John Banville - Ancient Light

Why, I asked Dawn Devonport—we are still pacing that insulted strip of grass behind the studio—why does Toby Taggart employ Billie Stryker to nose out the secret weaknesses and sorrows of his players? I knew the answer, of course, so why did I ask? ‘To have what he thinks will be power over us,’ she said, and laughed. ‘He imagines he is Svengali—don’t they all?’

It will seem odd, perhaps, but I did not think badly of Toby for this, no more than I did of Billie Stryker. He is a professional, as am I; in other words we are cannibals, the pair of us, and would eat our young for the sake of a scene. I cannot help but like him. He is large and ill-assembled, built on the lines of a buffalo, with absurdly tiny feet and skinny legs and a broad chest and broader shoulders and a shaggy mop of mahogany-coloured curls from under which shine out those glossy sad brown eyes of his, pleading love and forbearance. His name is Tobias—yes, I asked him—it is a family tradition on his mother’s side, from her father the duke back through the centuries to an originary Tobias the Terrible who fought at Hastings and is said to have cradled the mortally wounded King Harold in his armoured arm. This last is the kind of dusty heirloom that Toby loves to bring out proudly from the vault of the family’s past for us to admire. He is a sentimentalist and a patriot of the old school and cannot understand my disregard for the deeds of doughty ancestors. I explained to him that I have no ancestors to speak of, only a motley line of petty tradesmen and near-peasants who never swung an axe in battle or comforted a king with an arrow in his eye. I would say that Toby is an anachronism in the movie world if I thought there was anyone in it who is not—look at me, for heaven’s sake. How he agonises on the set. Are we all happy in our parts? Is he being true to the spirit of JB’s wonderful script? Is the studio’s money being well spent? Will audiences understand what we are attempting? There he stands, always to the right and a little behind the cameraman, amid a clutter of wiring and those mysterious long black boxes with reinforced metal corners that are strewn at random about the floor, in his big brown jumper and ragged jeans, nibbling at his nails like a squirrel at a nut, as if he were trying to get at the elusive essence of himself, and worrying, worrying. The crew adore him and are fiercely protective, flexing their biceps and glowering at anyone seeming to offer the slightest slight. There is something saintly about him. No, not saintly, not quite. I know, I know what it is he reminds me of: one of those prelates the Church militant used to produce, muscular but soft, big-hearted, privy to the world’s cesspit of sin yet ever undaunted, not for a moment doubting that this chaotic phantasmagoria into which he must sink himself each day will in the end be redeemed and turned into a paradisal vision of light and grace and resplendently cavorting souls.

I can hardly believe it—we are already in the final week of filming. They move so fast, the movies.

How pleased and proud Mrs Gray would be if she could see me on the set, her boy made good. She was something of an aficionado—aficionada?—of the cinema, though she called it the pictures. On almost every Friday night the Gray family would get dressed up and proceed, parents in front and the children two paces behind, to the Alhambra Kino, a barn-like converted music-hall that stood on a blind corner halfway along the Main Street. Here they sat four abreast in the one-and-sixpennies, the best seats in the house, to view the latest offerings from Parametro, from Warner-Goldwyn-Fox, from Gauling or Eamont Studios. What shall we say of the lost picture palaces of our youth? The Alhambra, despite the spits on the wooden floor and the fug of fag smoke in the dirty air, was for me a place of deep erotic suggestion. I admired especially the magnificent scarlet curtain, with its softly curved fluting and delicate gold frills, which put me in mind, inevitably, of the Kayser Bondor lady in her pleated frock and lacy petticoat. It did not rise, this curtain, as it would surely have done in music-hall times, but parted in the middle and drew back on either side with a hushed, silken swish, while the house-lights slowly dimmed and the louts down in the fourpenny seats set to whistling like cockatoos and made a jungle drumming on the floorboards with their cleated heels.

On a couple of successive Friday nights that spring, and inadvisedly, as I would too late discover—the thing turned out nothing less than a torture—I wheedled a florin out of my mother and went to the Alhambra myself, not to see the film but to spy on the Grays. Now, this required some nice timing and careful placement. For instance, if I was to avoid being spotted, it was imperative for me not to go in before the lights went down at the start of the show, and to slip out before they went up again at the close so as not to be trapped by the National Anthem. I could picture Mrs Gray’s alarmed and furious glare, or Billy’s slow grin of surprise, could see Kitty jumping up in her seat to point me out with delighted malevolence, while her father fumbled under the seat in search of his umbrella. And what about the interval between the ads and the main feature, when the lamps were turned on to show us the magical apparition of the ice-cream girl posed in a spot in front of the curtain with her little tray hitched under her starched bosom? Just how far down in a cinema seat was it possible to slide? I arrived too late the first time, so that the place was nearly full and the only seat I could find was six rows behind the Grays, from where I had a maddeningly intermittent view of the back of what I took for Mrs Gray’s head but which turned out to be, inexplicably, the bald pate of a fat old fellow with a large and shinily ripe boil on the back of his neck. The next time was better; that is, I had a better view but experienced even worse frustration and torment. And not much of a better view, either. I got a seat two rows in front of the Grays but over at the far end of the aisle, so that to glimpse Mrs Gray at all I had to keep twisting my head sideways and back, as if my shirt collar were too tight, or as if I were suffering from some affliction that made me twitch and turn every thirty seconds or so.

How terrible it was to witness Mrs Gray caught up in such innocent enjoyment—the innocence more than the enjoyment was what was terrible, to me. She sat there, canted backwards a little, her face lifted in dreamy ecstasy to the screen and her lips parted in a smile that kept trying to achieve itself but never quite succeeded, lost as she was in blissful forgetfulness, of self, of surroundings, and, most piercingly, of me . The twitchy light from the screen sliding over her face made it seem that she was being slapped, repeatedly, lasciviously, with a grey silk glove. The way in which I was seeing her, snatching a moving series of images by repeatedly turning my head quickly to the side, was a clumsy version of the process going on inside the clackety projector up in its little room behind us. Despite my covert manoeuvres had she spotted me come in? Did she know I was there and had decided to ignore me and not let me spoil her fun? If so she gave no sign of it, and afterwards I was too ashamed to ask, for how could I admit to such despicable peeping-tommery? For her husband at her side, for Billy, for his sister, I had no eyes at all—let them see me, I did not care now—fixed as I was on her, on her, on her , until my neighbour but one, a burly chap in a tight suit, with a shiny quiff and smelling strongly of hair-oil, leaned across his girlfriend and assured me in a confiding undertone that if I did not stop that jerking and lepping he would put my front teeth down my fucking throat for me.