Ancient Light

way. I cannot explain it. There were no tears, of course, only the words pouring out of me unstoppably, yet I had that almost voluptuous sense of helpless, headlong falling that one has when one gives in to a really good bawl. And of course when at last I ran out of words I was rueful and abashed all over, as if I had lightly scalded myself. How did Billie Stryker, seemingly without the least effort, get me to say so much? There must be more to her than meets the eye. As I should hope there is, for what meets the eye is less than prepossessing.

What did I say to her, what did I tell her? I cannot remember. I recall only the babbling, not what it was I babbled. Did I say my daughter was a scholar and that she suffered from a rare disorder of the mind? Did I describe how when she was young and her condition was as yet undiagnosed her mother and I would swing dizzyingly between anxious hope and ashen disappointment as the signs of her malady seemed to diminish only to rise up again more starkly and more unmanageably than ever? How we used to long, in those years, for just one ordinary day, a day when we might get up in the morning and eat our breakfast without caring for anything, reading bits out of the paper to each other and planning things to do, and afterwards take a stroll, and look at the scenery with an innocent eye, and later share a glass of wine, and later still go to bed together and lie at peace in each other’s arms and drift into untroubled sleep. But no: our lives with Cass were a constant watching brief, and when she eluded us at last and did her disappearing trick—when she made away with herself, as they so accurately say—we acknowledged even in the midst of our sorrow that the end she had brought to our vigil had been inevitable. We wondered, too, and were aghast to find ourselves wondering it, if our vigilance itself had somehow served to hasten that end. The truth is she had been eluding us all along. At the time of her death we thought she was in the Low Countries deep in her arcane studies, and when word came from Portovenere, far off in the south, the dread word that in our hearts we had known all along would some day come, we felt not only bereaved but in a manner outmanoeuvred, cruelly and, yes, unforgivably outwitted.

But wait, hang on—something has just struck me. I was the one whom Billie Stryker was researching today. That was the point of all that hedging and hesitating on her part, all those ponderous silences: it was all a stalling tactic while she waited patiently for me to start talking, as I inevitably would, into the vacuum she had carefully prepared. How subtle of her, not to say sly, not to say, indeed, underhand. But what did she find out about me, except that I once had a daughter and she died? When I apologised for rambling on for so long about Cass, she shrugged and smiled—she has a very affecting smile, by the way, sad and sweetly vulnerable—and said it was all right, she did not mind, that it was her job to listen. ‘That’s me,’ she said, ‘the human poultice.’

I think I really will ask her to find Mrs Gray for me. Why not?

We went downstairs and I escorted her to the front door. Lydia was nowhere to be seen now. Billie’s car is an ancient and badly rusted Deux Chevaux. When she had clambered in behind the wheel she leaned out again to inform me, seemingly as an afterthought, that there is to be a read-through of the script, in London, early next week. All the cast will be there, the director, of course, and the scriptwriter. The latter’s name is Jaybee, something like that—I have become slightly deaf and it distresses me to have to keep on asking people to repeat what they have said.

Billie drove off in swirling billows of dark-brown exhaust smoke. I stood looking after her until she was gone from the square. I was puzzled and at a loss, and prey to a faint but definite unease. Was it by some sorcery she had got me to speak of Cass, or was I only waiting for the chance? And if this is the sort of person I shall be dealing with in the coming months, what have I let myself in for?

I have spent the afternoon perusing, I think that is the word, The Invention of the Past, the big biography of Axel Vander. The prose style was what struck me first and most forcefully— indeed, it nearly knocked me over. Is it an affectation, or a stance deliberately taken? Is it a general and sustained irony? Rhetorical in the extreme, dramatically elaborated, wholly unnatural, synthetic and clotted, it is a style such as might be forged—le mot juste!—by a minor court official at Byzantium, say, a former slave whose master had generously allowed him the freedom of his extensive and eclectic library, a freedom the poor fellow all too eagerly availed himself of. Our author—the tone is catching—our author is widely but unsystematically read, and uses the rich tidbits that he gathered from all those books to cover up for the lack of an education—little Latin, less Greek, ha ha—although the effect is quite the opposite, for in every gorgeous image and convoluted metaphor, every instance of cod learning and mock scholarship, he unmistakably shows himself up for the avid autodidact he indubitably is. Behind the gloss, the studied elegance, the dandified swagger, this is a man racked by fears, anxieties, sour resentments, yet possessed too of an occasional mordant wit and an eye for what one might call the under-belly of beauty. No wonder he was drawn to Axel Vander for a subject.

This Vander, I may say, was an exceedingly strange bird. For a start, it seems he was not Axel Vander at all. The real Vander, a native of Antwerp, died mysteriously some time in the early years of the war—there were rumours, widespread though hardly plausible, that despite his hair-raisingly reactionary politics he took part in the Resistance—and this other, counterfeit, one, who has no recorded history, simply assumed his name and slipped adroitly into his place. The false Vander carried on the genuine one’s career as a journalist and critic, fled Europe for America, married, and settled in California, in the pleasant-sounding town of Arcady, and taught for many years at the university there; the wife died—it appears she was prematurely senile and Vander may in fact have murdered her—and shortly afterwards Vander abandoned his work and moved to Turin, where he was to die himself a year or two later. These are the facts, garnered from the helpful Chronology our author supplies after the Preface, and which he would be scandalised to see me present in such an unadorned and unfiddled-with fashion. The books that Vander wrote in his American years, in particular the collection of essays hermetically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity, won him a large if contested reputation as an iconoclast and an intellectual sceptic. ‘A strain of nastiness runs throughout the work,’ his disenchanted biographer writes, with a palpably curled lip, ‘and all too often his tone is that of a crabbed and venomous spinster, the kind of person who confiscates footballs that small boys accidentally kick into her garden and spends her evenings writing poison-pen letters on perfumed note-paper to her neighbours in the village.’ You see what I mean about the style.

And this Vander is the character I have to play. Dear me.

Yet in a way I can see why someone thought there is material for a movie here. Vander’s story weaves a certain mephitic spell. Perhaps I am overly suggestible, but as I sat reading in the old green armchair where lately Billie Stryker had perched and panted, the feeling came over me of being surreptitiously seized on and deftly taken hold of. The October sky in the slanted window above me had a floating of copper clouds, and the light in the room was a pale dense gas, and the silence too was dense, as if my ears had been stopped up as in an aeroplane, and I seemed to see the shadowy first and valid Axel Vander faltering and falling without a sound and his usurper stepping seamlessly into his place and walking on, into the future, and overtaking me, who will presently in turn become a sort of him, another insubstantial link in the chain of impersonation and deceit.

I shall go out for a walk; perhaps it will restore me to myself.

I like to walk. Or better say, I walk, and leave it at that. It is an old habit, acquired in the early months of grieving after Cass died. There is something in the rhythm and the aimlessness of being out for a stroll that I find soothing. My profession, from which I thought I had retired until Marcy Meriwether summoned me back to the footlights, or the arc-lights, or whatever they are called, has always allowed me the freedom of the daytime hours. There is a certain tepid satisfaction to be had in being abroad and at one’s leisure while other folk are penned indoors at work. The streets at mid-morning or in the early afternoon have an air of definite yet unfulfilled purpose, as if something important had forgotten to happen in them. The halt and the lame come out by day to air themselves, the old, too, and the no longer employed, wiling away the empty hours, nursing their losses, probably, as I do. They have a watchful and a slightly guilty manner; perhaps they fear being challenged for their idleness. It must be hard to get used to there being nothing urgent that needs to be done, as I am bound to find out when those arc-lights are extinguished for the last time and the set is struck. Theirs I imagine is a world without impetus. I see them envying the busyness of others, eyeing resentfully the lucky postman on his round, the housewives with their shopping baskets, the white-coated men in vans delivering necessary things. They are the unintended idlers, the ones astray, the at-a-loss ones.

I observe the tramps, too, that is another old pastime of mine. It is not what it used to be. Over the years the tramp, your true tramp, has been diminishing steadily in quality and quantity. Indeed, I am not sure that one can any more speak of tramps as such, in the old, classic sense. No one nowadays rambles the roads, or carries a bundle on a stick or sports a coloured neckerchief, or ties his trouser legs below the knees with twine, or collects cigarette butts from the gutter to keep in a tin. The wandering ones are all drunks, now, or on drugs, and care nothing for the traditional ways of the road. The addicts in particular are a new breed, always in a hurry, always on