Ancient Light

The caller, Lydia said, was a woman, whose name she did not catch, though she was unmistakably American. I waited. Lydia was looking dreamily beyond me now, out through the sloped window in front of my desk, to the mountains in the distance, pale blue and flat, as if they had been painted on the sky in a weak wash of lavender; it is one of the charms of our city that there are few places in it from which these soft and, I always think, virginal hills are not visible, if one is prepared to stretch. What, I asked gently, had this woman on the phone wished to speak to me about? Lydia with an effort withdrew her gaze from the view. A film, she said, a movie, in which it seems I am being offered a leading part. This is interesting. I have not acted in a film before. I enquired as to the movie’s title, or what it is to be about. Lydia’s look grew vague, I mean more vague than it had been up to now. She did not think the woman had told her what the title is. Apparently it is to be a biopic, but of whom she is not sure —some German, it seems. I nodded. Had the woman perhaps left a number so that I might call her back? At this Lydia lowered her head and frowned at me from under her eyebrows in solemn silence, like a child who has been asked a difficult and onerous question the answer to which she does not know. Never mind, I said, no doubt the woman would phone again, whoever she was.

My poor Lydia, she is always a little dazed like this after one of her bad nights. Her name, by the way, is really Leah—Lydia is a mishearing of mine that stuck—Leah Mercer as was, as my mother would have said. She is large and handsome, with broad shoulders and a dramatic profile. Her hair these days is a two-tone shade of what used to be called salt-and-pepper with, in the undergrowth, a few uncertain sallow lowlights. When I met her first her hair had the lustre of a raven’s wing, with a great silver streak in it, a flash of white fire; as soon as the silver began to spread she allowed herself to succumb to the blandishments of Adrian at Curl Up and Dye, whence she returns hardly recognisable after her monthly appointment with this master colourist. Her glossy, kohl-black eyes, those eyes of a desert daughter, as I used to think them, have lately taken on a faded, filmy aspect, which makes me worry about the possibility of cataracts. In her young days her figure had the ample lines of one of Ingres’s odalisques but now the glory has fallen and she wears nothing but loose, billowing garments in muted hues, her camouflage, as she says with a sad laugh. She drinks a little too much, but then so do I; our decade-long great sorrow simply will not be drowned, tread it though we will below the surface and try to hold it there. Also she smokes heavily. She has a sharp tongue of which I am increasingly wary. I am very fond of her, and she, I believe, is fond of me, despite our frictions and occasional tight-lipped disagreements.

We had a dreadful night, the two of us, I with my dream of having been replaced in Lydia’s affections by an androgynous writer of Gothic tales, and Lydia suffering one of those nocturnal bouts of mania that have beset her at irregular intervals over the past ten years. She wakes, or at least leaps from the bed, and goes dashing in the dark through all the rooms, upstairs and down, calling out our daughter’s name. It is a kind of sleepwalking, or sleeprunning, in which she is convinced our Catherine, our Cass, is still alive and a child again and lost somewhere in the house. I get up groggily and follow her, only half awake myself. I do not try to restrain her, heeding the old wives’ caution against interfering in any way with a person in that state, but I keep close in case she should trip over something and I might be able to catch her before she falls and save her from injuring herself. It is eerie, scurrying through the darkened house—I do not dare switch on the lights—in desperate pursuit of this fleeting figure. The shadows throng us round like a silent chorus, and at intervals a patch of moonlight or the radiance from a street-lamp falling in at a window will seem a dimmed spotlight, and I am reminded of one of those tragic queens in the Greek drama, raging through the king her husband’s palace at midnight shrieking for her lost child. Eventually she tires herself out, or comes to her senses, or both, as she did last night, sinking down on a step of the stairs, all in a heap, shedding terrible tears and sobbing. I hovered about her helplessly, not knowing quite how to get my arms around her, so amorphous a shape did she appear, in her sleeveless black nightdress, her head hanging and her hands plunged in her hair that in the dark looked as black as it was the first time I saw her, walking out into summer through the revolving door of her father’s hotel, the Halcyon of happy memory, the tall glass panels of the door throwing off repeated, glancing bursts of blue and gold—yes, yes, the crest of the wave!

The worst part, for me, of these extravaganzas of anguished hue and cry comes at the end, when she is all contrition, berating herself for her foolishness and begging to be forgiven for waking me so violently and causing such needless panic. It is just, she says, that in her sleepwalking state it seems to her so real a thing that Cass is alive, her living daughter, trapped in one of the rooms of the house, terrified and unable to make herself heard as she calls for help. Last night she was so ashamed and angry that she swore at herself, using horrible words, until I hunkered down beside her and held her in an awkwardly simian embrace and made her lay her head in the hollow of my shoulder, and at last she grew quiet. Her nose was running and I let her wipe it on the sleeve of my pyjamas. She was shivering, but when I offered to fetch her dressing-gown or a blanket she clung to me the more tightly and would not let me leave her. The faintly stale smell of her hair was in my nostrils and the ball of her bare shoulder was chill and smooth as a marble globe under my cupped hand. Around us the hall furniture stood dimly in the gloom like shocked and speechless attendants.

I think I know what it is that torments Lydia, besides the unassuageable grief she has been nursing in her heart throughout the ten long years since our daughter died. Like me, she was never a believer in any of the worlds to come, yet I suspect she fears that through a cruel loophole in the laws of life and death Cass did not fully die but is somehow existing still, a captive in the land of the shades and suffering there, half of the pomegranate seeds still unswallowed in her mouth, waiting in vain for her mother to come and claim her back to be among the living again. Yet what is now Lydia’s horror was once her hope. How could anyone die who was so much alive? she demanded of me that night in the hotel in Italy where we had come to claim Cass’s body, and so fierce was her tone and so compelling her look that for a moment I too thought that a mistake might have been made, that it might be someone else’s unrecognisable daughter who had smashed herself to death on those wave-washed rocks below the bare little church of San Pietro.

As I have said, we had not ever believed in the immortal soul, Lydia and I, and would smile in gentle condescension when others spoke of their hopes of some day seeing again departed loved ones, but there is nothing like the loss of an only child to soften the wax of sealed convictions. After Cass’s death—to this day I cannot see those words written down without a disbelieving shock, they seem so unlikely, even as I grave them on the page—we found ourselves venturing, tentatively, shamefacedly, to entertain the possibility not of the next world, exactly, but of a world next to this one, contiguous with it, where there might linger somehow the spirits of those no longer here and yet not entirely gone, either. We seized on what might be signs, the vaguest portents, wisps of intimation. Coincidences were not now what they had been heretofore, mere wrinkles in the otherwise blandly plausible surface of reality, but parts of a code, large and urgent, a kind of desperate semaphoring from the other side that, maddeningly, we were unable to read. How we would begin to listen now, all else suspended, when, in company, we overheard people speaking of having been bereaved, how breathlessly we hung on their words, how hungrily we scanned their faces, looking to see if they really believed their lost one not entirely lost. Certain dispositions of supposedly chance objects would strike us with a runic force. In particular those great flocks of birds, starlings, I think they are, that gather out over the sea on certain days, amoebically swooping and swirling, switching direction in perfect, instantaneous co-ordination, seemed to be inscribing on the sky a series of ideograms directed exclusively at us but too swiftly and fluidly sketched for us to interpret. All this illegibility was a torment to us.

I say us, but of course we never spoke of these pathetic hopes of a hint from the beyond. Bereavement sets a curious constraint between the bereaved, an embarrassment, almost, that is not easy to account for. Is it the fear that such things if spoken of will take on an even greater weight, become an even heavier burden? No, that is not it, not quite. The reticence, the tactfulness, that our mutual grieving imposed on Lydia and me was at once a measure of magnanimity, the same that makes the gaoler tiptoe past the cell in which the condemned man on his last night is asleep, and a mark of our dread of stirring up and provoking to even more inventive exercises those demonic torturers whose special task it was, is, to torment us. Yet even without saying, each knew what the other was thinking, and, more acutely, what the other was feeling—this is a further effect of our shared sorrow, this empathy, this mournful telepathy.

I am thinking of the morning after the very first one of Lydia’s nocturnal rampages when she had started up from the pillow convinced our recently dead Cass was alive and in the house somewhere. Even when the panic was over and we had dragged ourselves back to bed we did not get to sleep again, not properly—Lydia doing hiccuppy after-sobs and my heart tom-tomming away—but lay on the bed on our backs for a long time, as if practising to be the corpses that one day we shall be. The curtains were thick and drawn tightly shut, and I did not realise the dawn had come up until I saw forming above me a brightly shimmering image that spread itself until it stretched over almost the entire ceiling. At first I took it for an hallucination generated out of my sleep-deprived and still half-