John Banville - Ancient Light

I would have liked to ask her why she became a nun. Does she believe it all, I wonder, the crib and the cross, the miraculous birth, sacrifice, redemption and resurrection? If so, in her version of things, Cass is eternally alive, Cass, and Mrs Gray, and Mr Gray, and Billy, and my mother and my father, and everyone else’s father and mother, back through all the generations, even unto Eden. But that is not the only possible or highest heaven. Among the wonders that Fedrigo Sorrán told me of that snowy night in Lerici was the theory of the many worlds. Some savants hold that there is a multiplicity of universes, all present, all simultaneously going on, wherein everything that might happen does happen. Just as on Kitty’s thronging paradisal plain, so too somewhere in this infinitely layered, infinitely ramifying reality Cass did not die, her child was born, Svidrigailov did not go to America; somewhere too Mrs Gray survived, perhaps is surviving still, still young and still remembering me, as I remember her. Which eternal realm shall I believe in, which shall I choose? Neither, since all my dead are all alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.

If I must choose one memory of Mrs Gray, my Celia, a last one, from my overflowing store, then here it is. We were in the wood, in Cotter’s place, sitting naked on the mattress, or she was sitting, rather, while I half lay in her lap with my arms loosely draped about her hips and my head on her breast. I was looking upwards, past her shoulder, to where I could see the sun shining through a rent in the roof. It must have been hardly more than a pinhole, for the beam of light coming through it was very fine, yet intense, too, radiating outwards in spokes in all directions, so that at every tiniest adjustment of the angle of my head it made a shivering, fiercely burning wheel that spun and stopped and spun again, like the gold wheel of an enormous watch. It struck me that I alone was witness to this phenomenon sparked at this one insignificant point by the conjunction of the great spheres of the world—more, that I was its maker, that it was in my eye it was being generated, that none but I would see or know it. Just then Mrs Gray shifted her shoulder, dousing the beam of sunlight, and the spoked wheel was no more. My dazzled eyes hastened to adjust to her shadowy form above me, and quickly the moment of eclipse passed and there she was, leaning down to me, holding up her left breast a little on three splayed fingers and offering it to my lips like a precious, polished gourd. What I saw, though, or what I see now, is her face, foreshortened in my view of it, broad and immobile, heavy-lidded, the mouth unsmiling, and the expression in it, pensive, melancholy and remote, as she contemplated not me but something beyond me, something far, far beyond.

Kitty let me out at a corner of the cloisters, through a postern gate, or sally-port—ah, yes, how I love the old words, how they comfort me. I was fiddling with my hat, my gloves, a fussed old party suddenly. I did not know what to say to her. We shook hands quickly and I turned and seemed to reel down that hillside, and was soon among those paltry, blemished streets again.

I am going to America. Shall I find Svidrigailov there? Perhaps I shall. JB and I are to travel together, an ill-assorted pair, I know. We have put our faith in the largesse of Professor Blank, our putative host at the Axelvanderfest in Arcady, where I am told there are no seasons. Our passage is booked, our bags are packed, we are eager to be off. All that remains is to shoot our final scene, the one in which Vander comes to bid farewell to Cora, his tragic girl who died of love for him. Yes, Dawn Devonport is back on set. In the end it was Lydia, of course, who persuaded her to return and be again among the living. I shall not ask what deal was done down in that kitchen lair, amid the libations of tea and the sacrificial fumes of cigarette smoke. Instead, I shall wait on the fringes of light as they lay out the star in her shroud and apply the last touches to her makeup, and I shall think, lingering there, before walking forwards to lean down and kiss her cold and painted brow, that a film set resembles nothing so much as a nativity scene, that little lighted space surrounded by its dim, attentive figures.

Billie Stryker too will shortly set out on a journey, to Antwerp, Turin, Portovenere. Yes, I have commissioned her to retrace whatever slime-trail Axel Vander may have left along that route ten years ago. More unfinished business. What things she will unearth I do not care to think but yet would know. I fear there is much that is buried. She is eager to be off, looking forward to getting away from that husband of hers, I do not doubt. I have signed over to her what I have been paid for playing Vander these past weeks. To what better use could I have put such a tainted bounty? Billie, my sleuth.

When I was a child I too, like Cass, suffered from insomnia. I think in my case it was that I deliberately kept myself awake, for I had bad dreams, and was prey to an abiding fear of sudden death—I would not lie on my left side, I remember, convinced that if my heart should fail while I was asleep I would wake up and feel it stopping and know I was about to die. I cannot say what age I was when I suffered this affliction; probably it was about the time of my father’s death. If so, I added to my bereaved mother’s torment by tormenting her with my wakefulness, night after night. I would beg her to leave her bedroom door open so that I could call out to her every few minutes to make sure she too was still awake. Eventually, exhausted no doubt by her own grief and my merciless importunings, she would fall asleep, and I would be left alone, wide-eyed and with scalding eyelids, crouched under the night’s stifling black blanket. I would stay there like that, in terror and anguish, for as long as I could bear it, which was not long, and then I would get up and go into my mother’s room. The convention was, and it never varied, that I had been asleep and had been wakened by one of my nightmares. Poor Ma. She would not allow me to get into bed with her, that was a rule she enforced, this least forceful of souls, but she would pass something to me, a blanket or an eiderdown, to put on the floor beside the bed to lie on. She would reach out a hand, too, from under the covers, and give me one of her fingers to hold. In time, when this ritual had become the norm, and I was spending a part of every night on the floor beside her bed, clutching her finger, I devised my own arrangement. I found a canvas sleeping bag in the attic—it must have been left behind by a lodger—and kept it in a cupboard, and would drag it with me into my mother’s room and wriggle into it and lie down in my place on the floor by her bed. This went on for months, until in the end I must have surmounted some barrier, crossed into a new and sturdier phase of growing up, and began to keep to my own room, and to sleep in my own bed. And then, years later, one night in the immediate, agonised aftermath of Mrs Gray’s departure, I found myself scrabbling in the cupboard for that old sleeping bag, and finding it I crept with stifled sobs into my mother’s room and spread it on the floor, as I used to. What did my mother think? I believed she was asleep, but presently—did she know I was weeping?—I heard a rustling sound and her hand came out from under the sheet and she touched me on the shoulder, offering me her finger to hold on to, as in the old days. I went rigid, of course, and shrank back from her touch, and presently she withdrew her hand and turned over with a heave and a sigh, and soon was snoring. I watched the window above me. The night was ending and the dawn was coming on, and light, uncertain as yet, a faint effulgence, was seeping in around the edges of the curtain. My eyes ached from weeping and my throat was swollen and raw. What I thought could not end had ended. Whom now would I love, and who would love me? I listened to my mother snoring. The air in the room was stale from her breath. One world was ending, without a sound. I looked to the window again. The light around the curtain was stronger now, a light that seemed somehow to shake within itself even as it strengthened, and it was as if some radiant being were advancing towards the house, over the grey grass, across the mossed yard, great trembling wings spread wide, and waiting for it, waiting, I slipped without noticing into sleep.