Ancient Light (10 page)

Some games. Was she guilty of rape, if only in the statutory sense? Can a woman be a rapist, technically? By taking to bed a fifteen-year-old boy, and a virgin, to boot, I imagine she would have been legally culpable to a serious degree. She must have thought of it. Perhaps her capacity to conceive of imminent disaster was blunted by a constant awareness of the possibility—the inevitability, as it happened—that one day a long time off in the future she would be found out and disgraced not only before her family but in the eyes of the entire town, if not the country. There were occasions when she would go silent and turn away from me and seem to be looking at something approaching that was still far off yet not so distant that she could not make it out in all its awfulness. And on those occasions did I offer solace, try to divert her, draw her away from that dreadful vista? I did not. I went into a huff at being neglected, or made a cutting remark and flung myself from that mattress on the rotted floorboards and stamped off to another part of the house. The whitewashed privy in the back garden with its stained and seatless throne and a century’s accumulation of cobwebs in the corners was a favourite perch when I wished to punish her for some misdemeanour by a prolonged and, I trusted, worrying absence. What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper. There was a particular smell from outside, sharp and greenly sour, that came in at the square hole set high up in the wall behind the cistern, that I catch at times still on certain damp days in summer and that makes something struggle to open inside me, a stunted blossom pushing up out of the past.

That she never followed me or tried to coax me back when I had stormed off like this added fuel to my resentment, and when I did return, feigning a cold and stony indifference, I would watch from the corner of my eye for any hint of mockery or amusement—a lip bitten to prevent a smile, or even a gaze too quickly averted, would have sent me marching straight off to the jakes again—but always I would find her waiting with a calm grave gaze and an expression of meek apology, although half the time she must have been bewildered as to what it could be that she was being required to atone for. How tenderly she would hold me, then, and how accommodatingly she would spread herself on that filthy mattress and take inside her all my engorged fury, need and bafflement.

It is extraordinary that we were not lighted upon sooner than we were. We took what precautions we could. At the start we were careful always to make our way to Cotter’s place separately. She would park the station wagon in a leafy lane half a mile away and I would hide my bike under a patch of brambles beside the path along by the hazel wood. It was scarily thrilling to strike off through the trees and make my stealthy way down to the hollow where the house was, stopping now and then and cocking an ear, alert as Leatherstocking, to the woodland’s restive silence.

I could not decide which I preferred, to get there first and have to wait for her, palms wet and my heart hammering—would she come this time or had she been brought to her senses and decided to have done with me forthwith?—or to find her there before me, crouching anxiously outside the front door as always, for she feared rats, she said, and would not venture inside on her own. In the first minute or two a peculiar constraint would settle between us, and we would not speak, or only stiffly, like polite strangers, and would hardly look at each other, awed by what we were to each other and also, and yet again, no doubt, by the enormity of what we had undertaken together. Then she would contrive to touch me casually in some way, brush her hand as if by chance against mine or trail a strand of her hair across my face, and at once, as if a catch had been released, we would fall into each other’s arms, kissing and clawing while she made little moaning sounds of sweet distress.

We became adept at getting out of our clothes, or most of them, without breaking our embrace, and then, her wonderfully cool and slightly granular skin pressed all along mine, we would crabwalk to the makeshift bed and fall over slowly together in a sort of toppling swoon. At first, on the mattress, we would be all knees and hips and elbows, but after a moment or two of desperate scrimmaging all our bones would seem to relax and bend and blend, and she would press her mouth against my shoulder and exhale a long, shuddering sigh, and so we would begin.

But what, you will be asking, of my friend Billy, what was he doing, or not doing, while his mother and I were at our joyous callisthenics? That is a question I myself often asked, with much anxiety. Of course I found it increasingly hard to face him now, to look him in that always relaxed and easy eye of his, for how would he not see the glow of guilt I felt sure I must be giving off? This became less of a difficulty when school ended and the summer holidays began. In the holidays allegiances shifted, fresh interests arose that inevitably involved us with new or at least different sets of companions. There was no question between Billy and me that we were still best friends, only we saw much less of each other now than heretofore, that was all. Away from school, even the best of friends were aware of a slight reserve between them, a shyness, an awkwardness, as if they were afraid, in the new dispensation of endless and untrammelled freedoms, of inadvertently catching each other out in some shaming circumstance, wearing ridiculous bathing-togs, say, or holding hands with a girl. Thus that summer Billy and I, like everyone else, began discreetly to avoid each other, he for the ordinary reasons I have mentioned, and I—well, I for my own, extraordinary reasons.

One morning his mother and I were given a horrible fright. It was a misty Saturday in early summer, the sun struggling whitely through the trees yet bringing the promise of a sweltering day to come. Mrs Gray was supposed to be shopping and I was supposed to be doing I do not remember what. We were sitting side by side on the mattress with our backs against the powdery wall and our elbows on our knees and she was letting me have a puff of her cigarette—it was a convention between us that I did not smoke although I was already on ten or fifteen a day, as she was well aware—when suddenly she sprang alert and put a hand fearfully on my wrist. I had heard nothing, but now I did. There were voices on the ridge above us. I thought at once of Billy and me up there that day when he had pointed out to me Cotter’s mossy roof camouflaged among the treetops. Could this be him again, come to show the place to someone else? We strained to hear, breathing at the shallowest tops of our lungs. Mrs Gray was looking at me sideways, the whites of her eyes flashing in terror. The voices coming down through the trees made a hollow, ringing sound, like the sound of steel mallets striking musically on wood—or of Fate, more like, amusedly tapping at his finger-drum. Were they the voices of children or of adults or of both? We could not tell. All kinds of wild fancies darted through my mind. If it was not Billy it was workmen coming with sledgehammers and crowbars to demolish what remained of the house; it was a search-party looking for a missing person; it was the Guards, dispatched by Mr Gray to arrest his wanton wife and her precocious inamorato.

Mrs Gray’s lower lip had begun to tremble. ‘Oh, holy God,’ she whispered gulpingly. ‘Oh, dear Jesus.’

In a short while, however, the voices faded and there was silence again up on the ridge. Still we dared not stir, still Mrs Gray’s fingers were digging like talons into my wrist. Then abruptly she scrambled up and began to put on her clothes in clumsy haste. I watched her with a mounting sense of alarm, no longer fearful of discovery but of something much worse, namely, that the shock she had got would cause her to take fright finally and flee the place and never come back to me. I demanded to know, my voice cracking, what she thought she was doing, but she did not answer. I could see by her eyes that she was elsewhere already, on her knees, probably, clinging to her husband’s trouser legs and desperately begging his forgiveness. I thought of making some large pronouncement, of delivering some solemn admonition—
If you walk out of here now you need never think of … 
—but I could not find the words, and even if I could have I would not have dared to utter them. I was staring into the abyss that had been there under me all along. If I were to lose her, how would I bear it? I should leap up now, I knew, and put my arms around her, not to reassure her—what did I care for her fear?—but to prevent her by main force from leaving. A peculiar lethargy had come over me, however, the terrified lethargy that is said to come over the skittering mouse when it looks up in dread and sees the hovering hawk, and I could do nothing but sit there and watch as she pulled up her pants under her dress and bent to gather up her velvet shoes. She turned her face to me, bleared with panic. ‘What do I look like?’ she demanded in a whisper. ‘Do I look all right?’ Without waiting for a reply she ran to her bag for her compact and snapped it open and peered into the little mirror inside it, looking a bit like an anxious mouse herself now, nostrils twitching and the tips of her two slightly overlapping front teeth exposed. ‘Look at me,’ she breathed in dismay. ‘The wreck of the
Hesperus
!’

I began to cry, startling even myself. It was the real thing, a child’s raw, helpless blurting. Mrs Gray stopped what she was doing and turned and stared at me, appalled. She had seen me weep before, but that was in rage or to try to get her to bend to my will, not like this, abjectly, defencelessly, and I suppose it was borne in on her afresh how young I was, after all, and how far out of my depth she had led me. She knelt down on the mattress again and embraced me. It was a shivery sensation to be in her arms naked when she was dressed, and even as I leaned into her and bawled for sorrow I found to my pleased surprise that I was becoming aroused again, and I lay back down and drew her with me and, despite her squirms of protest, got my hands under her clothes, and so we were off again, my sobs of childish fear and anguish now become the familiar, hoarse panting that would rise and rise along its arc to the final, familiar whoop of triumph and wild relief.

I think that was the day I told her of my intention to make her pregnant. I recall a drowsy noontide and the two of us lying quietly together in a tangle of sweat-smeared limbs, a wasp buzzing at the corner of a broken pane and a smoking blade of sunlight from one of the holes in the roof plunged at an angle in the floor beside us. I had been brooding as so often on the painful and unavoidable fact that was Mr Gray, her inexpungible husband, working myself the while into a fine state of suppressed wrath, and the thought of wreaking what would surely be the ultimate revenge upon him had hardly formed in my mind before I had heard myself announce it aloud and quite as if it were a thing in need only of being accomplished. At first it seemed Mrs Gray did not understand, could not take in what I had said, and small wonder—it was hardly the kind of thing a woman in the midst of a more than usually perilous affair would expect to hear from the mouth of her under-age lover. When she was taken off-guard or had been told something that she could not absorb at once she had a way, I have noticed it in other women, too, of going very still and quiet on the spot, as if she had found herself suddenly under threat and were lying low until the danger had passed. So she remained for some moments motionless, with her back and her warm behind against my front and one of my arms gone to sleep underneath her. Then she heaved herself over violently on to her other side so that she was facing me. First she stared at me disbelievingly, then she gave me a tremendous, two-handed push in the chest that sent me sliding backwards across the mattress so that my shoulder-blades clattered against the wall. ‘That’s a disgusting thing to say, Alex Cleave,’ she said, in a low and terrible voice. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, so you should.’

Was it then that she told me about the child she had lost? A little girl, it was, her last-born after Billy and his sister. The babe was sickly, and died after a day or two of flickering life. The death itself when it came was sudden, however, and it was a torment to Mrs Gray that the mite had not been baptised and that therefore her soul was in Limbo. It made me uneasy to hear of this creature, who for her mother was a vividly lingering presence, idealised and adored. When Mrs Gray spoke of her, crooning and lovingly sighing, I thought of the little gilt figurine of the Infant of Prague, with its crown and cape, its sceptre and orb, which reigned in impassive, miniature splendour behind the fanlight over the front door of my mother’s house and which I had been afraid of when I was little and found uncanny still. Mrs Gray’s grasp on the finer points of Christian eschatology was not strong, and in her view of it Limbo was not a place of permanent sequester for the souls of the unchristened but a sort of painless Purgatory, a halfway house between earthly life and the rewards and joys of the beatific transcendent, where her babe even now was biding in patient expectation of being one day, perhaps the Last Day, raised up to the presence of her Heavenly Father, where the two of them, mother and child, would be joyfully reunited. ‘I hadn’t even chosen a name for her,’ Mrs Gray told me, with a sorrowful gulp, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Small wonder my threat of impregnation alarmed and angered her.

Yet I might have suggested to her, that day, that if she and I were indeed to have a little one of our own it would be a replacement down here for the embryonic angel impatiently waiting her turn in line at the Limbic gate. By now, however, what with this talk of dead babies, my enthusiasm for precocious fatherhood had cooled considerably—had turned, in fact, to ashes.

It struck me afterwards that what was remarkable about her response when I stated my intention of putting her in the family way was that she did not seem entirely surprised by it; shocked, naturally, outraged, yes, but not surprised. Perhaps women are never surprised by the prospect of being pregnant, perhaps they live in a constant state of preparedness for just that eventuality; I might consult Lydia on this matter, Lydia, my Lydia, my encyclopydia. Mrs Gray that day did not even ask why I should want her to have a child, as if she accepted that it would be the most natural and obvious thing that I should want. If she had asked, I would not have known quite how to answer. Should she get pregnant by me it would hurt her husband, yes, and that would be pleasing, but it would hurt us, too, her and me, and grievously. Did I really know what I was saying, and if I did, did I mean it? I am sure I did not—I was hardly more than a child myself, after all—and had said it I am sure only to shock her and attract all her attention on to myself, exclusively, a task to which I devoted much effort and ingenuity. Yet I find myself contemplating now, with a pang of what feels like genuine regret, the possibility that between us we might have produced a fine, bright boy, say, with her eyes and my limbs, or a glowing girl, a miniature version of her, complete with shapely ankles and slender toes and an unruly curl behind her ear. Absurd, absurd. Think of it, my meeting up with him or her now, a son or daughter nearly as old as I am, the two of us tongue-tied with embarrassment before the grotesque and comic predicament into which an accident of love and a boy’s spitefulness had thrown us, and from which nothing could extricate us except my death, and even that would not wipe the laughable stain from the record. And yet, and yet. My mind turns in confusion, my heart shrinks and swells. Absurd. Look at me, blundering here on the brink of old age and still wistfully dreaming of generation, of a son who might comfort me, of a daughter whom I could love, and on whom I might one day lean an infirm arm and be led down the last road at the end of which awaits what the Psalmist in his solemn fashion calls my long home.