Ancient Light

by John Banville

  But wait, hang on—something has just struck me. I was the one whom Billie Stryker was researching today. That was the point of all that hedging and hesitating on her part, all those ponderous silences: it was all a stalling tactic while she waited patiently for me to start talking, as I inevitably would, into the vacuum she had carefully prepared. How subtle of her, not to say sly, not to say, indeed, underhand. But what did she find out about me, except that I once had a daughter and she died? When I apologised for rambling on for so long about Cass, she shrugged and smiled—she has a very affecting smile, by the way, sad and sweetly vulnerable—and said it was all right, she did not mind, that it was her job to listen. ‘That’s me,’ she said, ‘the human poultice.’

  I think I really will ask her to find Mrs Gray for me. Why not?

  We went downstairs and I escorted her to the front door. Lydia was nowhere to be seen now. Billie’s car is an ancient and badly rusted Deux Chevaux. When she had clambered in behind the wheel she leaned out again to inform me, seemingly as an afterthought, that there is to be a read-through of the script, in London, early next week. All the cast will be there, the director, of course, and the scriptwriter. The latter’s name is Jaybee, something like that—I have become slightly deaf and it distresses me to have to keep on asking people to repeat what they have said.

  Billie drove off in swirling billows of dark-brown exhaust smoke. I stood looking after her until she was gone from the square. I was puzzled and at a loss, and prey to a faint but definite unease. Was it by some sorcery she had got me to speak of Cass, or was I only waiting for the chance? And if this is the sort of person I shall be dealing with in the coming months, what have I let myself in for?

  I have spent the afternoon perusing, I think that is the word, The Invention of the Past, the big biography of Axel Vander. The prose style was what struck me first and most forcefully—indeed, it nearly knocked me over. Is it an affectation, or a stance deliberately taken? Is it a general and sustained irony? Rhetorical in the extreme, dramatically elaborated, wholly unnatural, synthetic and clotted, it is a style such as might be forged—le mot juste!—by a minor court official at Byzantium, say, a former slave whose master had generously allowed him the freedom of his extensive and eclectic library, a freedom the poor fellow all too eagerly availed himself of. Our author—the tone is catching—our author is widely but unsystematically read, and uses the rich tidbits that he gathered from all those books to cover up for the lack of an education—little Latin, less Greek, ha ha—although the effect is quite the opposite, for in every gorgeous image and convoluted metaphor, every instance of cod learning and mock scholarship, he unmistakably shows himself up for the avid autodidact he indubitably is. Behind the gloss, the studied elegance, the dandified swagger, this is a man racked by fears, anxieties, sour resentments, yet possessed too of an occasional mordant wit and an eye for what one might call the under-belly of beauty. No wonder he was drawn to Axel Vander for a subject.

  This Vander, I may say, was an exceedingly strange bird. For a start, it seems he was not Axel Vander at all. The real Vander, a native of Antwerp, died mysteriously some time in the early years of the war—there were rumours, widespread though hardly plausible, that despite his hair-raisingly reactionary politics he took part in the Resistance—and this other, counterfeit, one, who has no recorded history, simply assumed his name and slipped adroitly into his place. The false Vander carried on the genuine one’s career as a journalist and critic, fled Europe for America, married, and settled in California, in the pleasant-sounding town of Arcady, and taught for many years at the university there; the wife died—it appears she was prematurely senile and Vander may in fact have murdered her—and shortly afterwards Vander abandoned his work and moved to Turin, where he was to die himself a year or two later. These are the facts, garnered from the helpful Chronology our author supplies after the Preface, and which he would be scandalised to see me present in such an unadorned and unfiddled-with fashion. The books that Vander wrote in his American years, in particular the collection of essays hermetically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity, won him a large if contested reputation as an iconoclast and an intellectual sceptic. ‘A strain of nastiness runs throughout the work,’ his disenchanted biographer writes, with a palpably curled lip, ‘and all too often his tone is that of a crabbed and venomous spinster, the kind of person who confiscates footballs that small boys accidentally kick into her garden and spends her evenings writing poison-pen letters on perfumed note-paper to her neighbours in the village.’ You see what I mean about the style.

  And this Vander is the character I have to play. Dear me.

  Yet in a way I can see why someone thought there is material for a movie here. Vander’s story weaves a certain mephitic spell. Perhaps I am overly suggestible, but as I sat reading in the old green armchair where lately Billie Stryker had perched and panted, the feeling came over me of being surreptitiously seized on and deftly taken hold of. The October sky in the slanted window above me had a floating of copper clouds, and the light in the room was a pale dense gas, and the silence too was dense, as if my ears had been stopped up as in an aeroplane, and I seemed to see the shadowy first and valid Axel Vander faltering and falling without a sound and his usurper stepping seamlessly into his place and walking on, into the future, and overtaking me, who will presently in turn become a sort of him, another insubstantial link in the chain of impersonation and deceit.

  I shall go out for a walk; perhaps it will restore me to myself.

  I like to walk. Or better say, I walk, and leave it at that. It is an old habit, acquired in the early months of grieving after Cass died. There is something in the rhythm and the aimlessness of being out for a stroll that I find soothing. My profession, from which I thought I had retired until Marcy Meriwether summoned me back to the footlights, or the arc-lights, or whatever they are called, has always allowed me the freedom of the daytime hours. There is a certain tepid satisfaction to be had in being abroad and at one’s leisure while other folk are penned indoors at work. The streets at mid-morning or in the early afternoon have an air of definite yet unfulfilled purpose, as if something important had forgotten to happen in them. The halt and the lame come out by day to air themselves, the old, too, and the no longer employed, wiling away the empty hours, nursing their losses, probably, as I do. They have a watchful and a slightly guilty manner; perhaps they fear being challenged for their idleness. It must be hard to get used to there being nothing urgent that needs to be done, as I am bound to find out when those arc-lights are extinguished for the last time and the set is struck. Theirs I imagine is a world without impetus. I see them envying the busyness of others, eyeing resentfully the lucky postman on his round, the housewives with their shopping baskets, the white-coated men in vans delivering necessary things. They are the unintended idlers, the ones astray, the at-a-loss ones.

  I observe the tramps, too, that is another old pastime of mine. It is not what it used to be. Over the years the tramp, your true tramp, has been diminishing steadily in quality and quantity. Indeed, I am not sure that one can any more speak of tramps as such, in the old, classic sense. No one nowadays rambles the roads, or carries a bundle on a stick or sports a coloured neckerchief, or ties his trouser legs below the knees with twine, or collects cigarette butts from the gutter to keep in a tin. The wandering ones are all drunks, now, or on drugs, and care nothing for the traditional ways of the road. The addicts in particular are a new breed, always in a hurry, always on a mission, trotting unswervingly along crowded pavements or weaving heedless through the traffic, lean as prairie dogs, with scrawny behinds and flat feet, the young men dead-eyed and scratchily light of voice, their women staggering behind them clutching stricken-eyed papooses and incoherently screaming.

  One vagrant I have been monitoring for some time now I call Trevor the Trinity-man. He is a very superior type, an aristocrat of the species. When I f
irst spotted him, it must be five or six years ago, he was in fine shape, sober and full of pep. It was a glary summer morning and he was crossing one of the bridges over the river, skipping along in the sharp light and swinging his arms, got up in a dark-blue pea-coat and brand-new desert boots of yellow suede with thick crêpe soles. He sported also a particularly jaunty corduroy cap with a peak, and despite the summer warmth he had a Trinity scarf knotted at his neck—hence my nickname for him. His grizzled beard was trimmed neatly to a point, his eyes were clear, his face was ruddy, with only the lightest tracery of broken veins. I am not sure what it was in him that caught my attention. It must have been the look he had of having been brought back from somewhere dreadful and restored to health and vigour, for I am sure he had been in St Vincent’s or St John of the Cross’s drying out; Lazarus probably looked like that after Martha and Mary brought him home from the cemetery and unwound the last of his grave-clothes and got him on his feet and generally smartened him up. I saw him again a couple of times about the streets, still bouncy and bright, and stood behind him one morning in a newsagent’s where he was buying the Times, and noted his markedly fruity tones.

  Then disaster struck. It was early, eight or half past on a misty autumn morn, and I was crossing the same bridge where I had got my first sighting of him, and there he was, scarf, jaunty cap, yellow boots and all, marooned in the stream of hurrying office workers, suspended at an angle, limp as a marionette and precipitously swaying, eyes shut as if he were dozing and his lower lip redly adroop, and clutching in his left hand a big bottle in a brown-paper bag.

  It was not the end of him, though, this plunge from grace, not at all. He has clambered back on to the wagon many a time, and although each time he has toppled off again, and although each fall takes a heavier toll on him generally, these repeated resurrections that he pulls off cheer me up, and I find myself breaking out in a smile of welcome when, after another ominous period of absence, he comes bustling towards me in the street, bright of eye, the nap of his suede boots brushed, his Trinners scarf freshly washed and free of drool. He pays me not the slightest heed, of course, and has never once, I am sure, felt the pressure of my eagerly following eye.

  When he is drinking he begs. He has honed his performance and is admirably consistent, shuffling up to likely marks with a cupped hand jutting out and crooning piteously, like a tired and thirsty infant, his face all twisted up to one side and his bloodshot eyes swimming with unshed tears. But it is only acting. Feeling extra magnanimous one day I gave him a tenner—it was after lunch and I had been drinking myself—and at once, startled by this unexpected bounty, he snapped out of character and beamed at me and thanked me warmly in a rich, Woosterish accent. I think if I had allowed it he would have seized my hand in both of his and pressed it in comradely gratitude and affection. As soon as I had passed on, however, he went straight back into his part, mooing and mugging with that hand held out.

  On a good day he makes a tidy sum, I should think. I spied him once in the bank, of all unlikely places, at a teller’s hatch, exchanging a counterful of copper coins for paper money. How patient the uniformed young woman attending him was, how forbearing and good-humoured, apparently not even minding the breathtaking stink that he gives off. Placidly he watched her count the coins, graciously he accepted the scant pile of notes she gave him in exchange, and stored them in an inner recess of his by now worn and permanently stained pea-coat. ‘Thank you, my dear, you are very kind,’ he murmured—yes, I had crept up close enough behind him to catch what he might say—and he touched the back of the young woman’s hand lightly in acknowledgement with the merest tip of a filthy finger.

  He ranges far and wide in his wanderings, for I have seen him all over the city, even in the outskirts. On the way to take a plane early one icy spring morning I spotted him on the airport road. He was making his determined way towards town, his breath smoking and a drop at the end of his poor old battered nose glinting like a fresh-cut jewel in the pink-tinged, frosty sunlight. What was he doing there, where was he coming from? Is it conceivable that he had been abroad, and had just returned, on a dawn flight? How do I know he is not an internationally renowned scholar, an expert in Sanskrit, say, or a peerless authority on the Noh theatre? The great pragmaticist Charles Sanders Peirce had to beg for bread and even for a time lived on the streets. Anything is possible.

  His gait. There must be something wrong with his feet—poor circulation, I would guess—for he moves at a slithering shuffle, a hindered jog-trot, one might call it, though still he makes a surprisingly rapid progress. His hands are bad, too—circulation again—and I notice he has taken to wearing fingerless grubby white woollen gloves that someone must have knitted for him. As he goes along he keeps his arms up, with elbows bent, those gloved paws held out before him, like a punch-drunk boxer going through the slow motions of warming up.

  It is a shock to think that he must be my junior by a good twenty years.

  I encountered him this afternoon, on my walk, as I hoped I would, for by now he is a kind of talisman to me. I was down by the dog-racing track, where the skeleton of the old gasometer still stands. That is the kind of neighbourhood, shabby and unassuming, where I prefer to stroll; I am a poor sort of flâneur and never took to the grand avenues or the broad sweeps of city parkland. I came upon Trevor of Trinity sitting contentedly on a bit of broken wall opposite the bus depot. He had a clear plastic carton in his lap and was eating something from it that he must have bought from the shop at the filling-station down the road. I thought it would be a pie of some kind, or one of those knobbly sausage rolls that look pre-eaten, but when I drew level with him I saw it was, of all things, a croissant. Good old Trev, ever the upholder of life’s little niceties! He had a paper cup of coffee, too—not tea, for I could smell the rich brown aroma of the beans. He was drunk, though, and quite befuddled, and was talking to himself in a mumble while he ate, the flakes of pastry tumbling down his front. I could have stopped and sat down beside him; I even slowed my pace and held back a little, thinking to do so, but then lost my nerve and walked on, regretfully. He was oblivious of me, as usual, too squiffy to notice the grey old faded matinée idol in his good tweed overcoat and strangler’s kid gloves skulking past.

  I should like to know who he is, or was. I should like to know where he lives. He has shelter, of that I am certain. Someone takes care of him, looks after him, buys him new boots when the old ones have worn out, launders his scarf, delivers him to the hospital to be dried out. I am sure it is a daughter. Yes, a devoted daughter, surely.

  Me and the silver screen, now, I know you will want to hear all about that. Not silver any more, of course, but gaudily tinted, which is nothing but a disimprovement, in my opinion. Marcy Meriwether had assured me that I was the first person to have been offered the part of Axel Vander, but I subsequently learned that it was offered to at least three other actors of my vintage, all of whom turned it down, which was when Marcy M. in desperation called me up and invited me to play the old monster. Why did I accept? I was a stage performer all my working life and thought it rather late in my career to be starting on a different tack. I suppose I was flattered—well, yes, I was flattered, of course I was: vanity again, my besetting sin—and could not but say yes. Film acting, as it turns out, seems markedly easy—standing around, mostly, and having one’s makeup constantly refreshed and repaired—in comparison with the nightly grind of the stage. Money for jam, really. Or ham, did I hear someone say?

  The read-through of the script took place in a big, white, eerily empty house on the Thames that had been hired specially for the occasion, near where the new Globe Theatre stands. I confess I was nervous to be venturing into this novel and faintly alarming world. I knew a few of the cast from stage productions we had been in together, and others were so familiar from the various films I had seen them in that I felt I knew them, too. The result was that there was for me something of the atmosphere of a first day back at school
after the long summer hols, a new class and new teachers to be coped with, a lot of new faces and the ones remembered from last term all slightly altered, slightly larger, coarser, more threatening. Billie Stryker was there, looking more damply cardboardy than ever today in her bulging jeans and high-necked jumper. She gave me a cautious wave and one of her rare and tentative and wearily melancholy smiles. The sight of her steadied me, which surely shows how much I was in need of reassurance.

  The hired house was cavernous and bone-white, like an enormous skull, hollowed out and bleached, with all sorts of passages and cubbyholes and winding stairways throughout which our voices reverberated, joining and clashing in a headache-inducing blare. The weather was strange—it was one of those hectic days that come sometimes in October, when it seems that out of sheer mischievousness the year has reversed itself temporarily and turned back to springtime. The tawny sunlight was hard and without warmth, and a stiff, muscular breeze was barrelling its way up the river and churning the water to mud-brown waves.

  Dawn Devonport was the last to arrive, naturally, being the starriest star among us. Her limousine, one of those special sleek black shiny jobs, probably armour-plated, with tinted, opaque windows and a menacing grille, wallowed heavily on its reinforced suspension as it drew up to the door. The driver, spruce in dove-grey and a cap with a shiny peak, hopped out in that burly yet balletic way they do and whisked open the rear door and the lady extricated herself from the deep back seat with practised deftness, affording the merest glimpse of the underside of one long, honey-hued leg. A couple of dozen of her fans had been waiting to greet her, huddled on the pavement in the cutting wind—how did they know where to come to, or am I being naïve?—and now they broke into a ragged round of applause that sounded to my ear more derisive than adoring. As she made her way between them she seemed not to walk but waft, borne along in the bubble of her inviolable beauty.