Ancient Light

by John Banville

  I began to cry, startling even myself. It was the real thing, a child’s raw, helpless blurting. Mrs Gray stopped what she was doing and turned and stared at me, appalled. She had seen me weep before, but that was in rage or to try to get her to bend to my will, not like this, abjectly, defencelessly, and I suppose it was borne in on her afresh how young I was, after all, and how far out of my depth she had led me. She knelt down on the mattress again and embraced me. It was a shivery sensation to be in her arms naked when she was dressed, and even as I leaned into her and bawled for sorrow I found to my pleased surprise that I was becoming aroused again, and I lay back down and drew her with me and, despite her squirms of protest, got my hands under her clothes, and so we were off again, my sobs of childish fear and anguish now become the familiar, hoarse panting that would rise and rise along its arc to the final, familiar whoop of triumph and wild relief.

  I think that was the day I told her of my intention to make her pregnant. I recall a drowsy noontide and the two of us lying quietly together in a tangle of sweat-smeared limbs, a wasp buzzing at the corner of a broken pane and a smoking blade of sunlight from one of the holes in the roof plunged at an angle in the floor beside us. I had been brooding as so often on the painful and unavoidable fact that was Mr Gray, her inexpungible husband, working myself the while into a fine state of suppressed wrath, and the thought of wreaking what would surely be the ultimate revenge upon him had hardly formed in my mind before I had heard myself announce it aloud and quite as if it were a thing in need only of being accomplished. At first it seemed Mrs Gray did not understand, could not take in what I had said, and small wonder—it was hardly the kind of thing a woman in the midst of a more than usually perilous affair would expect to hear from the mouth of her under-age lover. When she was taken off-guard or had been told something that she could not absorb at once she had a way, I have noticed it in other women, too, of going very still and quiet on the spot, as if she had found herself suddenly under threat and were lying low until the danger had passed. So she remained for some moments motionless, with her back and her warm behind against my front and one of my arms gone to sleep underneath her. Then she heaved herself over violently on to her other side so that she was facing me. First she stared at me disbelievingly, then she gave me a tremendous, two-handed push in the chest that sent me sliding backwards across the mattress so that my shoulder-blades clattered against the wall. ‘That’s a disgusting thing to say, Alex Cleave,’ she said, in a low and terrible voice. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, so you should.’

  Was it then that she told me about the child she had lost? A little girl, it was, her last-born after Billy and his sister. The babe was sickly, and died after a day or two of flickering life. The death itself when it came was sudden, however, and it was a torment to Mrs Gray that the mite had not been baptised and that therefore her soul was in Limbo. It made me uneasy to hear of this creature, who for her mother was a vividly lingering presence, idealised and adored. When Mrs Gray spoke of her, crooning and lovingly sighing, I thought of the little gilt figurine of the Infant of Prague, with its crown and cape, its sceptre and orb, which reigned in impassive, miniature splendour behind the fanlight over the front door of my mother’s house and which I had been afraid of when I was little and found uncanny still. Mrs Gray’s grasp on the finer points of Christian eschatology was not strong, and in her view of it Limbo was not a place of permanent sequester for the souls of the unchristened but a sort of painless Purgatory, a halfway house between earthly life and the rewards and joys of the beatific transcendent, where her babe even now was biding in patient expectation of being one day, perhaps the Last Day, raised up to the presence of her Heavenly Father, where the two of them, mother and child, would be joyfully reunited. ‘I hadn’t even chosen a name for her,’ Mrs Gray told me, with a sorrowful gulp, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Small wonder my threat of impregnation alarmed and angered her.

  Yet I might have suggested to her, that day, that if she and I were indeed to have a little one of our own it would be a replacement down here for the embryonic angel impatiently waiting her turn in line at the Limbic gate. By now, however, what with this talk of dead babies, my enthusiasm for precocious fatherhood had cooled considerably—had turned, in fact, to ashes.

  It struck me afterwards that what was remarkable about her response when I stated my intention of putting her in the family way was that she did not seem entirely surprised by it; shocked, naturally, outraged, yes, but not surprised. Perhaps women are never surprised by the prospect of being pregnant, perhaps they live in a constant state of preparedness for just that eventuality; I might consult Lydia on this matter, Lydia, my Lydia, my encyclopydia. Mrs Gray that day did not even ask why I should want her to have a child, as if she accepted that it would be the most natural and obvious thing that I should want. If she had asked, I would not have known quite how to answer. Should she get pregnant by me it would hurt her husband, yes, and that would be pleasing, but it would hurt us, too, her and me, and grievously. Did I really know what I was saying, and if I did, did I mean it? I am sure I did not—I was hardly more than a child myself, after all—and had said it I am sure only to shock her and attract all her attention on to myself, exclusively, a task to which I devoted much effort and ingenuity. Yet I find myself contemplating now, with a pang of what feels like genuine regret, the possibility that between us we might have produced a fine, bright boy, say, with her eyes and my limbs, or a glowing girl, a miniature version of her, complete with shapely ankles and slender toes and an unruly curl behind her ear. Absurd, absurd. Think of it, my meeting up with him or her now, a son or daughter nearly as old as I am, the two of us tongue-tied with embarrassment before the grotesque and comic predicament into which an accident of love and a boy’s spitefulness had thrown us, and from which nothing could extricate us except my death, and even that would not wipe the laughable stain from the record. And yet, and yet. My mind turns in confusion, my heart shrinks and swells. Absurd. Look at me, blundering here on the brink of old age and still wistfully dreaming of generation, of a son who might comfort me, of a daughter whom I could love, and on whom I might one day lean an infirm arm and be led down the last road at the end of which awaits what the Psalmist in his solemn fashion calls my long home.

  Of course, I would have preferred a daughter. Yes, definitely a daughter.

  It is a wonder, in fact, that Mrs Gray did not become pregnant, as frequently and as energetically as we went at the business that would have made her so. How did she avoid it? In this land, in those days, there was no available legal means to prevent conception, other than celibacy, and even if there had been she would not have consented to it, out of devotion to her faith. For she did believe in God, not the God of love, I think, but certainly the God of vengeance.

  But wait. Maybe she did get pregnant. Maybe that was why she skedaddled so precipitately when our affair was discovered. Maybe she went off and had a baby, a little girl, ours, without telling me. If so, that little girl is a big woman now, fifty years old, with a husband, and children of her own, perhaps—other, unknown, people, bearing my genes! Dear God. What a thing that is to think of. But no, no. By the time I came along, frisky and cocksure, she must have been barren.

  The scout from Pentagram Pictures turns out to be Billie, not Billy like my pal, and Stryker, not Striker—yes, it was probably Marcy Meriwether’s idea of a joke not to spell these names out for me—and is a woman and emphatically not, as I had assumed, a man. I was up here in my attic as usual when I heard her preposterous little car come whining and coughing into the square and then the doorbell ringing. I paid no heed, thinking it must be someone to see Lydia. And as it happened Lydia did detain her, took her into the kitchen and sat her down and plied her with cigarettes and tea and a biscuit; my wife has a weakness for misfortunates and oddities of all kinds, especially if they are female. What can they have talked about, those two? Afterwards I did not enquire
, out of some form of delicacy, or shyness, or misgiving. It was a good twenty minutes before Lydia came up and knocked on my door to tell me I had a visitor. I rose from my desk, ready to accompany her downstairs, but she moved to one side in the narrow doorway and, with the air of a magician producing a very large rabbit from a very small hat, brought the young woman forwards from the narrow stairway and with a gentle push propelled her into the room, and departed.

  As well as being a woman, Billie Stryker is not at all what I had expected. What did I expect? Someone smart and snappy and transatlantic, I suppose. Billie, however, is obviously a native of these parts, a short pudgy person in, I judge, her middle to late thirties. She really is of a remarkable shape, and might have been assembled from a collection of cardboard boxes of varying sizes that were first left out in the rain and then piled soggily any old way one on top of another. The general effect was not improved by the extremely tight jeans she was wearing, and the black polo-necked jumper that made her large head look like a rubber ball set squarely atop all those precariously stacked cartons. She has a tiny sweet face inset amid much surplus flesh, and her wrists are dimpled like a baby’s and look as if they have been tied round with tight loops of thread at the junctures where her hands are attached to, or inserted into, as it might be, the ends of her arms. There was a purple and yellow shadow under her left eye, the remains of what a week or so ago must have been a real shiner—how or where did she come by that, I wonder?

  I wished that Lydia had not brought her up here, for besides the fact that it is my bolthole, the sloped room is small and Billie is not, and as I edged my way around her I felt rather like Alice grown huge and trapped in the White Rabbit’s house. I directed her to the old green armchair that is the only piece of furniture there is space enough for in here, along with my desk that I work at—I call it work—and the antique swivel chair that I sit in. When we moved in first Lydia tried to persuade me to make a proper study for myself in one of the downstairs rooms that are empty—the house is large and there are just the two of us—but I am content up here, and do not mind being cramped, except on occasions such as this, which are extremely rare. Billie Stryker sat there, with a decided but inexplicably forlorn air, twiddling her chubby fingers and panting softly and looking at everything except me. She has a special and slovenly way of inhabiting a chair, seeming to sag from it rather than sit in it, perching herself on the front edge of the cushion with her big knees loosely splayed and her runnered feet turned inwards so that the outer sides of her ankles are resting flat on the floor. I sidled to my desk, smiling and nodding, like a lion-tamer making cautiously towards his chair and pistol, and sat down.

  She seemed to know no more of why she was here than I did. She is a researcher, if I understood her correctly; are movie researchers known as scouts? I have so much to learn. I asked if she had been researching the life of Axel Vander and she looked at me as if I had made a joke, though not a funny one, and gave a brief and seemingly derisory laugh that sounded as if it had been learned from Marcy Meriwether. Yes, she said, she had done a job on Vander. Done a job, eh? That sounds worryingly strenuous. I was puzzled by her unforthcoming manner and did not know how to proceed, and we sat together in a weighty silence for quite a long time. Idly it occurred to me that since she was a researcher and would know how to go about that sort of thing I might hire her on a freelance basis to track down Mrs Gray for me. Honestly, the fancies that wander into one’s head. All the same, it should not be difficult to trace my lost love’s whereabouts. There will be people still in the town who will remember the Grays—it is only fifty years since they left, after all, and the cause of their sudden leaving was surely memorable—and who will be bound to know what became of them. And Billie Stryker, I feel sure, would be a relentless bloodhound were she to be set on the scent.

  I put a question or two about the movie project we are both supposedly engaged on and again she darted at me that quick and, I thought, incredulous glance, though it progressed hardly higher than my knees, and then she went back to gazing morosely at the carpet. This was hard work, and I was beginning to lose patience. Idly I walked my fingers along the desk and, humming, looked out of the window, from which past a corner of the square a glimpse can be had of the canal. This orderly and placid imitation river is as much of water as I can bear these days; after Cass’s death we could not go on living by the sea, as we used to; the sight of waves crashing on rocks was not to be borne. Why and to what purpose had Marcy Meriwether sent this taciturn and lumpish creature to me?—and what had Lydia been up to with her in that long interval they had spent together downstairs? There are times when I feel myself caught up in a definite, concerted and yet seemingly aimless conspiracy run by women. ‘Not everything means something,’ Lydia likes to say, cryptically, and takes on that slightly swollen look, as if she were sternly but with difficulty forbidding herself to laugh.

  I asked Billie Stryker if there was anything I could fetch for her in the way of refreshments, which was when she told me about the tea and biccies that Lydia had pressed on her, down in the kitchen. I should say something about this kitchen. It is Lydia’s place, as this attic room is mine. She spends much of her time there these days—I rarely venture beyond the threshold. It is a cavernous chamber with a high ceiling and unclad walls of rough stone. There is a big window over the sink but it looks directly into a clump of briars that immemorially was a rose tree, so that the daylight hardly penetrates and a brooding dimness reigns in the room. Lydia’s desert ancestry is never more plainly apparent, to me, at any rate, than when she is presiding there, at the high square table of scrubbed deal, with her newspapers and her cigarettes, a shawl of circassian purple draped over her shoulders and her dusky forearms hooped with many slender bangles of jingling silver and gold. I should not say so, but I often think that in another age my Lydia might have been taken for a witch. What did they talk about down there, she and Billie Stryker?

  Billie said now that she would have to be getting on—to what? I wondered—yet she gave no other sign of being ready to depart. I said, though I could not hide my perplexity, that I was glad that she had called, and that I was happy to have met her. This was followed by more silence and slack staring. And then, almost before I knew it, I had begun to talk about my daughter. This was strange, not at all like me. I cannot remember when I last spoke of Cass to anyone, even Lydia. I guard my memories of my lost one jealously, keep them securely under wraps, like a folio of delicate watercolours that must be protected from the harsh light of day. Yet there I was, babbling about her and her doings to this uncommunicative and wary stranger. Of course, I see Cass in every young woman I meet, not Cass as she was when she cut short her own life but as she might be now, these ten years later. She would be about Billie Stryker’s age, as it happens, though that, surely, is the extent of what they would have in common.

  Yet being reminded of Cass, especially in such a tenuous fashion, was a far cry from talking about her, and so precipitately, at that, so wildly, even. When I think of Cass—and when am I not thinking of Cass?—I seem to sense all about me a great rushing and roaring, as if I were standing directly under a waterfall that drenches me and yet somehow leaves me dry, dry as a bone. This is what mourning has become for me, a constant, parching deluge. I find too that a certain shame attaches to being bereft. Or no, it is not quite shame. A certain awkwardness, say, a certain sheepishness. Even in the very earliest days after Cass’s death I felt it imperative not to blubber overmuch in public but at all costs to maintain my poise, or the appearance of it; when we wept we wept in private, Lydia and I, smilingly shutting the front door on our departing comforters and immediately falling on each other’s neck and fairly howling. However, talking to Billie Stryker now I felt as if I were indeed weeping in some way. I cannot explain it. There were no tears, of course, only the words pouring out of me unstoppably, yet I had that almost voluptuous sense of helpless, headlong falling that one has when one g
ives in to a really good bawl. And of course when at last I ran out of words I was rueful and abashed all over, as if I had lightly scalded myself. How did Billie Stryker, seemingly without the least effort, get me to say so much? There must be more to her than meets the eye. As I should hope there is, for what meets the eye is less than prepossessing.

  What did I say to her, what did I tell her? I cannot remember. I recall only the babbling, not what it was I babbled. Did I say my daughter was a scholar and that she suffered from a rare disorder of the mind? Did I describe how when she was young and her condition was as yet undiagnosed her mother and I would swing dizzyingly between anxious hope and ashen disappointment as the signs of her malady seemed to diminish only to rise up again more starkly and more unmanageably than ever? How we used to long, in those years, for just one ordinary day, a day when we might get up in the morning and eat our breakfast without caring for anything, reading bits out of the paper to each other and planning things to do, and afterwards take a stroll, and look at the scenery with an innocent eye, and later share a glass of wine, and later still go to bed together and lie at peace in each other’s arms and drift into untroubled sleep. But no: our lives with Cass were a constant watching brief, and when she eluded us at last and did her disappearing trick—when she made away with herself, as they so accurately say—we acknowledged even in the midst of our sorrow that the end she had brought to our vigil had been inevitable. We wondered, too, and were aghast to find ourselves wondering it, if our vigilance itself had somehow served to hasten that end. The truth is she had been eluding us all along. At the time of her death we thought she was in the Low Countries deep in her arcane studies, and when word came from Portovenere, far off in the south, the dread word that in our hearts we had known all along would some day come, we felt not only bereaved but in a manner outmanoeuvred, cruelly and, yes, unforgivably outwitted.