronging paradisal plain, so too somewhere in this infinitely layered, infinitely ramifying reality Cass did not die, her child was born, Svidrigailov did not go to America; somewhere too Mrs Gray survived, perhaps is surviving still, still young and still remembering me, as I remember her. Which eternal realm shall I believe in, which shall I choose? Neither, since all my dead are all alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.

  If I must choose one memory of Mrs Gray, my Celia, a last one, from my overflowing store, then here it is. We were in the wood, in Cotter’s place, sitting naked on the mattress, or she was sitting, rather, while I half lay in her lap with my arms loosely draped about her hips and my head on her breast. I was looking upwards, past her shoulder, to where I could see the sun shining through a rent in the roof. It must have been hardly more than a pinhole, for the beam of light coming through it was very fine, yet intense, too, radiating outwards in spokes in all directions, so that at every tiniest adjustment of the angle of my head it made a shivering, fiercely burning wheel that spun and stopped and spun again, like the gold wheel of an enormous watch. It struck me that I alone was witness to this phenomenon sparked at this one insignificant point by the conjunction of the great spheres of the world—more, that I was its maker, that it was in my eye it was being generated, that none but I would see or know it. Just then Mrs Gray shifted her shoulder, dousing the beam of sunlight, and the spoked wheel was no more. My dazzled eyes hastened to adjust to her shadowy form above me, and quickly the moment of eclipse passed and there she was, leaning down to me, holding up her left breast a little on three splayed fingers and offering it to my lips like a precious, polished gourd. What I saw, though, or what I see now, is her face, foreshortened in my view of it, broad and immobile, heavy-lidded, the mouth unsmiling, and the expression in it, pensive, melancholy and remote, as she contemplated not me but something beyond me, something far, far beyond.

  Kitty let me out at a corner of the cloisters, through a postern gate, or sally-port—ah, yes, how I love the old words, how they comfort me. I was fiddling with my hat, my gloves, a fussed old party suddenly. I did not know what to say to her. We shook hands quickly and I turned and seemed to reel down that hillside, and was soon among those paltry, blemished streets again.

  I am going to America. Shall I find Svidrigailov there? Perhaps I shall. JB and I are to travel together, an ill-assorted pair, I know. We have put our faith in the largesse of Professor Blank, our putative host at the Axelvanderfest in Arcady, where I am told there are no seasons. Our passage is booked, our bags are packed, we are eager to be off. All that remains is to shoot our final scene, the one in which Vander comes to bid farewell to Cora, his tragic girl who died of love for him. Yes, Dawn Devonport is back on set. In the end it was Lydia, of course, who persuaded her to return and be again among the living. I shall not ask what deal was done down in that kitchen lair, amid the libations of tea and the sacrificial fumes of cigarette smoke. Instead, I shall wait on the fringes of light as they lay out the star in her shroud and apply the last touches to her makeup, and I shall think, lingering there, before walking forwards to lean down and kiss her cold and painted brow, that a film set resembles nothing so much as a nativity scene, that little lighted space surrounded by its dim, attentive figures.

  Billie Stryker too will shortly set out on a journey, to Antwerp, Turin, Portovenere. Yes, I have commissioned her to retrace whatever slime-trail Axel Vander may have left along that route ten years ago. More unfinished business. What things she will unearth I do not care to think but yet would know. I fear there is much that is buried. She is eager to be off, looking forward to getting away from that husband of hers, I do not doubt. I have signed over to her what I have been paid for playing Vander these past weeks. To what better use could I have put such a tainted bounty? Billie, my sleuth.

  When I was a child I too, like Cass, suffered from insomnia. I think in my case it was that I deliberately kept myself awake, for I had bad dreams, and was prey to an abiding fear of sudden death—I would not lie on my left side, I remember, convinced that if my heart should fail while I was asleep I would wake up and feel it stopping and know I was about to die. I cannot say what age I was when I suffered this affliction; probably it was about the time of my father’s death. If so, I added to my bereaved mother’s torment by tormenting her with my wakefulness, night after night. I would beg her to leave her bedroom door open so that I could call out to her every few minutes to make sure she too was still awake. Eventually, exhausted no doubt by her own grief and my merciless importunings, she would fall asleep, and I would be left alone, wide-eyed and with scalding eyelids, crouched under the night’s stifling black blanket. I would stay there like that, in terror and anguish, for as long as I could bear it, which was not long, and then I would get up and go into my mother’s room. The convention was, and it never varied, that I had been asleep and had been wakened by one of my nightmares. Poor Ma. She would not allow me to get into bed with her, that was a rule she enforced, this least forceful of souls, but she would pass something to me, a blanket or an eiderdown, to put on the floor beside the bed to lie on
. She would reach out a hand, too, from under the covers, and give me one of her fingers to hold. In time, when this ritual had become the norm, and I was spending a part of every night on the floor beside her bed, clutching her finger, I devised my own arrangement. I found a canvas sleeping bag in the attic—it must have been left behind by a lodger—and kept it in a cupboard, and would drag it with me into my mother’s room and wriggle into it and lie down in my place on the floor by her bed. This went on for months, until in the end I must have surmounted some barrier, crossed into a new and sturdier phase of growing up, and began to keep to my own room, and to sleep in my own bed. And then, years later, one night in the immediate, agonised aftermath of Mrs Gray’s departure, I found myself scrabbling in the cupboard for that old sleeping bag, and finding it I crept with stifled sobs into my mother’s room and spread it on the floor, as I used to. What did my mother think? I believed she was asleep, but presently—did she know I was weeping?—I heard a rustling sound and her hand came out from under the sheet and she touched me on the shoulder, offering me her finger to hold on to, as in the old days. I went rigid, of course, and shrank back from her touch, and presently she withdrew her hand and turned over with a heave and a sigh, and soon was snoring. I watched the window above me. The night was ending and the dawn was coming on, and light, uncertain as yet, a faint effulgence, was seeping in around the edges of the curtain. My eyes ached from weeping and my throat was swollen and raw. What I thought could not end had ended. Whom now would I love, and who would love me? I listened to my mother snoring. The air in the room was stale from her breath. One world was ending, without a sound. I looked to the window again. The light around the curtain was stronger now, a light that seemed somehow to shake within itself even as it strengthened, and it was as if some radiant being were advancing towards the house, over the grey grass, across the mossed yard, great trembling wings spread wide, and waiting for it, waiting, I slipped without noticing into sleep.