Ancient Light (5 page)

It was not a Saturday, certainly not a Sunday, so it must have been a holiday, or a holyday—the Feast of St Priapus, perhaps—but at any rate there was no school, and I had called at the house for Billy. We had a plan to go somewhere, to do something. In the little gravelled square where the Grays lived the cherry trees were shivering in the wind and sinuous streels of cherry blossom were rolling along the pavements like so many pale-pink feather boas. The flying clouds, smoke-grey and molten silver, had great gashes in them where the damp-blue sky shone through, and busy little birds darted swiftly here and there or settled on the ridges of the roofs in huddled rows, fluffing up their feathers and carrying on a ribald chattering and piping. Billy let me in. He was not ready, as usual. He was half dressed, in shirt and pullover, but still had on striped pyjama bottoms and was barefoot, and gave off the woolly odour of an unfresh bed. He led the way upstairs to the living room.

In those days, when no one but the very rich could afford to have central heating, our houses on spring mornings such as this one had a special chill that gave a sharp, lacquered edge to everything, as if the air had turned to waterglass overnight. Billy went off to finish dressing and I stood in the middle of the floor, being nothing much, hardly even myself. There are moments like that, when one slips into neutral, as it were, not caring about anything, often not noticing, often not really
being
, in any vital sense. My mood that morning was not one of absence, however, not quite, but of passive receptivity, as I think now, a state of not quite conscious waiting. The metal-framed oblong windows here, all shine and sky, were too bright to sustain my gaze, and I turned from them and cast idly about the room. How quick with portent they always seem, the things in rooms that are not ours: that chintz-covered armchair braced somehow and as if about to clamber angrily to its feet; that floor-lamp keeping so still and hiding its face under a coolie’s hat; the upright piano, its lid greyed by an immaculate coating of dust, clenched against the wall with a neglected, rancorous mien, like a large ungainly pet the family had long ago ceased to love. Clearly from outside I could hear those lewd birds doing their wolf-whistles. I began to feel something, a vague, flinching sensation down one side, as if a weak beam of light had been trained on me or a warm breath had brushed my cheek. I glanced quickly towards the doorway, but it was empty. Had there been someone there? Was that a skirl of fading laughter I had caught the end of?

I crossed quickly to the door. The corridor outside was empty, although I seemed to detect the trace of a presence there, a wrinkle in the air where someone had been a moment before. Of Billy there was no sign—perhaps he had gone back to bed, I would not have been surprised. I ventured along the corridor, the carpet—what colour, what colour was it?—muffling my tread, not knowing where I was going or what I was looking for. The wind was whispering in the chimneys. How the world talks to itself, in its own dreamy, secretive fashion. A door was halfway open, I did not notice it until I had almost passed by. I see myself there, glancing sideways and back, and everything slowing down suddenly with a sort of a lurch and a bump.

That carpet, now I remember: it was a pale blue or bluey-grey strip, what is called a runner, I think, and the floorboards at the sides were varnished an unpleasant dark shade of brown and glistened like sucked, sticky toffee. See what can be called up, all manner of thing, when one concentrates.

Time and Memory are a fussy firm of interior decorators, though, always shifting the furniture about and redesigning and even reassigning rooms. I am convinced that what I looked into through that open doorway was a bathroom, for I recall distinctly the chilly gleam of porcelain and zinc, yet what caught my gaze was the kind of looking-glass that dressing-tables in women’s bedrooms had in those days, with a curved upper edge and wings at the sides and even—can this be right?—little triangular flaps set atop the wings that the lady seated at her toilet could draw forwards at an angle to give her a view of herself from above. More confusingly still, there was another mirror, a full-length one, fixed to what would have to have been the outwards-facing side of the inwards-opening door, and it was in this mirror that I saw the room reflected, with at its centre the dressing-table, or whatever it was, with its own mirror, or I should say mirrors. What I had, therefore, was not, strictly speaking, a view of the bathroom, or bedroom, but a reflection of it, and of Mrs Gray not a reflection but a reflection of a reflection.

Bear with me, through this crystalline maze.

So there I am, paused outside that doorway, gaping at an angle into the full-length looking-glass fixed, improbably, to the outside of the door that stood opened inwards. I did not register at once what it was I was seeing. Up to then the only body I had known at close quarters was my own, and even with that still evolving entity I was not on particularly intimate terms. What I would have expected a woman with no clothes on to look like I am not sure. No doubt I had pored hotly over reproductions of old paintings, ogled this or that old master’s pink-thighed frump fighting off a faun or classical matron enthroned in pomp among, in Madame Geoffrin’s happy formulation, a fricassee of children, but I knew that even the nakedest of these strapping figures, with their tundish breasts and perfectly bald and grooveless deltas, gave a far from naturalistic representation of woman in the raw. Now and then in school an antique dirty postcard would be passed from hand to fumbling hand under the desks, but as often as not the daguerreotyped cocottes showing off bare bits of themselves would be obscured behind smeared thumbprints and a filigree of white creases. In fact, my ideal of mature womanhood was the Kayser Bondor lady, a foot-high, cut-out cardboard beauty propped on the hosiery counter of Miss D’Arcy’s haberdashery shop at the near end of our Main Street, arrayed in a lavender gown and showing off an excitingly chaste fringe of petticoat above a pair of lovely and impossibly long legs sheathed in fifteen-denier nylon, a svelte sophisticate who came swishing imperiously into many a nocturnal fantasy of mine. What mortal woman could match up to such presence, such stately poise?

Mrs Gray in the mirror, in the mirrored mirror, was naked. It would be more gallant to say she was nude, I know, but naked is the word. After the first instant of confusion and shock I was struck by the grainy look of her skin—I suppose she must have had gooseflesh, standing there—and by the dull glimmer of it, like the sheen on a tarnished knife-blade. Instead of the shades of pink and peach that I would have expected—Rubens has a lot to answer for—her body displayed, disconcertingly, a range of muted tints from magnesium white to silver and tin, a scumbled sort of yellow, pale ochre, and even in places a faint greenishness and, in the hollows, a shadowing of mossy mauve.

What was presented to me was a triptych of her, a body as it were dismembered, or I should say disassembled. The mirror’s central panel, that is, the central panel of the mirror on the dressing-table, if that is what it was, framed her torso, breasts and belly and that smudge of darkness lower down, while the panels at either side showed her arms and her elbows, oddly flexed. There was a single eye, somewhere at the top, fixed on me levelly and with the hint of a challenge, as if to say,
Yes, here I am, what do you make of me?
I know very well this jumbled arrangement is unlikely, if not impossible—for one thing, she would have needed to be positioned close up to and directly in front of the mirror, with her back turned to me, for me to be able to see her reflected like that, but she was not there, only her reflection was. Could she have been standing some way away, at the opposite side of the room, and hidden from me in the angle of the open door? But in that case she would not have bulked so large in the mirror, would have appeared more distant and much smaller than she did. Unless the two mirrors, the one on the dressing-table in which she was reflected and the one on the door reflecting her reflection, produced in combination a magnifying effect. I do not think so. Yet how can I account for all these anomalies, these improbabilities? I cannot. What I have described is what appears in my memory’s eye, and I must say what I see. Later, when I asked her, Mrs Gray herself denied such a thing had ever happened, and said I must take her for a fine rawsie—her word—if I thought she would show herself off in that fashion to a stranger in the house, and a boy, at that, and her son’s best friend. But she lied, I am convinced of it.

That was all there was, that briefest glimpse of a fragmented woman, and at once I passed on along the corridor, stumblingly, as if I had been given a hard push in the small of the back. What? you will cry. Call that an encounter, call that a dalliance? Ah, but think of the boiling storm in a boy’s heart after such licence, such accommodation. And yet, no, not a storm. I was not as shocked or inflamed as I should have expected to be. The strongest sensation I had was one of quiet satisfaction, as an anthropologist might feel, or a zoologist, who by happy chance, all unexpectedly, has glimpsed a creature the aspect and attributes of which confirm a theory as to the nature of an entire species. I knew now something I could never unknow, and if you scoff and say that after all it was knowledge only of what a naked woman looks like, you show that you do not remember what it was to be young and yearning for experience, yearning for what is commonly called love. That the woman had not flinched under my gaze, had not run to slam the door shut or even put up a hand to cover herself, seemed to me neither heedless nor brazen, but odd, rather, very odd, and a matter for deep and prolonged speculation.

The thing did not end without a fright, however. When on reaching the head of the stairs I heard rapid footsteps behind me I would not turn for fear it might be she, sprinting after me like a maenad, still without a stitch on and driven by who knew what wild design. I felt the skin at the back of my neck pucker as if in expectation of being set upon violently, by hands, clutching fingers, teeth, even. What could she want of me? The obvious was not the obvious—I was only fifteen, remember. I was torn between the impulse to plunge headlong down the stairs and flee the house, never to darken its doorstep again, and an opposite urge to stand my ground, and turn, and open wide my arms and receive into them this lavish and unlooked-for gift of womanhood, naked as a needle, in Piers the ploughman’s happy formulation, all breathless and a-flutter and drooping with desire. The person behind me was not Mrs Gray, however, but her daughter, Billy’s sister, the unnerving Kitty, all pigtails and specs, who squeezed past me now, wheezing and tittering, and went clattering down the stairs, at the bottom of which she stopped and turned and cast up at me a hair-raisingly knowing smirk, and then was gone.

After taking a deep and for some reason painful breath I too descended, circumspectly. The hall was empty, with Kitty nowhere to be seen, for which I was relieved. I opened the front door quietly and stepped out into the square, my gonads humming like those pretty porcelain insulators, little fat doll-like things, that there used to be on the arms of telegraph poles, that the wires went through, or around—remember? I knew that Billy would wonder what had become of me but I did not think that in the circumstances I could face him, not for now, anyway. He bore a strong resemblance to his mother, have I mentioned that? Oddly, though, he never did speak of my having flown the house, not when I met up with him next day, not ever, in fact. I sometimes wonder—well, I do not know what it is I wonder. Families are strange institutions, and the inmates of them know many strange things, often without knowing that they know them. When Billy eventually found out about his mother and me, did I not think his rage, those violent tears, a mite excessive, even in a case as provocative as the one in which we all suddenly found ourselves mired? What do I imply? Nothing. Move on, move on, as we are directed to do at the scene of an accident, or a crime.

Days passed. Half the time I spent in contemplation of Mrs Gray reflected in the mirror of my memory and the other half imagining I had imagined everything. It was a week or more before I saw her again. There was a tennis club outside the town, by the estuary, where the Grays had a family membership, and where I went sometimes with Billy to knock a ball about, feeling horribly conspicuous in my cheap plimsolls and threadbare singlet. Ah, but the tennis clubs of yore! My heart haunts still those enchanted courts. Even the names, Melrose, Ashburn, Wilton, The Limes, bespoke a world more graceful far than the dingy backwater where we lived. This one, out by the estuary, was called Court-lands; I imagine the pun was unintentional. I had seen Mrs Gray playing there only once, partnering her husband in a doubles match against another couple who in my memory are no more than a pair of white-clad phantoms bobbing and dipping in the ghostly soundlessness of a lost past. Mrs Gray played the net, crouching menacingly with her rear end in the air and springing up to slash at the ball like a samurai slicing an enemy diagonally in half. Her legs were not as long as the Kayser Bondor lady’s, were in fact more sturdy than anything else, but nicely tanned, and shapely enough at the ankle. She wore shorts rather than one of those boring skirtlets, and there were damp patches at the armpits of her short-sleeved cotton shirt.

That day, the day of the incident—the incident!—that I wish to record, I was walking homewards alone when she overtook me in the car and stopped. Was it the day of the doubles match? Cannot remember. If it was, where was her husband? And if I was coming from the club, where was Billy? Detained, the pair of them, by the amatory goddess, delayed, diverted, locked in the lavatory and shouting in vain to be let out—no matter, they were not there. It was evening and the sunlight was watery after a day of showers. The road, patterned with fragrant patches of damp, ran beside the railway line, and beyond that the estuary was a shifting mass of turbulent purple, and the horizon was fringed with a boiling of ice-white clouds. I had slung my jumper over my shoulders and knotted the sleeves loosely in front, like a real tennis player, and carried my racquet in its press at a negligent angle under my arm. When I heard the motor slowing behind me I knew, I do not know how, that it was she, and my heartbeat too seemed to slow, and developed a syncopated catch. I stopped, and turned, frowning in feigned surprise. She had to stretch all the way across the passenger seat to roll down the window. The car was not a car in fact but a station wagon, of a flat grey shade and somewhat battered; she had left the motor running and the big ugly hump-backed thing gasped and trembled on its chassis like an old horse with a chill, coughing out blue smoke at the back. Mrs Gray leaned low with her face tilted up towards the open window, smiling at me quizzically, reminding me of the amiably sardonic heroines of the screwball comedies of an earlier day, who made rapid-fire wisecracks and bullied their beaux and gaily spent their gruff fathers’ countless millions on sports cars and silly hats. Did I say her hair was of an oaken shade and cut in a nondescript style, and that there was a curl at one side that she was always pushing behind her ear, though it would never stay put? ‘I think, young man,’ she said, ‘we are both going the same way.’ And so we were, although it turned out not to be the way home.