Ancient Light (20 page)

‘She was pregnant, my daughter, when she died,’ I said.

Billie took this without comment, and only frowned, protruding a pink and shiny lower lip. These frowns of hers give her the look of a vexed cherub.

The sky was fading and a chilly dusk was coming on, and I suggested we should stop at a pub to have a drink. This was unusual, for me—I could not remember the last time I had been inside a public house. We went to a place on a corner by one of the canal bridges. Brown walls, stained carpet, a huge television set above the bar with the sound turned down and sportsmen in garish jerseys sprinting and shoving and signalling in relentless dumbshow. There were the usual afternoon men with their pints and racing papers, two or three spivvish young fellows in suits, and the inevitable pair of gaffers sitting opposite each other at a tiny table, smeared whiskey glasses at hand, and sunk in an immemorial silence. Billie looked about with sour disdain. She has a certain hauteur, I have noticed it before. She is, I think, something of a puritan, and secretly considers herself a cut above the rest of us, an undercover agent who knows all our secrets and is privy to our tawdriest sins. She has been a researcher for too long. Her tipple, it turned out, is a splash of gin drowned in a big glass of orange crush and further neutralised by a hefty shovelful of groaning ice cubes. I began to tell her, nursing a thimbleful of tepid port, which I am sure she thought a sissy’s drink, how Billy Gray and I in time discovered that we preferred gin to his father’s whiskey. It was as well, since the bottle we had been winkling out of the cocktail cabinet had over the weeks become so watered down that the whiskey was almost colourless. Gin, quicksilver and demure, now seemed to us altogether more sophisticated and dangerous than whiskey’s rough gold. In the immediate aftermath of my first frolic in the laundry room with Mrs Gray I had been in deep dread of encountering Billy, thinking he was the one, more than my mother, more than his sister, even, who would detect straight off the scarlet sign of guilt that must be blazoned on my brow. But of course he noticed nothing. Yet when he came and leaned down to pour another inch of gin into my glass and I saw the pale patch on the crown of his head the size of a sixpence where his hair whorled, a sense of uncanniness swept over me so that I almost shivered, and I shrank back from him, and held my breath for fear of catching his smell and recognising in it a trace of his mother’s. I tried not to look into the brown depths of those eyes, or dwell on those unnervingly moist pink lips. I felt that suddenly I did not know him, or, worse, that through knowing his mother, in all senses of the word, ancient and modern, I knew him also and all too intimately. So I sat there on his sofa in front of the flickering telly and gulped my gin and squirmed in secret and exquisite shame.

I told Billie Stryker that I would be going away for a time. To this also she offered no response. She really is an incommunicative young woman. Is there something I am missing? There usually is. I said that when I went I would be taking Dawn Devonport with me. I said I was counting on her to break the news of this to Toby Taggart. Neither of his leads would be available for work for a week, at least. At this, Billie smiled. She likes a bit of trouble, does Billie, a bit of strife. I imagine it makes her feel less isolated in her own domestic disorders. She asked where it was I was going. Italy, I told her. Ah, Italy, she said, as if it were her second home.

A trip to Italy, as it happens, was prominent on the list of things that Mrs Gray had longed for and felt she should have by right. Her dream was to set out from one of those fancy Riviera towns, Nice or Cannes or somesuch, and motor along the coast all the way down to Rome to see the Vatican, and have an audience with the Pope, and sit on the Spanish Steps, and throw coins in the Trevi Fountain. She also desired a mink coat to wear to Mass on Sundays, a smart new car to replace the battered old station wagon—‘that jalopy!’—and a red-brick house with a bay window on the Avenue de Picardy in the posher end of town. Her social ambitions were high. She wished her husband were something more than a lowly optician—he had wanted to be a proper doctor but his family had been unable, or unwilling, to pay the college fees—and she was determined that Billy and his sister would
do well
. Doing well was her aim in everything, giving the neighbours one in the eye, making the town—‘this dump!’—sit up and take notice. She liked to daydream aloud, as we lay in each other’s arms on the floor of our tumbledown love nest in the woods. What an imagination she had! And while she was elaborating these fantasies of bowling along that azure coast in an open sports car swathed in furs with her husband the famous brain surgeon at her side, I would divert myself by pinching her breasts to make the nipples go fat and hard—and these, mark you, were the paps that had given my friend Billy suck!—or running my lips along that pinkly inflamed, serrated track the elastic of her half-slip had imprinted on her tender tummy. She dreamed of a life of romance, and what she got was me, a boy with blackheads and bad teeth and, as she often laughingly lamented, only one thing on his mind.

She never seemed so young as when she was weaving these happy fantasies of success and moneyed opulence. It is strange to think that I was less than half as young as she while she was not much more than half the age that I am now. The mechanism of my memory has difficulty grappling with these disparities, yet at the time, after the initial shock of that rainy afternoon in the laundry room, I began to take it all blandly for granted, her age, my youth, the unlikeliness of our love, everything. To me, at fifteen, the most implausible thing had only to take place more than once to become the norm. The real puzzle is what she thought and felt. I cannot recall her ever acknowledging, aloud, the disproportion and incongruity of our—I still do not know quite what to call it; our love affair, I suppose I must say, though it rings falsely to my ear. People in the stories in the magazines that Mrs Gray read, or characters in the films that she went to see on Friday nights, they had affairs; for me, as for her, what we did together was far more simple, far more elemental, far more—if I may employ such a word in this context—childish, than the adulterous doings of adults. Perhaps that is what she accomplished for herself through me, a return to childhood, not the childhood of dolls and hair ribbons, however, but of swollen excitements, of sweaty fumblings and happy dirt. For my goodness but she could be on occasion a naughty girl.

There was a river in our wood, a secret, brown, meandering stream that seemed to have got diverted into this bosky glade on the way to somewhere far more important. In those days I had a deep regard for water, a reverence, even, and would still if it were not so grimly associated in my mind with Cass’s death. Water is one of those things that are everywhere present—air, the sky, light and darkness, these are others—that nonetheless strike me as uncanny. Mrs Gray and I were very fond of our little river, stream, brook, freshet, whatever to call it. At a particular spot it made a loop around a clump of alder trees, I think they were alders. The water was deep there and moved so slowly it might not have been moving at all were it not for the small telltale eddies that formed on the surface, formed and dissolved and formed again. There were trout sometimes, speckled wraiths barely to be made out near the bottom, poised in stillness against the current yet so quick when they took fright that they would give a quiver and seem to vanish on the spot. We spent happy hours together there, my love and I, in the balmiest days of that summer, in the cool shadows under those stunted and excitable trees. Mrs Gray liked to wade in the water, the depths of which were the same glossy shade of brown as her eyes. Venturing out gingerly from the bank, watching for sharp stones on the bottom, with that self-forgetting smile and her skirts lifted to her hips, she was Rembrandt’s Saskia, sunk to the shins in her own world of umber and gold. One day it was so hot that she took her dress off altogether, pulled it over her head and threw it back for me to catch. She had been wearing nothing underneath, and advanced now naked out into the middle of the stream and stood there, up to her waist, her arms outstretched on either side, happily patting the surface of the water with her palms and humming—did I mention that she was an inveterate hummer, even though she had not a note of music in her head? The sun through the alder leaves scattered her about with flickering gold coins—my Danaë!—and the hollows of her shoulders and the undersides of her breasts glimmered with reflected, swaying lights. Impelled by the madness of the moment—what if some rambler from the town had chanced upon the scene?—I waded in after her, in my khaki shorts and shirt. She watched me coming towards her, my elbows sawing and neck thrust out, and gave me that look from under her eyelashes that I liked to imagine she reserved for me alone, her chin tucked in and her lips compressed in a thin upturned impish arc, and I dived, down into the brown water, my shorts suddenly a sodden weight and my shirt clutching with breathtaking coldness at my chest, and managed to flip over on to my back—at that age, my God, I was as agile as one of those speckled trout!—and reached my hands around her bottom and pulled her to me and got my face between her thighs that at first resisted and then went shudderingly slack, and pressed my fish-mouth to her nether lips that were chill and oysterish on the outside and hot within, and a cold shock of water went up my nose and gave me an instant ache between my eyes, and I had to let go of her and flounder to the surface, flailing and gasping, but triumphant, too—oh, yes, every advantage I got of her represented a nasty, miniature victory for my self-esteem and sense of lordship over her. Once out of the water we scampered back to Cotter’s place, I with her dress in my arms and she naked still, a birch-pale dryad flickering ahead of me through the sunlight and shadows of the wood. I can still feel, as I felt when presently we threw ourselves panting on to our makeshift bed, the rough texture of her goosefleshed arms, and can smell, too, the excitingly stale tang of river-water on her skin, and taste the lingering, brackish chill between her thighs.

Ah, days of play, days of—dare I say it?—days of innocence.

‘Did she tell you why she did it?’ Billie asked.

She was perched before me on a high wooden stool with her tubular thighs in those tight jeans splayed and her glass held in both hands between her knees. I was confused for a moment, my mind having been off doing bold things with Mrs Gray, and thought she was referring to Cass. No, I said, no, of course not, I had no inkling why she did it, how could I? She gave me one of her balefully deprecating looks—she has a way of making her eyes seem to bulge that is distinctly unnerving—and I realised it was Dawn Devonport she meant. To cover up for my mistake I looked away, frowning, and fiddled with my glass of port. I said, sounding rather prim to my own ears, that I was sure it had been a mistake and that Dawn Devonport had not meant to do it. Billie, seeming to lose interest, only gave a grunt and glanced idly about the bar. I studied her puffy profile, and as I did so I had briefly a vertiginous sensation, as if I had been brought up short at the very lip of a high sheer cliff. It is a feeling I have sometimes when I look, I mean really look, at other people, which I do not often do, which no one does, often, I expect. It is linked in a mysterious way with the feeling that used to come over me occasionally on stage, the feeling of falling somehow into the character I was playing, literally falling, as one might trip and pitch forwards on one’s face, and losing all sense of my other, unacting, self.

The statisticians tell us there is no such thing as coincidence, and I must accept they know what they are talking about. If I were to believe that a certain confluence of events was a special and unique phenomenon outside the ordinary flow of happenstance I would have to accept, as I do not, that there is a transcendent process at work above, or behind, or within, commonplace reality. And yet I ask myself, why not? Why should I not allow of a secret and sly arranger of seemingly chance events? Axel Vander was in Portovenere when my daughter died. This fact, and I take it as a fact, stands before me huge and immovable, like a tree, with all its roots hidden deep in darkness. Why was she there, and why was he?

Svidrigailov.

I intended to go, I said now, to Portovenere, and that although I intended taking Dawn Devonport with me, she did not know it yet. I think that was the first time ever I heard Billie Stryker laugh out loud.

In former times the only access to those little towns was from the sea, for the hinterland along that coast is formed largely of a chain of mountains the flanks of which plunge at a sharp angle into the bay. Now there is a narrow railway track cut through the rock that runs under many tunnels and affords abrupt, dizzying vistas of steep landscapes and inlets where the sea gleams dully like stippled steel. In winter the light has a bruised quality, and there is salt in the air and the smell of sea-wrack and of diesel fumes from the fishing boats that crowd the tiny harbours. The car that I had hired turned out to be a surly and recalcitrant beast and gave me much trouble and more than one fright on the road as we travelled eastwards from Genoa. Or perhaps the fault was mine, for I was in a state of some agitation—I am not a good traveller, being nervous of foreign parts and a poor linguist besides. As we drove I thought of Mrs Gray and how she would have envied us, down here on this blue coast. At Chiavari we abandoned the car and took the train. I had difficulty with the bags. The train was smelly and the seats were hard. As we chugged along eastwards a rain storm swept down from the mountains and lashed at the carriage windows. Dawn Devonport watched the downpour and spoke out of the depths of the upturned big collar of her coat. ‘So much,’ she said, ‘for the sunny south.’

From the moment when we stepped on to foreign soil she had been recognised everywhere, despite the headscarf and the enormous sunglasses that she wore; or perhaps it was because of them, they being the unmistakable disguise of a troubled star on the run. This prominence was something I had not anticipated, and although I was a largely disregarded presence at her side or, more often, in her wake, I still felt unnervingly exposed, a chameleon that has lost its adaptive powers. We were due that day at Lerici, where I had booked hotel rooms for us, but she had insisted on seeing the Cinque Terre first, and so here we were, uncertainly astray on this cheerless winter afternoon.