Ancient Light

by John Banville

  Mrs Gray for all her worked-at air of hazy detachment was, I have no doubt, permanently on tenterhooks, fearful that sooner or later I was bound to go too far and take a pratfall and send us both sprawling in the disarray of our perfidy at the feet of her astonished loved ones. And I, I am ashamed to say, teased her heartlessly. It amused me to let the mask drop now and then, just for a second. I would wink at her sultrily when I judged the others were not looking, or in passing would softly bump against some part of her as if by accident. I found endearingly erotic the way in which if, say, I touched her leg under the breakfast table she would try to cover up her start of fright, reminding me of the flustered, helpless attempts at modesty she used to make in our earliest days together when I would bundle her into the back seat of the station wagon and claw at her clothes in my haste to get at this or that high or hollow of her bared flesh as it shrank from me and at the same time enticed me onwards. What a pressure she must have been under at those times, in her own kitchen, what a panic-fright she must have felt. And how callous I was, how careless, to put her through such trials. Yet there was a side to her, the wanton side, that cannot but have thrilled, however fearfully, to these prods that I so cavalierly gave to the blandly domestic surface of her day.

  I am thinking of the occasion of Kitty’s party. How did I come to be there, who invited me? Not Kitty herself, I know, nor Billy, and certainly not Mrs Gray. Curious, these holes one encounters when one presses over-insistently upon the moth-eaten fabric of the past. Anyway, for whatever reason, I was there. The little monster was celebrating her birthday, I do not remember which one—she always seemed ageless to me. It was an occasion of wild misrule. The guests were all girls, a score of undersized hoydens who romped unchecked in a pack through the house, elbowing each other and grabbing at each other’s clothes and screaming. One of them, a whey-faced creature, neckless and fat, displayed an alarmingly adhesive interest in me, and kept popping up at my elbow with a congested, insinuating smile; Kitty must have been talking about me. There were party games all of which ended in violent scuffles, with hair pulled and blows exchanged. Billy and I, whom Mrs Gray, before taking refuge in the kitchen, had charged with keeping order, waded into these mêlées shouting and slapping, like a bo’sun and his mate struggling to quell a riot among a gang of drunken sailors on shore leave in a dockside tavern of an unlicensed Saturday night.

  At one particularly boisterous passage of these revels I too retreated into the kitchen, tousled and unnerved. Kitty’s fat friend, called Marge, if I recall—she probably grew up a sylph and broke men’s hearts with the arching of an eyebrow—tried to follow me but I gave her a Gorgon’s transfixing glare and she hung back dolefully and let me shut the kitchen door in her face. I had not come in search of Mrs Gray but there she was, in her apron, with her sleeves rolled and her arms floury, bending to lift a tray of fairy cakes from the oven. Fairy cakes! I was creeping up on her, intent on embracing her about the hips, when, still bending, she turned her head and saw me. I began to say something, but she was looking beyond me now, to the door through which I had just entered, and her face had taken on an expression of alarm and warning. Billy had come in unheard behind me. At once I straightened and let my hands fall to my sides, unsure, though, that I had been quick enough, and that he had not seen me there, advancing at a crouch, ape arms outspread and fingers hooked, towards his mother’s tautly proffered hindquarters. But luckily Billy was not an observant boy, and he swept us both with an indifferent glance and went to the table and took up a slice of plum-cake and began to stuff it into his mouth with slovenly dispatch. All the same, how my heart wobbled from the gleeful terror of such a close thing.

  Mrs Gray, making herself ignore me, came and set the tray of cakes on the table and stood back, pushing out her lower lip and sending a quick puff of breath upwards to blow a stray fall of hair from her forehead. Billy was still chewing cake, mumbling complaints of his sister and her riotous friends. His mother bade him absently not to speak with his mouth full—she was still admiring the cakes, each in its fluted paper cup and snug in its own shallow compartment in the tray and smelling warmly of vanilla—but he paid her no heed. Then she lifted a hand and laid it on his shoulder. This gesture too was absent-minded, but for that reason all the more shocking, to me. I was outraged, outraged to see the two of them together there, she with her hand resting so lightly on his shoulder, in the midst of all that homeliness, that shared, familiar world, while I stood by as if forgotten. Whatever liberties Mrs Gray might grant me I would never be as near to her as Billy was at that moment, as he always had been and always would be, at every moment. I could only get into her from the outside, but he, he had sprung from a seed and grown inside her, and even after he had shouldered his brute way out of her he was still flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are the things I thought, exactly, but I had the gist of them, and suddenly, in that moment, I was sorely pained. There was no one and nothing that would not make me jealous; jealousy crouched inside me like a bristling, green-eyed cat, ready to spring at the slightest provocation, real or, more often, imagined.

  She had Billy take up the remaining slices of plum-cake on its plate and a big bottle of lemonade and, bearing an imbricated array of banana sandwiches on a wooden tray, went after him out of the kitchen. Was there a swing door? Yes, there was: she stopped and held it ajar with her knee and cast back at me a grimful sort of glance that had in it both reproof and pardon, inviting me wordlessly to follow her. I gave her a sulky scowl and turned aside, and heard the spring make its comical, rubbery sound—boing-g-g!—as she let go the door and it swung shut, releasing as it did so a final creak and then a heavy after-sigh.

  Left alone, I lingered moodily by the table, glaring at the tin tray of cooling fairy cakes. All was still. Even the hoydens had gone quiet, temporarily silenced, it must be, by banana sandwiches and glasses of lemon pop. Winter sunlight—no, no, it was summer, for heaven’s sake keep up!—summer sunlight, calm, and heavy as honey, was shining in the window beside the fridge, which was silent too. Mrs Gray had left a kettle of water on the stove, grumbling to itself over a low flame. It was one of those conical-shaped whistling kettles that were so popular then and that one hardly ever sees nowadays, when everyone has given in to the electric kettle. The whistle was not on it, though, and from the stubby spout a broad slow column of steam was rising, dense with the sunlight in it and lazily undulant, and curling on itself in an elegant scroll at its topmost reach. When I made to approach the stove something of my own dense aura must have gone before me and this charmed cobra of steam leaned delicately away, as if in vague alarm; I paused, and it righted itself, and when I moved again it moved, too, as before. So we stood wavering there, this friendly wraith and I, held in tremulous equilibrium by the heavy air of summer, and all unexpectedly and for no reason I could think of, a slow burst of happiness enveloped me, a happiness without weight or object, like the simple sunlight itself in the window.

  When I did return to the party, however, this bright and blissful glow was clouded on the instant by the unexpected arrival of Mr Gray. He had left his assistant in charge of the shop—a Miss Flushing; I shall get round to her presently, if I have the heart for it—and had come home bringing Kitty’s birthday present. Tall, thin, angular, he stood in the kitchen amidst a pool of little girls, like one of those poles that stick up crookedly out of the lagoon at Venice. He had a remarkably small and disproportionate head, which gave one the illusion that one was always farther off from him than was in fact the case. He wore a bedraggled, pale-brown linen jacket and brown corduroy bags and suede shoes scuffed about the toecaps. The bow-ties that he favoured were an affectation even in those archaic days, and represented the only mark of colour or character that I could discern in the otherwise washed-out aspect that he presented to the world. Spurning what must have been a shopful of styles and makes of frame, he chose to wear cheap, steel-rimmed spectacles, which he would remo
ve slowly, holding them delicately at one hinge between a thumb and two fingers, as if they were pince-nez, and closing his eyes he would slowly massage with the first two fingers and thumb of his other hand the knotted flesh at the bridge of his nose, sighing the while to himself. Mr Gray’s soft sighs sounded at once imprecatory and resigned, like the prayers offered up by a minister who has long ago given in to religious doubts. He had about him permanently an air of troubled inadequacy, seeming incompetent to deal with the practicalities of everyday life. This dim distressfulness had the effect of rallying ministrators around him. People always seemed to be pressing forwards anxiously to aid him, to smooth his way, to make straight his path, to lift an invisible burden from his sloping shoulders. Even Kitty and her friends as they gathered about him now had a hushed and helping aspect. Mrs Gray, too, was solicitous, as she handed to him over the heads of the children his after-work half-inch of whiskey in a cut-glass tumbler, perhaps the very tumbler that I used to drink from with Billy, upstairs, and from which afterwards I would guiltily wipe my fingerprints with a less than clean hankie. How tired was the smile of thanks he gave to her, how weary seemed the hand with which he put the drink down on the table behind him, untasted.

  And maybe, indeed, he was ill. Do I not recall hushed talk of doctors and hospitals after the Grays’ flight from our midst? At the time, sunk in bitter sorrow, I thought it must be just the town as usual spinning a story to cover over for decency’s sake a scandal the initial revelation of which had delighted so many. But maybe I was wrong, maybe all along he was suffering from some chronic ailment that was brought to crisis by the discovery of what his wife and I had been up to. That is an unsettling thought, or should be, anyway.

  Kitty’s birthday gift was a microscope—she was supposed to have a scientific bent—yet another cost-price item, I spitefully surmise, from Gray’s the Optician. A sumptuous instrument it was, though, matt-black and solid where it stood on its single, semi-circular foot, the barrel silky and cold to the touch, the little winding-nut so smooth in action, the lens so small yet giving on to so magnified a version of the world. I coveted it, of course. I was particularly taken by the box it came in, and in which it would live when not in use. It was made of pale polished wood hardly heavier than balsa, dove-tailed at the corners—what a tiny blade such fine work must have called for!—and had a lid, with a thumbnail-shaped notch in it, that slid open lengthways along two waxed grooves in the sides. It was fitted within with a wonderfully delicate set of tiny trestles, carved from wafer-thin plywood, on which the instrument lay snugly on its back, like a doted-on black baby asleep in its custom-made crib. Kitty was delighted, and with a beadily possessive light in her eye took it off into a corner to gloat over it, while her friends, suddenly forgotten, stood about in leporine uncertainty.

  Now I was torn between envying Kitty and keeping a jealous watch on Mrs Gray as she attended to her husband, home wan and weary from the day’s breadwinning. His arrival had affected the atmosphere, the wild party spirit had drained from the air, and the guests, sobered and subdued and disregarded still by their undersized hostess, were getting ready in their bedraggled way to go home. Mr Gray, folding his long frame as if it were a delicate piece of geometrical equipment, a calipers, say, or a big wooden compass, sat down in the old armchair beside the stove. This chair, his chair, covered with a worn, pilled fabric that resembled mouse-fur, seemed wearier even than its occupant, sagging badly in the seat as it was and leaning drunkenly at one corner where a castor was missing. Mrs Gray brought the whiskey glass from the table and once again pressed it on her husband, more tenderly this time, and again he thanked her with his invalid’s dolorous smile. Then she stood back, her hands clasped under her bosom, and contemplated him with a worriedly helpless air. This was how it always seemed to be between them, he at the end of some vital resource that only the greatest effort would replenish, and she anxiously eager to aid him but at a loss to know how.

  Where is Billy? I have lost track of Billy. How—I ask it again—how did he not see what was going on between his mother and me? How did they all not see? Yet the answer is simple. They saw what they expected to see and did not see what they did not expect. Anyway, why do I exclaim so? I am sure that I for my part was no more perspicacious than they were. That kind of myopia is endemic.

  The attitude that Mr Gray displayed towards me was curious—that is to say, it was strange, for certainly it betrayed no trace of interest. His eye would fall on me, would roll over me, rather, like an oiled ball-bearing, registering nothing, or so I believed. He never seemed quite to recognise me. Perhaps, with his poor eyesight, he imagined it was a different person he was seeing each time I appeared in the house, a succession of Billy’s friends all inexplicably similar in appearance. Or perhaps he was afraid I was someone he was supposed to know perfectly well, a family relation, a cousin of the children’s, say, who came on frequent visits and whose exact identity he was at this late stage too embarrassed to enquire into. For all I know he may have thought I was a second son, Billy’s brother, whom he had unaccountably forgotten about and now must accept without comment. I do not think I was singled out particularly for his lack of attention. As far as I could see he looked upon the world in general with the same slightly puzzled, slightly worried, fogged-over gaze, his bow-tie askew and his long, bony, twig-like fingers moving over the surface of things in feeble, fruitless interrogation.

  We had an assignation that evening, the evening of Kitty’s party, Mrs Gray and I. Assignation: that is a word I like, suggestive as it is of the velvet cloak and tricorn hat, the fluttering fan, the bosom heaving under tautened satin; I fear our circumspect outings had little of such flash and dash. How did she manage to slip away, with so many chores to be done in the aftermath of the party?—in those days women cleared up and washed the dishes without expectation of help or thought of protest. In fact, it galls me that I do not know how she managed any of our desperate liaison, or how she got away with it for as long as she did. Our luck held remarkably, given the dangers we ran. I was not the only one who tweaked the love god’s nose. Mrs Gray herself took foolhardy risks. As it happened, that was the very evening we ventured together for a stroll on the boardworks. It was her idea. I had been expecting, indeed warmly anticipating, that we would do on this occasion what we always did when we managed to be alone together, but when she arrived at our meeting place on the road above the hazel wood she had me get into the station wagon and drove off at once, and would not answer when I asked where we were going. I asked again, more plaintively, more whiningly, and still getting no response I lapsed into a sulk. I should confess that sulking was my chief weapon against her, nasty little tyke that I was, and I employed it with the skill and niceness of judgement that only a boy as heartless as I would have been capable of. She would resist me for as long as she was able, as I fumed in silence with my arms clamped across my chest and my chin jammed on my collar-bone and my lower lip stuck out a good inch, but always it was she who gave in, in the end. This time she held out until, rattling along by the river, we had passed the entrance to the tennis club. ‘You’re so selfish,’ she burst out then, but laughing, as if it were an undeserved compliment. ‘Honest to God, you have no idea.’

  At this of course I became at once indignant. How could she say such a thing of me, who for her sake risked the ire of Church, State and my mother? Did I not treat her as the sovereign of my heart, did I not indulge her every whim? So wrought was I that anger and self-righteousness formed a hot lump in my throat, and even if I had been willing to I would not have been able to speak.

  It was June, midsummer, the time of endless evenings and white nights. Who can imagine what it was like to be a boy and loved in such of the world’s weather? What I was still too young to recognise, or acknowledge, was that even at its glorious height the year was already poised to wane. Had I given time and time’s vanishings their due it would perhaps have accounted for the prick of indefinite sor
row in my heart. But I was young, and there was no end in sight, no end to anything, and the sadness of summer was no more than a faint bloom, of a delicate cobweb shade, on the cheek of love’s ripe and gleaming apple.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Mrs Gray said.

  Well, why not? The simplest, the most innocent thing in the world, you would think. But consider. Our little town was a panopticon patrolled by warders whose vigilance never flagged. True, there should not have been much to remark in the sight of a respectably married woman strolling along the quayside in the broad light of a summer evening in the company of a boy who was her son’s best friend—not much, that is, for an observer of an averagely unspeculative and unsuspicious disposition, but the town and everyone in it had an unregenerately filthy mind that never ceased computing, and by putting one and one together was always sure to come up with an illicit two, clasped and panting in each other’s guilty arms.

  That outwardly blameless promenade along the boardworks—the local name for this construction—constituted, I believe, the most audacious and rashest risk we ever took, aside from the final risk, had we but known it as such, that led precipitately to our ruin. We had come to the harbour and Mrs Gray parked the station wagon on the clinkered verge beside the railway line—the railway ran along the boardworks, a single track, a thing for which our town was noted, and is to this day, for all I know—and we got out, I sulking still and Mrs Gray humming to herself in a pretence of not noticing my surly glare. With one hand she reached quickly behind and plucked the seat of her dress free at the back in that way that every time she did it provoked in me an inward gasp of agonised desire. The air over the sea was still, and the water, high and motionless, had a thin floating of oil from the moored coal-boats, that gave it the look of a sheet of red-hot steel suddenly gone cool, aswirl with iridescent shades of silver-pink and emerald and a lovely lucent brittle blue, shimmery as the sheen on a peacock feather. We were not by any means the only promenaders. There were quite a few couples out, ambling dreamily arm in arm in the late soft glow of the evening’s immemorial sunlight. Perhaps, after all, no one so much as noticed us, or paid us the slightest heed. A guilty heart sees glancing eyes and knowing grins on every side.