Ancient Light

by John Banville

  That was all there was, that briefest glimpse of a fragmented woman, and at once I passed on along the corridor, stumblingly, as if I had been given a hard push in the small of the back. What? you will cry. Call that an encounter, call that a dalliance? Ah, but think of the boiling storm in a boy’s heart after such licence, such accommodation. And yet, no, not a storm. I was not as shocked or inflamed as I should have expected to be. The strongest sensation I had was one of quiet satisfaction, as an anthropologist might feel, or a zoologist, who by happy chance, all unexpectedly, has glimpsed a creature the aspect and attributes of which confirm a theory as to the nature of an entire species. I knew now something I could never unknow, and if you scoff and say that after all it was knowledge only of what a naked woman looks like, you show that you do not remember what it was to be young and yearning for experience, yearning for what is commonly called love. That the woman had not flinched under my gaze, had not run to slam the door shut or even put up a hand to cover herself, seemed to me neither heedless nor brazen, but odd, rather, very odd, and a matter for deep and prolonged speculation.

  The thing did not end without a fright, however. When on reaching the head of the stairs I heard rapid footsteps behind me I would not turn for fear it might be she, sprinting after me like a maenad, still without a stitch on and driven by who knew what wild design. I felt the skin at the back of my neck pucker as if in expectation of being set upon violently, by hands, clutching fingers, teeth, even. What could she want of me? The obvious was not the obvious—I was only fifteen, remember. I was torn between the impulse to plunge headlong down the stairs and flee the house, never to darken its doorstep again, and an opposite urge to stand my ground, and turn, and open wide my arms and receive into them this lavish and unlooked-for gift of womanhood, naked as a needle, in Piers the ploughman’s happy formulation, all breathless and a-flutter and drooping with desire. The person behind me was not Mrs Gray, however, but her daughter, Billy’s sister, the unnerving Kitty, all pigtails and specs, who squeezed past me now, wheezing and tittering, and went clattering down the stairs, at the bottom of which she stopped and turned and cast up at me a hair-raisingly knowing smirk, and then was gone.

  After taking a deep and for some reason painful breath I too descended, circumspectly. The hall was empty, with Kitty nowhere to be seen, for which I was relieved. I opened the front door quietly and stepped out into the square, my gonads humming like those pretty porcelain insulators, little fat doll-like things, that there used to be on the arms of telegraph poles, that the wires went through, or around—remember? I knew that Billy would wonder what had become of me but I did not think that in the circumstances I could face him, not for now, anyway. He bore a strong resemblance to his mother, have I mentioned that? Oddly, though, he never did speak of my having flown the house, not when I met up with him next day, not ever, in fact. I sometimes wonder—well, I do not know what it is I wonder. Families are strange institutions, and the inmates of them know many strange things, often without knowing that they know them. When Billy eventually found out about his mother and me, did I not think his rage, those violent tears, a mite excessive, even in a case as provocative as the one in which we all suddenly found ourselves mired? What do I imply? Nothing. Move on, move on, as we are directed to do at the scene of an accident, or a crime.

  Days passed. Half the time I spent in contemplation of Mrs Gray reflected in the mirror of my memory and the other half imagining I had imagined everything. It was a week or more before I saw her again. There was a tennis club outside the town, by the estuary, where the Grays had a family membership, and where I went sometimes with Billy to knock a ball about, feeling horribly conspicuous in my cheap plimsolls and threadbare singlet. Ah, but the tennis clubs of yore! My heart haunts still those enchanted courts. Even the names, Melrose, Ashburn, Wilton, The Limes, bespoke a world more graceful far than the dingy backwater where we lived. This one, out by the estuary, was called Court-lands; I imagine the pun was unintentional. I had seen Mrs Gray playing there only once, partnering her husband in a doubles match against another couple who in my memory are no more than a pair of white-clad phantoms bobbing and dipping in the ghostly soundlessness of a lost past. Mrs Gray played the net, crouching menacingly with her rear end in the air and springing up to slash at the ball like a samurai slicing an enemy diagonally in half. Her legs were not as long as the Kayser Bondor lady’s, were in fact more sturdy than anything else, but nicely tanned, and shapely enough at the ankle. She wore shorts rather than one of those boring skirtlets, and there were damp patches at the armpits of her short-sleeved cotton shirt.

  That day, the day of the incident—the incident!—that I wish to record, I was walking homewards alone when she overtook me in the car and stopped. Was it the day of the doubles match? Cannot remember. If it was, where was her husband? And if I was coming from the club, where was Billy? Detained, the pair of them, by the amatory goddess, delayed, diverted, locked in the lavatory and shouting in vain to be let out—no matter, they were not there. It was evening and the sunlight was watery after a day of showers. The road, patterned with fragrant patches of damp, ran beside the railway line, and beyond that the estuary was a shifting mass of turbulent purple, and the horizon was fringed with a boiling of ice-white clouds. I had slung my jumper over my shoulders and knotted the sleeves loosely in front, like a real tennis player, and carried my racquet in its press at a negligent angle under my arm. When I heard the motor slowing behind me I knew, I do not know how, that it was she, and my heartbeat too seemed to slow, and developed a syncopated catch. I stopped, and turned, frowning in feigned surprise. She had to stretch all the way across the passenger seat to roll down the window. The car was not a car in fact but a station wagon, of a flat grey shade and somewhat battered; she had left the motor running and the big ugly hump-backed thing gasped and trembled on its chassis like an old horse with a chill, coughing out blue smoke at the back. Mrs Gray leaned low with her face tilted up towards the open window, smiling at me quizzically, reminding me of the amiably sardonic heroines of the screwball comedies of an earlier day, who made rapid-fire wisecracks and bullied their beaux and gaily spent their gruff fathers’ countless millions on sports cars and silly hats. Did I say her hair was of an oaken shade and cut in a nondescript style, and that there was a curl at one side that she was always pushing behind her ear, though it would never stay put? ‘I think, young man,’ she said, ‘we are both going the same way.’ And so we were, although it turned out not to be the way home.

  She was an impatient driver, apt to lose her footing on the pedals, and given to swearing under her breath and yanking violently at the gear stick, which was mounted on the steering column, her left arm working like the articulated handle of a pump. Did she smoke a cigarette? Yes, she did, darting it frequently at the gap where her window was open an inch at the top, though each time most of the ash blew back in again. The front seat had no armrest in the middle and was as wide and as plumply upholstered as a sofa, and when she trod on the brakes or clashed the gears we jounced a little on it in unison. For a long time Mrs Gray said nothing, frowning out at the road ahead, her thoughts seemingly elsewhere. I sat with my hands resting in my lap, the fingers touching at their tips. What was I thinking of? Nothing, that I recall; I was just waiting, again, for what would happen to happen, as I waited that day in the Grays’ living room before the encounter in the mirror, but more excitedly, more breathlessly, this time. She had changed out of her tennis whites into a dress made of some light stuff with a pattern of pale flowers. Now and then I caught a faint whiff of her mingled fragrances, while a dribble of cigarette smoke from her lips drifted sideways and went into my mouth. I had never been so sharply conscious of the presence of another human being, this separate entity, this incommensurable not-I; a volume displacing air, a soft weight pressing down on the other side of the bench seat; a mind working; a heart beating.

  We skirted the town, following a sun-dappled bac
k road beside a dry-stone wall and a wood of glimmering birches. It was a part of the town’s hinterland I rarely found myself in; odd, how in a place so narrowly circumscribed as ours there were parts where one tended not to go. The evening was waning but the light was still strong, the sun racing through the trees beside us, those trees which as I see them now are much too lushly leaved, it being only April, for the seasons are shifting yet again. We crested a low hill where the wood fell back, and were afforded an unexpectedly panoramic view across garishly lit uplands to the sea, then we plunged down into a shadowed dell and suddenly at a muddy bend Mrs Gray with a grunt spun the steering wheel and slewed the car to the left and we shot off the road on to an overgrown woodland track and she took her foot off the accelerator and the car bumped drunkenly over a few yards of uneven ground and came to a groaning, swaying stop.

  She switched off the engine. Birdsong invaded the silence. With her hands still resting on the steering wheel she leaned forwards to peer up through the slanted windscreen into the tracery of ivory and brown branches above us. ‘Would you like to kiss me?’ she asked, still with her eye canted upwards.

  It had seemed less an invitation than a general enquiry, something she was simply curious to know. I looked into the brambled gloom beside the car. What was surprising was not to be surprised by any of this. Then, in the way of these things, we both turned our heads at the same moment and she set a fist down between us on the soft seat to brace herself and with one shoulder lifted she advanced her face, tilted sideways at a slight angle, her eyes closed, and I kissed her. It was really a very innocent kiss. Her lips were dry and felt as brittle as a beetle’s wing. After a second or two we disengaged, and sat back, and I had to clear my throat. How piercingly the birds’ voices rang through the hollow wood. ‘Yes,’ Mrs Gray murmured, as if confirming something to herself, then started up the engine again and twisted about to look through the rear window, the tendons of her neck drawn tight at the side and an arm laid along the back of the seat, and crunched the gears into reverse and joggled us backwards along the track and out on to the road.

  I knew precious little about girls—and consequently the little I knew was precious indeed—and next to nothing about grown women. At the seaside for a summer when I was ten or eleven there had been an auburn beauty of my own age whom I had adored at a distance—but then, who in the honeyed haze of childhood has not adored an auburn beauty by the seaside?—and a redhead in town one winter, called Hettie Hickey, who despite her less than lovely name was as delicate as a Meissen figurine, who wore multiple layers of lace petticoats and showed off her legs when she danced the jive, and who on three consecutive and never to be forgotten Saturday nights consented to sit with me in the back row of the Alhambra cinema and let me put a hand down the front of her dress and cup in my palm one of her surprisingly chilly but excitingly pliable, soft little breasts.

  These glancing hits of the love god’s shafts, along with that vision of the bicyclist in the churchyard laid bare by a breeze—a playful god at work there too, surely—had formed the total of my erotic experience to date, aside from solitary exercises, which I do not count. Now, after that kiss in the car, I seemed to myself not to be living, quite, but suspended in a state of quivering potential, blundering through my days and tossing at night on a sweaty and reeking bed, wondering did I dare—? and would she dare—? Such schemes I devised to meet her again, to be alone with her again, to verify what I hardly could hope would be true, that if I pressed my advantage she might—well, that she might what? Here was the point where all grew vague. Often I could not tell which was more urgent, the longing to be allowed to delve into her flesh—for after that kiss my formerly passive intentions had moved on to the stage of active intent—or the need to understand what exactly such delving and doing would entail. It was a confusion between the categories of the verb to know. That is, I was more or less familiar with what would be required in order for me to do and for her to be done to, but inexperienced though I was I felt certain that the mere mechanics of the thing would be the least of it.

  What I was certain of was that what seemed promised by my two encounters with Mrs Gray, the one on the far side of that nexus of looking-glasses and the one on this side, in the station wagon under the trees, would be of an entirely new order of experience. My feelings were a giddily intensified mixture of anticipation and alarm, and a beady determination to take with both hands, and whatever other extremities might be called on, anything that should prove to be on offer. There was an avid throb now in my blood that startled me, and shocked me, too, a little, I think. And, yet, all the while, despite this passion, these pains, there lingered an odd sense of disengagement, of not registering fully, of being there and not being there, as if everything were still taking place in the depths of a mirror, while I remained outside, gazing in, untouched. Well, you know the sensation, it is not unique to me.

  That brief moment of contact in the birch wood was followed by another week of silence. At first I was disappointed, then incensed, then sullenly disheartened. I thought I was deceived and that the kiss, no more than the exhibition in the mirror, had meant next to nothing to Mrs Gray. I felt an outcast, alone with my humiliation. I avoided Billy and walked to school on my own. He seemed not to notice my coolness, my new wariness. I watched him covertly for any sign that he might know something of what had occurred between his mother and me. In my darker moments I would have myself convinced that Mrs Gray was playing an elaborate prank and making mock of me, and I burned for shame at being so easily duped. I had a hideous vision of her regaling the tea-table with an account of what had occurred between us—‘And then he did, he kissed me!’—and the four of them, even glum Mr Gray, shrieking and hilariously shoving each other. My distress was such that it even roused my mother from her chronic lethargy, though her murmurs of enquiry and half-hearted concern only infuriated me, and I would give her no answer, but would stump out of the house and slam the door shut behind me.

  When at last at the end of that second, tormented, week I met Mrs Gray in the street by chance my first impulse was not to acknowledge her at all, but to display a cutting hauteur and walk straight past her without a word or a sign. It was a spring day of wintry gales and spitting sleet, and we were the only two abroad in Fishers Walk, a laneway of whitewashed cottages that ran under the high granite wall of the railway station. She was struggling against the wind with her head down, the bat-wings of her umbrella snapping, and it would have been she who passed me by, seeing nothing of me above the knees, had I not halted directly in her path. Where did I find the courage, the effrontery, to take such a bold stand? For a second she did not recognise me, I could see, and when she did she seemed flustered. Could she have forgotten already, or have decided to pretend to forget, the display in the mirror, the embrace in the station wagon? She had no hat and her hair was sprinkled with glittering beads of melted ice. ‘Oh,’ she said, with a faltering smile, ‘look at you, you’re frozen.’ I suppose I must have been shivering, not from the cold so much as the miserable excitement of encountering her accidentally like this. She wore galoshes and a smoke-coloured transparent plastic coat buttoned all the way up to her throat. No one wears those coats any more, or galoshes either; I wonder why. Her face was blotched from the cold, her chin raw and shiny, and her eyes were tearing. We stood there, buffeted by the wind, helpless in our different ways. A foul gust came to us from the bacon factory out by the river. Beside us the wet stone wall glistened and gave off a smell of damp mortar. I think she would have sidestepped me and walked on had she not seen my look of need and desolate entreaty. She gazed at me for a long moment in surmise, measuring the possibilities, no doubt, calculating the risks, and then at last made up her mind.

  ‘Come along,’ she said, and turned, and we walked off together in the direction whence she had come.

  It was the week of the Easter holidays, and Mr Gray had taken Billy and his sister to the circus for the afternoon.
I thought of them huddled on a wooden bench in the cold with the smell of trodden grass coming up between their knees and the tent flapping thunderously around them and the band blaring and farting, and I felt superior and more grown-up than not only Billy and his sister but than their father, too. I was in their home, in their kitchen, sitting at that big square wooden table drinking a mug of milky tea that Mrs Gray had made for me, watchful and wary, it is true, but sheltered, and warm, and quivering like a gun-dog with expectancy. What were acrobats to me, or a dreary troupe of clowns, or even a spangled bareback rider? From where I sat I would have happily heard that the big top had collapsed in the wind and smothered them all, performers and spectators alike. An iron wood-stove in one corner sparked and hissed behind a sooty window, its tall black flue trembling with heat. Behind me the big refrigerator’s motor shut itself off with a heave and a grunt and where there had been an unheard hum was suddenly a hollow quiet. Mrs Gray, who had gone off to shed her raincoat and her rubber overshoes, came back chafing her hands. Her face that had been blotched was glowing pink now but her hair was still dark with wet and stood out in spikes. ‘You didn’t tell me there was a drop on the end of my nose,’ she said.

  She had an air of faint desperation and at the same time seemed ruefully amused. This was uncharted territory, after all, for her, surely, as much as for me. Had I been a man and not a boy, perhaps she would have known how to proceed, by way of banter, sly smiles, a show of reluctance betokening its opposite—all the usual—but what was she to do with me, squatting there toad-like at her kitchen table with the rain-wet legs of my trousers lightly steaming, my eyes determinedly downcast, my elbows planted on the wood and the mug clutched tight between my hands, struck dumb by shyness and covert lust?