John Banville - Ancient Light

We became adept at getting out of our clothes, or most of them, without breaking our embrace, and then, her wonderfully cool and slightly granular skin pressed all along mine, we would crabwalk to the makeshift bed and fall over slowly together in a sort of toppling swoon. At first, on the mattress, we would be all knees and hips and elbows, but after a moment or two of desperate scrimmaging all our bones would seem to relax and bend and blend, and she would press her mouth against my shoulder and exhale a long, shuddering sigh, and so we would begin.

But what, you will be asking, of my friend Billy, what was he doing, or not doing, while his mother and I were at our joyous callisthenics? That is a question I myself often asked, with much anxiety. Of course I found it increasingly hard to face him now, to look him in that always relaxed and easy eye of his, for how would he not see the glow of guilt I felt sure I must be giving off? This became less of a difficulty when school ended and the summer holidays began. In the holidays allegiances shifted, fresh interests arose that inevitably involved us with new or at least different sets of companions. There was no question between Billy and me that we were still best friends, only we saw much less of each other now than heretofore, that was all. Away from school, even the best of friends were aware of a slight reserve between them, a shyness, an awkwardness, as if they were afraid, in the new dispensation of endless and untrammelled freedoms, of inadvertently catching each other out in some shaming circumstance, wearing ridiculous bathing-togs, say, or holding hands with a girl. Thus that summer Billy and I, like everyone else, began discreetly to avoid each other, he for the ordinary reasons I have mentioned, and I—well, I for my own, extraordinary reasons.

One morning his mother and I were given a horrible fright. It was a misty Saturday in early summer, the sun struggling whitely through the trees yet bringing the promise of a sweltering day to come. Mrs Gray was supposed to be shopping and I was supposed to be doing I do not remember what. We were sitting side by side on the mattress with our backs against the powdery wall and our elbows on our knees and she was letting me have a puff of her cigarette—it was a convention between us that I did not smoke although I was already on ten or fifteen a day, as she was well aware—when suddenly she sprang alert and put a hand fearfully on my wrist. I had heard nothing, but now I did. There were voices on the ridge above us. I thought at once of Billy and me up there that day when he had pointed out to me Cotter’s mossy roof camouflaged among the treetops. Could this be him again, come to show the place to someone else? We strained to hear, breathing at the shallowest tops of our lungs. Mrs Gray was looking at me sideways, the whites of her eyes flashing in terror. The voices coming down through the trees made a hollow, ringing sound, like the sound of steel mallets striking musically on wood—or of Fate, more like, amusedly tapping at his finger-drum. Were they the voices of children or of adults or of both? We could not tell. All kinds of wild fancies darted through my mind. If it was not Billy it was workmen coming with sledgehammers and crowbars to demolish what remained of the house; it was a search-party looking for a missing person; it was the Guards, dispatched by Mr Gray to arrest his wanton wife and her precocious inamorato.

Mrs Gray’s lower lip had begun to tremble. ‘Oh, holy God,’ she whispered gulpingly. ‘Oh, dear Jesus.’

In a short while, however, the voices faded and there was silence again up on the ridge. Still we dared not stir, still Mrs Gray’s fingers were digging like talons into my wrist. Then abruptly she scrambled up and began to put on her clothes in clumsy haste. I watched her with a mounting sense of alarm, no longer fearful of discovery but of something much worse, namely, that the shock she had got would cause her to take fright finally and flee the place and never come back to me. I demanded to know, my voice cracking, what she thought she was doing, but she did not answer. I could see by her eyes that she was elsewhere already, on her knees, probably, clinging to her husband’s trouser legs and desperately begging his forgiveness. I thought of making some large pronouncement, of delivering some solemn admonition— If you walk out of here now you need never think of … —but I could not find the words, and even if I could have I would not have dared to utter them. I was staring into the abyss that had been there under me all along. If I were to lose her, how would I bear it? I should leap up now, I knew, and put my arms around her, not to reassure her—what did I care for her fear?—but to prevent her by main force from leaving. A peculiar lethargy had come over me, however, the terrified lethargy that is said to come over the skittering mouse when it looks up in dread and sees the hovering hawk, and I could do nothing but sit there and watch as she pulled up her pants under her dress and bent to gather up her velvet shoes. She turned her face to me, bleared with panic. ‘What do I look like?’ she demanded in a whisper. ‘Do I look all right?’ Without waiting for a reply she ran to her bag for her compact and snapped it open and peered into the little mirror inside it, looking a bit like an anxious mouse herself now, nostrils twitching and the tips of her two slightly overlapping front teeth exposed. ‘Look at me,’ she breathed in dismay. ‘The wreck of the Hesperus !’

I began to cry, startling even myself. It was the real thing, a child’s raw, helpless blurting. Mrs Gray stopped what she was doing and turned and stared at me, appalled. She had seen me weep before, but that was in rage or to try to get her to bend to my will, not like this, abjectly, defencelessly, and I suppose it was borne in on her afresh how young I was, after all, and how far out of my depth she had led me. She knelt down on the mattress again and embraced me. It was a shivery sensation to be in her arms naked when she was dressed, and even as I leaned into her and bawled for sorrow I found to my pleased surprise that I was becoming aroused again, and I lay back down and drew her with me and, despite her squirms of protest, got my hands under her clothes, and so we were off again, my sobs of childish fear and anguish now become the familiar, hoarse panting that would rise and rise along its arc to the final, familiar whoop of triumph and wild relief.

I think that was the day I told her of my intention to make her pregnant. I recall a drowsy noontide and the two of us lying quietly together in a tangle of sweat-smeared limbs, a wasp buzzing at the corner of a broken pane and a smoking blade of sunlight from one of the holes in the roof plunged at an angle in the floor beside us. I had been brooding as so often on the painful and unavoidable fact that was Mr Gray, her inexpungible husband, working myself the while into a fine state of suppressed wrath, and the thought of wreaking what would surely be the ultimate revenge upon him had hardly formed in my mind before I had heard myself announce it aloud and quite as if it were a thing in need only of being accomplished. At first it seemed Mrs Gray did not understand, could not take in what I had said, and small wonder—it was hardly the kind of thing a woman in the midst of a more than usually perilous affair would expect to hear from the mouth of her under-age lover. When she was taken off-guard or had been told something that she could not absorb at once she had a way, I have noticed it in other women, too, of going very still and quiet on the spot, as if she had found herself suddenly under threat and were lying low until the danger had passed. So she remained for some moments motionless, with her back and her warm behind against my front and one of my arms gone to sleep underneath her. Then she heaved herself over violently on to her other side so that she was facing me. First she stared at me disbelievingly, then she gave me a tremendous, two-handed push in the chest that sent me sliding backwards across the mattress so that my shoulder-blades clattered against the wall. ‘That’s a disgusting thing to say, Alex Cleave,’ she said, in a low and terrible voice. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, so you should.’