John Banville - Ancient Light

I knew precious little about girls—and consequently the little I knew was precious indeed—and next to nothing about grown women. At the seaside for a summer when I was ten or eleven there had been an auburn beauty of my own age whom I had adored at a distance—but then, who in the honeyed haze of childhood has not adored an auburn beauty by the seaside?—and a redhead in town one winter, called Hettie Hickey, who despite her less than lovely name was as delicate as a Meissen figurine, who wore multiple layers of lace petticoats and showed off her legs when she danced the jive, and who on three consecutive and never to be forgotten Saturday nights consented to sit with me in the back row of the Alhambra cinema and let me put a hand down the front of her dress and cup in my palm one of her surprisingly chilly but excitingly pliable, soft little breasts.

These glancing hits of the love god’s shafts, along with that vision of the bicyclist in the churchyard laid bare by a breeze—a playful god at work there too, surely—had formed the total of my erotic experience to date, aside from solitary exercises, which I do not count. Now, after that kiss in the car, I seemed to myself not to be living, quite, but suspended in a state of quivering potential, blundering through my days and tossing at night on a sweaty and reeking bed, wondering did I dare—? and would she dare—? Such schemes I devised to meet her again, to be alone with her again, to verify what I hardly could hope would be true, that if I pressed my advantage she might—well, that she might what? Here was the point where all grew vague. Often I could not tell which was more urgent, the longing to be allowed to delve into her flesh—for after that kiss my formerly passive intentions had moved on to the stage of active intent—or the need to understand what exactly such delving and doing would entail. It was a confusion between the categories of the verb to know. That is, I was more or less familiar with what would be required in order for me to do and for her to be done to, but inexperienced though I was I felt certain that the mere mechanics of the thing would be the least of it.

What I was certain of was that what seemed promised by my two encounters with Mrs Gray, the one on the far side of that nexus of looking-glasses and the one on this side, in the station wagon under the trees, would be of an entirely new order of experience. My feelings were a giddily intensified mixture of anticipation and alarm, and a beady determination to take with both hands, and whatever other extremities might be called on, anything that should prove to be on offer. There was an avid throb now in my blood that startled me, and shocked me, too, a little, I think. And, yet, all the while, despite this passion, these pains, there lingered an odd sense of disengagement, of not registering fully, of being there and not being there, as if everything were still taking place in the depths of a mirror, while I remained outside, gazing in, untouched. Well, you know the sensation, it is not unique to me.

That brief moment of contact in the birch wood was followed by another week of silence. At first I was disappointed, then incensed, then sullenly disheartened. I thought I was deceived and that the kiss, no more than the exhibition in the mirror, had meant next to nothing to Mrs Gray. I felt an outcast, alone with my humiliation. I avoided Billy and walked to school on my own. He seemed not to notice my coolness, my new wariness. I watched him covertly for any sign that he might know something of what had occurred between his mother and me. In my darker moments I would have myself convinced that Mrs Gray was playing an elaborate prank and making mock of me, and I burned for shame at being so easily duped. I had a hideous vision of her regaling the tea-table with an account of what had occurred between us—‘And then he did, he kissed me!’—and the four of them, even glum Mr Gray, shrieking and hilariously shoving each other. My distress was such that it even roused my mother from her chronic lethargy, though her murmurs of enquiry and half-hearted concern only infuriated me, and I would give her no answer, but would stump out of the house and slam the door shut behind me.

When at last at the end of that second, tormented, week I met Mrs Gray in the street by chance my first impulse was not to acknowledge her at all, but to display a cutting hauteur and walk straight past her without a word or a sign. It was a spring day of wintry gales and spitting sleet, and we were the only two abroad in Fishers Walk, a laneway of whitewashed cottages that ran under the high granite wall of the railway station. She was struggling against the wind with her head down, the bat-wings of her umbrella snapping, and it would have been she who passed me by, seeing nothing of me above the knees, had I not halted directly in her path. Where did I find the courage, the effrontery, to take such a bold stand? For a second she did not recognise me, I could see, and when she did she seemed flustered. Could she have forgotten already, or have decided to pretend to forget, the display in the mirror, the embrace in the station wagon? She had no hat and her hair was sprinkled with glittering beads of melted ice. ‘Oh,’ she said, with a faltering smile, ‘look at you, you’re frozen.’ I suppose I must have been shivering, not from the cold so much as the miserable excitement of encountering her accidentally like this. She wore galoshes and a smoke-coloured transparent plastic coat buttoned all the way up to her throat. No one wears those coats any more, or galoshes either; I wonder why. Her face was blotched from the cold, her chin raw and shiny, and her eyes were tearing. We stood there, buffeted by the wind, helpless in our different ways. A foul gust came to us from the bacon factory out by the river. Beside us the wet stone wall glistened and gave off a smell of damp mortar. I think she would have sidestepped me and walked on had she not seen my look of need and desolate entreaty. She gazed at me for a long moment in surmise, measuring the possibilities, no doubt, calculating the risks, and then at last made up her mind.

‘Come along,’ she said, and turned, and we walked off together in the direction whence she had come.

It was the week of the Easter holidays, and Mr Gray had taken Billy and his sister to the circus for the afternoon. I thought of them huddled on a wooden bench in the cold with the smell of trodden grass coming up between their knees and the tent flapping thunderously around them and the band blaring and farting, and I felt superior and more grown-up than not only Billy and his sister but than their father, too. I was in their home, in their kitchen, sitting at that big square wooden table drinking a mug of milky tea that Mrs Gray had made for me, watchful and wary, it is true, but sheltered, and warm, and quivering like a gun-dog with expectancy. What were acrobats to me, or a dreary troupe of clowns, or even a spangled bareback rider? From where I sat I would have happily heard that the big top had collapsed in the wind and smothered them all, performers and spectators alike. An iron wood-stove in one corner sparked and hissed behind a sooty window, its tall black flue trembling with heat. Behind me the big refrigerator’s motor shut itself off with a heave and a grunt and where there had been an unheard hum was suddenly a hollow quiet. Mrs Gray, who had gone off to shed her raincoat and her rubber overshoes, came back chafing her hands. Her face that had been blotched was glowing pink now but her hair was still dark with wet and stood out in spikes. ‘You didn’t tell me there was a drop on the end of my nose,’ she said.

She had an air of faint desperation and at the same time seemed ruefully amused. This was uncharted territory, after all, for her, surely, as much as for me. Had I been a man and not a boy, perhaps she would have known how to proceed, by way of banter, sly smiles, a show of reluctance betokening its opposite—all the usual—but what was she to do with me, squatting there toad-like at her kitchen table with the rain-wet legs of my trousers lightly steaming, my eyes determinedly downcast, my elbows planted on the wood and the mug clutched tight between my hands, struck dumb by shyness and covert lust?