Ancient Light

windscreen. I had not meant it, anyway, I knew I would not go there again and spend another day like the one that had just passed. She waited until I was halfway along the street before driving off. I stopped and turned and watched the twin jewels of the station wagon’s rear lights dwindle and fade. I was recalling how she had looked when she saw me walking towards her up Station Road, how she had started in panic and dismay, and how after a second her eyes had taken on that narrow, calculating look. Was that how it would be again one day, one final day, her eyes cold and her face set against me, against all my begging and bawling, against my bitterest tears? Was that how it would be, in the end?

___

But what, you will be asking, what happened, what transpired, as Mrs Gray would have said, on that night in Lerici after my encounter in the snowbound hotel with the mysterious man from the pampas? For surely, you will say, surely something happened. After all, was it not the stuff of the sweaty fantasies of my boyhood to have all unbidden in my bed a creature such as Dawn Devonport, a star in need of succour, a goddess in want of tender tending? Was a time, after boyhood days were done, when in such circumstances I would have known exactly what to do and would not have hesitated for a second. Not that I was ever really a womaniser, even in the days of my hot youth and vigour, despite what certain people will say. An actress in distress, though, I could never resist. Tours especially saw brisk nocturnal activity, for the rooms were cold and the beds lonely in those cheerless digs and fleabag hotels where our little troupes used to put up, establishments that were dispiritingly familiar for me, son of the boarding-house that I was. In the febrile aftermath of the night’s show, often it would take no more than a wounding notice in an early edition to cause a girl still with dabs of greasepaint behind her earlobes to come tumbling in tears into my arms. I was known for my soft touch. Lydia was aware of these chance collisions, or at least she guessed at them, I know that. Did she stray, too, when I was off gallivanting? And if she did, what do I feel about it, now? I press upon the place that should smart and nothing returns. Yet I adored once, and was myself adored. Such a long time ago, all that, I might be speaking of a lost antiquity. Ah, Lydia.

Dawn Devonport, I have to tell you, is a snorer. I hope she will not mind my revealing this unflattering fact. It will not harm her, I am sure—we prefer our deities to display a human flaw or two. Anyway, I like to listen to a woman snore; I find it soothing. Lying there in the dark with that sonorous rhythm going on beside me I feel I am out on a calm sea at night, being borne along in a little skiff and gently rocked from side to side; a buried recollection of the amniotic voyage, perhaps. That night, when at last I slipped back into my room, the street-light outside was still shedding a soiled glow in the window and the snow was still steadily falling. Have you ever thought how odd a thing it is that all hotel rooms are bedrooms? Even in suites, even in the grandest of them, the other rooms are just anterooms to the inner sanctum where the bed stands in all its smug and canopied majesty, like nothing so much as a sacrificial altar. In mine, now, Dawn Devonport still lay sleeping. I contemplated my choices. What was it to be, a few uncomfortable hours—by now it was very late and first light could not be far off—huddled in my clothes on that rush-bottomed Van Gogh chair, or reclining with a crick in my neck on the equally uninviting sofa? I looked at the chair, I looked at the sofa. The former seemed to shrink under my gaze, while the latter was pressed against the wall opposite the bed with its back up and its padded arms braced to the floor, regarding me through the gloom with an air of smouldering suspicion. I note how more and more I feel my presence resented by supposedly inanimate objects. Perhaps it is the kindly world’s way, by making me increasingly unwelcome among its furniture, of easing me towards the final door, the one through which I shall presently be seen out for the last time.

In the end I opted to risk the bed. I padded softly around the side of it, and out of habit took off my watch and set it down on the little glass-topped table there. The clink that it made, of metal on glass, brought suddenly back to me all those nighttime vigils spent beside Cass’s sick-bed when she was little, the unquiet darkness and the staled air, and the child felled there and seeming not to sleep but to be away in some half-tormented trance. Slipping soundlessly out of my shoes, but still dressed, with even my jacket buttons demurely done, and without drawing back the covers, I lay down, very cautiously—though even so a few springs deep in the mattress twanged, in jubilant derision, so it sounded—and stretched out on my back beside the sleeping woman and folded my hands on my breast. She stirred and snuffled a bit but did not wake. If she had woken, and turned to see me there, what a fright she would have got, thinking that surely a corpse all neatly parcelled in its funeral suit had been laid out beside her while she slept. She was resting on her side, facing away from me. Against the backdrop of the dimly illumined window the high curve of her hip might have been the outline of a graceful hill seen at a distance in the darkness against a sallowly lit sky; I have always admired this view of the female form, at once monumental and homely. Her snores made a delicate rattling in the passages of her nostrils. Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead. I wondered what Dawn Devonport might be dreaming of, although I have the theory, based on no grounds whatever, that snoring precludes dreaming. For my part I was in that state of late-night hallucinated wakefulness that makes the very notion of sleep seem preposterous, yet presently I felt myself to be suddenly stepping off a footpath and missing my step, and I came to with a jolt that made the bed recoil, and realised I had drifted into a sort of sleep, after all.

Dawn Devonport too had woken. She was as she had been before, lying on her side, and did not move, but she had stopped snoring and her stillness was that of one awake and intently attending. She was so still I thought she might be rigid with fear—it was entirely possible that she did not remember how she had come to be here, in someone else’s bed, in the middle of the night, with that ghastly light in the window and the snow falling outside. Discreetly I cleared my throat. Should I slide from the bed and slip out of the room and take myself off downstairs again—Senor Sorran might still be in the bar, broaching another bottle of Argentinian red—so that she might think I had been only the figment of a dream and thus reassured drift back into sleep? I was juggling these alternatives, none of them persuasive, when I felt the bed begin to tremble, or quake, in a way I could not at first account for. Then I understood the cause. Dawn Devonport was weeping, muffling violent sobs and making hardly a sound. I was shocked, and my hands on my breast clutched at each other in a spasm of fright. The sound of a woman sobbing to herself in the darkness is a terrible thing. What was I to do? How was I to console her—was I required to console her? Was anything at all to be asked of me? I was trying to recall the words of a silly little ditty that I used to sing with Cass when she was small, something about lying in bed on one’s back and getting tears in one’s ears—how Cass used to laugh—and in the extremity of the moment I think I too would have begun to weep had Dawn Devonport not reared up suddenly, giving the sheet and the blanket a mighty yank, and fairly flung herself from the bed with a wordless exclamation of what seemed anger and run from the room, leaving the door wide open behind her.

I switched on the lamp and sat up, blinking, and swung my legs over the side of the bed and set my stockinged feet on the floor. Weariness settled all at once on my bowed shoulders, like the weight of all that snow outside, or of the night itself, the great dome of darkness all above me. My feet were cold. I wriggled them into their shoes, and leaned forwards, but then just stayed leaning there, my arms hanging, incapable even of doing up the laces. There are moments, infrequent though marked, when it seems that by some tiny shift or lapse in time I have become misplaced, have outstripped or lagged behind myself. It is not that I think myself lost, or astray, or even that it is inappropriate to be where I am. It is just that somehow I am in a place, I mean a place in time— what an odd way language has of putting things—at which I have not arrived of my own volition. And for that moment I am helpless, so much so that I imagine I will not be able to move on to the next place, or go back to the place where I was before—that I will not be able to stir at all, but will have to remain there, sunk in perplexity, mured in this incomprehensible fermata. But always, of course, the moment passes, as it passed now, and I got myself to my feet and shuffled in my unlaced shoes to the door Dawn Devonport had left open, and shut it, and returned and switched off the lamp, and lay down again, still in my clothes, with my tie still knotted, and passed at once into blessed oblivion, as if a panel had opened in the night’s wall and I had been slid on a slab into the dark and shut away there.

We never did make the crossing to Portovenere, Dawn Devonport and I. Perhaps I had never intended that we should. We might have gone, there was nothing to stop us—unless it was everything, of course—for despite the winter storms the ferries were operating and the roads were open. She, it turned out, had known all along that it was in the little port across the bay that my daughter died—she had heard it from Billie Stryker, I imagine, or Toby Taggart, for it was no secret, after all. She did not ask why I had chosen not to tell her myself, why I had pretended