John Banville - Ancient Light

Sister Catherine was a brisk little body with a smoker’s cough. I would not have taken her for a nun at all. Her hair, grizzled like mine but cut shorter, was uncovered, and her habit, such as it was, square-cut from grey serge, looked to me like the kind of outfit that librarians and businessmen’s dowdy secretaries used to wear in my young days. When exactly was it that nuns stopped dressing the part? One must go far to the south, nowadays, to the Latin lands, to find the true original: the heavy black skirts to the ground, the hood and wimple, the big wooden rosary slung about the non-existent waist. This person’s legs were bare, her ankles thick. Strain though I might I could not see in her a likeness of her mother. She was home, she told me, on vacation, her word, from the mission fields abroad. At once I pictured a vast sandy tract under a white and pitiless sun, all scattered about with skulls and bleached bones and bits of glass and glittering metal lashed with thongs to painted sticks. She is a doctor as well as a nun—I remembered that coveted microscope. Her accent has a New World edge. She chain-smokes, Lucky Camels being her brand. She still wears those thick-lensed specs; they might have been from her father’s shop. I told her that Catherine was, had been, my daughter’s name. ‘Called Kitty, too, like me?’ she asked. No, I said: Cass.

There was an inner cloister where we walked, a stone-flagged, arcaded corridor around four sides of a gravelled courtyard with an open sky above. On the gravel there were palms growing in tall Ali Baba pots, and a trellis trailing some variety of winter-flowering climber with a pallid and despondent bloom. Despite my overcoat I was cold, but Sister Catherine, as I suppose I must go on calling her, in her thin grey cardigan, seemed not to notice the raw air and the wind’s insidious, icy fingers.

It seems I was mistaken about everything. Nobody knew about her mother and me. She had told no one what she had seen in the laundry room that day. She was lighting a cigarette, and had her hands cupped around a match, and now she looked up at me sideways with a glint of the Kitty of old, scornful and amused. Why, she asked, had I imagined that everyone knew? But I thought, I said in bewilderment, I thought the town was rife with talk of how her mother and I had carried on so disgracefully throughout that summer. She shook her head, detaching a flake of tobacco from her lip. But her father, I said, had she not told him? ‘What—Daddy?’ she said, spluttering on a mouthful of smoke. ‘He’d have been the last one I would tell. And even if I had told him he wouldn’t have believed me—in his eyes Mumser could do no wrong.’ Mumser? ‘That’s what we called her, Billy and I. Don’t you remember anything?’ Evidently not.

We walked on. The wind moaned among the stone arcades. I was suffering the same constraint that used to take hold of me in the old days in face of Kitty’s mockery and sly merriment. And how peculiar it felt, being here with her, after all these years, this tough little person giving off puffs of smoke like an old-fashioned steam train and shaking her head in happy wonderment at my ignorance, my deludedness. They used to say she was delicate; obviously they were wrong. Even if, she was saying, even if it had been proved to her father that for months his wife had been up to monkey business with a boy of—what age had I been then, anyway?—he would have done nothing about it, for he loved Mumser so desperately and held her in such helpless awe that he would have let her get away with anything. Saying these things, she displayed no rancour against me, the me of now or the me of then. She did not even seem to feel I had done wrong. I, on the other hand, was in a sweat of shame and embarrassment. Monkey business.

But Marge, I said, stopping short as I suddenly remembered, her friend Marge, what about her? Well, she said, stopping too, what about her? Surely, I said, she would have told what she had seen. She frowned, peering up at me as though I had lost my senses. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Marge wasn’t there.’ This I could not take in at all. I had seen them in the doorway of the laundry room, I remembered it distinctly, the two of them standing there, Kitty in her pigtails and her round glasses and lardy Marge breathing through her mouth, both staring in that dull and slightly puzzled way, like a pair of putti who had lighted by mistake upon a crucifixion scene. But no, the nun said firmly, no, I was wrong, Marge was not there, it had been she alone at the open door.

We had come to a corner of the rectangular courtyard where there was an unglazed arched narrow window, an arrow-loop, or loop-hole, I think it is called, affording a view down the hillside to where those three roads converged. We could see cramped housing estates with serried roofs, and parked cars like so many coloured beetles, and gardens, and television masts, and mushrooming water-towers. The wind was streaming steadily through the stone slit, forceful and cold as a cascade of water, and we stopped and leaned into the deep embrasure to get the unexpectedly fresh feel of it on our faces. Sister Catherine—no, Kitty, I shall call her Kitty, it feels unnatural not to—Kitty was shielding her cigarette in her fist and still smiling to herself in bemusement at the enormity of my misconceptions, my misrememberings. Yes, she said again cheerily, I was wrong about everything, everything. The day that she happened upon us in the laundry room was not the day that Mrs Gray left to go back to her mother, that was a month later, more than a month, and Mr Gray had not shut the shop and put the house up for sale until long afterwards, at Christmas time. By then her mother, who had been ill throughout that summer, our summer, hers and mine, was failing fast; everyone had been surprised that she had held on for so long. ‘Because of you, probably,’ Kitty said, tapping a finger on the sleeve of my coat, ‘if that’s any comfort to you.’ I put my face close up to the narrow window and looked down into that populous vale. So many, so many of the living!

She had been mortally sick for a long time, my Mrs Gray, and I without an inkling. The child who had died had torn something in her insides when it was being born, and in that fissure the mad cells gathered and bided until their hour came. ‘Endometrial carcinoma,’ Kitty said. ‘Brr’—she gave herself a shake—‘to be a doctor is to know too much.’ Her mother died, she said, on the last day of that year. By then my heart had healed, and I had turned sixteen, and was about other business. ‘She was cold, all the time, that September,’ Kitty said, ‘though remember how hot it was? Every morning Pa would build a fire for her and she would sit in front of it all day wrapped in a blanket, looking into the flames.’ She gave a sort of soft little angry laugh through her nostrils and shook her head. ‘She was waiting for you, I think,’ she said, shooting me a glance. ‘But you never came.’

We turned and walked back across the courtyard. I told her how Billy had flung himself at me in the Forge that day, shouting and weeping and swinging his fists. Yes, Kitty said, she had told him, he was the only one she had told. She had felt she had owed it to him. I did not ask why. Now we were pacing again under the arcades, our footsteps sharp on the flagstones. ‘Will you look at those,’ she said, stopping, and pointing with her cigarette, ‘those palms. What sort of a thing are they, to have here?’ Billy died three years ago, of something in the brain, an aneurysm, she supposed. She had not seen him for a long time, had hardly known him any more. Her father outlived him by a year—‘Imagine that!’ Now they were all gone, and she was the last of the line, and the name would die with her. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘the world will hardly lack for Grays.’