Ancient Light (25 page)

Business must have been slow that afternoon, for Miss Flushing, Mr Gray’s assistant, was standing in the shop doorway with the door open, enjoying the sunlight that had already begun to decline at a sharp angle over the rooftops but that was still strong and dense with heat. Was Miss Flushing smoking a cigarette? No, in those days women did not smoke in public, though bold Mrs Gray sometimes did, sometimes even in the street. Miss Flushing was big-boned and blonde, high at bosom and waist, with prominent and very white teeth that were impressive though somewhat alarming to look at. She gave a sense of all-over fairness and pinkness, and there was always a faint, delicate shine, like that on the inner whorl of a seashell, along the edges of her nostrils and the rims of her slightly starting eyes. She favoured angora cardigans that she must have knitted herself, unless she had a mother who knitted them for her; she kept them tightly buttoned so that they emphasised the impossibly sharp points of her perfectly conical breasts. She was extremely short-sighted, and wore spectacles with lenses as thick as the bottoms of bottles. Is it not remarkable that Mr Gray, myopic himself, should have hired an assistant whose vision was even worse than his own? Unless she was meant to be a sort of advertisement, an awful warning against the neglect of defective eyesight. She was a kindly if somewhat scattered person, although with slow or indecisive patients she could on occasion be distinctly short. My mother, a mistress of indecision, disliked and disapproved of her, and when once a year she took ten shillings from the petty cash and went to have her eyesight tested she would insist on being received and treated exclusively by Mr Gray, who was, as she often said, smiling wistfully, a lovely man. The notion of my mother submitting herself to the professional attentions of Mr Gray caused in me an unpleasant, even a queasy, sensation. Did they speak of Mrs Gray? Did my mother enquire after her well-being? I imagined the subject coming up, being briefly, tentatively contemplated, then put away carefully like a pair of glasses into their silk-lined case, after which there would be a silence into which my mother would let drop a soft, faint cough.

I was not acquainted with Miss Flushing, except insofar as everyone in our hardly populous little town could be said to be acquainted, more or less, with everyone else. When I arrived in the street that evening and, seeing her in the doorway, lifted up my chin and knotted my brow into a frown and made to walk past as if I were hurrying on a vital errand elsewhere—it was imperative she should not imagine I was there for any reason to do with the Grays, particularly Mrs Gray—she suddenly spoke to me, to my surprise and even some fright, addressing me by name, which I did not know she knew. I confess that, in my boy’s beady fashion and out of nothing other than a desire for a model against which to compare Mrs Gray’s full-fleshed charms, I had more than once in recent times speculated on how Miss Flushing would look if, somewhere like Cotter’s place some lazy afternoon, she were to be persuaded to take off that fluffy cardigan and the pointy paraphernalia of lace and whalebone underneath it, and I suspect that now when she spoke my name I must have blushed—not, I suppose, that she would have noticed.

She said the Grays had gone away. I nodded, still frowning, still trying to pretend I was about important business from which she was keeping me. She was peering at me in her short-sighted way, which made her lift her full upper lip a little in the middle and wrinkle her nose. In those big lenses her pale, protuberant eyes were the size and shade of two shrunken gooseberries. ‘They’ve gone to Rossmore,’ she said, ‘for a fortnight. They went this morning.’ I seemed to catch in her tone a note of commiseration. Was she also in some way bereft? Was she too sorrowing, like me, and offering sympathy? The sun was striking down on some polished surface in the shop window and dazzling my already sorrow-dazed eyes. ‘Mr Gray is going to come up to town every day on the train,’ Miss Flushing was saying, smiling out of what I was sure now was a fixed, bright misery. ‘He’ll be working here and going down to them at night.’
Them
. ‘It’s not far, on the train,’ she added, and a wobble came into her voice. ‘Not far at all.’

And then I saw it. Miss Flushing was commiserating not with me but with herself. The sorrow she could not keep from betraying was not on my part, it was on her own. Of course! For she was in love with Mr Gray, at that moment I was suddenly certain of it. And he?—was he in love with her? Were they as Mrs Gray and I were to each other? It would account for so many things—Mr Gray’s other kind of myopia, for instance, that prevented him from seeing what was going on under his nose between his wife and me, which perhaps was not myopia at all, I thought now, but the indifference of one whose affections had been transferred elsewhere. Yes, that was it, it had to be: he did not care if his wife spent her afternoons not shopping as she said she did or playing tennis with her housewife friends—what housewife friends did she have, anyway?—but tumbling top over tail with me at Cotter’s place, because meanwhile he was in the back room here with the shades pulled and the closed sign displayed, busy ridding flushed Miss Flushing of her ugly specs and clingy cardigan and underwired armour plating. Oh, indeed, I saw it all now, and was exultant, and the balloon of life’s possibilities was on the instant full to bursting again and tugging at its tether. And I knew what I would do. Come Monday morning, when Mr Gray was bound for town on the up line I would be on the down, speeding in a welter of steam and sparks towards my beloved, whose lovely limbs were sure to be by then already touched with a first alluring sunny flush. What of my mother, though, and what she would say? Well, what of her? It was the school holidays still, I would make some excuse to be gone for the day; she would not object, she credited my every lie and subterfuge, the poor, dim thing.

I pause. I am suddenly assailed by a memory of her, my mother, sitting on a beach on a windy bright day in the midst of the remains of a picnic, paper plates and crushed paper cups, bread crusts in a big tin biscuit-box, a banana skin rudely splayed, a bottle with the dregs of milky tea in it sunk at a drunken angle in the sand. She is sitting up straight with her bare mottled legs extended before her, and there is something on her head, a headscarf, or a shapeless cotton hat. Is she at her sewing?—for she wears that abstracted half-smile that she does when she is doing her embroidery. Where is my as yet undead father? I do not see him. He is down at the shallows, it must be, where he often was, paddling, his trousers rolled, his calves and his knobbed ankles on show, greyish-white, the colour of lard. And I, where am I, or what?—an eye suspended in mid-air, a hovering witness only, there and not there? Ah, Mother, how can the past be past and yet still be here, untarnished, gleaming, bright as that tin box? And did you never suspect what your son was up to, never once, throughout that broiling, tumid summer? Surely a mother would not be so blind to the passions of her only child. You said no word, dropped no hint, posed no pointed question. Yet what if you did suspect, what if you did know, and were too appalled, too terrified, to speak, to challenge, to forbid? This possibility troubles me, more, even, than the possibility that everyone knew, all along. So many people I have betrayed in my life, starting with her, the first casualty.

Would I really go to Rossmore? Countless times throughout that Saturday night and all of Sunday my resolution failed me, then rallied, only to falter and fail again. But go I did, surprising myself. The business of getting away turned out to be simplicity itself—I am sure there is a devil’s apprentice whose special task it is to smooth the way for clandestine lovers. I told my mother, at the demon’s dictation, that Billy Gray had invited me to come down and spend the day with him. Not only was she not suspicious, she was positively pleased, for the Grays were what she called a professional family and therefore a desirable connection for me to have and to cultivate. She gave me the train fare and something extra to buy an ice cream, made sandwiches for me to bring, ironed one of my two good shirts, and even insisted on whitening my plimsolls with pipe-clay. Her fussing infuriated me, of course, in my impatience to be away, but I kept my temper for fear of provoking capricious Fate, which so far had been smiling upon me with such unwonted tolerance.

Boarding the train, I had a twinge of misgiving that was something mysteriously to do with the smell of coal smoke and the bristly feel of the upholstery of the seats. Was I recalling then, too, my mother at Rossmore? Was I ashamed of having lied to her that morning with such oily ease? It is remarkable how few such pricks of conscience I was prey to in those days—I saved them all up for later, for now—yet in that moment, as the train wheezed and clanked its way out of the station, was it that I was afforded a glimpse of the fiery plain and the burning lake of sorrows, did I hear the cries of doomed lovers rising from the pit?
This is a grave sin, my child
, Father Priest had said, and surely it was. Well, let damnation come, I did not care. I got up from the seat, accompanied by little jets of ancient dust squirting out of the upholstery, and let the heavy wooden window down on its thick leather strap, and summer with all its promise leapt into my arms.

I have always liked trains. The old ones were best, of course, their soot-black engines venting bursts of steam and chuffing links of stylised white smoke, and the carriages rattling and yawing and the wheels violently clanging—so much might and effort, yet producing such a gay and toy-like effect. And then the way the landscape seemed to rotate like a vast, slow wheel, or to keep opening like a fan, and the telegraph wires dipped and slid, and birds flew past the window backwards, slowly, effortfully, like so many discarded bits of black rag.

How broad and flat the silence is that spreads along a station platform in summer when the train pulls out. I was the only one who had got off. The fat-necked station master in his peaked cap and navy-blue coat spat on the line and ambled off, that hoop thing he had got from the driver—was it? or from the guard in the guard’s van?—dangling on his shoulder. Parched grass on the far side of the track made ticking noises in the sun. A crow was perched on a post. I went through the little green gate up to the road. Dimly I saw, with a sort of inward undulation like that of a heavy black curtain stirring in a cold wind, how mad a thing it was to have come here like this; but still, no, I did not care, I would not care. I was too far gone to go back, and anyway there would not be an up train for hours. I took out of my pocket the packet of sandwiches my mother had made for me and hurled it across the track into the grass, as a pledge of my commitment, I suppose, of my determination not to be daunted. The crow on the post gave a put-upon squawk and unwrapped its wings of black crape and with a few lazy flaps flew down inexpectantly to investigate. All this had happened before somewhere.

The Beach Hotel, where the Grays were staying, a long, low, one-storeyed establishment with a glassed-in veranda, was a hotel in name only, being hardly more than a boarding-house, though a distinct cut above the shabby place my mother kept. I flitted past, not daring even to glance in the direction of those many sky-reflecting panes. What if Billy or, more calamitously, Kitty, were to come out and see me there? How would I account for myself? I did not have the necessary props to support an alibi, not even swimming trunks or a towel. I went on down the road, and presently came to a gap between a café and a shop that led on to the beach. The morning was hot, and I thought of buying the ice cream my mother had given me the money for, but decided to wait, since I did not know how long this day might last. I was already regretting the sandwiches I had so profligately thrown away.

I went and sat on the beach, and made a funnel of my fist and let sand pour through it while I gazed dolefully out to sea. The water with the sun on it was a broad sheet of rapidly bobbing sharp metallic flakes, old-gold, silver, chrome. People were out walking their dogs, and there were a few swimmers in the sea already, splashing and squealing. I was sure that all eyes were on me, that I was the centre of attention. What if that old boy with the bulldog, for instance, or that skinny woman with the sprig of lilac in the band of her straw hat, what if one of them were to become suspicious and challenge me—what defence of my idle presence would I be able to offer? And Mrs Gray, what would she say when she saw me, what would she do? There were times when she was for me only another adult, just as preoccupied and unpredictable and prone to outbursts of unreasoning anger; just as unlike me, that is, as all the rest of the grown-up world.

I stayed squatting there miserably in the sand for what seemed at least an hour but which when I checked by the clock on the bell-tower of the Protestant church behind the beach turned out to have been not a full ten minutes. I got up and brushed myself down and set off to walk through the village, to see what might be seen, which was only the usual: holiday-makers in wide shorts and silly hats, shops with clusters of beach balls in the doorways and ice-cream machines that whirred and thumped, golfers on the golf course in sleeveless yellow pullovers and big shoes with frilled wings. Sunlight glanced on passing windscreens and made sharp shadows in gateways. I stopped to watch a dog fight between three dogs but it was quickly over. As I was going by the galvanised-iron church I thought I spotted Kitty approaching on a bike and hid behind a hedge, my heart a hot lump struggling in my chest like a cat in a sack.

In those echoless caverns of empty time, being unobserved, unnoticed, I became increasingly detached from myself, increasingly disembodied. At moments I seemed to have become a phantom, and felt that I might walk up to people and pass straight through them and they would not even register a breath. At midday I bought a bun and a bar of chocolate and ate them sitting on a bench outside Myler’s grocery shop. Boredom and the beating sun were making me feel slightly sick. In desperation I began to devise stratagems so that I could call at the Beach Hotel and ask for Mrs Gray. I had got on the Rossmore train by mistake and was stranded here and needed to borrow the fare home; there had been an attempted break-in at their house on the square and I had rushed down to tell them of it; Mr Gray had thrown himself out of the carriage on the way up because Miss Flushing had threatened to jilt him, and they were still searching along the tracks for his mangled body—what did it matter? I was ready to say anything. But still I wandered, agitated and desolate, and the time went slower and slower.