John Banville - Ancient Light

In the event she managed with an ease and briskness that I had not the experience to appreciate properly at the time. In a cramped room off the kitchen there was a top-loading washing machine with a big metal paddle sticking up through its middle, a stone sink, an ironing board standing tensed and spindly as a mantis, and a metal-framed camp bed that could have doubled as an operating table had it not been so low to the ground. But, come to think of it, was it a bed? It might have been a horsehair mattress thrown on the floor, for I seem to recall cartoon convict stripes and rough ticking that tickled my bare knees. Or am I confusing it with the subsequent mattress on the floor at the Cotter house? Anyway, in this place of lying down we lay down together, on our sides at first and facing each other, still in our clothes, and she pressed herself against me full-length and kissed me on the mouth, hard, and for some reason crossly, or so it seemed to me. Casting up a quick glance sideways past her temple towards the ceiling so high above, I had the panicky sensation of lying among sunken things at the bottom of a deep cistern.

Above the bed and halfway up the wall there was a single window of frosted glass, and the rain-light coming through was soft and grey and steady, and that and the laundry smell and the smell of some soap or cream that Mrs Gray had used on her face seemed all to be drifting up out of the far past of my infancy. And indeed I did feel like an impossibly overgrown baby, squirming and mewling on top of this matronly, warm woman. For we had progressed, oh, yes, we had made rapid progress. I suspect she had not intended we should do more than lie there for a certain time chaste enough in our clothes, grinding ourselves against each other’s lips and teeth and hip bones, but if so she had not reckoned with a fifteen-year-old boy’s violent single-mindedness. When I had writhed and kicked myself free of trousers and underpants the air was so cool and satiny against my naked skin that I seemed to feel myself break out all over in a foolish smile. Did I still have my socks on? Mrs Gray, putting a hand to my chest to stay my impatience, got to her feet and took off her dress and lifted her slip and slithered out of her underthings, and then, still in her shift, lay down again and suffered me to re-fasten my tentacles around her. She was saying No over and over in my ear now, no no no nooo! though it sounded to me more like low laughter than a plea that I should stop what I was doing.

And what I did turned out to be so easy, like learning without effort how to swim. Frightening, too, of course, above those unplumbed depths, but far stronger than fear was the sense of having achieved, at last and yet so early on, a triumphant climacteric. No sooner had I finished—yes, I am afraid it was all very quick—and rolled off Mrs Gray on to my back to lie teetering on the very rim of the narrow mattress with one leg flexed while she was wedged against the wall than I began to puff up with pride, even as I laboured for breath. I had the urge to run and tell someone—but whom could I tell? Not my best friend, that was certain. I would have to be content to hug my secret close to me and share it with no one. Though I was young I was old enough to know that in this reticence would lie a form of power, over myself as well as over Mrs Gray.

If I was in fear, frantically swimming there, what must she have felt? What if there had indeed been a catastrophe at the circus so that the show had to be stopped and Kitty had come running in to tell how the young man on the flying trapeze had lost his grip and plummeted down through the powdery darkness to break his neck in a cloud of sawdust in the dead centre of the ring, only to find her mammy engaged in half-naked and incomprehensible acrobatics with her brother’s laughable friend? I stand in amazement now before the risks that Mrs Gray took. What was she thinking of, how did she dare? Despite the pride of my accomplishment, I had no sense that it was for the sole sake of me that she was willing, more than willing, to put so much at peril. I should say that I did not imagine myself so treasured, I did not think myself so loved. This was not from diffidence or a lack of a sense of my own significance, no, but the very opposite: engrossed in what I felt for myself, I had no measure against which to match what she might feel for me. That was how it was at the start, and how it went on, to the end. That is how it is, when one discovers oneself through another.

Having had of her what I had most grievously desired I now faced the tricky task of disengaging from her. I do not mean I was not appreciative or that I felt no fondness for her. On the contrary, I was adrift in a daze of tenderness and incredulous gratitude. A grown-up woman of my own mother’s age but otherwise as unlike her as could be, a married woman with children, my best pal’s ma, had taken off her dress and unhooked her suspenders and stepped out of her drawers—white, ample, sensible—and with one stocking still up and the other sagging to the knee had lain down under me with her arms open and let me spill myself into her, and even now had turned on her side again with a fluttery sigh of contentment and pressed her front to my back, her slip bunched around her waist and the fuzz at her lap wiry and warm against my backside, and was caressing my left temple with the pads of her fingers and crooning in my ear what seemed a softly salacious lullaby. How could I not think myself the town’s, the nation’s—the world’s!—most favoured son and lavishly blest boy?

I still had the taste of her in my mouth. My hands still tingled from a certain cool roughness along her flanks and the outsides of her upper arms. I could still hear her rasping gasps and feel the way that she seemed to be falling and falling out of my arms even as she arched herself violently against me. Yet she was not I, she was wholly another, and young though I was and new to all this, I saw at once, with merciless clarity, the delicate task that I had now of thrusting her back into the world among the countless other things that were not myself. Indeed, I was gone from her already, was already sad and lonely for her, though still clasped in her arms with her warm breath on the back of my neck. I had once seen a pair of dogs locked together after mating, standing end to end and facing away from each other, the hound casting about in a bored and gloomy fashion, the female hanging her head dejectedly, and God forgive me but this was what I could not keep myself from thinking of now, poised like a spring on the edge of that low bed, yearning to be elsewhere and remembering this lavish, astonishing, impossible quarter of an hour of happy toil in the embrace of a woman-sized woman. So young, Alex, so young, and already such a brute!

At last we got up gropingly and fastened ourselves away into our clothes, bashful now as Adam and Eve in the garden after the apple was eaten. Or no, I was the bashful one. Although I thought I must surely have injured her insides with all my plunging and gouging, she was quite collected, and even seemed preoccupied, thinking perhaps what to make for tea when her family came home from the circus, or, prompted by our surroundings, wondering if my mother would notice telltale stains on my underwear next wash-day. First love, the cynic observes, and afterwards the reckoning.

I too had my distractions, and wanted for instance to know why there should be a bed, or even a bare mattress, if that was what it was, in the laundry room, but feared it would be indelicate to ask—I never did find out—and perhaps the suspicion crossed my mind that I had not been the first to lie down there with her, though if it did the suspicion was unfounded, I am sure of that, for she was anything but promiscuous, despite all that had just occurred, and all that was yet to occur, between her and me. Also, I was unpleasantly sticky in the region of my groin, and I was hungry, too, as what young chap would not be after such exertions? The rain had stopped a while before but now another shower began to tinkle against the window above the bed, I could see the wind-driven ghostly drops shiver and slide on the greyly misted glass. I thought with what felt like sorrow of the wetted boughs of the cherry trees outside glistening blackly and the bedraggled blossoms falling. Was this what it was to be in love, I asked myself, this sudden plangent gusting in the heart?