John Banville - Ancient Light

My beloved’s taste in film was broad, though there were exclusions. Musicals she did not like, having no ear for a tune, as she admitted. Nor did she care for the plangent, plunging love stories that were still so popular then, the women all shoulder-pads and lipstick and the men either craven or treacherous or both—‘sloppy stuff,’ she would say with dismissive scorn, pursing her mouth and giving it a Betty Huttonish twist. Action was what she craved. She loved war pictures, with lots of explosions and German soldiers in square helmets being fired straight up into the air like mortar shells amid fountains of flying masonry. Westerns were her favourites, though, or Cowboys-and-Indians, as she would have it. She believed in it all, the noble-hearted gunslinger and the cowpuncher in his chaps, the ginghamed schoolmarm, the bedizened saloon girl who is no better than she should be but who could break a whiskey bottle over a bushwhacker’s head without pausing in the midst of a sentimental ditty. Nor was it enough for her merely to see a picture: she had to replay the entire thing over again afterwards. I was her ideal auditor for these recountings of what in her version of them were impossibly convoluted plots, with multiple side turnings and back-trackings and a wild confusion of half-remembered names and wholly forgotten motives. I was happy to listen, or pretend to, so long as she consented to lie in my embrace in the back seat of the station wagon or on the mattress in Cotter’s place, she going on with her retold tale, trying to sort out who dry-gulched whom or which bit of the bulge the Jerries failed to breach, while I poked at and played with her various warm and, by her, temporarily disregarded parts. She had a cinematic lexicon all of her own. In Westerns the hero was always the Chap and the heroine the Girl, no matter what age the actors were. If she forgot a character’s name she would replace it with an attribute—‘and then Beardy-face grabbed the gun and plugged Wall-eye’—sometimes achieving a weird poetical or picturesque resonance, as in Lonesome Kid, or Barroom Belle or, my favourite, the Dirty Doc.

I speculate now that all these detailed rehashings were at least in part a ruse by which she secured some respite from my urgent requirement that she lie down and let me do to her what I never tired of doing. She was Scheherazade and Penelope rolled into one, weaving and unweaving endlessly her tales from the movies. I had read somewhere, or had been told by someone in school—there was a boy, I think his name was Hynes, who knew the most amazing things—that after coition the human male will have regenerated his juices and be capable of full erection after just fifteen minutes. It was a proposition I was keen to test. I do not recall that I succeeded, but certainly I went at it with application. And yet for all that, always, at the back of my mind, there was the suspicion that my efforts, and redoubled efforts, were not as welcome to Mrs Gray as they might be or as she repeatedly assured me they were. I have a notion that all men worry that all women do not really care for the physical manifestations of love, and only acquiesce to them so as to indulge us, their overgrown, needful, insatiate infants. Hence the unwavering hold over us of the myth of the nymphomaniac, that fabulous creature more elusive than the unicorn or the unicorn’s lady, which, once found, would allay our deepest fears. There were moments when, fastened to her breast or rootling about in her lap, I would chance to glance up and catch her smiling down on me with a fond benevolence that was nothing less, and nothing more, than maternal. At times too she was as impatient with me as any mother would be of her endlessly importuning child—‘Get off me!’ she would grunt, and tumble me aside and sit up scowling crossly, looking for her clothes. Always I could get her to lie down again, though, simply by touching the tip of my tongue to the chocolate-brown mole between her shoulder-blades or walking two fingers up the soft, fishbelly-white inner side of her arm. Then she would shiver, and turn to me with something that was more than a sigh and less than a moan, her eyes closed and her eyelids fluttering, and offer me helplessly her open hot slack mouth to kiss. She was never so desirable to me as in such moments of reluctant surrender. Those eyelids in particular I loved, carven shells of veined, translucent marble, always cool, always deliciously damp when I touched my lips to them. The milky backs of her knees too were peculiarly cherishable. I even prized the shiny mother-of-pearl stretch-marks on her belly.

Did I appreciate these things then as I appreciate them now, or am I only luxuriating in them in retrospect? Could a boy of fifteen have been possessed of my old roué’s discriminating and hungry eye? Mrs Gray taught me many lessons, the first and most precious of which was to forgive another human being for being human. I was a boy and therefore had in my mind’s eye the platonically perfect girl, a creature bland as a manikin that did not sweat or go to the lavatory, that was docile, adoring and fabulously compliant. Mrs Gray was as unlike this fantasy as could be. She only had to do her laugh, a high whinny in the sinuses with a deep diaphragm note underneath, to send that lifeless dummy flying in tatters from my head. It was not a smooth substitution, the actual woman for the imagined ideal. In the early days I found Mrs Gray’s fleshliness itself disconcerting, at certain moments, in certain postures. Remember, up to then my knowledge of the female form had been confined to the Kayser Bondor lady’s legs and the bud-like breasts that Hettie Hickey had let me fondle in the Alhambra’s smoky darkness years before. Though Mrs Gray was not all that much more imposing in stature than Hettie, at times she seemed to me, in our early days, at least, a giantess looming over me, a figure of unassailable erotic power.

Yet she was thoroughly, inescapably, at times dismayingly, human, with all a human creature’s frailties and failings. One day we were tussling on the floor in Cotter’s place—she was dressed and had been attempting to leave but I had got hold of her and made her plump back down on the mattress with my hand under her behind—when she inadvertently released into my palm an abrupt soft fart. Its single note was followed by a terrible silence, such as there would be after a pistol shot or the first rumble of an earthquake. It was, of course, for me a great shock. I was still at an age when although I knew that in matters peristaltic the sexes are identical I could blithely deny to myself that it was so. A fart, however, was incontrovertible. In the aftermath of this one Mrs Gray drew away from me quickly with a heave of the shoulders. ‘Now look,’ she said angrily, ‘now look what you made me do, yanking at me like that as if I was a tinker’s trollop or something.’ The injustice of this left me speechless. When she turned back, though, and saw my look of outrage, she gave a spluttering laugh and pushed me hard in the chest and demanded to know, still laughing, if I was not thoroughly ashamed of myself. As so often, it was her laughter that saved the moment, and in time, far from being repelled by the thought of that fundamental report she had let go, I felt privileged, as though she had invited me to be with her in a place where no one before me had ever been permitted.

The fact is, she spoiled most other females for me. Girls like Hettie Hickey were nothing to me now, their meagre breasts and boyish hips, their knock-knees, their plaits and pony-tails—all this I discounted, I who had known the opulence of a grown-up woman, the feel of her full flesh straining inside the strictures of her clothing, the hot fatness of her lips when they went pulpy from passion, the cool moist touch of her slightly pitted cheek when she laid it against my belly. As well as fleshliness she possessed too a quality of lightness, of grace, that not the daintiest slip of a girl could match. Her colours, for me, were grey, naturally, but a particular lilac-grey, and umber, and rose, and another tint, hard to name—dark tea? bruised honeysuckle?—to be glimpsed in her most secret places, along the fringes of her nether lips and in the aureole of the pursed little star occluded within the crevice of her bum.