Ancient Light (30 page)

Who was it that was standing in the doorway? Yes, yes, I need not tell you, you know already who it was. The lank plaits, the thick specs, the knock-knees. She was wearing one of those dresses that little girls wore then, vaguely Alpine, dotted all over with tiny flowers, pleated, and with a crimpled, elasticated front to the bodice. In her hand she was holding something, I do not remember what—a fiery sword, perhaps. Marge was there too, her fat friend from the birthday party, the one who took a shine to me, but I paid her scant heed. They just stood, the two of them, looking at us, with curiosity, it seemed, more than anything else, then turned aside, not hurriedly, but in that dull blank way that spectators turn aside from the scene of an accident when the ambulance has driven off. I heard their clumsy school shoes clattering on the wooden steps up to the kitchen. Did I hear Kitty snicker? Mrs Gray went to the doorway and put her head into the corridor, but did not call out to her daughter, did not say anything, and after a moment came back again, into the room, to me. She was frowning, and nibbling at her lower lip. She looked as if she had misplaced something and were trying hard to think where she might have left it. What did I do? Did I speak? I remember her looking at me for a second as if puzzled, then smiling, distractedly, and putting a hand to my cheek. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘you should go home now.’ It was so strange, the simple, utter, incontestable finality of it. It was like the end of an orchestral performance. All that had held us suspended and rapt for so long, all that violent energy, that tension and concentration, all that glorious clamour, suddenly in that moment stopped, leaving nothing but a fading gleam of sound upon the air. I did not think to protest, to plead or weep or shout, but did as she bade me and stepped past her meekly without a word, and went home.

What happened after that happened with bewildering swiftness and dispatch. By evening Mrs Gray had fled. I heard—from whom?—that she had gone back to the town where she and Mr Gray had come from, to the grand boulevards and the worldly sophisticates about which and whom she had so liked to tease me. It must have been where she was born, for she was staying there in the care of her mother, it was said. The news that Mrs Gray had a mother was so amazing as to divert me for a moment from my anguish. She had never mentioned a mother to me, unless she did and I was not listening; it is possible, but I do not think even I would have been that inattentive. I tried to picture this fabulous personage and saw an immensely aged version of Mrs Gray herself, wrinkled, stooped and for some reason blind, leaning at a wicket fence in a sunlit cottage garden profuse with summer flora, smiling in sad forgiveness and holding out her hands in that vaguely beseeching way that blind people do, welcoming home her disgraced and penitent daughter. So strange, so strange even now to think of a previous Mrs Gray—no, she would have been a Mrs someone else. That is another thing I never knew, my maiden’s maiden name.

The next day, auctioneer’s signs sprouted on the front of the house in the square, and in the window of the shop in the Haymarket, too, and Miss Flushing’s nostrils and the rims of her eyes were redder than ever. Do I recall the station wagon pulling out of the square packed with household things, and Mr Gray and Billy and Billy’s sister crowded together in the front seat, that seat on which Mrs Gray and I had so often bounced together as on an enchanted trampoline, Mr Gray looking pained but with his jaw juttingly set, like Gary Fonda in
The Grapes of Noon
? Surely I am inventing again, as so often.

Yet come to think of it their going cannot have been that precipitate, for days were to pass, a week, even, or more than a week, before I had my final encounter with Billy Gray. In my memory the seasons have shifted yet again, for although it was still September I see our confrontation acted out in raw winter weather. The place was called the Forge, near the square where the Grays lived; a blacksmith must have worked there, long ago. The surroundings were appropriate, for the Forge was always associated for me, and still is, with a nameless disquiet. Yet it was an unremarkable enough place, where a hill road leading up to the square broadened and turned in an odd, lopsided way, and another, narrower road, little used, led off at a sharp angle into the countryside. Where this road started there was an overhang of heavy dark trees, underneath which was a well, or not a well, but a broad-mouthed metal pipe protruding from the wall, through which poured a constant flow of water, smooth and shiny as moulded zinc and thick as a man’s upper arm, that plunged into a mossed-over concrete trough that was always full yet never overflowed. I used to wonder where so much water could be coming from, for it did not slacken off even in the driest months of summer, and was, I thought, uncanny in its unrelenting dedication to its one, monotonous task. And where did it go to, the water? Must have run off underground into the Sow River—can that really have been its name?—a meagre dirty stream that ran along a culvert at the foot of the hill. What do they matter, these details? Who cares where the water came from or went to, or what the season was or how the sky looked or whether the wind was blowing—who cares? Yet someone must—someone has to. Me, I suppose.

Billy was walking up the hill and I was walking down. I cannot say why I was there or where I was coming from. I must have been in the square, even though I distinctly recall making every effort to avoid the sight of that cardboard For Sale sign displayed outside Mrs Gray’s bedroom window like a flag on a plague ship. I might have crossed to the other side of the road, or Billy might have, but neither of us did. My memory, with its lamentable fondness for the pathetic fallacy, sets a raw wind skirmishing about us, and there are dead leaves, of course, scraping along the pavements, and those dark trees shake and sway. Details again, you see, always details, exact and impossible. Yet I have not remembered what Billy said to me, except that he called me a dirty fucking bastard and suchlike, but I do see his tears, and hear his sobs of rage and shame and bitter sorrow. He tried to hit me, too, wildly swinging those sheaf-gatherer’s arms of his, while I retreated in little skips and hops, bent halfway over backwards like a contortionist. And I, what did I say? Did I attempt to apologise, did I try to explain myself and my base betrayal of our friendship? What explanation could I have offered? I felt peculiarly detached from the moment. It was as if what was happening were something that was being shown to me, a particularly violent sequence from a morality play, illustrating the inevitable consequence of Unchastity, Lust and Lewdness. Yet at the same time, and I know it will provoke jeers of contempt and disbelief when I say it, at the same time I had never felt such care, such compassion, such tenderness—such, yes, such love for Billy as I felt there on that hill road, with him flailing and sobbing and me bobbing backwards, ducking and weaving, and the cold wind blowing and the dead leaves scrabbling and that thick skein of water crashing and crashing into its depthless trough. If I had thought he would allow it, I believe I would have embraced him. What was enacted there, in cries of pain and wildly aimed blows, was, I suppose, some version, for me, of the parting scene that had not played itself out between me and Mrs Gray, so that I welcomed even this poor simulacrum of what had been withheld and what I so piercingly missed.

In the days immediately following Mrs Gray’s flight I think what I felt most strongly was fear. I found myself abandoned and astray in a place that was alien to me, a place I had not known existed, and in which I suspected I had not the experience or the fortitude necessary to survive without suffering grave damage. This was grown-up territory, where I should not have to be. Who would rescue me, who would follow and find me and lead me back to be again among the scenes and the safety I had known before that bewitched summer? I clung to my mother as I had not done since I was an infant. I should say that although I thought it impossible for her not to have heard the scandalous news of Mrs Gray and me—it might have been put about by a town crier, such was the instantaneity and volume of the gossip as it flew from street corner to church gate to kitchen nook and back again—she uttered not a single word about it, to me, and surely not to anyone else. Perhaps she also was afraid, perhaps for her also it was a strange and terrifying territory my salacious doings had landed her in.

Oh, but what a good son I was now, attentive, grave, studious, dutiful far beyond the call of duty. How prompt I was to run a household errand for my mother, with what patience and sympathy did I listen to her complaints, her grievances, her denunciations of our lodgers’ laziness, venality and neglect of personal hygiene. It was all a sham, of course. If Mrs Gray had bethought herself and come back as suddenly as she had gone, a thing that seemed to me not at all impossible, I would have flung myself upon her with all the old ardour, the old recklessness. For it was not discovery and disgrace, not the town’s gossips or my mother’s unspoken accusations, that made me tremble with fear. What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it; that, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean. Or rather say a Theseus, abandoned on Naxos while Ariadne hastened off about her uncaring business.

What was striking too was the silence that I felt around me. The town was humming with talk and I was the only one nobody spoke to. I welcomed Billy’s onslaught that day in the Forge, for it made a noise, at least, and was aimed at me, uniquely. There will have been those in the town who were genuinely shocked and scandalised, but those too who will have secretly envied Mrs Gray and me, the one lot not necessarily exclusive of the other. And everyone, to be sure, must have been vastly entertained, even those few who might have sympathised with us, disgraced, bereft and wounded as we were. I fully expected Father Priest to come calling again, this time to recommend that I be incarcerated among the Trappists on some sheep-flecked mountainside in remotest Alpland, but even he kept his distance, and his peace. Perhaps he was embarrassed. Perhaps, I ask myself uneasily, they were all embarrassed, even as they rubbed their hands in relish at the scandal? I would have preferred them to be outraged. It would have seemed more—what shall I say?—more respectful of the great thing Mrs Gray and I had made between us and that was now no more.

I waited, confidently at first but then with deepening bitterness, for Mrs Gray to send me something, a word, a valediction from afar, but nothing came. How would she have communicated with me? She could hardly have sent a letter through the post to me, to my mother’s house. But wait—how did we communicate before, when our affair was still going on? There was a telephone in the overflowing cubby-hole beside the kitchen that my mother called her office, it was an antiquated model with a handle at the side that had to be cranked to get a connection to the operator, but I would never have called Mrs Gray on it, and she would never have dreamed of calling me, for apart from anything else the operator always listened in, she could be heard on the line, making curious shiftings and excited, mousy scrabblings. We must have left notes for each other somewhere, at Cotter’s place, maybe—but no, Mrs Gray did not go there alone, she was afraid of the woods, and on those occasions when by chance she got there before me I would find her cowering anxiously in the doorway and on the point of flight. So how did we manage? I do not know. Another unsolved mystery, among the many mysteries. There was an occasion when through some mix-up she did not come when she was supposed to, and I waited for her through an agonised afternoon, increasingly convinced that she would appear no more, that she was lost to me for ever. That was the single occasion I can recall when the lines of communication between us broke down—but what lines were they, and where were they laid?

I did not dream about her, after she was gone, or if I did I forgot what I had dreamed. My sleeping mind was more merciful than the waking one, which never tired of tormenting me. Well, yes, it did tire of its sport, eventually. Nothing so intense could last for long. Or might it have, if I had truly loved her, with selfless passion, as they say, as people are said to have loved in olden times? Such a love would have destroyed me, surely, as it used to destroy the heroes and the heroines in the old books. But what a pretty corpse I would have made, marbled on my bier, clutching in my fingers a marble lily for remembrance.

My my, talk about trouble. Marcy Meriwether says she is going to sue me. She telephones half a dozen times a day, demanding to know what I have done with Dawn Devonport, where I have hidden her, her furious voice on the line swooping from operatic trills and warbles to a gangster’s guttural muttering. I imagine her, a disembodied Medusa-head suspended in the ether, threatening, bullying, cajoling. I insist repeatedly that I do not know the whereabouts of her star. At this she does her harsh and phlegmy laugh, followed by an interval of heavy wheezing as she lights up another cigarette. She knows I am lying. If filming is disrupted for one more day,
one more day
, she will terminate my contract and set her lawyers on me. This she has been saying every day for a week. I will not be paid another cent, she squawks at me, not another red cent, and furthermore she will move to seize back from me the pay I have received up to now. Behind all the blare and bluster I seem to detect a note of relish, for she enjoys a fight, that much is plain. When she slams down the phone it leaves a whirring sensation for some seconds in my ear.

Toby Taggart invited me to lunch at Ostentation Towers the day after my return from Italy. I found him in the Corinthian Rooms, in a plush-lined booth, squirming and sighing and sitting on his hands to keep from biting his nails. What an aggrieved and wounded look he gave me. He was drinking a martini with an olive in it, he said it was his third; I have never seen him drink before, it is a mark of his distress. Look, Alex, he said, softly, patiently, this is serious, his shaggy head lowered and his square hands joined before him over his martini as if to consecrate it—this could jeopardise the whole movie, do you understand that, Alex, do you? Toby reminds me of a boy I knew at school, a shambling fellow with an enormous head that was made more massive still by a mop of glistening black hair coiled tight in wiry curls that tumbled over his forehead and his ears. Ambrose, he was called, Ambrose Abbott, nicknamed Bud, of course, or sometimes, ingeniously, Lou—yes, even in the matter of names he had no luck, no luck at all, poor chap. Ambrose could be heard coming from afar, for he was a keen collector of metal objects—blunt penknives, keys without locks, tarnished coins no longer in circulation, bottle-tops, even, in times of scarcity—so that as he walked he clinked and chinked like a Bedouin’s loaded pack-camel. Also he was asthmatic, and carried on constantly a medley of sighs and soft whoops and faint, rasping whistles. He was immensely brainy, though, and took first place in every school test and State examination. I think, looking back, he had a crush on me. I imagine he envied my pose of insolent bravado—I was already rehearsing for those future roles as dashing leading men—and my proclaimed disdain for study and hard work. Perhaps too he sensed the musky aura of Mrs Gray about me, for it was in the time of Mrs Gray that I came to know him well, or wellish. He was a tender soul. He used to press gifts on me, gems from his collection, which I accepted with ill grace and swapped for other things, or lost, or threw away. He was killed, later, knocked off his bike by a lorry on his way home from school. Sixteen, he was, when he died. Poor Ambrose. The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.