John Banville - Ancient Light

Mrs Gray was fastening a suspender, the hem of her dress lifted high, and I pictured myself falling to my knees in front of her and burying my face between the bare and very white tops of her legs, plumped up a little and rounded above the tightness of her stockings. She saw me looking and smiled indulgently. ‘You’re such a nice boy,’ she said, straightening, and giving herself a shimmy from shoulder to knee to settle her garments into line, a thing that, I realised with a qualm of dismay, I had often seen my mother do. Then she reached out a hand and touched my face, cupping her palm along my cheek, and her smile turned troubled and became almost a frown. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ she murmured, with a helpless little laugh, as if in happy amazement at everything. ‘—You’re not even shaving yet!’

I thought her quite old—she was the same age as my mother, after all. I was not sure what to feel about this. Should I be flattered that a woman of such maturity, a respectable wife and mother, had found me, maculate, ill-barbered and far from fragrant though I was, so overpoweringly desirable that there was nothing for it but to take me to bed while her husband and her children all unknowing were splitting their sides at the antics of Coco the clown or gazing up in anxious admiration as petite Roxanne and her blue-jawed brothers cavorted flat-footedly on the high-wire? Or had I been simply a diversion, a plaything of the moment, to be toyed with by a bored housewife in the dull middle of an ordinary afternoon and then unceremoniously sent packing, while she turned back to the business of being who she really was and forgot all about me and the transfigured creatures we had both seemed to be when she was thrashing in my arms and crying out in ecstasy?

By the by, I do not fail to notice how persistently the theme of the circus, with its gaud and glitter, has intruded on proceedings here. I suppose it is an apt background to the hectic spectacle Mrs Gray and I had just put on, although our only audience was a washing-machine, an ironing board and a box of Tide, unless of course the goddess and all her starry fays were present, too, unseen.

I left the house gingerly, drunker than I had been that other time on Billy’s father’s whiskey, my knees as rickety as an old man’s and my face on fire still. The April day that I stepped out into was, of course, transfigured, was all flush and shiver and skimming light, in contrast to the sluggishness of my sated state, and as I moved through it I felt that I was not so much walking as wallowing along, like a big slack balloon. When I got home I avoided my mother, for I was sure the livid marks of a lust so lately, if only temporarily, satisfied would be plainly visible in my burning features, and I went straight to my room and threw myself, fairly threw myself, on the bed and lay on my back with a forearm shielding my shut eyes and replayed on an inner screen, frame by frame, in maniacally slow slow-motion, all that had taken place not an hour past on that other bed, gaped upon in awe and astonishment by a gallery of innocent domestic appliances. Down in the drenched garden a blackbird began to rinse its throat with a cascade of song and as I listened to it hot tears welled in my eyes. ‘ O Mrs Gray! ’ I cried out softly, ‘ O my darling! ’ and hugged myself for sweet sorrow, suffering the while from the stabs of a stinging prepuce.

I had no thought that she and I would ever do again what we had done that day. That it had happened once was hard enough to credit, that it should be repeated was inconceivable. It was essential therefore that every detail be fetched up, verified, catalogued and stored in memory’s lead-lined cabinet. Here, however, I experienced frustration. Pleasure, it turned out, was as difficult to relive as pain would have been. This failure was no doubt part of the price for being shielded from the imagination’s re-enactive powers, for had I been allowed to feel again with the same force, every time I thought of it, all that I had felt as I was bouncing up and down on top of Mrs Gray, I think I should have died. Similarly, of Mrs Gray herself I was unable to call up a satisfactorily clear and coherent image. I could remember her, certainly I could, but only as a series of disparate and dispersed parts, as in one of those old paintings of the Crucifixion in which the implements of torture, the nails and hammer, spear and sponge, are laid out in a close-up and lovingly executed display while off to the side Christ is dying on the cross in blurred anonymity—dear God, forgive me, compounding bawdry with blasphemy as I do. I could see her eyes of wet amber, unnervingly reminiscent of Billy’s, brimming under half-closed lids that throbbed like a moth’s wings; I could see the damp roots of her hair that was drawn back from her forehead, already showing a greying strand or two; I could feel the bulging side of a plump and polished breast lolling against my palm; I could hear her enraptured cries and smell her slightly eggy breath. But the woman herself, the total she, that was what I could not have over again, in my mind. And I, too, even I, there with her, was beyond my own recall, was no more than a pair of clutching arms and spasming legs and a backside frenziedly pumping. This was all a puzzle, and troubled me, for I was not accustomed yet to the chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done, and it would take practice and the resultant familiarity before I could fix her fully in my mind and make her of a piece, in total, and me along with her. But what does it mean when I say in total and of a piece? What was it I retrieved of her but a figment of my own making? This was a greater puzzle, a greater trouble, this enigma of estrangement.

I did not want to face my mother that day, not solely because I thought my guilt must be writ plain all over me. The fact was, I would not look at any woman, even Ma, in quite the same way ever again. Where before there had been girls and mothers, now there was something that was neither, and I hardly knew what to make of it.

As I was leaving the house that day Mrs Gray had stopped me on the front-door mat and quizzed me as to the state of my soul. She was herself devout in a hazy sort of way and wished to be assured that I was on good terms with Our Lord and, especially, with his Holy Mother, for whom she had a particular reverence. She was anxious that I should go to confession without delay. It was apparent she had given the matter some consideration—had she been thinking it over when we were still grappling on that improvised bed in the laundry room?—and said now that while certainly I must lose no time in confessing the sin I had just committed, there would be no need to reveal with whom I had committed it. She too would confess, of course, without identifying me. While she was saying these things she was briskly straightening my collar and combing my horrent hair with her fingers as best she could—I might have been Billy being seen off to school! Then she put her hands on my shoulders and held me at arms’ length and looked me up and down with a carefully critical eye. She smiled, and kissed me on the forehead. ‘You’re going to be a handsome fellow,’ she said, ‘do you know that?’ For some reason this compliment, although delivered with an ironical cast, straight away set my blood throbbing again, and had I been more practised, and less worried about the imminent return of the rest of the family, I would have hustled her backwards down the stairs to the laundry room and pulled off her clothes and mine and pushed her on to that pallet-bed or mattress and started all over again. She mistook my suddenly louring aspect for a scowl of resentful scepticism, and said she had truly meant it, that I was good-looking, and that I should be pleased. I could think of no reply, and turned from her in a tumult of emotions and stumbled off swollenly into the rain.