John Banville - Ancient Light

I think it is time Dawn Devonport was returned to the world. I am not sure how to put this to her. Lydia will help, I know. They spend a great deal of time together down in the kitchen, smoking and drinking tea and talking. Lydia has become an inveterate tea drinker, like my mother. I approach the kitchen door but when I hear their voices from the other side, an undulant blended buzz, I stop, and turn, and tiptoe away. I cannot think what things they talk about. Voices behind a door always seem to me to be coming from another world, where other laws obtain.

Yes, I shall ask Lydia to aid me in persuading our auroral guest, our star of the morning, to reassume her role, to step back into her part, to be in the world again. The world? As if it were the world.

I met JB for a drink, not sure why, and now wish I had not. We went at the cocktail hour to a place of his choosing, a sort of gentlemen’s club up a side street, a curious establishment, unremarkable on the outside but gloomily palatial within, pillared and porticoed and sunk in a somnolent hush. The pillars were white, the walls Athenian blue, and there were many oil portraits of indistinct staring figures with high collars and mutton-chop whiskers. We sat on either side of a vast fireplace, in buttoned leather armchairs that squeaked and groaned in weary protest under us. The fireplace was deep, and disturbingly black in its depths, with an ornate brass fender and a brass coal scuttle and gleaming firedogs, but no fire. An ancient attendant in bow-tie and tails brought us our brandies on a silver tray and set them down wheezingly on a low table between us and went away without a word. I thought we were the only ones in the place until I heard someone unseen in the far depths of the room clearing his throat with a long, hawking rasp.

JB is distinctly odd, and grows odder each time I encounter him. He maintains a furtive, anxious air, and gives the impression always of being in the process of edging nervously away, even when he is sitting still, as now, in his high, winged armchair with his legs crossed and a brandy glass in his hand. Toby Taggart tells me it was JB who recommended me for the part of Vander. It seems he was there in the audience that disastrous night years ago when I dried on stage, a tongue-tied, goggling Amphitryon, and was impressed. I wonder what impressed him. What would he not be prepared to do for me had I dragged my way through to the final curtain? Now he sat there, at once glazed and alert, watching my lips intently as I spoke, as if he thought to read from them a different and darkly revealing version of the altogether too innocent-sounding matters that my words were meant to convey. No, he said hastily, interrupting me, no, he was sure there had been no one with Axel Vander in Liguria. This gave me pause. If I wished he would look up his notes, he went on, with a vehement gesture of the hand that was not holding the brandy snifter, but he believed he could say with certainty that Vander had been alone in Portovenere, quite alone. Then he looked away, frowning, and making a faint distressed humming noise at the back of his throat. There was a pause. So Vander, then, I said, had been in Portovenere, in fact. I felt like one who has been discharged from hospital with a clean bill of health but who arrives home only to find the ambulance waiting outside the house, its back doors wide open and two bored attendants standing in the street holding ready the stretcher, with its blood-red blanket. At my question JB turned back, I could almost hear the cogs in his neck grinding, and stared at me pop-eyed, opening and closing his mouth as if to test the mechanism before trusting himself to speak. He did recall, he said, the Nebraskan savant Fargo DeWinter, when he spoke to him in Antwerp all those years ago, mentioning something about an assistant who had worked with him on the Vander papers. I waited. JB blinked, gazing at me now in what seemed a fixed, faint torment. He had the impression, he said, with the wincing look of one trying in desperation to hold on to some fragile thing he knows he is about to let drop, and it was only an impression, mind, the merest hint of a suspicion, that it was this assistant and not DeWinter himself who had unearthed the goods, the real, that is the bad, goods on Vander and his questionable, to say the least, past. I waited again. JB went on staring and twitching. It was I now who felt I was about to let fall that breakable thing. When Cass was a little girl she used to say that as soon as she was grown-up she would marry me and we would have a child just like her so that if she died I would not miss her and be lonely. Ten years; she has been dead ten years. Must I set off in search of her again, in sorrow and in pain? She will come no more to my world, but I go towards hers.

Billie Stryker telephoned. I have come to fear these calls. She tells me there is someone I should speak to. I thought she said this person was a nun and I assumed I had misheard. I really must have my hearing seen to. My hearing, seen to—ha! There it is again, language playing with itself.

I have begun to look at Billie under a new light. Languishing for so long in the shadow of my inattention she seemed herself a shadow. But she too has her aura. She is, after all, the link between so many of the figures that most closely concern me—Mrs Gray, my daughter, even Axel Vander. I ask myself if she might be more than merely a link, if she is, rather, in some way a co-ordinator. Co-ordinator? Odd word. I do not know what I mean, but I seem to mean something. I used to think, long ago, that despite all the evidence I was the one in charge of my own life. To be, I told myself, is to act. I missed the vital pun, though. Now I realise that always I have been acted upon, by unacknowledged forces, hidden coercions. Billie is the latest in that line of dramaturgs who have guided from behind the scenes the poor production that I am, or am taken to be. Now what new twist of the plot has she uncovered?

The Convent of Our Sacred Mother stands on a bleak rise above a windy confluence where three ways meet. Here we are in the suburbs, yet I felt as though I had ventured on to a trackless wilderness. Do not mistake me—I am fond of spots like this, bleak and seemingly characterless, if that is the word, fond, I mean. Yes, give me an unconsidered corner any day over your verdant vales, your sparkling, majestic peaks. My scenic detours will lead you down littered streets where washing hangs from windows and slippered old parties with their dentures out stand in front doorways watching you. There will be slinking dogs going about their business, and children with dirt-smeared faces playing behind barbed wire on waste ground under a charred sky. Young men will put their heads far back and flare their nostrils and stare truculently, and girls in high heels and piled-up hairstyles will preen and flounce, pretending not to be aware of you, and screech at each other with the voices of parrots; it is always the girls who know there is an elsewhere, you can see them yearning for it. There are dustbin smells, and smells of mouldering plaster and rotting mattresses. You do not want to be here yet there is something here that speaks to you, something uneasily half remembered, half imagined; something that is you and not-you, a portent out of the past.

Why would the canny Sisters build their mother house—their mother house!—on such a spot? Maybe the building, painted mantle-blue and many-windowed, as commodious as one of Heaven’s promised mansions, was designed originally for some other purpose, was a barracks, maybe, or maybe a madhouse. The sky seemed impossibly low this day, the bellied clouds as if resting on the ranks of chimney pots and the rooks skimming down in deep, long arcs on to the wind-polished grass, seeming pressed upon by the weight of that sky and steering themselves by the ragged tips of their wings.