John Banville - Ancient Light

After taking a deep and for some reason painful breath I too descended, circumspectly. The hall was empty, with Kitty nowhere to be seen, for which I was relieved. I opened the front door quietly and stepped out into the square, my gonads humming like those pretty porcelain insulators, little fat doll-like things, that there used to be on the arms of telegraph poles, that the wires went through, or around—remember? I knew that Billy would wonder what had become of me but I did not think that in the circumstances I could face him, not for now, anyway. He bore a strong resemblance to his mother, have I mentioned that? Oddly, though, he never did speak of my having flown the house, not when I met up with him next day, not ever, in fact. I sometimes wonder—well, I do not know what it is I wonder. Families are strange institutions, and the inmates of them know many strange things, often without knowing that they know them. When Billy eventually found out about his mother and me, did I not think his rage, those violent tears, a mite excessive, even in a case as provocative as the one in which we all suddenly found ourselves mired? What do I imply? Nothing. Move on, move on, as we are directed to do at the scene of an accident, or a crime.

Days passed. Half the time I spent in contemplation of Mrs Gray reflected in the mirror of my memory and the other half imagining I had imagined everything. It was a week or more before I saw her again. There was a tennis club outside the town, by the estuary, where the Grays had a family membership, and where I went sometimes with Billy to knock a ball about, feeling horribly conspicuous in my cheap plimsolls and threadbare singlet. Ah, but the tennis clubs of yore! My heart haunts still those enchanted courts. Even the names, Melrose, Ashburn, Wilton, The Limes, bespoke a world more graceful far than the dingy backwater where we lived. This one, out by the estuary, was called Court-lands; I imagine the pun was unintentional. I had seen Mrs Gray playing there only once, partnering her husband in a doubles match against another couple who in my memory are no more than a pair of white-clad phantoms bobbing and dipping in the ghostly soundlessness of a lost past. Mrs Gray played the net, crouching menacingly with her rear end in the air and springing up to slash at the ball like a samurai slicing an enemy diagonally in half. Her legs were not as long as the Kayser Bondor lady’s, were in fact more sturdy than anything else, but nicely tanned, and shapely enough at the ankle. She wore shorts rather than one of those boring skirtlets, and there were damp patches at the armpits of her short-sleeved cotton shirt.

That day, the day of the incident—the incident!—that I wish to record, I was walking homewards alone when she overtook me in the car and stopped. Was it the day of the doubles match? Cannot remember. If it was, where was her husband? And if I was coming from the club, where was Billy? Detained, the pair of them, by the amatory goddess, delayed, diverted, locked in the lavatory and shouting in vain to be let out—no matter, they were not there. It was evening and the sunlight was watery after a day of showers. The road, patterned with fragrant patches of damp, ran beside the railway line, and beyond that the estuary was a shifting mass of turbulent purple, and the horizon was fringed with a boiling of ice-white clouds. I had slung my jumper over my shoulders and knotted the sleeves loosely in front, like a real tennis player, and carried my racquet in its press at a negligent angle under my arm. When I heard the motor slowing behind me I knew, I do not know how, that it was she, and my heartbeat too seemed to slow, and developed a syncopated catch. I stopped, and turned, frowning in feigned surprise. She had to stretch all the way across the passenger seat to roll down the window. The car was not a car in fact but a station wagon, of a flat grey shade and somewhat battered; she had left the motor running and the big ugly hump-backed thing gasped and trembled on its chassis like an old horse with a chill, coughing out blue smoke at the back. Mrs Gray leaned low with her face tilted up towards the open window, smiling at me quizzically, reminding me of the amiably sardonic heroines of the screwball comedies of an earlier day, who made rapid-fire wisecracks and bullied their beaux and gaily spent their gruff fathers’ countless millions on sports cars and silly hats. Did I say her hair was of an oaken shade and cut in a nondescript style, and that there was a curl at one side that she was always pushing behind her ear, though it would never stay put? ‘I think, young man,’ she said, ‘we are both going the same way.’ And so we were, although it turned out not to be the way home.

She was an impatient driver, apt to lose her footing on the pedals, and given to swearing under her breath and yanking violently at the gear stick, which was mounted on the steering column, her left arm working like the articulated handle of a pump. Did she smoke a cigarette? Yes, she did, darting it frequently at the gap where her window was open an inch at the top, though each time most of the ash blew back in again. The front seat had no armrest in the middle and was as wide and as plumply upholstered as a sofa, and when she trod on the brakes or clashed the gears we jounced a little on it in unison. For a long time Mrs Gray said nothing, frowning out at the road ahead, her thoughts seemingly elsewhere. I sat with my hands resting in my lap, the fingers touching at their tips. What was I thinking of? Nothing, that I recall; I was just waiting, again, for what would happen to happen, as I waited that day in the Grays’ living room before the encounter in the mirror, but more excitedly, more breathlessly, this time. She had changed out of her tennis whites into a dress made of some light stuff with a pattern of pale flowers. Now and then I caught a faint whiff of her mingled fragrances, while a dribble of cigarette smoke from her lips drifted sideways and went into my mouth. I had never been so sharply conscious of the presence of another human being, this separate entity, this incommensurable not-I; a volume displacing air, a soft weight pressing down on the other side of the bench seat; a mind working; a heart beating.

We skirted the town, following a sun-dappled back road beside a dry-stone wall and a wood of glimmering birches. It was a part of the town’s hinterland I rarely found myself in; odd, how in a place so narrowly circumscribed as ours there were parts where one tended not to go. The evening was waning but the light was still strong, the sun racing through the trees beside us, those trees which as I see them now are much too lushly leaved, it being only April, for the seasons are shifting yet again. We crested a low hill where the wood fell back, and were afforded an unexpectedly panoramic view across garishly lit uplands to the sea, then we plunged down into a shadowed dell and suddenly at a muddy bend Mrs Gray with a grunt spun the steering wheel and slewed the car to the left and we shot off the road on to an overgrown woodland track and she took her foot off the accelerator and the car bumped drunkenly over a few yards of uneven ground and came to a groaning, swaying stop.

She switched off the engine. Birdsong invaded the silence. With her hands still resting on the steering wheel she leaned forwards to peer up through the slanted windscreen into the tracery of ivory and brown branches above us. ‘Would you like to kiss me?’ she asked, still with her eye canted upwards.

It had seemed less an invitation than a general enquiry, something she was simply curious to know. I looked into the brambled gloom beside the car. What was surprising was not to be surprised by any of this. Then, in the way of these things, we both turned our heads at the same moment and she set a fist down between us on the soft seat to brace herself and with one shoulder lifted she advanced her face, tilted sideways at a slight angle, her eyes closed, and I kissed her. It was really a very innocent kiss. Her lips were dry and felt as brittle as a beetle’s wing. After a second or two we disengaged, and sat back, and I had to clear my throat. How piercingly the birds’ voices rang through the hollow wood. ‘Yes,’ Mrs Gray murmured, as if confirming something to herself, then started up the engine again and twisted about to look through the rear window, the tendons of her neck drawn tight at the side and an arm laid along the back of the seat, and crunched the gears into reverse and joggled us backwards along the track and out on to the road.