Ancient Light Page 20

  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.

  I did encounter Billy. It was the most peculiar thing. I turned a corner and ran smack into him. He was coming from the public tennis courts, along with three or four other fellows, none of whom I knew. We faltered, Billy and I, then stopped, and stared. Stanley and Livingstone could not have been more startled. Billy was in tennis whites, a cream-coloured jumper with a blue band tied by the arms around his waist, and carried a racket—no, two rackets, I see them, both of them in shiny new wooden presses. He blushed, and I am sure I did, too, in the exquisite awkwardness of the moment. We both began to say something at the same time, and stopped. This was not supposed to have happened, we were not supposed to meet here like this—what did I mean by being here, anyway? And what was to be done? Billy was trying to hide those two rackets in their ostentatious presses, holding them down at his side with a show of negligence. The others had gone on a little way but now they paused, and looked back at us with not much curiosity. Mark, I was not thinking of Mrs Gray or my purpose in being there, that was not what was making for this discomfiting sensation, this hot mixture of embarrassment, dull dread and sharp annoyance. Then what was? Just the surprise, I suppose, the being caught off-guard. It was as if we had both become unfairly entangled in something shaming and could not think how to extricate ourselves; in a moment it seemed we would be snarling at each other, like two beasts halted snout to snout on a jungle path. Then everything suddenly relaxed, and Billy did his lopsided and faintly apologetic smile, ducking his head to one side—for a moment he was his mother—and with eyes downcast stepped past me, in a gingerly sinuous fashion, as if he were negotiating a barbed and bristling obstacle that had risen in his way. He spoke a word, too, that I did not catch, and went on to join his new seaside friends, who by now were grinning in ignorant enjoyment of what they had seen and had not understood. I could make out clearly the still reddened back of Billy’s neck. One of them clapped him on the shoulder, as if he had come valiant and safe through some tricky trial, and then they went on together, laughing, and a second one of them put an arm around Billy’s shoulders and glanced back at me with spiteful scorn. It all was done with so quickly that as I walked on it was as if it had not happened at all, and with a calm that surprised me I resumed my wanderings.

  It was eerie how often that day I seemed to see—no, how often I saw Mrs Gray appear out of the throngs of summer people. She was everywhere, a tantalising brightness flitting among so many featureless shades. It was exhausting, coping with these surges of joyful recognition that no sooner rose up in me than they were dashed down again. It was like being teased by a mischievous and cruel-hearted sprite playing hide-and-seek with me among the drifting crowd. The more often I spied her and immediately lost her again the more maddened with longing for her I became, until I thought I should faint, or lose my reason, if the real she did not soon appear. Yet when she did, I had seen so many imaginary versions of her that I did not at first believe my eyes.

  I had relinquished hope by then and was trudging up the road to the station on my way to take the last train home. So dispirited was I that I did not so much as cast a glance at the Beach Hotel as I passed by. She came towards me from the direction of the station with the sun at her back, a moving silhouette outlined in burning gold. She was wearing sandals, and her short-sleeved dress with the flower pattern—it was the dress I recognised first—and her hair was pinned back in a way that made her seem very young, a bare-legged girl slapping along in her sandals, swinging a shopping bag. At first she, too, I saw, could not believe the evidence of her eyes, and stopped on the path and stared in astonishment and dawning alarm. This was not at all the way I had imagined us meeting. What was I doing here, she demanded—was there something wrong? I did not know what to say. I had been right about the sunburn: there was a pink flush on her forehead and in the hollow of her throat, and a few freckles were sprinkled very fetchingly across the saddle of her nose.

  She tilted her head and was regarding me with a sharp, sidewise stare, her eyes narrowed and her mouth set. The look of fright that had come into her face at the sight of me was turning now into a frown of suspicion and angry reproach. I could see her urgently calculating in her mind the dimensions of the problem that my sudden, shocking appearance here had presented her with. At any moment one of her children might walk out at the hotel gate not a hundred yards down the road and see the two of us there, and then what? In return I eyed her sulkily, kicking with my toe at a crack in the pavement. I
was disappointed—more, I was disillusioned, bitterly so. Yes, I had given her a shock; yes, there was a danger we might be spotted and unable to account for ourselves; but what of her repeated affirmations of love for me, that love that was supposed to be careless of all convention? What of the heedless passion that had led her to lie down with me in her laundry room on an April afternoon, that had sent her prancing naked through the summer woods, and for the sake of which she was willing to park the station wagon at the side of a public road in broad daylight and scramble into the back seat and without preamble hike her skirt up to her waist and draw me peremptorily down upon her, her bucking boy? Her eyes now had taken on a harried look, and she kept glancing past me down the road towards the hotel and pressing the tip of her tongue back and forth along her lower lip. Something, I saw, would have to be done, and done quickly, to draw her attention away from herself and all she might lose and turn it back on me. I let my shoulders droop and lowered my gaze in chastened fashion—oh, yes, an actor in the making—and in a voice that had the merest hint of a sob in it I told her that I had come to Rossmore because I had not known what else to do, since I could not have borne to be away from her another day, another hour. She peered at me for a long moment, startled by the seeming intensity of my words, and then smiled, in that delighted, slow, blurry way of hers. ‘Aren’t you a terrible fellow?’ she murmured, her voice thickening, and she shook her head, and was mine again.

  We went together back the way she had come, passing by the station, and having crossed the little humpbacked bridge we were at once in the countryside. Where had she been, I wanted to know, where had she come from? She laughed. She had been in town, all day. She showed me her bulging shopping bag. ‘They haven’t a thing in that place,’ she said, jerking her head disdainfully backwards in the direction of the Beach Hotel, ‘only sausages and spuds, spuds and sausages, every damned day.’ So she had gone up this morning, and come back, now, on the train? Yes, and she had been idling, like me, wandering about the town for hours, wondering where I might be, when all the time I was here! She laughed again, to see my chagrined scowl. We were walking along by the side of the road. The sun was in our eyes, and the evening light had turned to tarnished gold. Long grasses leaned out from the ditch and slapped at us lazily and left their dust on our legs. A wispy white mist was forming ankle-deep over the fields, and cattle stood on invisible hoofs and watched us as we went past, their lower jaws moving sideways and up in that mechanical, bored way. Summer, and the silence of evening, and my love by my side.

  If she had come on the train, I said, what about Mr Gray—where was he? He was stuck in town, she said, and would catch the late mail train. Stuck in town. I thought of Miss Flushing’s blonde waves and high-set waist and those two big damply glistening front teeth of hers. Should I say something, should I let fall a hint of what I thought I knew of Mr Gray’s guilty secret? Not yet. And when I eventually did tell her, some time afterwards, how she laughed—‘Oh, God, I think I’ve wet myself!’—clapping her hands and shrieking. She knew her husband better than I did.

  We stopped at a bend of the road, in the purple-brown shade of a stand of rustling trees, and I kissed her. Have I said she was taller than I was, by an inch or so? I was still a growing lad, after all; hard to think of that. Her sunburned skin was plushly hot against my lips, slightly swollen, delicately adhesive, more like a secret inner lining than an outer skin. Of all the kisses we exchanged, that is the one I recall most sharply, simply for the strangeness of it, I suppose, for it was strange to be standing up like that, under trees, at dusk on an otherwise unremarkable summer evening. Though we too were innocent, in our way, and that is strange, too. I see us as in one of those old rustic woodcuts, the youthful swain and his freckled Flora chastely embracing in a shady arbour under tangled honeysuckle and dew-sweet eglantine. All a fancy, you see, all a dream. When the kiss was done we each took a step back, cleared our throats, and turned together and walked on in decorous silence. We were holding hands, and I, the aspiring gallant, was carrying her shopping bag. What were we to do now? It was growing late, and I had missed the last train. What if someone who knew us were to come driving along and see us there, strolling hand in hand between those misty fields so late in the day, a beardless boy, a married woman, and yet a pair of lovers, plainly? I pictured it, the car swerving wildly and the driver’s disbelieving look over the wheel, his mouth opening to exclaim. Mrs Gray began to tell me how when she was small her father used to take her out on evenings such as this to gather mushrooms, but then broke off and became pensive. I tried to see her as a girl, picking her way barefoot through the mist-white meadows, with a basket on her arm, and the man, her father, going ahead of her, bespectacled, whiskered and waistcoated, like the fathers in fairy tales. For me she could have no past that was not a fable, for had I not invented her, conjured her out of nothing but the mad desires of my heart?

  She said she would go back and fetch the station wagon and drive me home. But how would she manage it, I wanted to know, how would she get away?—for I had begun at last to weigh the perils of our predicament. Oh, she said, she would think of some story or other. Or had I, she enquired, a better plan to suggest? I did not like her sarcastic tone and did as I so often did and set to sulking. She laughed, and said I was a big baby, and drew me to her with both arms and gave me what was half a hug and half a shake. Then she pushed me away again, and brought out her lipstick and made herself a new mouth, pouting, and sucking in her lips until it looked as if she had no teeth and making faint smacking sounds. I was to wait by the railway bridge, she said, and she would come back and pick me up there. I should keep an eye out in case Mr Gray’s train arrived in the meantime. What, I asked, was I supposed to do if it did? ‘Hide behind the ditch,’ she said drily, ‘unless you want to explain to him how you happened to be hanging about here at this hour of the night.’

  She took the shopping bag from me and went off. I watched her dimmening figure waver away through the twilight, over the bridge, and disappear, slipping like a shadow through a gap between two worlds, hers and mine. Why in so many of my memories of her is she walking away from me? I had not asked her what she had bought in town. I had not cared to know, but now I pictured her as in one of those brightly coloured cheery advertisements of the day, freckled and tanned in her summer frock, attended by Billy and Kitty, the two of them gazing up at her with rosy cheeks propped on their fists, grinning and eager, their eyes bright as buttons, as she produces from the cornucopia of her bag all manner of comestible delights—biscuits and bonbons, cobs of corn, sliced pans in wax-paper wrappers, oranges the size of bowling balls, a squamous pineapple with its gay topknot—while in the background Mr Gray, husband, father, only provider of all this abundance, looks up from his newspaper and smiles indulgently, modest, dependable, square-jawed Mr Gray. Their world, never to be mine. The summer was ending.

  I went and sat on a stile. Below me the rail lines shone in the day’s last light, and in the station master’s office a wireless set inserted its needle of buzzing sound into the silence. Night came on, diffusing the purple-grey gloam that passes for darkness at that time of year. Now a light went on in the waiting-room window, and moths wove drunken, zigzag patterns under a buzzing lamp at the end of the platform. Behind me in the fields a corncrake began insistently to shake its wooden rattle. There were bats out, too, I could sense them flickering here and there above me in the indigo air, their wings making a tiny sound like that of tissue paper being surreptitiously folded. Presently a huge, fat-faced moon the colour of honey hoisted itself up out of somewhere and goggled down at me, mirthful and knowing. And shooting stars!—when is the last time you saw a shooting star? By now Mrs Gray had been gone a worryingly long time. Had something happened, had she been waylaid? Maybe she would not be able to come back for me at all. I was growing chilled, and hungry, too, and I thought mournfully of home, my mother in the kitchen, in her chair by the window, reading a detective sto
ry from the library, her glasses on the end of her nose, one ear-piece repaired with sticking-plaster, licking her thumb to turn the pages and blinking sleepily. But maybe she would not be reading, maybe she would be standing by the window, peering out worriedly into the dark, wondering why I was abroad so late, and where I could be, and what doing.

  The arm of the railway signal below the bridge came down with a jerk and a clack, startling me, and the signal light had turned from red to green, and away off in the distance I could see the light of the approaching mail train. Mr Gray would shortly arrive, would step down to the platform, with his briefcase, and a rolled newspaper under his arm, and stand a moment, peering about and blinking, as if he were not sure he was in the right place. What should I do? Should I try to divert him? But as Mrs Gray had sensibly said, what excuse could I offer for being there, alone, so late at night, cold and shivering? Then the station wagon appeared over the crest of the hill. One of its headlamps was permanently askew, so that the lights had a comically wall-eyed, groping glare. It drew up and stopped by the stile. The window on the driver’s side was open and Mrs Gray was smoking a cigarette. She glanced past me at the light of the approaching train that was as big now and as yellow as the moon. ‘Jeepers,’ she said, ‘just in time, eh?’ I got in beside her. The leather seat felt cold and clammy. She reached out a hand and touched my cheek. ‘Poor you,’ she said, ‘your teeth are chattering.’ She gouged at the gears and in a burst of tyre-smoke we shot off into the night.