Ancient Light

by John Banville

  Then the rattly lift, the vermiform corridors, the crunch of the key in the lock and a stale sigh of air released out of the shadowed room. The muttering porter with his stooped back went ahead and placed the bags just so at the foot of the big square bed that had a hollow in the middle of it and looked as if generations of porters, this one’s predecessors, had been born in it. How accusingly a suitcase once set down can seem to look at one. I could hear Dawn Devonport next door making many mysterious small noises, clinks and knocks and softly suggestive rustlings as she unpacked her bags. Then there came that moment of mild panic when the clothes had been hung, the shoes stowed, the shaving things set out on the bathroom’s marble shelf, where someone’s forgotten cigarette had left a burned stain, a black smear with amber edges. Down in the street a car swished past, and the flare of its head-lamps poked a pencil-ray of yellow light through a chink in the curtains that probed the room from one side to the other before being swiftly withdrawn. Upstairs a lavatory gulped and swallowed, and in response the drain in the bathroom here, getting into the spirit, made a deep-throated sound that might have been a gurgle of lewd laughter.

  Downstairs, a humming quiet reigned. I paced on soundless feet over the carpet’s coarse pelt. The restaurant was closed; dimly through the glass I saw the many chairs standing on their tables, as if they had leaped up there in fright of something on the floor. The fellow at the desk mentioned the possibility of room service, though sounding doubtful. Fosco, he was called, so I was told by a tag on his lapel, Ercole Fosco. This name seemed a portent, though I could not say of what. Ercole Fosco. He was the night manager. I liked the look of him. Middle-aged, greying at the temples, heavy-jowled and somewhat sallow in complexion—Albert Einstein in his pre-iconic middle years. His soft brown eyes reminded me a little of Mrs Gray’s. His manner was touched with melancholy, though it was reassuring, too; he reminded me of one of those unmarried uncles who used to appear with gifts at Christmas time when I was a child. I dawdled at the desk, trying to find something to talk to him about, but could think of nothing. He smiled apologetically and made a little fist—what small hands he had—and put it to his mouth and coughed into it, those soft eyes sagging at the outer corners. I could see I was making him nervous, and wondered why. I thought him perhaps not a native of these parts, for he had a northern look—Turin, perhaps, capital of magic, or Milan, or Bergamo, or even somewhere farther off, beyond the Alps. He asked, on a weary note, mechanically, if my room was to my satisfaction. I told him it was. ‘And the signora, she is satisfied?’ I said yes, yes, the signora also was satisfied. We were both very satisfied, very happy. He made a little bow of acknowledgement, bobbing to one side so that it seemed he was not so much bowing as shrugging. I wondered idly if my manner and movements seemed as foreign to him as his seemed to me.

  I went and stood inside the front door and looked out through the glass. It was deeply dark out there, in the gap between two street-lights, and the snow appeared almost black, falling rapidly straight down in big wet flakes, in a softly murmurous silence. Perhaps the ferries to Portovenere would not be plying at this time of year, in this weather—that was a subject I could have talked about to Ercole the night manager—perhaps I would have to go by road, back through La Spezia and out by the coast. It was a long way, and on the road there were many twists and bends above ragged cliffs. What a thing it would be for Lydia to hear of, her husband dashed to pieces against rocks on the way to where her daughter had died in similar fashion, in other circumstances.

  When I moved, somehow my reflection in the glass did not move with me. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw that it was not my reflection I was seeing, but that there was someone out there, facing me. Where had he appeared from, how had he come to be there? It was as if he had materialised on the instant. He was not wearing an overcoat, and had no hat, or umbrella. I could not quite make out his features. I stood back and pulled the door open for him, it made a sucking sound, and the night bounded in like an animal, agile and eager, with cold air trapped in its fur. The man entered. There was snow on his shoulders, and he stamped his feet on the carpet, first one, then the other, three times each. He gave me a keen, a measuring, look. He was a young man, with a high, domed forehead. Or perhaps, I thought on second glance, perhaps he was not young, for his neatly trimmed beard was grizzled and there were fine wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. He wore spectacles with thin frames and oval-shaped lenses, which lent him a vaguely scholarly appearance. We stood there for a moment, facing each other—confronting each other, I was going to say—just as we had a moment ago but with no glass between us now. His expression was one of scepticism tempered with humour. ‘Cold,’ he said, fitting his lips around the word in a wine-taster’s pout. He spoke as if there were some small hindrance in his mouth, a seed or stone, that he must keep manoeuvring his tongue around. Had I already seen him somewhere? I seemed to know him, but how could I?

  In the days when I was still working, in the theatre, I mean, for the duration of a run I did not dream. That is, I must have, since we are told the mind cannot be idle, even in sleep, but if I did dream I forgot what I dreamed about. Strutting and prating on stage five nights a week and twice on Saturdays must have fulfilled whatever the function is that dreaming otherwise performs for us. When I retired, though, my nights turned to riot, and more often than not I would wake of a morning in a sweaty tangle, panting and exhausted, having endured long and torturous passages through a chamber of horrors, or a tunnel of love, or sometimes both combined, tumbling helplessly headlong through all manner of grotesque calamities, and with no trousers on, as often as not, my shirttails flapping and my backside on show. Nowadays, ironically, one of my most frequent nightmares—those ungovernable steeds—carries me irresistibly back on stage and dumps me again at the footlights. I am playing in some grand drama or impossibly intricate comedy, and I dry in the middle of a lengthy speech. This did happen to me, famously, in real life, I mean waking life—I was playing Kleist’s Amphitryon—and it brought my theatrical career to an abrupt and inglorious end. It was odd, that lapse, for I had a remarkable memory, in my prime, it may even have been what is called a photographic memory. My method of learning off lines was to fix the text itself, I mean the very pages, as a series of images in my head, to be read and recited from. The terror of this particular dream, though, is that on the pages I have memorised, the text, so black and sharp one moment, the next begins to decay and crumble before my mind’s, my sleeping mind’s, desperately squinting eye. At first I am not greatly worried, convinced that I will be able to recall sufficient portions of the speech to bluff my way through it, or that if worse comes to worst I can improvise the entire thing. However, the audience soon realises that something is going badly awry, while the rest of the actors on stage with me—there is a milling crowd of them—suddenly finding a corpse in their midst, begin to fidget and to throw big-eyed looks at each other. What is to be done? I try to get round the audience, to win it over, by adopting a cravenly ingratiating manner, smiling and lisping, shrugging my shoulders and mopping my brow, frowning at my feet, peering up into the flies, all the while inching sideways towards the blessed shelter of the wings. A horrible comedy attaches to all this, a comedy that is all the more distressing in that it has nothing to do with stage business. Indeed, this is the very essence of the nightmare, that all theatrical pretence has been stripped away, and with it all protection. The scraps of costume that cling to me have become transparent, or as good as, and I am there, bare and exposed, in front of me a packed and increasingly restive house and at my back a cast that would happily kill me if it could and make of me a real corpse. The first catcalls are rising as I start awake, and find myself huddled around myself piteously in the middle of a disordered, hot and sweat-soaked bed.

  There was someone at the door. There was someone pounding at the door. I did not know where I was, and lay palpitant and motionless like a hunted criminal cowering in a ditch. I was on
my side, one arm in a cramp under me and the other thrown up as if to shield myself from assault. At the window the gauze curtains were yellowly aglow, and behind them there was a rapid and general downward undulation, which I could not understand or identify, until I remembered the snow. Whoever was at the door had stopped hammering, and instead seemed to be pressed against it, making a low keening sound that buzzed against the wood. I got up from the bed. The room was cold and yet I was sweating, and had to step through a miasma of my own fetor. At the door I hesitated, a hand on the knob. I had not switched on a lamp and the only illumination in the room was provided by the sulphurous glow of the street-light through the curtains behind me. I opened the door. At first I thought that someone in the hall had hurled an item of flimsy clothing at me, for the impression I had was the chill, shivery slither of something silken, with no one, it seemed, inside it. Then Dawn Devonport’s fingers were scrabbling at my wrist, and all at once she materialised within her nightdress, trembling and panting and redolent of night and terror.

  She could not say what was the matter. Indeed, she could hardly speak. Was it a dream, I asked, an actor’s nightmare, perhaps, like the one her pounding at the door had woken me from? No—she had not been asleep. She had felt some vast thing in the room with her, a knowing, malignant and invisible presence. I led her to the bed and switched on the lamp on the table beside it. She sat with her head bowed and her hair hanging down and her hands resting lax on her thighs with the palms turned up. Her nightdress was made of pearl-grey satin, so fine and thin that I could have counted the links of her spine. I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders, and it was only then I noticed that I was still fully dressed—I must have come in and crawled on to the bed and fallen asleep straight off. What was I to do, now, with this shivering creature, who in her night attire seemed more naked than she would have been without it, so that I hardly dared to lay a hand on her? She said I did not have to do anything, only let her stay for a minute, until whatever it was had passed. She did not look up when she spoke, but sat as before, abject and trembling, with her head hanging and her hands turned helplessly up and the exposed pale back of her neck gleaming in the light of the bedside lamp.

  How strange a thing it is, the immediate and intimate proximity of another. Or is it only I who think it strange? Perhaps for others others are not other at all, or at any rate not as they are for me. For me, there are two modes of otherness only, that of the loved one or of the stranger, and the former is hardly other, but more an extension of myself. For this state of affairs I believe I have Mrs Gray to thank, or blame. She took me into her arms so early on that there was not time for me to learn the laws of proper perspective. She being so close, the rest inevitably were pushed disproportionately farther off. Here I pause a moment to consider. Is this really the case, or am I indulging in that sophistry which from earliest days has bedevilled me? But how can I know if I am? I feel it to be so, that Mrs Gray was the original and, to an extent, abiding arbiter in my relations with other people, and no effort of thought, however extended or intense, will convince me otherwise. Even if I were to coerce myself into a contrary opinion by the force of thinking, feeling would still feel itself in the right, and be an ever-present, disgruntled rump, ready to assert its claim at every smallest opportunity. Such are the speculations a man will indulge in when in the snowy small hours of the morning many miles from hearth and home he finds himself unexpectedly entertaining in his hotel room a famous and notoriously beautiful film star wearing nothing but her nightie.

  I got her to lie down on my unfragrantly sweaty bed—she was so limp I had to put a hand behind her ankles and help her to lift her chilly feet from the floor—and spread the blanket over her. She still had my jacket around her shoulders. It was apparent that she was even yet not entirely awake, and I was reminded of Lydia when she goes flying through the house on her frantic nocturnal quests for our lost daughter; is this the only role there is to be for me now, a comforter of driven and afflicted women? I drew a rush-bottomed chair to the bed and sat down to consider my position, here with this young woman whom I hardly knew, sleepless and harried, on this wintry shore. Yet there was something starting up too at the base of my spine, a hot trickle of secret excitement. When I was a boy, after Meg the doll but long before the advent of Mrs Gray, I used to entertain a recurring fantasy in which I was required to attend to certain cosmetic requirements of a grown-up woman. The woman was never specific but generic, woman in the abstract, I suppose, the celebrated Ewig-Weibliche. It was all very innocent, in action, at least, for I was not called upon to do more than administer to this imaginary idol a thorough hair-wash, say, or buff her fingernails, or, in exceptional circumstances, apply her lipstick—this last no easy feat, by the way, as I was to find out later on when I got Mrs Gray to let me have a go at her gorgeously pulpy, unfixable mouth with one of those sticks of crimson wax that always look to me like a brass cartridge case in which is embedded a surreally soft and glistening scarlet bullet. What I felt now, here in this dingy hotel room, was something of the same mildly tumescent pleasure that I used to enjoy all those years ago when I imagined assisting my phantom lady at her toilet.

  ‘Tell me,’ my unlooked-for visitor asked now, in an urgent whisper, breathlessly, opening wide those slightly hazed grey eyes of hers, ‘tell me what happened to your daughter.’

  She was lying on her back with her hands folded on her breast and her head turned sideways towards me and her cheek crushing the lapel of my jacket underneath her. She has a way, I have come to know it by now, of speaking out suddenly like this, suddenly and softly, when least expected, and it is the suddenness that confers on what she says an oracular quality, so that her words, no matter how mundane or inconsequential they might be, generate an archaic throb. I presume this is a trick she has learned from her years before the camera. A film set does have, it is true, something of the airless intensity of the shrine of a sibyl. There, in that cave of hot light, with the mike at the end of its boom dangling over our heads and the crew fixed on us from the shadows like a circle of hushed suppliants, we might be forgiven for imagining that the lines we recite are the utterances, transmitted through us, of the riddling god himself.

  I told her that I did not know what had happened to my daughter, except that she had died. I told her how Cass used to hear voices, and said perhaps they had driven her to it, the voices, as often is the case, so I understand, with those whose minds are damaged and who are led to damage themselves. I was remarkably calm, I might even say detached, as if the circumstances—the anonymous hotel room, the lateness of the hour, this young woman’s unwavering, grave regard—had at a stroke, and so simply, released or at any rate paroled me from the toils of the ten-year-long pact of restraint and reticence that I had made with Cass’s spirit. Anything might be spoken here, it seemed, any thought might be summoned up and freely expressed. Dawn Devonport waited, her great eyes fixed on me unblinking. There had been, I told her, someone with my daughter. ‘And so,’ she said, ‘you have come back here, to find out who it was.’

  I frowned at that, and looked away from her. How yellow was the lamplight, how thickly beyond it the shadows thronged. In the window behind the web of curtain the heavy wet flakes fell down, fell down.

  Her name for him, I said measuredly, whoever he was, was Svidrigailov. She reached a hand from under the blanket and laid it lightly, briefly, on one of mine, more in restraint, it seemed, than encouragement. Her touch was cool and curiously impersonal; she might have been a nurse testing my temperature, taking my pulse. ‘She was pregnant, you see,’ I said.

  Had I told her that already? I could not recall.

  That was, to my faint surprise, the end of our exchange, for like a child satisfied with only the opening of a goodnight story Dawn Devonport sighed and turned her face away and slept, or pretended to. I waited, not moving for fear of making the chair creak and causing her to have to wake up again. In the quiet I f
ancied I could hear the snow falling outside, a faint susurrus that yet bespoke unstinting labour and muffled suffering steadfastly endured. How the world works on, uncomplaining, no matter what, doing what it has to do. I was, I realised, at peace. My mind seemed bathed in a pool of limpid darkness that acted on me like a balm. Not since the far-off days of Father Priest and the confessional had I felt so lightened and—what?—shorn? I looked at the phone on the bedside table and it occurred to me to call Lydia, but it was too late at night, and anyway I did not know what it might be that I would say to her.

  I stood up cautiously and eased my jacket from under the sleeping young woman and put the chair away and took up my key and left the room. As I was closing the door I glanced back at the bed under its low canopy of lamplight, but there was no movement to be seen, and no sound save that of Dawn Devonport steadily breathing. Was she, too, at peace for the moment, for a moment?

  The corridor had its hush. I shied from the lift—its narrow double doors of dented stainless steel gave off a sinister shine—and took the stairs instead. They delivered me to an area of the lobby that I did not know, with a lavish palm in a pot and a cigarette-dispensing machine, as big as an upright sarcophagus, with a darkly opalescent shimmer down its side, and for a moment I lost my bearings entirely and experienced a flicker of panic. I turned this way and that, swivelling on a heel, and at last located the reception desk, off beyond that dusty splurge of palm fronds. Ercole the night manager was there, or at least his head was, in profile, for that was all of him I could see, resting so it seemed on the counter, behind a plate of boiled sweets. I thought of Salome’s grisly prize on a platter. Those sweets, by the way, are a convention left over from the days of the old currency, when they were offered in place of pocketfuls of negligible change. The things I retain, memory’s worthless coin.