Ancient Light Read online

  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.

  I ask myself, again, if she were deliberately daring the world to find us out. One day she summoned me to meet her after she had been to an appointment with the doctor—‘women’s trouble,’ she would say brusquely, and make a face—and when she arrived in the station wagon at our meeting place on the road above the hazel wood she insisted I make love to her there and then, on the spot. ‘Come on,’ she said, almost angrily, her rump waggling at me as she clambered into the back seat of the station wagon, ‘do it to me, come on.’ I have to admit I was shocked by her shamelessness, and for once I was even a little unwilling—the spectacle of such raw desire threatened to have a deflating effect on me—but she put an arm that seemed as hard as a man’s around my neck and drew me fiercely down to her, and I could feel her heart already hammering and her belly shaking, and of course I did to her what she demanded. It was over in a minute and then she was all dismissive briskness, pushing me away and pulling at her clothes and using her pants to wipe herself. We had left a glistening smear on the leather seat between us. She had parked hardly ten yards off the road, and although there was little traffic in those days, any motorist who happened to slow down going past could have seen us, her upraised nyloned legs and my bare white backside plunging and rearing between them. Now we climbed back into the front seat, exclaiming at the hotness of the leather where the sun had been shining on it, and she lit a cigarette and sat half turned away from me with her elbow out of the open window and a fist under her chin, saying nothing. I waited meekly for her mood to pass, frowning at my hands.

  What had happened, I wondered, that she was so wrought? Had I done something to anger her? For most of the time I was unshakeably confident of her love, with all of youth’s callous assurance, yet it would have taken no more than a harsh word or a disparaging glance from her to convince me on the spot that all was as good as over. It was peculiarly exciting, to be certain of her affections and yet always in fear of forfeiting them; to be in some sort of control of this passionate woman and yet also at her mercy. Such lessons she was teaching me about the human heart. That day, though, as always, it was not long before the gloom lifted. She stirred herself and flicked the unsmoked half of her cigarette out of the window—she might have been the cause of burning down the hazel wood and our love nest along with it—and then leaned forwards and drew her skirt back and peered into her lap. She saw my startled and disbelieving look—could she be ready to start up again, already?—and gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m only searching for the button that you tore off my suspender.’ The button was not to be found, however, and in the end she had to borrow a threepenny piece from me to use in its place. It was an expedient I was familiar with, for I had seen my mother more than once do the same thing. My mother used Pond’s Cold Cream, too, as Mrs Gray did now. She took a little fat pot of the stuff from her handbag and unscrewed the cap with a quick turn of the wrist, as if deftly wringing the neck of some small creature, and, holding the pot and the cap both in a slack left hand, shimmied forwards on the seat, straining upwards to see herself in the driving mirror, and with a fingertip applied the ice-white salve to her forehead and cheeks and chin. I do not know if there is such a thing as wholly disinterested love, but if there is I came closest to it at moments such as this, when she was engaged in some ritual she had performed so often she was no longer really conscious of it, and her eyes struggled to focus and her features relaxed into a look of lovely vacancy except in the space between her eyebrows where the skin drew itself tight in a tiny frown of concentration.

  I think that must have been the day she told me she would be going away—the family was to take its annual holiday at the seaside. At first I found it hard to grasp what she was saying. This is something I recall with fascination now, the way in which my mind, before the batterings of experience had sufficiently softened it up and made it porous, would refuse to accommodate the things it found unpalatable. In those days there was nothing I could not believe or disbelieve, accept or reject, if it suited me and fitted with my view of how matters must be. She could not go away; it was simply not possible for us to be parted, not possible at all. It could not be the case that I would be left alone while she went off for two weeks—two weeks!—to disport herself half naked on a beach, and play games of tennis and clock golf, and enjoy candlelit dinners with her dopey husband before waddling upstairs tipsily and falling on her back laughing on to a hotel bed—no no no! Contemplating this appalling, this not-to-be-entertained prospect, I had the sense of horror-struck incredulity that comes in the instant after the kni
fe-blade has sliced into the ball of the thumb or the acid has splashed into the eye, when everything is suspended while pain the playful demon takes a deep and determined breath preparatory to getting down to the serious work at hand. What would I do without her all that time—what would I do? She was gazing at me in amused dismay, shocked at my shock. She pointed out that she was not going far, that Rossmore was only ten miles away by train—she would be practically down the road, she said, hardly away at all. I shook my head. I may even have clasped my hands before her in supplication. A sob of anguish was forming inside me like a big soft warm unlayable egg. She did not seem capable of grasping the essential fact that I could not think of being separated from her, that I could not imagine her being in a place where I was not. Something would happen to me, I declared, I would fall ill, I might even die. At this she laughed but quickly checked herself. I was not to be silly, she said in her married-woman’s voice, I would not get sick, I would not die. Then I would run away from home, I said, narrowing my eyes at her, I would pack my things in my schoolbag and come to Rossmore and live on the beach for the two weeks while she was there, and every time she and the other Grays stepped out of doors there I would be, dragging myself and my sorrow about the hotel grounds, and the tennis courts, and the golf range, her hollow-eyed, heartsick boy.

  ‘Now listen to me,’ she said, turning sideways and draping an arm on the steering wheel and lowering her head to glare at me sternly, ‘I have to go on this holiday—do you understand? I have to.’

  I shook my head again, shook it and shook it until my cheeks rattled. She was becoming alarmed by my vehemence, I saw with satisfaction, and in her alarm I saw, too, a tiny sharp gleam of hope. I must press on—I must press harder. The sun was beating through the windscreen, greying the glass, and the leather upholstery was giving off a strong animal odour to which no doubt Mrs Gray and I were adding a post-coital tang. I had a shaky sensation, as if everything inside me had turned to crystal and was vibrating at a very fast and uniform pitch. I think if I had heard a car coming I would have leaped out and stood in the middle of the road with my hand up and made it stop, so that I might denounce Mrs Gray to the driver—Look, sir, upon this heartless jade!—for in my distress I was working up a steaming head of fury, and I would have welcomed a witness to the sore injustice I was being made to suffer. Who can do outrage and injury better than a boy in love? I said I would not let her go to Rossmore, and that was final. I said I would tell Billy what his mother and I had been up to, and he would tell his father, and Mr Gray would throw her out on the street, and then she would have no choice but to run away with me to England. I could see from the way her lips were twitching that she was finding it hard not to smile, and this drove me to a new extreme of fury. If she went away she would be sorry, I said narrowly. When she came back I would not be here, she would never see me again, and then how would she feel?—yes, I would go, I would leave this place altogether, I told her, and then she would know what it felt like to be abandoned and alone.