Ancient Light

by John Banville

  We left the café and walked up through the narrow streets of the town. In the hotel the lounge was deserted and we went in there. It was a cramped room with a high ceiling, very like the parlour in my mother’s lodging-house, with its shadows and its silence and its vague but indispersible air of ill-content. I sat on a sort of sofa with a low back and a high-sprung seat; the upholstery smelt strongly of immemorial cigarette smoke. A grandfather clock, its toiling innards on show through an oval glass panel in its front, stood in a corner sentry-straight and ticked and tocked with ponderous deliberation, seeming to hesitate an instant before each tock and tick. The centre of the room was occupied by a high and somehow overbearing dining-table made of black wood, with stout carven legs, on which was spread a cloth of heavy brocade that hung low over the sides and was edged with tassels. On it the busy set designer had placed, of all things, and as if all so artlessly, an antique volume of the poems of Leopardi, with marbled edges and a tooled leather spine, in which I tried to read—

  Dove vai? chi ti chiama

  Lunge dai cari tuoi,

  Belissima donzella?

  Sola, peregrinando, il patrio tetto

  Sì per tempo abbandoni? …

  —but the poetry’s gorgeous sonorities and sobbing cadences soon defeated me, and I put the book back where I had taken it from and returned to my seat creakingly, like a chided schoolboy. Dawn Devonport sat in a narrow armchair in a corner opposite the grandfather clock, leaning forwards tensely with her legs crossed, flipping rapidly and, as it seemed, contemptuously through the pages of a glossy magazine in her lap. She was smoking a cigarette, and after each puff, without turning her head, she would twist up her mouth as if to whistle and shoot out a thin jet of smoke sideways. I studied her. Often it seems to me the closer I come to a person the farther off I am. How is that, I wonder? I used to watch Mrs Gray like that when we were in bed together, and would feel her grow distant even as she lay beside me, just as sometimes, disconcertingly, a word will detach itself from its object and float away, weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble.

  Abruptly Dawn Devonport tossed the magazine on to the table—how flabbily the heavy pages flopped—and rose and said she would go to her room and lie down. She lingered a moment and looked at me strangely, with what seemed a strange surmise. ‘I suppose you think he was Svidrigailov,’ she said, ‘Axel Vander—you think he was him.’ She made herself shiver, wincing as if she had tasted something sour, and went out.

  I sat on there alone for a long time. I was remembering—or I am remembering now, it does not matter which—Mrs Gray talking to me one day about dying. Where were we? In Cotter’s place? No, somewhere else. But where else was there that we could have been? Bizarrely, my memory places us in that upstairs living room where Billy and I used to drink his father’s whiskey. Surely it is not possible, yet that is where I see us. But how would she have managed to smuggle me into the house, under what pretext, and for what purpose?—certainly not the accustomed one, given that we were in the living room, with our clothes on, and not down in the laundry room. I have a picture in my mind of the two of us sitting very properly in two armchairs set close to each other at an angle opposite the rectangular window with the metal frames. It was a Sunday morning, I believe, a late-summer Sunday morning, and I was wearing a tweed suit in which I was hot and itchy, and in which I felt ridiculous, more nearly naked than clothed, as I always did when I was made to put on my Sunday best. Where were the others, Billy and his sister and Mr Gray? What can have been going on? I must have been there for a reason; Billy and I must have been going somewhere, on a school outing, maybe, and he was late as always and I was waiting for him. But would I have called for him, given that now I was devoting so much energy and ingenuity to avoiding him? Anyway, I was there, that is all there is to say. The sun was shining full upon the square outside and everything out there seemed made of vari-coloured glass, and a playful breeze was filling the lace curtain at the open window and making it billow inwards and upwards in ever-swelling languor. I always had a strong sense of estrangement on those Sunday mornings when I was young—the noose-like feel of my shirt collar, the birds at their excited business, those far church-bells—and there was always an air that seemed to waft from the south, yes, the south, with its lion-coloured dust and lemon glare. No doubt it was the future I was anticipating, the shimmering promise of it, for the future for me always had a southern aspect, which is strange to think of now, now that the future is arrived, up here in Ultima Thule, arrived and steadily pouring through the pinhole of the present, into the past.

  Mrs Gray was dressed in a rather severe blue suit—a costume, she would have called it—and wore black shoes with high heels, seamed stockings, a pearl necklace. Her hair was done differently from usual, swept back in some way that even managed to subdue for the moment that wayward curl at her ear, and she smelt as my mother did, as I suppose everyone’s mother did, on Sunday mornings in summer, of scent and cold cream and face powder, of sweat, a little, of flesh-warm nylon and faintly mothbally wool, and of something vaguely ashen, too, that I was never able to identify. The jacket of her suit was fashionably high at the shoulders and tightly nipped at the waist—she must have been wearing a corset—and the calf-length skirt was narrow, with a slit at the back. I had not seen her dressed so formally before, so rigidly, all interestingly pinned and pent, and I sat surveying her with an impudent and, it might almost be, an uxorial sense of possession. It is a scene from one of those women’s pictures of the day, of course, the kind that Mrs Gray did not like, for I see it in black-and-white, or charcoal-and-silver, rather, she in the Older Woman role while I am played by, oh, some boy wonder with a cheeky grin and a quiff, as pert as you please in my neat tweed suit and starched white shirt and striped, clip-on tie.

  At first I did not absorb what it was she was talking about, distracted as I was in studying the complicated system of seams—darts, I believe they are called—in the wonderfully full bosom of her dress, the brittle blue material of which had an excitingly metallic burnish, and made tiny crackling sounds with each breath she took. She had turned her head away and was looking pensively towards the window and the sunlit square, and was saying, with a finger to her cheek, how she wondered sometimes what it would be like not to be here—would it be like being under an anaesthetic, maybe, with no sense of anything, not even of time passing?—and how hard it was to imagine being somewhere else, and how harder still it was to think of not being anywhere at all. Slowly her words filtered their way into the inilluminable dimness of my self-regarding consciousness, until, with a sort of click, I understood, or thought I understood, exactly what she was saying, and suddenly I was all ears. Not to be here? To be somewhere else? What was all this, surely, but a roundabout way of letting me know that she was preparing to have done with me? Now, at other times, should the barest suspicion have entered my head that she was hinting at any such thing, I would straight away have set to whining and howling and drumming my fists, for I was a child still, remember, with all a child’s conviction of the imperative need for an instant, tearful and clamorous response to even the mildest threat to my well-being. That day, however, and for whatever reason, I bided, warily, watchfully, and let her talk on until, perhaps sensing the vigilant quality of my attentiveness, she paused, and turned, and focused in that way she did, seeming to swivel and train on me an invisible telescope. ‘Do you ever think of it,’ she asked, ‘dying?’ Before I could answer she laughed self-disparagingly and shook her head. ‘But of course you don’t,’ she said. ‘Why would you?’

  Now my interest switched on to another track. If she was really talking about death as death and not as a hint that she was leaving me, then she must be talking about Mr Gray. The possibility that her husband was mortally ill had been taking an ever-strengthening hold on my imagination, with a consequent bolstering of my hopes of securing Mrs Gray for myself on a long-term basis. If t
he old boy were to croak, there at last and gloriously would be my chance. I must not make a move precipitately, of course. We would have to wait, the two of us, until I was of age, and even then there would be obstacles, Kitty and my mother not the least of them, while Billy would hardly warm to the grotesque prospect of having for his stepfather a boy of his own age, and a sometime best friend, at that. In the interval, however, while we were anticipating my majority, what opportunities would offer themselves for me to fulfil my childhood dream of having not a bald and inarticulated doll to cuddle and care for and operate on, but a full-sized, warm-blooded, safely widowed woman all of my own, accessible to me all day and every day, and, more momentously, every night, too, a prized possession that I might show off boldly to the world, whenever and wherever I pleased. So now I sharpened my ears and listened keenly to whatever else she might have to add on the subject of her husband’s prospective demise. Alas, she would say nothing more, and seemed abashed, indeed, by what she had already said, and short of asking straight out how long the doctors had given the purblind optician I could get nothing further out of her.

  But what was I doing there, in her living room, in my scratchy suit, on a Sunday, in the dying days of that summer—what? So often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing.

  Although I grew up in that world of transience and hidden presences, and married a woman who grew up there too, I still find hotels uncanny, not only in the stillness of the night but in the daytime, too. At mid-morning, especially, something sinister always seems to be afoot under cover of that fake, hothouse calm. The receptionist behind the desk is one I have not seen before, and gives me a blank look as I drift past and does not smile or offer a word of greeting. In the deserted dining room all the tables are set, the gleaming cutlery and the sparkling napery laid out just so, like an operating theatre where multiple surgical procedures will presently be carried out. Upstairs, the corridor buzzes with a breathless, tight-lipped intent. I pass along it soundlessly, a disembodied eye, a moving lens. The doors, all identical, a receding double procession of them, have the look of having been slammed smartly shut one after another a second before I stepped out of the lift. What can be going on behind them? The sounds that filter out, a querulous word, a cough, a snatch of low laughter, seem each the beginning of a plea or a tirade that is cut short at once by an unheard slap, or a hand clapped over a mouth. There is a smell of last night’s cigarettes, of cold breakfast coffee, of faeces and shower soap and shaving balm. And that big trolley thing abandoned there, stacked with folded sheets and pillow-cases and with a bucket and a mop hooked on at the back, where is the chambermaid who should be in charge of it, what has become of her?

  I stood outside Dawn Devonport’s door for fully a minute before knocking, and even then I barely brushed my knuckles against the wood. There was no response from within. Was she sleeping again? I tried the knob. The door was not locked. I opened it an inch and waited again, listening, and then stepped into the room, or insinuated myself, rather, slipping in sideways without a sound, and closed the door carefully behind me, holding my breath as the catch caught. The curtains were not drawn and although the air was chill there was more brightness than I had expected, almost a summer radiance, with a broad beam of sunlight angling down from a corner of the window, like a spot, and the net curtain a blaze of gauzy whiteness. Everything was tidied and orderly—that missing maid had been in here, anyway—and the bed might not have been slept in. Dawn Devonport lay on top of the covers, on her side again, with a hand under her cheek and her knees drawn up. I noticed how shallow an indentation in the mattress her body made, so light is she and how little of her there is. She still had her coat on, the fur collar making an oval frame for her face. She was looking at me from where she lay, those grey eyes of hers turned up to me, larger and wider than ever. Was she frightened, had I alarmed her by sliding into the room in that sinuous and sinister way? Or was she just drugged? Without lifting her head she extended her free hand to me. I clambered on to the bed, shoes and all, and lay down, face to her face, our knees touching; her eyes seemed larger than ever. ‘Hold on to me,’ she murmured. ‘I feel as if I’m falling, all the time.’ She drew back the wing of her coat and I moved closer and put my arm over her, inside her coat. Her breath was cool on my face and her eyes were almost all I could see now. I felt her ribs under my wrist, and her heart beating. ‘Imagine I’m your daughter,’ she said. ‘Pretend I am.’

  So we remained for some time, there on the bed, in the cold, sunlit room. I felt as if I were gazing into a mirror. Her hand lay lightly, a bird’s claw, on my arm. She talked about her father, how good he had been, how cheerful, and how he would sing to her when she was little. ‘Silly songs, he sang,’ she said, ‘“Yes, We Have No Bananas”, “Roll Out the Barrel”, that sort of thing.’ One year he had been elected Pearly King of the Cockneys. ‘Have you ever seen the Pearly King? He was so pleased with himself, in that ridiculous suit—he even had pearls on his cap—and I was so ashamed I hid in the cupboard under the stairs and wouldn’t come out. And Mum was Pearly Queen.’ She cried a little, then wiped at the tears impatiently with the heel of a hand. ‘Stupid,’ she said, ‘stupid.’

  I withdrew my arm and we sat up. She swung her legs off the bed but remained sitting on the side of it, with her back turned to me, and lit a cigarette. I lay down again, propped on an elbow, and watched the lavender smoke curling and coiling upwards into the shaft of sunlight at the window. She was crouching forwards now, with her knees crossed and an elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand. I watched her, the slope of her back and the set of her shoulders and the outline of her shoulder-blades folded like wings and her hair wreathed in smoke. A drama coach I once took lessons from told me a good actor should be able to act with the back of his head. ‘Roll out the barrel,’ she sang softly, huskily, ‘we’ll have a barrel of fun.’

  Had she really intended to kill herself, I asked. Had she wanted to die? She did not answer for a long time, then lifted her shoulders and let them fall again in a weary shrug. She did not turn when she spoke. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Don’t they say the ones who fail weren’t serious in the first place? Maybe it was just, you know, what we do, you and I.’ Now she twisted her head and looked at me at a sharp angle over her shoulder. ‘Just acting.’

  I said we should go back, that we should go home. She was still regarding me from under her hair, her head on one side and her chin resting on her shoulder. ‘Home,’ she said. Yes, I said. Home.

  Somehow it seems to me it was the thunder-clap that did it, I mean I think it was by some dark magic our undoing. Certainly it presaged the end. The storm caught us at Cotter’s place. There is something vindictive about that kind of rain, a sense of vengeance being wrought from above. How relentlessly it clattered through the trees that day, like artillery fire showering down on a defenceless and huddled village. We had not minded rain, before, but that was the gentler kind, mere grapeshot compared to this barrage. At Cotter’s place it even used to give us a game to play, running here and there to set a pot or a jam-jar on the floor under each new leak in the ceiling as it sprang. How Mrs Gray would squeal when a plummeting cold drop fell on the back of her neck and slithered down along her bare skin under her flowered dress. By happy chance the corner where we had set out our mattress was one of the few dry places in the house. We would sit there together contentedly side by side, listening to the susurrating rain among the leaves, she smoking one of her Sweet Aftons and I practising jackstones with the beads from a necklace of hers the string of which I had broken unintentionally one afternoon in the course of a particularly energetic bout of love-making. ‘Babes in the wood, that’s us,’ Mrs Gray would say, and grin at me, displaying those two endearingly overlapping front teeth.

  It turned out she was terrified of thunder. At the first crash of it, directly overhead and at what seemed no higher than the level of the roof, she went ashen-faced on the insta
nt and crossed herself rapidly. We had been just short of the house when the rain came on, sweeping down on us through the trees with a muffled roar, and although we had sprinted the last few yards along the track we were thoroughly wet by the time we tumbled in at the front door. Mrs Gray’s hair was plastered to her skull, except for that irrepressible curl at her ear, and her dress was stuck to the front of her legs and moulded around the curves of her belly and her breasts. She stood flat-footed in the middle of the floor with her arms out at either side and flapped her hands, scattering drops from her fingertips. ‘What’ll we do?’ she wailed. ‘We’ll catch our deaths!’

  The summer had drawn to an end almost without our noticing—the storm was a brusque reminder—and I was back at school. I had not called for Billy on the first morning of the new term, and did not on any subsequent morning, either. It was harder than ever to look him in the eye now, not least because that eye was so like his mother’s. What did he imagine had happened, that I should shun him like this? Maybe he thought of that day in Rossmore when I bumped into him with his tennis friends and his two rackets in their fancy new presses. In the school yard we avoided each other, and walked home by separate ways.

  I was in trouble elsewhere, too. I had done badly in my exams, which was a surprise to everyone, though not to me, whom love had kept busy throughout that previous spring when I should have been at my studies. I was a bright boy and much had been expected of me, and my mother was sorely disappointed in me. She reduced my pocket money by half, but only for a week or two—no moral tenacity, that woman—and, much more seriously, threatened to make me stay indoors and apply myself to my schoolwork from now on. Mrs Gray, when I told her of these punitive measures, sided against me, to my astonishment, saying my mother was quite right, that I should be ashamed of myself for not working harder and for putting in such a poor academic performance. This led at once into the first real row we had, I mean the first that was caused by something other than my unresting jealousy and her amused disregard of it, and I went at her, bald-headed, as she would have said, which is to say, just like an adult—I was very much older now than I had been before this summer began. How darkly she glowered back at me, how defiantly, from under down-drawn brows, as I thrust my face close up to hers and snivelled and snarled. A fight like that is never forgotten, but goes on bleeding unseen, under its brittle cicatrice. But how tenderly we made up afterwards, how lovingly she rocked me in her embrace.