Ancient Light Read online

  We were in Cotter’s house, on the mattress on the floor in what had been the kitchen, both of us naked, she sitting tailor-fashion with her ankles crossed—I was not so upset that I did not notice the glinting dewy pearls that I had left sprinkled through the wiry floss between her legs—and I kneeling before her, face contorted in jealous rage and all smeared over with mingled tears and snot, shrieking at her for her perfidy. She waited until I had worn myself out, then made me lie down against her, still sniffling, and began to play distractedly with my hair—what locks, what tresses, I had then, my God, despite those barber’s shears she wielded—and after a number of hesitations and false starts, with much sighing and troubled murmuring, she said that I must try to understand how difficult all this was for her, being married and a mother, and that her husband was a good man, a good, kind man, and that she would die rather than hurt him. My sole response to this parroting of the romantic claptrap from the women’s magazines she was so partial to was an angrily dismissive wriggle. She stopped, and was silent for a long while, and her fingers too left off worrying my hair. Outside, thrushes were making the woods round about ring with their manic whistling, and the sun of early summer shining through a broken casement was hot on my bare back. We must have made a striking composition there, the two of us, a profane pietà, the troubled woman nursing in her embrace a heartsick young male animal who was not and yet somehow was her son. When she began to speak again her voice sounded far-off, and different, as if she had changed into someone else, a stranger, pensive and calm: in other words, alarmingly, an adult. ‘I was married young, you know,’ she said, ‘barely nineteen—what’s that, only four years older than you? I was afraid I’d be left on the shelf.’ She laughed with bitter rue and I could feel her shaking her head. ‘And now look at me.’

  I took this as an admission of profound unhappiness with her married lot, and consented to be mollified.

  This is I think the point at which to say a word or two about our secret place of rendezvous. How proud of myself and my resourcefulness I was when I first took Mrs Gray to see it. I met her on the roadside above the hazel wood as we had arranged, stepping out from under the trees and feeling gratifyingly like a fellow in the pictures who is obviously up to no good. She came driving along in that negligent way that always gave me a thrill to see, one hand loosely gripping the big, worn, polished cream-coloured steering wheel and the other holding a cigarette, her freckled elbow stuck out at the rolled-down window and that curl behind her ear spinning in the wind.

  She stopped a little way off from me and waited until another car going in the opposite direction had passed by. It was an overcast May morning with a metallic glare in the clouds. I had not gone to school, but had crept off here, and my schoolbag was hidden under a bush. I told her that I had the day free because of an appointment at the dentist’s later. For all that she was technically my lover she was a grown-up, too, and often I found myself fibbing to her like this, as I would to my mother. She was wearing her light, flowered frock with the wide skirt, knowing by now how much I enjoyed watching her take it off—lifting it over her head with her arms straight up and her breasts in their white halter huddling fatly against each other—and a pair of black velvet pumps that she had to slip out of and carry, to save them from the woodland mire. She had pretty feet, all at once I see them, pale and unexpectedly long and slender, very narrow at the heel and broadening gracefully towards the toes, which were quite straight and almost as prehensile as fingers, each one separate to itself, and which she wiggled now as she walked, digging them luxuriantly into the leaf-mould and the wet loam and squealing faintly for pleasure.

  I had thought of making her wear a blindfold, to sharpen the surprise of what I had to show her, but had been afraid she might trip and break something: I had a horror of her suffering an injury when she was with me and of my having to run for help to someone, my mother, say, or even, God forbid, Mr Gray. She was childishly excited, dying to know what was the surprise that I had for her, but I would not tell, and the more she pressed the more stubborn I grew, and even began to be a little annoyed by her importuning, and strode ahead of her so that she had to hurry at almost a stumbling run, barefoot as she was, just to keep up with me. The path wound its sombre way under the unleaving trees—see, it has suddenly become autumn again, impossibly!—and by now I was full of vexed misgiving. I am struck, looking back, by how volatile my temper was when I was with her, how quickly I would fly into a rage over a trifle, or for no reason at all. I seemed permanently suspended over a pit of smouldering, sulphurous fury the fumes of which made my eyes smart and took my breath away. What was the cause of this sullen sense of being put upon and unfairly used that never stopped tormenting me? Was I not happy? I was, but underneath I was angry, too, all the time. Perhaps it was that she was too much for me, that love itself and all it demanded of me was too heavy a burden, so that even as I writhed rapturously in her embrace I longed in my secret heart for the old complacencies, the old and easy ordinariness of things before they had suffered her transforming touch. I suspect that in my heart I wanted to be a boy again, and not whatever it was my desire for her had made of me. What a thing of contradictions I was, poor, addled Pinocchio.

  But, oh dear, how her face fell when at last she saw what I had brought her to, I mean Cotter’s old house, in the woods. It was a matter of a moment only, her faltering, and at once she rallied and put on her broadest, bravest, head-girl’s smile, but in that moment even a creature as self-absorbed and unobservant as I could not have missed the look of sharp distress that crazed the skin of her cheeks and pinched her mouth and drew her eyes down at their corners, as if what she was confronted with, a house once foursquare and handsome now laid waste by time, its walls falling and its paltry timbers all on show, were the very image of all the folly and danger she had indulged in by taking for her lover a boy young enough to be her son.

  To distract us both from her dismay she busied herself putting on her absurdly dainty shoes, propping an ankle on a knee and using her index finger for a shoehorn, maintaining her balance by holding on tightly to my arm with a hand that trembled from more than merely the effort of keeping herself upright. Affected by her disillusionment I too was disillusioned now, and saw the tumbledown old place for what it was and cursed myself for bringing her there. I freed my arm from her grasp and drew away from her brusquely, and went forwards and gave the mildewed front door a hard, angry push, sending it yawing wildly with a screech on the single hinge that was all that was holding it up, and stepped inside. The walls in places were hardly more than a mesh of laths, stuck in patches here and there with crumbling plaster, and wallpaper most of which hung down in lank strips, like lianas. There was a smell of rotting wood and lime and old soot. The staircase had collapsed, and there were holes in the ceilings, and in the bedroom ceilings above, too, and in the roof above that again, so that when I looked up I could see clear through two storeys and the attic to the sky, glinting in spots through the slates.

  Of Cotter I knew nothing except that he must have been long gone, and all the other Cotters with him.

  A floorboard creaked behind me. She cleared her throat delicately. Sulking, I refused to turn. We stood there in the dusty hush, amid pallid beams of radiance from above, I facing into the empty house and she at my back. We might have been in church.

  ‘It’s a grand place,’ she said apologetically, in a softly subdued voice, ‘and you were very clever to find it.’

  We walked about, with a sober and thoughtful mien, saying nothing and avoiding each other’s eye, like a pair of newlyweds dubiously pacing the lines of their prospective first home while the bored estate agent loiters outside on the step smoking a cigarette. We did not so much as kiss, that day.

  It was she who on a later day found the lumpy, stained old mattress, folded in two and squashed into a dank and reeking cupboard under the stairs. Together we dragged it out, and to air it we set it over two kitch
en chairs under the only window that still had glass in it and where we judged the sun would shine in most strongly. ‘It’ll do,’ Mrs Gray said. ‘I’ll bring sheets, next time.’

  In fact, over the coming weeks she brought all sorts of things: an oil lamp, never to be lit, with a bulbous chimney of marvellously fine spun glass that made me imagine old Muscovy; a teapot and an unmatched pair of teacups and saucers, also never to be used; soap and a bath towel and a bottle of eau-de-Cologne; various foodstuffs, too, including a jar of potted meat and tinned sardines and packages of crackers, ‘in case,’ she said with a low laugh, ‘you might get peckish.’

  She delighted in this parody of home-making. When she was little, she said, she had loved to play house, and indeed as I watched her producing one toy-like goody after another from her shopping basket and arranging them on sagging shelves about the room she seemed of the two of us by far the younger. I pretended to disdain this feeble simulacrum of domestic bliss that she was assembling piece by piece, but there must have been something in me, an enduring strain of childishness, that would not allow me to hold back but led me forwards, as if by the hand, to join her in her happy games.

  Some games. Was she guilty of rape, if only in the statutory sense? Can a woman be a rapist, technically? By taking to bed a fifteen-year-old boy, and a virgin, to boot, I imagine she would have been legally culpable to a serious degree. She must have thought of it. Perhaps her capacity to conceive of imminent disaster was blunted by a constant awareness of the possibility—the inevitability, as it happened—that one day a long time off in the future she would be found out and disgraced not only before her family but in the eyes of the entire town, if not the country. There were occasions when she would go silent and turn away from me and seem to be looking at something approaching that was still far off yet not so distant that she could not make it out in all its awfulness. And on those occasions did I offer solace, try to divert her, draw her away from that dreadful vista? I did not. I went into a huff at being neglected, or made a cutting remark and flung myself from that mattress on the rotted floorboards and stamped off to another part of the house. The whitewashed privy in the back garden with its stained and seatless throne and a century’s accumulation of cobwebs in the corners was a favourite perch when I wished to punish her for some misdemeanour by a prolonged and, I trusted, worrying absence. What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper. There was a particular smell from outside, sharp and greenly sour, that came in at the square hole set high up in the wall behind the cistern, that I catch at times still on certain damp days in summer and that makes something struggle to open inside me, a stunted blossom pushing up out of the past.

  That she never followed me or tried to coax me back when I had stormed off like this added fuel to my resentment, and when I did return, feigning a cold and stony indifference, I would watch from the corner of my eye for any hint of mockery or amusement—a lip bitten to prevent a smile, or even a gaze too quickly averted, would have sent me marching straight off to the jakes again—but always I would find her waiting with a calm grave gaze and an expression of meek apology, although half the time she must have been bewildered as to what it could be that she was being required to atone for. How tenderly she would hold me, then, and how accommodatingly she would spread herself on that filthy mattress and take inside her all my engorged fury, need and bafflement.

  It is extraordinary that we were not lighted upon sooner than we were. We took what precautions we could. At the start we were careful always to make our way to Cotter’s place separately. She would park the station wagon in a leafy lane half a mile away and I would hide my bike under a patch of brambles beside the path along by the hazel wood. It was scarily thrilling to strike off through the trees and make my stealthy way down to the hollow where the house was, stopping now and then and cocking an ear, alert as Leatherstocking, to the woodland’s restive silence.

  I could not decide which I preferred, to get there first and have to wait for her, palms wet and my heart hammering—would she come this time or had she been brought to her senses and decided to have done with me forthwith?—or to find her there before me, crouching anxiously outside the front door as always, for she feared rats, she said, and would not venture inside on her own. In the first minute or two a peculiar constraint would settle between us, and we would not speak, or only stiffly, like polite strangers, and would hardly look at each other, awed by what we were to each other and also, and yet again, no doubt, by the enormity of what we had undertaken together. Then she would contrive to touch me casually in some way, brush her hand as if by chance against mine or trail a strand of her hair across my face, and at once, as if a catch had been released, we would fall into each other’s arms, kissing and clawing while she made little moaning sounds of sweet distress.

  We became adept at getting out of our clothes, or most of them, without breaking our embrace, and then, her wonderfully cool and slightly granular skin pressed all along mine, we would crabwalk to the makeshift bed and fall over slowly together in a sort of toppling swoon. At first, on the mattress, we would be all knees and hips and elbows, but after a moment or two of desperate scrimmaging all our bones would seem to relax and bend and blend, and she would press her mouth against my shoulder and exhale a long, shuddering sigh, and so we would begin.

  But what, you will be asking, of my friend Billy, what was he doing, or not doing, while his mother and I were at our joyous callisthenics? That is a question I myself often asked, with much anxiety. Of course I found it increasingly hard to face him now, to look him in that always relaxed and easy eye of his, for how would he not see the glow of guilt I felt sure I must be giving off? This became less of a difficulty when school ended and the summer holidays began. In the holidays allegiances shifted, fresh interests arose that inevitably involved us with new or at least different sets of companions. There was no question between Billy and me that we were still best friends, only we saw much less of each other now than heretofore, that was all. Away from school, even the best of friends were aware of a slight reserve between them, a shyness, an awkwardness, as if they were afraid, in the new dispensation of endless and untrammelled freedoms, of inadvertently catching each other out in some shaming circumstance, wearing ridiculous bathing-togs, say, or holding hands with a girl. Thus that summer Billy and I, like everyone else, began discreetly to avoid each other, he for the ordinary reasons I have mentioned, and I—well, I for my own, extraordinary reasons.

  One morning his mother and I were given a horrible fright. It was a misty Saturday in early summer, the sun struggling whitely through the trees yet bringing the promise of a sweltering day to come. Mrs Gray was supposed to be shopping and I was supposed to be doing I do not remember what. We were sitting side by side on the mattress with our backs against the powdery wall and our elbows on our knees and she was letting me have a puff of her cigarette—it was a convention between us that I did not smoke although I was already on ten or fifteen a day, as she was well aware—when suddenly she sprang alert and put a hand fearfully on my wrist. I had heard nothing, but now I did. There were voices on the ridge above us. I thought at once of Billy and me up there that day when he had pointed out to me Cotter’s mossy roof camouflaged among the treetops. Could this be him again, come to show the place to someone else? We strained to hear, breathing at the shallowest tops of our lungs. Mrs Gray was looking at me sideways, the whites of her eyes flashing in terror. The voices coming down through the trees made a hollow, ringing sound, like the sound of steel mallets striking musically on wood—or of Fate, more like, amusedly tapping at his finger-drum. Were they the voices of children or of adults or of both? We could not tell. All kinds of wild fancies darted through my mind. If it was not Billy it was workmen coming with sledgehammers and crowbars to demolish what remained of the house; it
was a search-party looking for a missing person; it was the Guards, dispatched by Mr Gray to arrest his wanton wife and her precocious inamorato.

  Mrs Gray’s lower lip had begun to tremble. ‘Oh, holy God,’ she whispered gulpingly. ‘Oh, dear Jesus.’

  In a short while, however, the voices faded and there was silence again up on the ridge. Still we dared not stir, still Mrs Gray’s fingers were digging like talons into my wrist. Then abruptly she scrambled up and began to put on her clothes in clumsy haste. I watched her with a mounting sense of alarm, no longer fearful of discovery but of something much worse, namely, that the shock she had got would cause her to take fright finally and flee the place and never come back to me. I demanded to know, my voice cracking, what she thought she was doing, but she did not answer. I could see by her eyes that she was elsewhere already, on her knees, probably, clinging to her husband’s trouser legs and desperately begging his forgiveness. I thought of making some large pronouncement, of delivering some solemn admonition—If you walk out of here now you need never think of … —but I could not find the words, and even if I could have I would not have dared to utter them. I was staring into the abyss that had been there under me all along. If I were to lose her, how would I bear it? I should leap up now, I knew, and put my arms around her, not to reassure her—what did I care for her fear?—but to prevent her by main force from leaving. A peculiar lethargy had come over me, however, the terrified lethargy that is said to come over the skittering mouse when it looks up in dread and sees the hovering hawk, and I could do nothing but sit there and watch as she pulled up her pants under her dress and bent to gather up her velvet shoes. She turned her face to me, bleared with panic. ‘What do I look like?’ she demanded in a whisper. ‘Do I look all right?’ Without waiting for a reply she ran to her bag for her compact and snapped it open and peered into the little mirror inside it, looking a bit like an anxious mouse herself now, nostrils twitching and the tips of her two slightly overlapping front teeth exposed. ‘Look at me,’ she breathed in dismay. ‘The wreck of the Hesperus!’