John Banville - Ancient Light

Abruptly Dawn Devonport tossed the magazine on to the table—how flabbily the heavy pages flopped—and rose and said she would go to her room and lie down. She lingered a moment and looked at me strangely, with what seemed a strange surmise. ‘I suppose you think he was Svidrigailov,’ she said, ‘Axel Vander—you think he was him.’ She made herself shiver, wincing as if she had tasted something sour, and went out.

I sat on there alone for a long time. I was remembering—or I am remembering now, it does not matter which—Mrs Gray talking to me one day about dying. Where were we? In Cotter’s place? No, somewhere else. But where else was there that we could have been? Bizarrely, my memory places us in that upstairs living room where Billy and I used to drink his father’s whiskey. Surely it is not possible, yet that is where I see us. But how would she have managed to smuggle me into the house, under what pretext, and for what purpose?—certainly not the accustomed one, given that we were in the living room, with our clothes on, and not down in the laundry room. I have a picture in my mind of the two of us sitting very properly in two armchairs set close to each other at an angle opposite the rectangular window with the metal frames. It was a Sunday morning, I believe, a late-summer Sunday morning, and I was wearing a tweed suit in which I was hot and itchy, and in which I felt ridiculous, more nearly naked than clothed, as I always did when I was made to put on my Sunday best. Where were the others, Billy and his sister and Mr Gray? What can have been going on? I must have been there for a reason; Billy and I must have been going somewhere, on a school outing, maybe, and he was late as always and I was waiting for him. But would I have called for him, given that now I was devoting so much energy and ingenuity to avoiding him? Anyway, I was there, that is all there is to say. The sun was shining full upon the square outside and everything out there seemed made of vari-coloured glass, and a playful breeze was filling the lace curtain at the open window and making it billow inwards and upwards in ever-swelling languor. I always had a strong sense of estrangement on those Sunday mornings when I was young—the noose-like feel of my shirt collar, the birds at their excited business, those far church-bells—and there was always an air that seemed to waft from the south, yes, the south, with its lion-coloured dust and lemon glare. No doubt it was the future I was anticipating, the shimmering promise of it, for the future for me always had a southern aspect, which is strange to think of now, now that the future is arrived, up here in Ultima Thule, arrived and steadily pouring through the pinhole of the present, into the past.

Mrs Gray was dressed in a rather severe blue suit—a costume, she would have called it—and wore black shoes with high heels, seamed stockings, a pearl necklace. Her hair was done differently from usual, swept back in some way that even managed to subdue for the moment that wayward curl at her ear, and she smelt as my mother did, as I suppose everyone’s mother did, on Sunday mornings in summer, of scent and cold cream and face powder, of sweat, a little, of flesh-warm nylon and faintly mothbally wool, and of something vaguely ashen, too, that I was never able to identify. The jacket of her suit was fashionably high at the shoulders and tightly nipped at the waist—she must have been wearing a corset—and the calf-length skirt was narrow, with a slit at the back. I had not seen her dressed so formally before, so rigidly, all interestingly pinned and pent, and I sat surveying her with an impudent and, it might almost be, an uxorial sense of possession. It is a scene from one of those women’s pictures of the day, of course, the kind that Mrs Gray did not like, for I see it in black-and-white, or charcoal-and-silver, rather, she in the Older Woman role while I am played by, oh, some boy wonder with a cheeky grin and a quiff, as pert as you please in my neat tweed suit and starched white shirt and striped, clip-on tie.

At first I did not absorb what it was she was talking about, distracted as I was in studying the complicated system of seams—darts, I believe they are called—in the wonderfully full bosom of her dress, the brittle blue material of which had an excitingly metallic burnish, and made tiny crackling sounds with each breath she took. She had turned her head away and was looking pensively towards the window and the sunlit square, and was saying, with a finger to her cheek, how she wondered sometimes what it would be like not to be here—would it be like being under an anaesthetic, maybe, with no sense of anything, not even of time passing?—and how hard it was to imagine being somewhere else, and how harder still it was to think of not being anywhere at all. Slowly her words filtered their way into the inilluminable dimness of my self-regarding consciousness, until, with a sort of click, I understood, or thought I understood, exactly what she was saying, and suddenly I was all ears. Not to be here? To be somewhere else? What was all this, surely, but a roundabout way of letting me know that she was preparing to have done with me? Now, at other times, should the barest suspicion have entered my head that she was hinting at any such thing, I would straight away have set to whining and howling and drumming my fists, for I was a child still, remember, with all a child’s conviction of the imperative need for an instant, tearful and clamorous response to even the mildest threat to my well-being. That day, however, and for whatever reason, I bided, warily, watchfully, and let her talk on until, perhaps sensing the vigilant quality of my attentiveness, she paused, and turned, and focused in that way she did, seeming to swivel and train on me an invisible telescope. ‘Do you ever think of it,’ she asked, ‘dying?’ Before I could answer she laughed self-disparagingly and shook her head. ‘But of course you don’t,’ she said. ‘Why would you?’

Now my interest switched on to another track. If she was really talking about death as death and not as a hint that she was leaving me, then she must be talking about Mr Gray. The possibility that her husband was mortally ill had been taking an ever-strengthening hold on my imagination, with a consequent bolstering of my hopes of securing Mrs Gray for myself on a long-term basis. If the old boy were to croak, there at last and gloriously would be my chance. I must not make a move precipitately, of course. We would have to wait, the two of us, until I was of age, and even then there would be obstacles, Kitty and my mother not the least of them, while Billy would hardly warm to the grotesque prospect of having for his stepfather a boy of his own age, and a sometime best friend, at that. In the interval, however, while we were anticipating my majority, what opportunities would offer themselves for me to fulfil my childhood dream of having not a bald and inarticulated doll to cuddle and care for and operate on, but a full-sized, warm-blooded, safely widowed woman all of my own, accessible to me all day and every day, and, more momentously, every night, too, a prized possession that I might show off boldly to the world, whenever and wherever I pleased. So now I sharpened my ears and listened keenly to whatever else she might have to add on the subject of her husband’s prospective demise. Alas, she would say nothing more, and seemed abashed, indeed, by what she had already said, and short of asking straight out how long the doctors had given the purblind optician I could get nothing further out of her.

But what was I doing there, in her living room, in my scratchy suit, on a Sunday, in the dying days of that summer—what? So often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing.

Although I grew up in that world of transience and hidden presences, and married a woman who grew up there too, I still find hotels uncanny, not only in the stillness of the night but in the daytime, too. At mid-morning, especially, something sinister always seems to be afoot under cover of that fake, hothouse calm. The receptionist behind the desk is one I have not seen before, and gives me a blank look as I drift past and does not smile or offer a word of greeting. In the deserted dining room all the tables are set, the gleaming cutlery and the sparkling napery laid out just so, like an operating theatre where multiple surgical procedures will presently be carried out. Upstairs, the corridor buzzes with a breathless, tight-lipped intent. I pass along it soundlessly, a disembodied eye, a moving lens. The doors, all identical, a receding double procession of them, have the look of having been slammed smartly shut one after another a second before I stepped out of the lift. What can be going on behind them? The sounds that filter out, a querulous word, a cough, a snatch of low laughter, seem each the beginning of a plea or a tirade that is cut short at once by an unheard slap, or a hand clapped over a mouth. There is a smell of last night’s cigarettes, of cold breakfast coffee, of faeces and shower soap and shaving balm. And that big trolley thing abandoned there, stacked with folded sheets and pillow-cases and with a bucket and a mop hooked on at the back, where is the chambermaid who should be in charge of it, what has become of her?