Ancient Light (11 page)

Of course, I would have preferred a daughter. Yes, definitely a daughter.

It is a wonder, in fact, that Mrs Gray did not become pregnant, as frequently and as energetically as we went at the business that would have made her so. How did she avoid it? In this land, in those days, there was no available legal means to prevent conception, other than celibacy, and even if there had been she would not have consented to it, out of devotion to her faith. For she did believe in God, not the God of love, I think, but certainly the God of vengeance.

But wait. Maybe she did get pregnant. Maybe that was why she skedaddled so precipitately when our affair was discovered. Maybe she went off and had a baby, a little girl, ours, without telling me. If so, that little girl is a big woman now, fifty years old, with a husband, and children of her own, perhaps—other, unknown, people, bearing my genes! Dear God. What a thing that is to think of. But no, no. By the time I came along, frisky and cocksure, she must have been barren.

The scout from Pentagram Pictures turns out to be Billie, not Billy like my pal, and Stryker, not Striker—yes, it was probably Marcy Meriwether’s idea of a joke not to spell these names out for me—and is a woman and emphatically not, as I had assumed, a man. I was up here in my attic as usual when I heard her preposterous little car come whining and coughing into the square and then the doorbell ringing. I paid no heed, thinking it must be someone to see Lydia. And as it happened Lydia did detain her, took her into the kitchen and sat her down and plied her with cigarettes and tea and a biscuit; my wife has a weakness for misfortunates and oddities of all kinds, especially if they are female. What can they have talked about, those two? Afterwards I did not enquire, out of some form of delicacy, or shyness, or misgiving. It was a good twenty minutes before Lydia came up and knocked on my door to tell me I had a visitor. I rose from my desk, ready to accompany her downstairs, but she moved to one side in the narrow doorway and, with the air of a magician producing a very large rabbit from a very small hat, brought the young woman forwards from the narrow stairway and with a gentle push propelled her into the room, and departed.

As well as being a woman, Billie Stryker is not at all what I had expected. What did I expect? Someone smart and snappy and transatlantic, I suppose. Billie, however, is obviously a native of these parts, a short pudgy person in, I judge, her middle to late thirties. She really is of a remarkable shape, and might have been assembled from a collection of cardboard boxes of varying sizes that were first left out in the rain and then piled soggily any old way one on top of another. The general effect was not improved by the extremely tight jeans she was wearing, and the black polo-necked jumper that made her large head look like a rubber ball set squarely atop all those precariously stacked cartons. She has a tiny sweet face inset amid much surplus flesh, and her wrists are dimpled like a baby’s and look as if they have been tied round with tight loops of thread at the junctures where her hands are attached to, or inserted into, as it might be, the ends of her arms. There was a purple and yellow shadow under her left eye, the remains of what a week or so ago must have been a real shiner—how or where did she come by that, I wonder?

I wished that Lydia had not brought her up here, for besides the fact that it is my bolthole, the sloped room is small and Billie is not, and as I edged my way around her I felt rather like Alice grown huge and trapped in the White Rabbit’s house. I directed her to the old green armchair that is the only piece of furniture there is space enough for in here, along with my desk that I work at—I call it work—and the antique swivel chair that I sit in. When we moved in first Lydia tried to persuade me to make a proper study for myself in one of the downstairs rooms that are empty—the house is large and there are just the two of us—but I am content up here, and do not mind being cramped, except on occasions such as this, which are extremely rare. Billie Stryker sat there, with a decided but inexplicably forlorn air, twiddling her chubby fingers and panting softly and looking at everything except me. She has a special and slovenly way of inhabiting a chair, seeming to sag from it rather than sit in it, perching herself on the front edge of the cushion with her big knees loosely splayed and her runnered feet turned inwards so that the outer sides of her ankles are resting flat on the floor. I sidled to my desk, smiling and nodding, like a lion-tamer making cautiously towards his chair and pistol, and sat down.

She seemed to know no more of why she was here than I did. She is a researcher, if I understood her correctly; are movie researchers known as scouts? I have so much to learn. I asked if she had been researching the life of Axel Vander and she looked at me as if I had made a joke, though not a funny one, and gave a brief and seemingly derisory laugh that sounded as if it had been learned from Marcy Meriwether. Yes, she said, she had done a job on Vander. Done a job, eh? That sounds worryingly strenuous. I was puzzled by her unforthcoming manner and did not know how to proceed, and we sat together in a weighty silence for quite a long time. Idly it occurred to me that since she was a researcher and would know how to go about that sort of thing I might hire her on a freelance basis to track down Mrs Gray for me. Honestly, the fancies that wander into one’s head. All the same, it should not be difficult to trace my lost love’s whereabouts. There will be people still in the town who will remember the Grays—it is only fifty years since they left, after all, and the cause of their sudden leaving was surely memorable—and who will be bound to know what became of them. And Billie Stryker, I feel sure, would be a relentless bloodhound were she to be set on the scent.

I put a question or two about the movie project we are both supposedly engaged on and again she darted at me that quick and, I thought, incredulous glance, though it progressed hardly higher than my knees, and then she went back to gazing morosely at the carpet. This was hard work, and I was beginning to lose patience. Idly I walked my fingers along the desk and, humming, looked out of the window, from which past a corner of the square a glimpse can be had of the canal. This orderly and placid imitation river is as much of water as I can bear these days; after Cass’s death we could not go on living by the sea, as we used to; the sight of waves crashing on rocks was not to be borne. Why and to what purpose had Marcy Meriwether sent this taciturn and lumpish creature to me?—and what had Lydia been up to with her in that long interval they had spent together downstairs? There are times when I feel myself caught up in a definite, concerted and yet seemingly aimless conspiracy run by women. ‘Not everything means something,’ Lydia likes to say, cryptically, and takes on that slightly swollen look, as if she were sternly but with difficulty forbidding herself to laugh.

I asked Billie Stryker if there was anything I could fetch for her in the way of refreshments, which was when she told me about the tea and biccies that Lydia had pressed on her, down in the kitchen. I should say something about this kitchen. It is Lydia’s place, as this attic room is mine. She spends much of her time there these days—I rarely venture beyond the threshold. It is a cavernous chamber with a high ceiling and unclad walls of rough stone. There is a big window over the sink but it looks directly into a clump of briars that immemorially was a rose tree, so that the daylight hardly penetrates and a brooding dimness reigns in the room. Lydia’s desert ancestry is never more plainly apparent, to me, at any rate, than when she is presiding there, at the high square table of scrubbed deal, with her newspapers and her cigarettes, a shawl of circassian purple draped over her shoulders and her dusky forearms hooped with many slender bangles of jingling silver and gold. I should not say so, but I often think that in another age my Lydia might have been taken for a witch. What
did
they talk about down there, she and Billie Stryker?

Billie said now that she would have to be getting on—to what? I wondered—yet she gave no other sign of being ready to depart. I said, though I could not hide my perplexity, that I was glad that she had called, and that I was happy to have met her. This was followed by more silence and slack staring. And then, almost before I knew it, I had begun to talk about my daughter. This was strange, not at all like me. I cannot remember when I last spoke of Cass to anyone, even Lydia. I guard my memories of my lost one jealously, keep them securely under wraps, like a folio of delicate watercolours that must be protected from the harsh light of day. Yet there I was, babbling about her and her doings to this uncommunicative and wary stranger. Of course, I see Cass in every young woman I meet, not Cass as she was when she cut short her own life but as she might be now, these ten years later. She would be about Billie Stryker’s age, as it happens, though that, surely, is the extent of what they would have in common.

Yet being reminded of Cass, especially in such a tenuous fashion, was a far cry from talking about her, and so precipitately, at that, so wildly, even. When I think of Cass—and when am I not thinking of Cass?—I seem to sense all about me a great rushing and roaring, as if I were standing directly under a waterfall that drenches me and yet somehow leaves me dry, dry as a bone. This is what mourning has become for me, a constant, parching deluge. I find too that a certain shame attaches to being bereft. Or no, it is not quite shame. A certain awkwardness, say, a certain sheepishness. Even in the very earliest days after Cass’s death I felt it imperative not to blubber overmuch in public but at all costs to maintain my poise, or the appearance of it; when we wept we wept in private, Lydia and I, smilingly shutting the front door on our departing comforters and immediately falling on each other’s neck and fairly howling. However, talking to Billie Stryker now I felt as if I were indeed weeping in some way. I cannot explain it. There were no tears, of course, only the words pouring out of me unstoppably, yet I had that almost voluptuous sense of helpless, headlong falling that one has when one gives in to a really good bawl. And of course when at last I ran out of words I was rueful and abashed all over, as if I had lightly scalded myself. How did Billie Stryker, seemingly without the least effort, get me to say so much? There must be more to her than meets the eye. As I should hope there is, for what meets the eye is less than prepossessing.

What did I say to her, what did I tell her? I cannot remember. I recall only the babbling, not what it was I babbled. Did I say my daughter was a scholar and that she suffered from a rare disorder of the mind? Did I describe how when she was young and her condition was as yet undiagnosed her mother and I would swing dizzyingly between anxious hope and ashen disappointment as the signs of her malady seemed to diminish only to rise up again more starkly and more unmanageably than ever? How we used to long, in those years, for just one ordinary day, a day when we might get up in the morning and eat our breakfast without caring for anything, reading bits out of the paper to each other and planning things to do, and afterwards take a stroll, and look at the scenery with an innocent eye, and later share a glass of wine, and later still go to bed together and lie at peace in each other’s arms and drift into untroubled sleep. But no: our lives with Cass were a constant watching brief, and when she eluded us at last and did her disappearing trick—when she made away with herself, as they so accurately say—we acknowledged even in the midst of our sorrow that the end she had brought to our vigil had been inevitable. We wondered, too, and were aghast to find ourselves wondering it, if our vigilance itself had somehow served to hasten that end. The truth is she had been eluding us all along. At the time of her death we thought she was in the Low Countries deep in her arcane studies, and when word came from Portovenere, far off in the south, the dread word that in our hearts we had known all along would some day come, we felt not only bereaved but in a manner outmanoeuvred, cruelly and, yes, unforgivably outwitted.

But wait, hang on—something has just struck me. I was the one whom Billie Stryker was researching today. That was the point of all that hedging and hesitating on her part, all those ponderous silences: it was all a stalling tactic while she waited patiently for me to start talking, as I inevitably would, into the vacuum she had carefully prepared. How subtle of her, not to say sly, not to say, indeed, underhand. But what did she find out about me, except that I once had a daughter and she died? When I apologised for rambling on for so long about Cass, she shrugged and smiled—she has a very affecting smile, by the way, sad and sweetly vulnerable—and said it was all right, she did not mind, that it was her job to listen. ‘That’s me,’ she said, ‘the human poultice.’

I think I really will ask her to find Mrs Gray for me. Why not?

We went downstairs and I escorted her to the front door. Lydia was nowhere to be seen now. Billie’s car is an ancient and badly rusted Deux Chevaux. When she had clambered in behind the wheel she leaned out again to inform me, seemingly as an afterthought, that there is to be a read-through of the script, in London, early next week. All the cast will be there, the director, of course, and the scriptwriter. The latter’s name is Jaybee, something like that—I have become slightly deaf and it distresses me to have to keep on asking people to repeat what they have said.

Billie drove off in swirling billows of dark-brown exhaust smoke. I stood looking after her until she was gone from the square. I was puzzled and at a loss, and prey to a faint but definite unease. Was it by some sorcery she had got me to speak of Cass, or was I only waiting for the chance? And if this is the sort of person I shall be dealing with in the coming months, what have I let myself in for?

I have spent the afternoon perusing, I think that is the word,
The Invention of the Past
, the big biography of Axel Vander. The prose style was what struck me first and most forcefully—indeed, it nearly knocked me over. Is it an affectation, or a stance deliberately taken? Is it a general and sustained irony? Rhetorical in the extreme, dramatically elaborated, wholly unnatural, synthetic and clotted, it is a style such as might be forged—
le mot juste!
—by a minor court official at Byzantium, say, a former slave whose master had generously allowed him the freedom of his extensive and eclectic library, a freedom the poor fellow all too eagerly availed himself of. Our author—the tone is catching—our author is widely but unsystematically read, and uses the rich tidbits that he gathered from all those books to cover up for the lack of an education—little Latin, less Greek, ha ha—although the effect is quite the opposite, for in every gorgeous image and convoluted metaphor, every instance of cod learning and mock scholarship, he unmistakably shows himself up for the avid autodidact he indubitably is. Behind the gloss, the studied elegance, the dandified swagger, this is a man racked by fears, anxieties, sour resentments, yet possessed too of an occasional mordant wit and an eye for what one might call the under-belly of beauty. No wonder he was drawn to Axel Vander for a subject.