Ancient Light

a mission, trotting unswervingly along crowded pavements or weaving heedless through the traffic, lean as prairie dogs, with scrawny behinds and flat feet, the young men dead-eyed and scratchily light of voice, their women staggering behind them clutching stricken-eyed papooses and incoherently screaming.

One vagrant I have been monitoring for some time now I call Trevor the Trinity-man. He is a very superior type, an aristocrat of the species. When I first spotted him, it must be five or six years ago, he was in fine shape, sober and full of pep. It was a glary summer morning and he was crossing one of the bridges over the river, skipping along in the sharp light and swinging his arms, got up in a dark-blue pea-coat and brand-new desert boots of yellow suede with thick crepe soles. He sported also a particularly jaunty corduroy cap with a peak, and despite the summer warmth he had a Trinity scarf knotted at his neck—hence my nickname for him. His grizzled beard was trimmed neatly to a point, his eyes were clear, his face was ruddy, with only the lightest tracery of broken veins. I am not sure what it was in him that caught my attention. It must have been the look he had of having been brought back from somewhere dreadful and restored to health and vigour, for I am sure he had been in St Vincent’s or St John of the Cross’s drying out; Lazarus probably looked like that after Martha and Mary brought him home from the cemetery and unwound the last of his grave-clothes and got him on his feet and generally smartened him up. I saw him again a couple of times about the streets, still bouncy and bright, and stood behind him one morning in a newsagent’s where he was buying the Times, and noted his markedly fruity tones.

Then disaster struck. It was early, eight or half past on a misty autumn morn, and I was crossing the same bridge where I had got my first sighting of him, and there he was, scarf, jaunty cap, yellow boots and all, marooned in the stream of hurrying office workers, suspended at an angle, limp as a marionette and precipitously swaying, eyes shut as if he were dozing and his lower lip redly adroop, and clutching in his left hand a big bottle in a brown- paper bag.

It was not the end of him, though, this plunge from grace, not at all. He has clambered back on to the wagon many a time, and although each time he has toppled off again, and although each fall takes a heavier toll on him generally, these repeated resurrections that he pulls off cheer me up, and I find myself breaking out in a smile of welcome when, after another ominous period of absence, he comes bustling towards me in the street, bright of eye, the nap of his suede boots brushed, his Trinners scarf freshly washed and free of drool. He pays me not the slightest heed, of course, and has never once, I am sure, felt the pressure of my eagerly following eye.

When he is drinking he begs. He has honed his performance and is admirably consistent, shuffling up to likely marks with a cupped hand jutting out and crooning piteously, like a tired and thirsty infant, his face all twisted up to one side and his bloodshot eyes swimming with unshed tears. But it is only acting. Feeling extra magnanimous one day I gave him a tenner—it was after lunch and I had been drinking myself—and at once, startled by this unexpected bounty, he snapped out of character and beamed at me and thanked me warmly in a rich, Woosterish accent. I think if I had allowed it he would have seized my hand in both of his and pressed it in comradely gratitude and affection. As soon as I had passed on, however, he went straight back into his part, mooing and mugging with that hand held out.

On a good day he makes a tidy sum, I should think. I spied him once in the bank, of all unlikely places, at a teller’s hatch, exchanging a counterful of copper coins for paper money. How patient the uniformed young woman attending him was, how forbearing and good-humoured, apparently not even minding the breathtaking stink that he gives off. Placidly he watched her count the coins, graciously he accepted the scant pile of notes she gave him in exchange, and stored them in an inner recess of his by now worn and permanently stained pea-coat. ‘Thank you, my dear, you are very kind,’ he murmured—yes, I had crept up close enough behind him to catch what he might say—and he touched the back of the young woman’s hand lightly in acknowledgement with the merest tip of a filthy finger.

He ranges far and wide in his wanderings, for I have seen him all over the city, even in the outskirts. On the way to take a plane early one icy spring morning I spotted him on the airport road. He was making his determined way towards town, his breath smoking and a drop at the end of his poor old battered nose glinting like a fresh-cut jewel in the pink-tinged, frosty sunlight. What was he doing there, where was he coming from? Is it conceivable that he had been abroad, and had just returned, on a dawn flight? How do I know he is not an internationally renowned scholar, an expert in Sanskrit, say, or a peerless authority on the Noh theatre? The great pragmaticist Charles Sanders Peirce had to beg for bread and even for a time lived on the streets. Anything is possible.

His gait. There must be something wrong with his feet—poor circulation, I would guess—for he moves at a slithering shuffle, a hindered jog-trot, one might call it, though still he makes a surprisingly rapid progress. His hands are bad, too—circulation again—and I notice he has taken to wearing fingerless grubby white woollen gloves that someone must have knitted for him. As he goes along he keeps his arms up, with elbows bent, those gloved paws held out before him, like a punch-drunk boxer going through the slow motions of warming up.

It is a shock to think that he must be my junior by a good twenty years.

I encountered him this afternoon, on my walk, as I hoped I would, for by now he is a kind of talisman to me. I was down by the dog-racing track, where the skeleton of the old gasometer still stands. That is the kind of neighbourhood, shabby and unassuming, where I prefer to stroll; I am a poor sort of flaneur and never took to the grand avenues or the broad sweeps of city parkland. I came upon Trevor of Trinity sitting contentedly on a bit of broken wall opposite the bus depot. He had a clear plastic carton in his lap and was eating something from it that he must have bought from the shop at the filling-station down the road. I thought it would be a pie of some kind, or one of those knobbly sausage rolls that look pre-eaten, but when I drew level with him I saw it was, of all things, a croissant. Good old Trev, ever the upholder of life’s little niceties! He had a paper cup of coffee, too—not tea, for I could smell the rich brown aroma of the beans. He was drunk, though, and quite befuddled, and was talking to himself in a mumble while he ate, the flakes of pastry tumbling down his front. I could have stopped and sat down beside him; I even slowed my pace and held back a little, thinking to do so, but then lost my nerve and walked on, regretfully. He was oblivious of me, as usual, too squiffy to notice the grey old faded matinee idol in his good tweed overcoat and strangler’s kid gloves skulking past.

I should like to know who he is, or was. I should like to know where he lives. He has shelter, of that I am certain. Someone takes care of him, looks after him, buys him new boots when the old ones have worn out, launders his scarf, delivers him to the hospital to be dried out. I am sure it is a daughter. Yes, a devoted daughter, surely.

___

Me and the silver screen, now, I know you will want to hear all about that. Not silver any more, of course, but gaudily tinted, which is nothing but a disimprovement, in my opinion. Marcy Meriwether had assured me that I was the first person to have been offered the part of Axel Vander, but I subsequently learned that it was offered to at least three other actors of my vintage, all of whom turned it down, which was when Marcy M. in desperation called me up and invited me to play the old monster. Why did I accept? I was a stage performer all my working life and thought it rather late in my career to be starting on a different tack. I suppose I was flattered—well, yes, I was flattered, of course I was: vanity again, my besetting sin—and could not but say yes. Film acting, as it turns out, seems markedly easy—standing around, mostly, and having one’s makeup constantly refreshed and repaired—in comparison with the nightly grind of the stage. Money for jam, really. Or ham, did I hear someone say?

The read-through of the script took place in a big, white, eerily empty house on the Thames that had been hired specially for the occasion, near where the new Globe Theatre stands. I confess I was nervous to be venturing into this novel and faintly alarming world. I knew a few of the cast from stage productions we had been in together, and others were so familiar from the various films I had seen them in that I felt I knew them, too. The result was that there was for me something of the atmosphere of a first day back at school after the long summer hols, a new class and new teachers to be coped with, a lot of new faces and the ones remembered from last term all slightly altered, slightly larger, coarser, more threatening. Billie Stryker was there, looking more damply cardboardy than ever today in her bulging jeans and high-necked jumper. She gave me a cautious wave and one of her rare and tentative and wearily melancholy smiles. The sight of her steadied me, which surely shows how much I was in need of reassurance.