Ancient Light (23 page)

I told her that I did not know what had happened to my daughter, except that she had died. I told her how Cass used to hear voices, and said perhaps they had driven her to it, the voices, as often is the case, so I understand, with those whose minds are damaged and who are led to damage themselves. I was remarkably calm, I might even say detached, as if the circumstances—the anonymous hotel room, the lateness of the hour, this young woman’s unwavering, grave regard—had at a stroke, and so simply, released or at any rate paroled me from the toils of the ten-year-long pact of restraint and reticence that I had made with Cass’s spirit. Anything might be spoken here, it seemed, any thought might be summoned up and freely expressed. Dawn Devonport waited, her great eyes fixed on me unblinking. There had been, I told her, someone with my daughter. ‘And so,’ she said, ‘you have come back here, to find out who it was.’

I frowned at that, and looked away from her. How yellow was the lamplight, how thickly beyond it the shadows thronged. In the window behind the web of curtain the heavy wet flakes fell down, fell down.

Her name for him, I said measuredly, whoever he was, was Svidrigailov. She reached a hand from under the blanket and laid it lightly, briefly, on one of mine, more in restraint, it seemed, than encouragement. Her touch was cool and curiously impersonal; she might have been a nurse testing my temperature, taking my pulse. ‘She was pregnant, you see,’ I said.

Had I told her that already? I could not recall.

That was, to my faint surprise, the end of our exchange, for like a child satisfied with only the opening of a goodnight story Dawn Devonport sighed and turned her face away and slept, or pretended to. I waited, not moving for fear of making the chair creak and causing her to have to wake up again. In the quiet I fancied I could hear the snow falling outside, a faint susurrus that yet bespoke unstinting labour and muffled suffering steadfastly endured. How the world works on, uncomplaining, no matter what, doing what it has to do. I was, I realised, at peace. My mind seemed bathed in a pool of limpid darkness that acted on me like a balm. Not since the far-off days of Father Priest and the confessional had I felt so lightened and—what?—shorn? I looked at the phone on the bedside table and it occurred to me to call Lydia, but it was too late at night, and anyway I did not know what it might be that I would say to her.

I stood up cautiously and eased my jacket from under the sleeping young woman and put the chair away and took up my key and left the room. As I was closing the door I glanced back at the bed under its low canopy of lamplight, but there was no movement to be seen, and no sound save that of Dawn Devonport steadily breathing. Was she, too, at peace for the moment, for a moment?

The corridor had its hush. I shied from the lift—its narrow double doors of dented stainless steel gave off a sinister shine—and took the stairs instead. They delivered me to an area of the lobby that I did not know, with a lavish palm in a pot and a cigarette-dispensing machine, as big as an upright sarcophagus, with a darkly opalescent shimmer down its side, and for a moment I lost my bearings entirely and experienced a flicker of panic. I turned this way and that, swivelling on a heel, and at last located the reception desk, off beyond that dusty splurge of palm fronds. Ercole the night manager was there, or at least his head was, in profile, for that was all of him I could see, resting so it seemed on the counter, behind a plate of boiled sweets. I thought of Salome’s grisly prize on a platter. Those sweets, by the way, are a convention left over from the days of the old currency, when they were offered in place of pocketfuls of negligible change. The things I retain, memory’s worthless coin.

I approached the desk. It was high, and Ercole was seated sideways behind it on a low stool, reading one of those old-style comic-books with curiously washed-out photographs instead of drawings. He glanced up at me with a mixture of deference and faint irritation, his droopy eyes looking more disconsolate than ever. I asked if it would be possible for me to have a drink, and he sighed and said of course, of course, if I would please to go to the bar he would come immediately. However, as I was walking away he spoke my name and I stopped and turned. He had put away his comic and risen from the stool, and was leaning forwards slightly, in a confidential attitude, supporting himself on fists set down before him on the desk, one to each side. I went back slowly and—devoutly, I was about to say. Signora Devonport, he asked, was everything all right with her? He spoke softly, with a breathy catch, as if in the aftermath of some ritual of sorrow and lamentation. Those melting eyes seemed to feel my face all over, like the fingertips of a blind seer. I said, yes, that everything was well. He smiled, gently disbelieving, as I saw. I did not know what he meant by this question, I did not know what he intended by it. Was it a caution? Had Dawn Devonport been heard banging on my door, had she been spied entering my room in distress? I am always uncertain about hotel rules. In the old days, if a lady were to come at night clandestinely to a gentleman’s room the house detective would have been up like a shot and collared them both, or the lady at least, whom he would have assumed was no lady at all, and driven her out into the snow. After a searching pause Ercole nodded, regretfully, I thought, as if I had disappointed him in some way. So many lies and petty evasions he must deal with, night after night. I tried to think of something to add in mitigation of whatever wrong I was guilty of in his sad brown eyes, but in vain, and instead I turned away. For all that, however, I felt I had been delivered, I do not know how, a benediction of some kind, my forehead crossed with chrism and my spirit salved.

The bar when I found it was unexpectedly new and sleek, with dark mirrors and black marble tables and low lamps that seemed to shed not light but a sort of radiant shadow, and gave the place a deceptive cast. I picked my way through this dim, glassy maze and settled myself on a tall stool at the bar. Behind the bar was another mirror, with shelves of bottles in front of it that were lit from below in an eerie fashion. I could barely see myself, reflected in fragments behind the bottles, where I seemed to be ducking and hiding even from myself. I waited for Ercole to come, and drummed my fingers. It was late, after a long day, yet I felt not at all tired or in need of sleep—on the contrary, I was almost painfully alert, the very follicles of my hair simmering. What could be the cause of this state of strange elation, strange expectation? Behind me someone coughed softly and, as it seemed, interrogatively. I turned quickly on the stool and peered into the gloom. A person was seated before a small table close by, calmly regarding me. Why had I not noticed him when I came in? I must have walked straight past that very table. He was leaning back in a low black leather armchair with his legs extended before him and crossed at the ankles and his fingers steepled in front of his chin. At first I did not know him. Then a chance dart of light from the illuminated shelves behind me slid across the lenses of his spectacles and I recognised the man I had met earlier at the front door of the hotel, the man with the snow on his shoulders. ‘
Buenas noches
,’ he said, and made a tiny bow, inclining his head an inch. There was a bottle on the table before him, and a glass—no, two glasses. Had he been expecting someone? Me, apparently, for now he gestured towards the bottle with his steepled fingers and asked if I would care to join him. Well, why not, in this endless night of strange encounters, fateful crossings?

He indicated the armchair opposite him, and I sat down. He was definitely younger than I, as I saw now, yes, a lot younger. I also noticed that the bottle was still full—had he indeed been waiting for me? How had he known I would come? He leaned forwards and, unhurriedly, with deliberation, filled our two glasses almost to the brims. He handed me mine. The heavy red wine looked black on the surface, with purple bubbles jostling around the edge. ‘It is an Argentinian vintage, I am afraid,’ he said. He smiled. ‘Like me.’

We raised our glasses in a wordless toast and drank. Wormwood, bitter gall, the taste of ink and luscious rot. We both leaned back, he opening his arms in a curious, flowing, arching movement and shooting his cuffs, and I thought of a priest in the days of the old dispensation turning from the faithful and setting down the chalice and lifting his shoulders and his arms in just that way, under the chasuble’s heavy yoke. He introduced himself. His name was Fedrigo Sorrán. He wrote it down for me, in a page of a little black notebook. I thought of far plains, the roaming herds, a hidalgo on a horse.

Ercole came and looked at us, and nodded, and smiled, as if all this had been arranged, and went away again, padding softly on flat feet.

What did we talk about at first, the man from the south and I? He told me he liked the night, preferring it to daytime. ‘So quiet,’ he said, smoothing the air before him with a flattened palm.
Sho gwyett
. He said he thought he recognised my name—could that be? I told him I used to be an actor, but that I doubted he would ever have heard of me. ‘Ah, then, you are perhaps a friend of’—he prodded a finger towards the ceiling and arched his eyebrows and rounded his eyes—‘the divine Señorita Devonport.’

We drank some more of the bitter wine. And what, I asked, did he do? He considered my question for a moment, smiling faintly, and joined his fingers together again and touched the tips of them lightly to his lips. ‘I am, let us say,’ he said, ‘in mining.’ This formulation seemed to amuse him. He directed towards the floor a mock-significant glance. ‘Underground,’ he whispered.

My mind must have wandered then, sent astray by the wine and the lack of sleep, or perhaps in fact I did sleep, a little, in some way. He had begun by speaking of mines and metals, of gold and diamonds and all precious elements buried deep in the earth, but now, without my knowing how, he had ranged out into the depths of space, and was telling me of quasars and pulsars, of red giants and brown dwarfs and black holes, of heat death and the Hubble constant, of quarks and quirks and multiple infinities. And of dark matter. The universe, according to him, contains a missing mass we cannot see or feel or measure. There is much, much more of it than there is of anything else, and the visible universe, the one that we know, is sparse and puny in comparison. I thought of it, this vast invisible sea of weightless and transparent stuff, present everywhere, undetected, through which we move, unsuspecting swimmers, and which moves through us, a silent, secret essence.

Now he was speaking of the ancient light of galaxies that travels for a million—a billion—a trillion!—miles to reach us. ‘Even here,’ he said, ‘at this table, the light that is the image of my eyes takes time, a tiny time, infinitesimal, yet time, to reach your eyes, and so it is that everywhere we look, everywhere, we are looking into the past.’

We had finished the bottle, he was pouring out the dregs. He tipped the rim of his glass against mine and made a ringing note. ‘You must take care of your star, in this place,’ he said in the softest of whispers, smiling, and leaning so far forwards in the chair that I could see myself reflected, doubly reflected, in the lenses of his spectacles. ‘The gods watch over us, and are jealous.’

It was a hot summer, that summer of Mrs Gray. Records were broken, new ones were set. There was a drought that lasted for months, water was rationed and stand-pipes were set up at street corners where vexatious mothers had to queue with buckets and saucepans, complaining, their sleeves pugnaciously rolled. Cattle died in the fields, or went mad. Gorse fires burst out spontaneously; entire hillsides were left blackened and smouldering and for hours afterwards the air in the town was acrid with smoke that made a scratch in the throat and gave everyone a headache. Tar in the roadways and in the cracks between paving stones melted and stuck to the soles of our sandals, and the tyres of our bicycles sank into it, and one boy fell off his bike that way and broke his neck. Farmers warned plaintively of a disastrous harvest, and in the churches special prayers for rain were offered.

For my part I recall those months as no more than bright and soft. I have an image, as in one of those sedulously crafted landscape paintings that were so popular in these parts in those days, of a big sky adrift with cotton clouds, and far gold fields with pudding-shaped haystacks, and a single distant spire, thin as a tack, and at the horizon the merest brushstroke of cobalt blue to suggest a glimpse of sea. Impossibly, I even remember rain—Mrs Gray and I loved to lie quiet in each other’s arms on the floor in Cotter’s place and listen to it sizzling through the leaves, while an impassioned blackbird somewhere close by whistled its heart out. How safe we felt then, how far removed from everything that would threaten us. The parched world around us might shrivel up and turn to tinder, we would be slaked by love.

I thought our idyll would never end. Or, rather, I would not entertain the thought of an end to it. Being young, I was sceptical of the future, and saw it as a matter of potential only, a state of things that might or might not arise and probably never would. Of course, there were markers to be observed, of an immediate kind. For instance, the summer certainly would come to a close, the holidays would be over, and I would be expected to start calling for Billy again in the mornings on the way to school—how would I carry that off? Would I be able to maintain the insouciant front that I did before the summer, when Mrs Gray and I were still merely strolling hand in hand up the lower slopes of what was soon to become Mount Hymettus itself, complete with golden honey-combs and cliffs of lovely blue-grey marble and naked nymphs in dells? The truth is, despite all youth’s daring and defiance, there hovered directly above my head a little cloud of foreboding. It was no more than a cloud, weightless, indefinite in shape, yet dark, outside its malignantly radiant silver lining. For the most part I managed to ignore it or pretend it was not there. What was a cloud, in comparison with love’s blazing sun?

It baffled me that people around us did not guess our secret; almost, at times, I found myself growing indignant at their lack of insight, their lack of imagination—in a word, at their underestimation of us. My mother, Billy, Mr Gray, these were not formidable enough figures to inspire much fear—though Kitty’s face I often seemed to glimpse in that menacing cloud over my head, grinning out at me gloatingly like the Cheshire Cat—but what about the town’s busybodies, the moral guardians, the powder-blue Legionnaires of Mary? Why were they so slack in their bounden duty to nose out Mrs Gray and me as we indulged ourselves shamelessly in endlessly inventive acts of concupiscence and lust? Heaven knows we took risks, at which Heaven itself must have been aghast. In this regard, of the two of us Mrs Gray was by far the more reckless, as I must already have said. It was a thing I could not account for, could not understand. I was about to say she had no fear, but it was not the case, for I had seen her on more than one occasion trembling in terror, I assumed at the prospect of being caught with me; at other times, though, she acted as if she had never known a moment of misgiving, parading with me brazenly that day on the boardworks, for example, or running naked in broad daylight through the wood, where the very trees seemed to throw up their arms and draw back, shocked and scandalised at the sight of her. Inexperienced in these matters though I was, I felt I could say with confidence that such behaviour was not commonplace among the matrons of our town.