John Banville - Ancient Light

I must remember to tell Lydia I have seen him, in all his renewed, Lazarine vigour. She knows of him only by repute, through my reports, nevertheless she takes a lively interest in his successive declines and recoveries. She is that sort of soul, my Lydia, she worries about the lost ones of the world.

In the long and troubled years of Cass’s childhood there were certain moments, certain intermittences, when a calm descended, not solely on Cass but upon all our little household, though a doubtful calm it was, heartsick and anxious at the core. Late at night sometimes, when I was at her bedside and she had lapsed at last into a sort of sleep after hours of turmoil and mute, inner anguish, it would seem to me that the room, and not just the room but the house itself and all its surroundings, had somehow dipped imperceptibly beneath the common level of things into a place of silence and imposed tranquillity. It reminded me, this languorous and slightly claustral state, of how as a boy at the seaside on certain stilled afternoons, the sky overcast and the air heavy, I would stand up to my neck in the warmish, viscid water and slowly, slowly let myself sink until my mouth, my nose, my ears, until all of me was submerged. How strange a world it was just under the surface there, glaucous, turbid, sluggishly asway, and what a roaring it made in my ears and what a burning in my lungs. A kind of gleeful panic would take hold of me then, and a bubble of something, not just breath, but a kind of wild, panicky joyfulness, would swell and swell in my throat until at last I had to leap up, like a leaping salmon, twisting and gasping, into the veiled, exploded air. Whenever I come into the house in these recent days I stop in the hall and stand for a moment, listening, antennae twitching, and I might be back, at night, in Cass’s room—sickroom, I was about to write, since that was what it most often was—so poised and hushed is the air, so shaded and dimmed the light, somehow, even where it is brightest—Dawn Devonport by a negative magic has wrought permanent twilight in our home. I do not complain of this, for to tell the truth I am glad of the effect—I find it a calmative. I like to imagine, standing there excitedly on the mat just inside the front door, submerged and breathless, that if I concentrate hard enough I will be able to locate by mental exertion alone the exact whereabouts in the house of both my wife and Dawn Devonport. How I am supposed to have developed this divinatory power I cannot say. In these latter days they reign like twin deities, the two of them, over our domestic afterworld. To my surprise—though why surprise?—they have come to be fond of each other. Or so I believe. They do not discuss this with me, needless to say. Even Lydia, even in the sanctuary of the bedroom, where such matters are meant to be aired, says nothing of our guest, if that is what she is—is she our captive?—or nothing that would suggest what her feelings or opinions are in regard to her. I suppose it is none of my business. When Dawn Devonport and I returned from Italy Lydia took her in without a word, I mean without a word of protest, or complaint, as if the thing had been ordained. Is it that women naturally accommodate each other when trouble comes? Do they, any more than men accommodate men, or women accommodate men, or men accommodate women? I do not know. I never know about these things. Other people’s motives, their desiderata and anathemas, are a mystery to me. My own are, too. I seem to myself to move in bafflement, to move immobile, like the dim and hapless hero in a fairy tale, trammelled in thickets, balked in briar.

One of Dawn Devonport’s favourite roosting places about the house is the old green armchair in my attic eyrie. She passes hours there, hours, doing nothing, only watching light change on those ever-present hills far off at the edge of our world. She says she likes the feeling there is of sky and space up here. She has borrowed a jumper of mine that Lydia knitted for me long ago. Lydia, knitting, I cannot imagine it, now. The sleeves are too long and she uses them as an improvised muff. She is always cold, she tells me, even when the heating is set to its highest. I think of Mrs Gray: she too used to complain of the cold as our summer waned. Dawn Devonport sits in a huddle in the chair with her legs drawn up, hugging herself. She wears no makeup and binds her hair back with a bit of ribbon. She looks very young with her face bare like that, or no, not young, but unformed, unshaped, an earlier, more primitive version of herself—a prototype, is that the word I want? I treasure her presence, secretly. I sit at my desk in my swivel chair, with my back turned to her, and write in my book. She says it pleases her to hear the scratching of the nib. I recall how Cass as a little girl used to lie on her side on the floor while I paced, reading my lines aloud from a script held up before me, reading them over and over, getting them into my head. Dawn Devonport has never acted in the theatre—‘Straight to screen, that was me’—but she says the mountains look like stage flats. She intends to give up acting altogether, so she insists. She does not say what she will do when she stops. I tell her of Marcy Meriwether’s threats, of Toby Taggart’s heart-struck appeals. She looks out again at the hills, ash-blue in the afternoon’s unseasonal sunlight, and says nothing. I suspect it pleases her to think herself a fugitive, sought by all. We are in a conspiracy together; Lydia is in it too. I try to remember what loving Cass was like. Love, that word, I say it and it makes my poor old heart run fast, tickety-tock, its little flywheel fairly spinning. I see nothing, understand nothing, or little, anyway; little. It seems not to matter. Perhaps comprehension is not the task, any more. Just to be, that seems enough, for now, up here in this high room, with the girl in her chair at my back.

Today there was a letter waiting for me on my desk, a letter in a long, cream-coloured envelope embossed with the blazon of the University of Arcady. That rang a cracked bell. Of course—Axel Vander’s safe haven off there on the sunny side of America, where Marcy Meriwether hails from. I love expensive stationery, the rich crackle of it, the shiny roughness of its surface, the gluey aroma that is for me the very smell of money. I am invited to attend a seminar the sobering title of which is Anarch: Autarch—Disorder and Control in the Writings of Axel Vander . Yes, I too was compelled to consult the dictionary; the result was not enlightening. All expenses paid, though, first-class flights, and a fee, or honorarium, as the letter’s signatory, one H. Cyrus Blank, delicately has it. This Blank is the Paul de Man—him again!—Professor of Applied Deconstruction in the English Department at Arcady. He seems a friendly type, from his tone. Yet he is vague, and does not say in what capacity I am being invited to join in these arcadian revels. I might be required to come as the old fraud himself, with limp and ebony walking stick, eye-patch and all—I would not put it past them, Professor Blank and his fellow deconstructionists, to have thought of hiring me as an impersonator, a sort of moving wax-work representation of their hero. Shall I go? JB is also invited. It might be a pleasant jaunt—think of all those oranges fresh off the trees—but I am wary. People, real people, expect actors to be the characters they play. I am not Axel Vander, nor anything like him. Am I?

Blank. I have come across that name in JB’s life of Vander, I am sure I have. Was there not a Blank involved somehow when Vander’s wife died, in suspicious circumstances, as they say? I must look up the index. Could my Professor Blank be this other Blank’s father, or his son? These spidery strands of connection, stretching across the world, their clinging touch gives me the shivers. Blank.