John Banville - Ancient Light

From the moment when we stepped on to foreign soil she had been recognised everywhere, despite the headscarf and the enormous sunglasses that she wore; or perhaps it was because of them, they being the unmistakable disguise of a troubled star on the run. This prominence was something I had not anticipated, and although I was a largely disregarded presence at her side or, more often, in her wake, I still felt unnervingly exposed, a chameleon that has lost its adaptive powers. We were due that day at Lerici, where I had booked hotel rooms for us, but she had insisted on seeing the Cinque Terre first, and so here we were, uncertainly astray on this cheerless winter afternoon.

Dawn Devonport was not as she had been. She was prone to flashes of irritation, and fussed constantly with things, her handbag, her sunglasses, the buttons of her coat, and I had a vivid and unsettling glimpse of what she would be when she was old. She was smoking heavily, too. And she had a new smell, faint yet definite behind the masking smells of perfume and face powder, a flat dry odour as of something that had first gone rank and then become parched and shrivelled. Physically she had taken on a new and starker aspect, which she wore with an air of dull forbearance, like a patient who has been suffering for so long that being in pain has become another mode of living. She had grown thinner, which would have seemed hardly possible, and her arms and her exquisite ankles looked frail and alarmingly breakable.

I had expected her to resist coming away with me, but in the end, to my surprise and, I confess, faint unease, she needed no persuading. I simply presented her with an itinerary, which she listened to, frowning a little, turning her head to one side as if she had become hard of hearing. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, in her faded green gown. When I finished speaking she looked away, towards the blue mountains, and sighed, which, in the absence of any other, I decided to take as a sign of acquiescence. The resistance, need I say, came from Toby Taggart and Marcy Meriwether. Oh, the noise they made, Toby’s bass rumblings and Marcy shrieking like a parrot down the transatlantic line! All this I ignored, and next day we simply took to the air, Dawn Devonport and I, and flew away.

It was odd, being with her. It was like being with someone who was not entirely present, not entirely conscious. When I was a very little boy I had a doll, I do not know how I came by it; certainly my mother would not have given me a girl’s toy to play with. I kept it in the attic, hidden under old clothes at the back of a wooden chest. I called it Meg. The attic, where one day years later I was to glimpse the shade of my dead father loitering irresolutely, was easy of access by way of a narrow set of wooden stairs running up along the wall from the landing. My mother stored onions up there, spread out on the floor; I think it was onions, I seem to remember the smell, or maybe it was apples. The doll, that must once have had abundant hair, was bald now, except for a scant blonde fringe at the back of the skull stuck in a clot of glittery yellow gum. It was jointed at the shoulders and the hips but its elbows and knees were rigid, the limbs moulded in a bowed shape so that it seemed to be locked in a desperate embrace with something, its twin, perhaps, that was no longer there. When it was laid on its back it would close its eyes, the lids giving a faint sharp click. I doted on this doll, with a dark and troubling intensity. I spent many a torrid hour dressing it in scraps of rag and then lovingly undressing it again. I performed mock operations on it, too, pretending to remove its tonsils, or, more excitingly, its appendix. These procedures were hotly pleasurable, I did not know why. There was something about the doll’s lightness, its hollowness—it had a loose bit inside it that rattled around like a dried pea—that made me feel protective and at the same time appealed to a nascent streak of erotic cruelty in me. That was how it was with Dawn Devonport, now. She reminded me of Meg, she of the boneless, brittle limbs and clicking eyelids. Like her, Dawn Devonport too seemed hollow and to weigh practically nothing, and to be in my power while yet I was in hers, somehow, alarmingly.

We got down from the train at random at one of the five towns, I cannot remember which. She walked off rapidly along the platform with her head down and her handbag clutched to her side, like one of those thin intense young women of the nineteen-twenties, in her narrow coat with the big collar, in her seamed stockings, her slender shoes. Meanwhile I was left yet again to struggle behind her lugging our three suitcases, two large ones hers, one small one mine. The rain had stopped but the sky still sagged and was the colour of wetted jute. We ate a late lunch in a deserted restaurant on the harbour. It stood at the head of a slipway where dark waves jostled like so many big metal boxes being tossed about vigorously. Dawn Devonport sat crouched over an untouched plate of seafood with her shoulders hunched, working fretfully at a cigarette that might have been a slip of wood she was whittling with her teeth. I spoke to her, asking her random things—these silences of hers I found unnerving—but she rarely bothered to answer. Already this venture I had embarked on with her seemed more improbable even than the extravaganza of light and shadow that her suicide attempt and our subsequent flight had so severely disrupted and, for all I knew, might have brought to an unfinished, unfinishable and ignominious end. What an ill-assorted pair we must have looked, the obscurely afflicted, stark-faced girl with her scarf and dark glasses, and the grizzled, ageing man sunk in glum unease, sitting there silent in that ill-lit low place above a winter sea, our suitcases leaning against each other in the glass vestibule, waiting for us like a trio of large, obedient and patiently uncomprehending hounds.

When Lydia heard of my plan to go off with Dawn Devonport she had laughed and given me a disbelieving look, head back and one eyebrow arched, the selfsame look that Cass used to turn on me when I had said something she considered silly or mad. Was I serious, my wife asked. A girl, again, at my age? I replied stiffly that it was not like that, not like that at all, that the trip was intended to be purely therapeutic and was a charitable act on my part. Saying this, I sounded even to myself like one of Bernard Shaw’s more pompous and tendentious leading asses. Lydia sighed and shook her head. How could I, she asked quietly, as if there were someone who might overhear, how could I take anyone, least of all Dawn Devonport, to that place, of all places in the world? To this I had no reply. It was as if she were accusing me of besmirching Cass’s memory, and I was shocked, for this, you must believe me, was something I had not considered. I said she was welcome to come with us but that only seemed to make things worse, and there was a very long silence, the air vibrating between us, and slowly she lowered her head, her brow darkening ominously, and I felt like a very tiny toreador facing a frighteningly cold and calculating bull. Yet she packed my suitcase for me, just as she used to do in the days when I still went on tour. The task done, she headed off at a haughty slouch to the kitchen. At the door she stopped and turned to me. ‘You won’t bring her back, you know,’ she said, ‘not like this.’ I knew she was not speaking of Dawn Devonport. Her curtain line delivered—not for nothing has she lived all these years with an actor—she went into her lair and shut the door behind her with a thud. Yet I had the conviction, greatly to my consternation, that she found the whole thing more than anything else absurd.

I had not told Dawn Devonport about Cass—that is, I had not told her that Portovenere was where my daughter died. I had proposed Liguria to her as if I had hit on it by chance, a place in the south where it would be quiet, a place of recuperation, uncrowded and tranquil at this time of year. I suppose it did not matter much to Dawn Devonport where she went, where she was taken. She came away with me in a stupor, as if she were a sleepy child whom I was leading by the arm.