Ancient Light (14 page)

I have known many leading ladies but I had never been thus close up to a real film star before and I had the odd impression of Dawn Devonport as a scaled-down replica of her public self, expertly fashioned and perfectly animate yet lacking some essential spark—duller, slightly dowdier, or just human, I suppose, just ordinarily human—and I did not know if I should feel disappointed, I mean disenchanted. I cannot remember any more of what we talked about on this second encounter than I can of what was said when we were introduced in the hall downstairs. There was something about her, about the combination in her of frailty and faint mannishness, that was a sharp reminder of my daughter. I do not believe I have seen a single film in which Dawn Devonport stars, but it does not matter: her face, with that teasing pout, those depthless, dawn-grey eyes, was as familiar as the face of the moon, and as distant, too. So how, standing there under that tall, light-filled window, would I not be reminded of my lost girl?

Every aurate woman I have loved in my life, and I use the word loved in its widest sense, has left her impression on me, as the old gods of creation are said to have left their thumbprints on the temples of the men that they fashioned out of mud and turned into us. Just so do I retain a particular trace of each one of my women—for I think of them all as mine still—stamped indelibly on the underside of my memory. I will glimpse in the street a head of wheat-coloured hair retreating among the hurrying crowd, or a slender hand lifted and waving farewell in a certain way; I will hear a phrase of laughter from the far side of a hotel lobby, or just a word spoken with a recognised, warm inflection, and on the instant this or that she will be there, vividly, fleetingly, and my heart like an old dog will scramble up and give a wistful woof. It is not that all the attributes of all these women are lost to me save one, only the one that remains most strongly is most characteristic: is, it would seem, an essence. Mrs Gray, though, despite the years that have elapsed since I last saw her, has stayed with me in her entirety, or as much of an entirety as one may have of a creature not oneself. Somehow I have gathered up all the disparate parts of her, as it is said we shall do with our own remains at the Last Trump, and assembled them into a working model sufficiently complete and life-like for memory’s purposes. It is for this reason that I do not see her in the street, do not find her summoned up in the turn of a stranger’s head, or hear her voice from the midst of an indifferent crowd: being so amply present to me, she does not need to send out fragmentary signals. Or perhaps, in her case, my memory works in a special way. Perhaps it is not memory at all that thinks it holds her fast inside me, but some other faculty altogether.

Even in those days themselves she was not always my she. When I was in their house and the family was there she was Mr Gray’s wife, or Billy’s mother, or, worse, Kitty’s. If I called for Billy and had to come in and sit down at the kitchen table to wait for him—he really was a tardy soul—Mrs Gray would let her not quite focused gaze slide over me, smiling in a remote fashion, and take up some vague chore as though the sight of me had reminded her of it. She moved more slowly than usual at those times, with an unwonted, telltale dreaminess that the others, had they really been others and not her family, would surely have taken suspicious note of. She would pick up something, anything, a teacup, a dishcloth, a butter-smeared knife, and look at it as if it had presented itself to her of its own volition, demanding her attention. After a moment, though, she would set the object down again, with an intensified air of abstractedness. I can see her there at the kitchen table, the thing put back where it had been yet not quite relinquished, her hand still resting lightly on it as if to retain the exact feel of it, the exact texture, while with the fingers of her other hand she twisted and twisted that unruly spring of hair behind her ear.

And I, what did I do on those occasions, how did I comport myself? I know it will seem fanciful, or just plain tendentious, when I say I believe that it was in those fraught intervals in the Grays’ kitchen that, without knowing it, I took my first, groping steps out on to the boards; nothing like an early clandestine love to teach one the rudiments of the actor’s trade. I knew what was required of me, knew the part I had to play. It was imperative above all to appear innocent to the point of idiocy. With what skill, therefore, did I adopt the protective cover of doltish adolescence and exaggerate the natural awkwardness of a fifteen-year-old, stumbling and mumbling, pretending not to know where to look or what to do with my hands, trotting out inappropriate observations and knocking over the salt cellar or slopping the milk in the milk jug. I even managed, when addressed directly, to make myself blush, not guiltily, of course, but as if out of an agony of shyness. How proud I was of the polish of my performance. Though I am sure I over-acted wildly, I believe neither Billy nor his father noticed that I was acting at all. Kitty, as usual, was the one who worried me, for every so often, in the midst of one of my little pantomimes, I would catch her eyeing me with what seemed a knowing and sardonic glint.

Mrs Gray for all her worked-at air of hazy detachment was, I have no doubt, permanently on tenterhooks, fearful that sooner or later I was bound to go too far and take a pratfall and send us both sprawling in the disarray of our perfidy at the feet of her astonished loved ones. And I, I am ashamed to say, teased her heartlessly. It amused me to let the mask drop now and then, just for a second. I would wink at her sultrily when I judged the others were not looking, or in passing would softly bump against some part of her as if by accident. I found endearingly erotic the way in which if, say, I touched her leg under the breakfast table she would try to cover up her start of fright, reminding me of the flustered, helpless attempts at modesty she used to make in our earliest days together when I would bundle her into the back seat of the station wagon and claw at her clothes in my haste to get at this or that high or hollow of her bared flesh as it shrank from me and at the same time enticed me onwards. What a pressure she must have been under at those times, in her own kitchen, what a panic-fright she must have felt. And how callous I was, how careless, to put her through such trials. Yet there was a side to her, the wanton side, that cannot but have thrilled, however fearfully, to these prods that I so cavalierly gave to the blandly domestic surface of her day.

I am thinking of the occasion of Kitty’s party. How did I come to be there, who invited me? Not Kitty herself, I know, nor Billy, and certainly not Mrs Gray. Curious, these holes one encounters when one presses over-insistently upon the moth-eaten fabric of the past. Anyway, for whatever reason, I was there. The little monster was celebrating her birthday, I do not remember which one—she always seemed ageless to me. It was an occasion of wild misrule. The guests were all girls, a score of undersized hoydens who romped unchecked in a pack through the house, elbowing each other and grabbing at each other’s clothes and screaming. One of them, a whey-faced creature, neckless and fat, displayed an alarmingly adhesive interest in me, and kept popping up at my elbow with a congested, insinuating smile; Kitty must have been talking about me. There were party games all of which ended in violent scuffles, with hair pulled and blows exchanged. Billy and I, whom Mrs Gray, before taking refuge in the kitchen, had charged with keeping order, waded into these mêlées shouting and slapping, like a bo’sun and his mate struggling to quell a riot among a gang of drunken sailors on shore leave in a dockside tavern of an unlicensed Saturday night.

At one particularly boisterous passage of these revels I too retreated into the kitchen, tousled and unnerved. Kitty’s fat friend, called Marge, if I recall—she probably grew up a sylph and broke men’s hearts with the arching of an eyebrow—tried to follow me but I gave her a Gorgon’s transfixing glare and she hung back dolefully and let me shut the kitchen door in her face. I had not come in search of Mrs Gray but there she was, in her apron, with her sleeves rolled and her arms floury, bending to lift a tray of fairy cakes from the oven. Fairy cakes! I was creeping up on her, intent on embracing her about the hips, when, still bending, she turned her head and saw me. I began to say something, but she was looking beyond me now, to the door through which I had just entered, and her face had taken on an expression of alarm and warning. Billy had come in unheard behind me. At once I straightened and let my hands fall to my sides, unsure, though, that I had been quick enough, and that he had not seen me there, advancing at a crouch, ape arms outspread and fingers hooked, towards his mother’s tautly proffered hindquarters. But luckily Billy was not an observant boy, and he swept us both with an indifferent glance and went to the table and took up a slice of plum-cake and began to stuff it into his mouth with slovenly dispatch. All the same, how my heart wobbled from the gleeful terror of such a close thing.

Mrs Gray, making herself ignore me, came and set the tray of cakes on the table and stood back, pushing out her lower lip and sending a quick puff of breath upwards to blow a stray fall of hair from her forehead. Billy was still chewing cake, mumbling complaints of his sister and her riotous friends. His mother bade him absently not to speak with his mouth full—she was still admiring the cakes, each in its fluted paper cup and snug in its own shallow compartment in the tray and smelling warmly of vanilla—but he paid her no heed. Then she lifted a hand and laid it on his shoulder. This gesture too was absent-minded, but for that reason all the more shocking, to me. I was outraged, outraged to see the two of them together there, she with her hand resting so lightly on his shoulder, in the midst of all that homeliness, that shared, familiar world, while I stood by as if forgotten. Whatever liberties Mrs Gray might grant me I would never be as near to her as Billy was at that moment, as he always had been and always would be, at every moment. I could only get into her from the outside, but he, he had sprung from a seed and grown inside her, and even after he had shouldered his brute way out of her he was still flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are the things I thought, exactly, but I had the gist of them, and suddenly, in that moment, I was sorely pained. There was no one and nothing that would not make me jealous; jealousy crouched inside me like a bristling, green-eyed cat, ready to spring at the slightest provocation, real or, more often, imagined.

She had Billy take up the remaining slices of plum-cake on its plate and a big bottle of lemonade and, bearing an imbricated array of banana sandwiches on a wooden tray, went after him out of the kitchen. Was there a swing door? Yes, there was: she stopped and held it ajar with her knee and cast back at me a grimful sort of glance that had in it both reproof and pardon, inviting me wordlessly to follow her. I gave her a sulky scowl and turned aside, and heard the spring make its comical, rubbery sound—
boing-g-g!
—as she let go the door and it swung shut, releasing as it did so a final creak and then a heavy after-sigh.

Left alone, I lingered moodily by the table, glaring at the tin tray of cooling fairy cakes. All was still. Even the hoydens had gone quiet, temporarily silenced, it must be, by banana sandwiches and glasses of lemon pop. Winter sunlight—no, no, it was summer, for heaven’s sake keep up!—summer sunlight, calm, and heavy as honey, was shining in the window beside the fridge, which was silent too. Mrs Gray had left a kettle of water on the stove, grumbling to itself over a low flame. It was one of those conical-shaped whistling kettles that were so popular then and that one hardly ever sees nowadays, when everyone has given in to the electric kettle. The whistle was not on it, though, and from the stubby spout a broad slow column of steam was rising, dense with the sunlight in it and lazily undulant, and curling on itself in an elegant scroll at its topmost reach. When I made to approach the stove something of my own dense aura must have gone before me and this charmed cobra of steam leaned delicately away, as if in vague alarm; I paused, and it righted itself, and when I moved again it moved, too, as before. So we stood wavering there, this friendly wraith and I, held in tremulous equilibrium by the heavy air of summer, and all unexpectedly and for no reason I could think of, a slow burst of happiness enveloped me, a happiness without weight or object, like the simple sunlight itself in the window.

When I did return to the party, however, this bright and blissful glow was clouded on the instant by the unexpected arrival of Mr Gray. He had left his assistant in charge of the shop—a Miss Flushing; I shall get round to her presently, if I have the heart for it—and had come home bringing Kitty’s birthday present. Tall, thin, angular, he stood in the kitchen amidst a pool of little girls, like one of those poles that stick up crookedly out of the lagoon at Venice. He had a remarkably small and disproportionate head, which gave one the illusion that one was always farther off from him than was in fact the case. He wore a bedraggled, pale-brown linen jacket and brown corduroy bags and suede shoes scuffed about the toecaps. The bow-ties that he favoured were an affectation even in those archaic days, and represented the only mark of colour or character that I could discern in the otherwise washed-out aspect that he presented to the world. Spurning what must have been a shopful of styles and makes of frame, he chose to wear cheap, steel-rimmed spectacles, which he would remove slowly, holding them delicately at one hinge between a thumb and two fingers, as if they were pince-nez, and closing his eyes he would slowly massage with the first two fingers and thumb of his other hand the knotted flesh at the bridge of his nose, sighing the while to himself. Mr Gray’s soft sighs sounded at once imprecatory and resigned, like the prayers offered up by a minister who has long ago given in to religious doubts. He had about him permanently an air of troubled inadequacy, seeming incompetent to deal with the practicalities of everyday life. This dim distressfulness had the effect of rallying ministrators around him. People always seemed to be pressing forwards anxiously to aid him, to smooth his way, to make straight his path, to lift an invisible burden from his sloping shoulders. Even Kitty and her friends as they gathered about him now had a hushed and helping aspect. Mrs Gray, too, was solicitous, as she handed to him over the heads of the children his after-work half-inch of whiskey in a cut-glass tumbler, perhaps the very tumbler that I used to drink from with Billy, upstairs, and from which afterwards I would guiltily wipe my fingerprints with a less than clean hankie. How tired was the smile of thanks he gave to her, how weary seemed the hand with which he put the drink down on the table behind him, untasted.