He was half dressed, in shirt and pullover, but still had on striped pyjama bottoms and was barefoot, and gave off the woolly odour of an unfresh bed. He led the way upstairs to the living room.
In those days, when no one but the very rich could afford to have central heating, our houses on spring mornings such as this one had a special chill that gave a sharp, lacquered edge to everything, as if the air had turned to waterglass overnight. Billy went off to finish dressing and I stood in the middle of the floor, being nothing much, hardly even myself. There are moments like that, when one slips into neutral, as it were, not caring about anything, often not noticing, often not really
I crossed quickly to the door. The corridor outside was empty, although I seemed to detect the trace of a presence there, a wrinkle in the air where someone had been a moment before. Of Billy there was no sign—perhaps he had gone back to bed, I would not have been surprised. I ventured along the corridor, the carpet—what colour, what colour was it?—muffling my tread, not knowing where I was going or what I was looking for. The wind was whispering in the chimneys. How the world talks to itself, in its own dreamy, secretive fashion. A door was halfway open, I did not notice it until I had almost passed by. I see myself there, glancing sideways and back, and everything slowing down suddenly with a sort of a lurch and a bump.
That carpet, now I remember: it was a pale blue or bluey-grey strip, what is called a runner, I think, and the floorboards at the sides were varnished an unpleasant dark shade of brown and glistened like sucked, sticky toffee. See what can be called up, all manner of thing, when one concentrates.
Time and Memory are a fussy firm of interior decorators, though, always shifting the furniture about and redesigning and even reassigning rooms. I am convinced that what I looked into through that open doorway was a bathroom, for I recall distinctly the chilly gleam of porcelain and zinc, yet what caught my gaze was the kind of looking-glass that dressing-tables in women’s bedrooms had in those days, with a curved upper edge and wings at the sides and even—can this be right?—little triangular flaps set atop the wings that the lady seated at her toilet could draw forwards at an angle to give her a view of herself from above. More confusingly still, there was another mirror, a full-length one, fixed to what would have to have been the outwards-facing side of the inwards-opening door, and it was in this mirror that I saw the room reflected, with at its centre the dressing-table, or whatever it was, with its own mirror, or I should say mirrors. What I had, therefore, was not, strictly speaking, a view of the bathroom, or bedroom, but a reflection of it, and of Mrs Gray not a reflection but a reflection of a reflection.
Bear with me, through this crystalline maze.
So there I am, paused outside that doorway, gaping at an angle into the full-length looking-glass fixed, improbably, to the outside of the door that stood opened inwards. I did not register at once what it was I was seeing. Up to then the only body I had known at close quarters was my own, and even with that still evolving entity I was not on particularly intimate terms. What I would have expected a woman with no clothes on to look like I am not sure. No doubt I had pored hotly over reproductions of old paintings, ogled this or that old master’s pink-thighed frump fighting off a faun or classical matron enthroned in pomp among, in Madame Geoffrin’s happy formulation, a fricassee of children, but I knew that even the nakedest of these strapping figures, with their tundish breasts and perfectly bald and grooveless deltas, gave a far from naturalistic representation of woman in the raw. Now and then in school an antique dirty postcard would be passed from hand to fumbling hand under the desks, but as often as not the daguerreotyped cocottes showing off bare bits of themselves would be obscured behind smeared thumbprints and a filigree of white creases. In fact, my ideal of mature womanhood was the Kayser Bondor lady, a foot-high, cut-out cardboard beauty propped on the hosiery counter of Miss D’Arcy’s haberdashery shop at the near end of our Main Street, arrayed in a lavender gown and showing off an excitingly chaste fringe of petticoat above a pair of lovely and impossibly long legs sheathed in fifteen-denier nylon, a svelte sophisticate who came swishing imperiously into many a nocturnal fantasy of mine. What mortal woman could match up to such presence, such stately poise?
Mrs Gray in the mirror, in the mirrored mirror, was naked. It would be more gallant to say she was nude, I know, but naked is the word. After the first instant of confusion and shock I was struck by the grainy look of her skin—I suppose she must have had gooseflesh, standing there—and by the dull glimmer of it, like the sheen on a tarnished knife-blade. Instead of the shades of pink and peach that I would have expected—Rubens has a lot to answer for—her body displayed, disconcertingly, a range of muted tints from magnesium white to silver and tin, a scumbled sort of yellow, pale ochre, and even in places a faint greenishness and, in the hollows, a shadowing of mossy mauve.
What was presented to me was a triptych of her, a body as it were dismembered, or I should say disassembled. The mirror’s central panel, that is, the central panel of the mirror on the dressing-table, if that is what it was, framed her torso, breasts and belly and that smudge of darkness lower down, while the panels at either side showed her arms and her elbows, oddly flexed. There was a single eye, somewhere at the top, fixed on me levelly and with the hint of a challenge, as if to say,
That was all there was, that briefest glimpse of a fragmented woman, and at once I passed on along the corridor, stumblingly, as if I had been given a hard push in the small of the back. What? you will cry. Call that an encounter, call that a dalliance? Ah, but think of the boiling storm in a boy’s heart after such licence, such accommodation. And yet, no, not a storm. I was not as shocked or inflamed as I should have expected to be. The strongest sensation I had was one of quiet satisfaction, as an anthropologist might feel, or a zoologist, who by happy chance, all unexpectedly, has glimpsed a creature the aspect and attributes of which confirm a theory as to the nature of an entire species. I knew now something I could never unknow, and if you scoff and say that after all it was knowledge only of what a naked woman looks like, you show that you do not remember what it was to be young and yearning for experience, yearning for what is commonly called love. That the woman had not flinched under my gaze, had not run to slam the door shut or even put up a hand to cover herself, seemed to me neither heedless nor brazen, but odd, rather, very odd, and a matter for deep and prolonged speculation.
The thing did not end without a fright, however. When on reaching the head of the stairs I heard rapid footsteps behind me I would not turn for fear it might be she, sprinting after me like a maenad, still without a stitch on and driven by who knew what wild design. I felt the skin at the back of my neck pucker as if in expectation of being set upon violently, by hands, clutching fingers, teeth, even. What could she want of me? The obvious was not the obvious—I was only fifteen, remember. I was torn between the impulse to plunge headlong down the stairs and flee the house, never to darken its doorstep again, and an opposite urge to stand my ground, and turn, and open wide my arms and receive into them this lavish and unlooked-for gift of womanhood, naked as a needle, in Piers the ploughman’s happy formulation, all breathless and a-flutter and drooping with desire. The person behind me was not Mrs Gray, however, but her daughter, Billy’s sister, the unnerving Kitty, all pigtails and specs, who squeezed past me now, wheezing and tittering, and went clattering down the stairs, at the bottom of which she stopped and turned and cast up at me a hair-raisingly knowing smirk, and then was gone.
