John Banville - Ancient Light

Now, I am sure this is too absurd to have been the case, but on that occasion I recall Mrs Gray, in her short-sleeved summer dress, wearing a pair of pretty gloves made of a reddish-blue net-like material—I can see it—transparent and brittle, with ruffles at the wrist of a darker, purplish shade, and, more absurd still, a matching hat, small and round and flat as a saucer, set slightly off-centre on the crown of her head. Where do I get such fancies from? All she lacks, in this outlandishly demi-mondaine vision of her, is a parasol to twirl, and a pearl-handled lorgnette to peer through. And why not a bustle, into the bargain? Anyway, there we were, young Marcel in unlikely company with bare-armed Odette, pacing side by side along the boardworks, our heels knocking hollowly on the planking and I silently recalling, with arch compassion for a former unformed self, how not so long ago I used to lurk under here with my urchin pals when the tide was out and squint through the gaps between the sleepers in hope of seeing up the skirts of girls walking by above us. Although I would not have thought of touching her in the glare of this public place I could feel across the space between us the thrilling crackle of Mrs Gray’s dismay at her own daring; dismay, but determination, too, to brazen it out. She would not look at anyone we met, and went along as erect and studiedly empty-eyed as a ship’s figurehead, her bosom thrust forwards and her head held aloft. I was at a loss as to what she thought she was up to, parading like this before the town, but there was a side to her that was still and always would be a romping girl.

I wonder now if secretly and without fully realising it she too yearned to be found out, if that was what this provocative display was for. Perhaps our liaison was all too much for her, as often-times it was for me, and she wished to be forced to have done with it. Need I say, such a possibility would not have entered my head at the time. When it came to girls I was as insecure and self-doubting as any average boy, yet that Mrs Gray should love me I took entirely for granted, as if it were a thing ordained within the natural order of things. Mothers were put on earth to love sons, and although I was not her son Mrs Gray was a mother, so how would she deny me anything, even the innermost secrets of her flesh? That was how I thought, and the thought dictated all my actions, and inactions. She was simply there, and not for a moment to be doubted.

We stopped by the stern of one of the coal boats to look across to the barrage bank, as it was called, a shapeless hulk of concrete stuck in the middle of the harbour, its original function long forgotten, even to itself, probably. Below the surface, under the slope of the boat’s dirty rump, big greyish fish made desultory weavings, and farther down in the shallow brown water I could dimly see crabs at their stealthy, sideways scuttlings among the stones and sunken beer bottles, the tin cans and tyreless pram wheels. Mrs Gray turned aside. ‘Come on, we’d better go,’ she said, sounding weary now and in a gloom suddenly. What had happened that her mood had turned so swiftly? In all of the time we were together I never knew what was going on in her head, not in any real or empathetic way, and hardly bothered to try to find out. She talked about things, of course, all sorts of things, all the time, but mostly I took it that she was talking to herself, telling herself her own wandering, various and disconnected story. This did not bother me. Her ramblings and ruminations and the odd breathless flight of wonderment I regarded as no more than the preliminaries I had to put up with before getting her into the back seat of that pachydermous old station wagon or on to the lumpy mattress on Cotter’s littered floor.

When we had got into the car she did not start the engine at once but sat watching through the windscreen the couples still passing to and fro in the deepening twilight. I do not see those net gloves now, or that silly hat. Surely I invented them, out of an impulse of frivolity; the Lady Memory has her moments of playfulness. Mrs Gray sat with her back pressed against the seat, her arms extended and her hands clamped beside each other on the top of the steering wheel. Have I spoken of her arms? They were plump though delicately shaped, with a little whorled notch under each elbow and curving in a nicely swept arc to the wrist, reminding me happily of those indian clubs we used to exercise with in the school yard on Saturday mornings. They were lightly freckled on the backs, and the undersides were fish-scale blue and wonderfully cool and silky to the touch, with delicate striations of violet veins along which I liked to slide the tip of my tongue, following them all the way to where they abruptly sank from sight in the dampish hollow of her elbow, one of the numerous ways I had of making her shiver and twitch and moan for mercy, for she was delightfully ticklish.

I laid an urging hand on her thigh, being eager to depart, but she took no notice. ‘Isn’t it peculiar,’ she said, in a tone of dreamy wonderment, still gazing through the windscreen, ‘how permanent people seem? As if they’ll always be here, the same ones, walking up and down.’

I thought for some reason of that swaying column of steam from the kettle in the kitchen, and of Mr Gray setting down his untouched glass of whiskey on the table in his infinitely weary way. Then I wondered if there might still be time and enough left of the long day’s light for Mrs Gray to drive me to Cotter’s place and let me lie down on top of her and assuage for a little while my so fierce, tender and inveterate need of her and her inexhaustibly desirable flesh.

Dawn Devonport, I have learned, has also suffered a bereavement, far more recent than mine. A little over a month ago her father died, of an unheralded heart attack, at the age of fifty-something. She told me of this last evening, at the end of the day’s filming, as we walked together in the open air behind the studio where we are working this week. She had come out to smoke the fifth of the six cigarettes that she claims are her daily ration—why six, I wonder. She says she does not like to let the cast and crew see her smoking, though obviously I am an exception, being already a stand-in, as I suspect, for the father who so recently absconded from her life. We were both suffering somewhat in the aftermath of a scene of brutal passion we had spent the afternoon doing and redoing—nine long takes before Toby Taggart grudgingly consented to be satisfied; did I say film-acting was easy?—and the chill air of late autumn, smelling of smoke and tinged with bronze behind far trees, was a balm for our throbbing brows. To be made to feign love-making before the camera was fraught enough, but to have had to follow the act with a mock blow of my fist between her small, bared and shockingly defenceless breasts—Axel Vander, as least as JB has written him, is decidedly not a nice man—had left me dry-mouthed and shaking. As we paced the strip of unconvinced grass under the high, windowless, gunmetal-grey back wall of the studio she spoke of her father in brief rapid bursts, drawing hard on her cigarette and expelling puffs of smoke like cartoon speech-bubbles in which exclamations of sorrow and anger and incredulity had yet to be inscribed. Dad was a taxi driver, a jolly fellow, it seems, never sick a day in his life until his arteries, all clogged up after forty years of forty a day—she looked at the cigarette in her fingers and gave a sour laugh—had shut off the valves one October morning and let the engine cough and die.

It turns out that it was Dad, dear old Dad, who lumbered her with the name Dawn Devonport. He dreamed it up for her when she was a ten-year-old hoofer and landed the part of First Fairy in a West End panto. Why she stuck with the name I do not know. An excess of filial devotion, perhaps. The abrupt manner in which the old cabbie sped off while she stood at the kerb, desperately signalling, had left her puzzled and cross, as if before anything else his death had been a dereliction of duty. She too, it seems, like Lydia and me, feels she has not so much lost as been eluded by a loved one. I could see she has not learned yet how to mourn—but does one ever learn that hard lesson?—and when we stepped away from the set on our way outside and in the sudden gloom beyond the lights she stumbled on one of those malignant fat black cables that turn a studio floor into a snake-pit and she grasped my wrist for support, I felt all along the bones of her strong, mannish hands the tremors of her inner distress.