Authors: John Banville
I ask myself, again, if she were deliberately daring the world to find us out. One day she summoned me to meet her after she had been to an appointment with the doctor—‘women’s trouble,’ she would say brusquely, and make a face—and when she arrived in the station wagon at our meeting place on the road above the hazel wood she insisted I make love to her there and then, on the spot. ‘Come on,’ she said, almost angrily, her rump waggling at me as she clambered into the back seat of the station wagon, ‘do it to me, come on.’ I have to admit I was shocked by her shamelessness, and for once I was even a little unwilling—the spectacle of such raw desire threatened to have a deflating effect on me—but she put an arm that seemed as hard as a man’s around my neck and drew me fiercely down to her, and I could feel her heart already hammering and her belly shaking, and of course I did to her what she demanded. It was over in a minute and then she was all dismissive briskness, pushing me away and pulling at her clothes and using her pants to wipe herself. We had left a glistening smear on the leather seat between us. She had parked hardly ten yards off the road, and although there was little traffic in those days, any motorist who happened to slow down going past could have seen us, her upraised nyloned legs and my bare white backside plunging and rearing between them. Now we climbed back into the front seat, exclaiming at the hotness of the leather where the sun had been shining on it, and she lit a cigarette and sat half turned away from me with her elbow out of the open window and a fist under her chin, saying nothing. I waited meekly for her mood to pass, frowning at my hands.
What had happened, I wondered, that she was so wrought? Had I done something to anger her? For most of the time I was unshakeably confident of her love, with all of youth’s callous assurance, yet it would have taken no more than a harsh word or a disparaging glance from her to convince me on the spot that all was as good as over. It was peculiarly exciting, to be certain of her affections and yet always in fear of forfeiting them; to be in some sort of control of this passionate woman and yet also at her mercy. Such lessons she was teaching me about the human heart. That day, though, as always, it was not long before the gloom lifted. She stirred herself and flicked the unsmoked half of her cigarette out of the window—she might have been the cause of burning down the hazel wood and our love nest along with it—and then leaned forwards and drew her skirt back and peered into her lap. She saw my startled and disbelieving look—could she be ready to start up again, already?—and gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m only searching for the button that you tore off my suspender.’ The button was not to be found, however, and in the end she had to borrow a threepenny piece from me to use in its place. It was an expedient I was familiar with, for I had seen my mother more than once do the same thing. My mother used Pond’s Cold Cream, too, as Mrs Gray did now. She took a little fat pot of the stuff from her handbag and unscrewed the cap with a quick turn of the wrist, as if deftly wringing the neck of some small creature, and, holding the pot and the cap both in a slack left hand, shimmied forwards on the seat, straining upwards to see herself in the driving mirror, and with a fingertip applied the ice-white salve to her forehead and cheeks and chin. I do not know if there is such a thing as wholly disinterested love, but if there is I came closest to it at moments such as this, when she was engaged in some ritual she had performed so often she was no longer really conscious of it, and her eyes struggled to focus and her features relaxed into a look of lovely vacancy except in the space between her eyebrows where the skin drew itself tight in a tiny frown of concentration.
I think that must have been the day she told me she would be going away—the family was to take its annual holiday at the seaside. At first I found it hard to grasp what she was saying. This is something I recall with fascination now, the way in which my mind, before the batterings of experience had sufficiently softened it up and made it porous, would refuse to accommodate the things it found unpalatable. In those days there was nothing I could not believe or disbelieve, accept or reject, if it suited me and fitted with my view of how matters must be. She could not go away; it was simply not possible for us to be parted, not possible at all. It could not be the case that I would be left alone while she went off for two weeks—two weeks!—to disport herself half naked on a beach, and play games of tennis and clock golf, and enjoy candlelit dinners with her dopey husband before waddling upstairs tipsily and falling on her back laughing on to a hotel bed—no no no! Contemplating this appalling, this not-to-be-entertained prospect, I had the sense of horror-struck incredulity that comes in the instant after the knife-blade has sliced into the ball of the thumb or the acid has splashed into the eye, when everything is suspended while pain the playful demon takes a deep and determined breath preparatory to getting down to the serious work at hand. What would I do without her all that time—what would I do? She was gazing at me in amused dismay, shocked at my shock. She pointed out that she was not going far, that Rossmore was only ten miles away by train—she would be practically down the road, she said, hardly away at all. I shook my head. I may even have clasped my hands before her in supplication. A sob of anguish was forming inside me like a big soft warm unlayable egg. She did not seem capable of grasping the essential fact that I could not think of being separated from her, that I could not imagine her being in a place where I was not. Something would happen to me, I declared, I would fall ill, I might even die. At this she laughed but quickly checked herself. I was not to be silly, she said in her married-woman’s voice, I would not get sick, I would not die. Then I would run away from home, I said, narrowing my eyes at her, I would pack my things in my schoolbag and come to Rossmore and live on the beach for the two weeks while she was there, and every time she and the other Grays stepped out of doors there I would be, dragging myself and my sorrow about the hotel grounds, and the tennis courts, and the golf range, her hollow-eyed, heartsick boy.
‘Now listen to me,’ she said, turning sideways and draping an arm on the steering wheel and lowering her head to glare at me sternly, ‘I have to go on this holiday—do you understand? I have to.’
I shook my head again, shook it and shook it until my cheeks rattled. She was becoming alarmed by my vehemence, I saw with satisfaction, and in her alarm I saw, too, a tiny sharp gleam of hope. I must press on—I must press harder. The sun was beating through the windscreen, greying the glass, and the leather upholstery was giving off a strong animal odour to which no doubt Mrs Gray and I were adding a post-coital tang. I had a shaky sensation, as if everything inside me had turned to crystal and was vibrating at a very fast and uniform pitch. I think if I had heard a car coming I would have leaped out and stood in the middle of the road with my hand up and made it stop, so that I might denounce Mrs Gray to the driver—
Look, sir, upon this heartless jade!
—for in my distress I was working up a steaming head of fury, and I would have welcomed a witness to the sore injustice I was being made to suffer. Who can do outrage and injury better than a boy in love? I said I would not let her go to Rossmore, and that was final. I said I would tell Billy what his mother and I had been up to, and he would tell his father, and Mr Gray would throw her out on the street, and then she would have no choice but to run away with me to England. I could see from the way her lips were twitching that she was finding it hard not to smile, and this drove me to a new extreme of fury. If she went away she would be sorry, I said narrowly. When she came back I would not be here, she would never see me again, and then how would she feel?—yes, I would go, I would leave this place altogether, I told her, and then she would know what it felt like to be abandoned and alone.
At last, after all these efforts, I ran out of energy, and turned away from her and folded my arms and glowered into the ragged hedgerow beside which we were parked. Silence erected itself between us like a barrier of glass. Then Mrs Gray stirred, and sighed, and said she would have to go home, that everyone would be wondering where she was, why she was so late. Oh, everyone would, would they? I said, with what was intended to be biting sarcasm. She laid a hand lightly on my arm. I would not unbend. ‘Poor Alex,’ she said cajolingly, and it struck me how seldom she spoke my name, which served to bring on yet a further access of anger and bitter resentment.
She started up the engine, mashing the gears as always, and reversed the station wagon and turned it in a storm of dust and flying gravel. Only then did we notice the three small boys standing with their bikes on the opposite side of the road, watching us. Mrs Gray spoke a word under her breath, and took her foot off the clutch too quickly and the engine gave a grunt and a heave and died. The dust continued to swirl lazily around us. The boys were homunculoid, grimy-faced, and had scabby knees and hacked-at hair—tinker children, probably, from the camp over by the town dump. They went on looking at us without expression, and there we sat, helplessly absorbing their blank stares, until presently they turned away in what seemed bland disdain and mounted up and rode off down the road at a leisurely glide. Mrs Gray laughed unsteadily. ‘Well, you needn’t worry, so,’ she said, ‘for if those fellows tell on us I won’t be going anywhere, and nor will you, my bucko, unless it’s to the reformatory.’
But she did go. Until the very last I did not believe she would have the resolve to part from me and leave me to suffer, yet the moment of her going came, and she went. Is it possible for a boy of fifteen to know love’s torments, I mean really to know them? Surely one would have to be fully and bleakly aware of the inevitability of death to experience the true anguish of loss, and to me as I was then the notion that I would one day die was preposterous, hardly to be entertained at all, the stuff of a bad and barely remembered dream. But if it was not actual pain I was experiencing then what was it? In form it was, or felt most like, a sort of pained, general dithering, so that I seemed to have grown old suddenly, old and fussed and infirm. In the week and more that I had to endure before her departure there continued and intensified in me the sense of agitation, of inner vibrating, that had started that day at the side of the road in the station wagon when she first made her announcement of the holiday. It might have been a form of ague, an interior St Vitus’s Dance. Outwardly I must have been much as usual, for no one, not even my mother, appeared to notice anything amiss with me. Inside, however, all was fever and confusion. I felt as one must feel who has been sentenced to death, torn between disbelief and stark dread. Had it never occurred to me that I would have to suffer some kind of separation from her sooner or later, even if only a temporary one? No, it had not. For me, lolling complacently in the lap of Mrs Gray’s opulent, all-embracing love, there was only the present, with no future in view, certainly not a future in which she did not figure. Now the sentence had been passed, the last meal had been eaten, and I was in the tumbril, I could hear its wheels harshing on the cobbles and could see clear the scaffold erected in the dead centre of the square, with its attendant hangwoman awaiting me, in her black hood.
It was a Saturday morning when they went. Imagine if you will a small-town summer day: flawless blue sky, birds in the branches of the cherry trees, a not unpleasant, sweetish reek of slurry from the pig farms out in the purlieus, the knock and clatter and cry of children at play. And now see me, skulking hunched and harrowed through the innocent, sunlit streets, on the way to meet in all its pitiless magnitude the first great sorrow of my young life. I will say this for suffering, that it lends a solemn weight to things and casts them in a starker, more revealing, light than any they have known hitherto. It expands the spirit, flays off a protective integument and leaves the inner self rawly exposed to the elements, the nerves all bared and singing like harp-strings in the wind. Approaching across the little square I kept my eyes averted from the house until the last minute, not wanting to see the dark-blue sun-blinds drawn in the windows, the note for the milkman screwed into the neck of an empty milk bottle, the front door locked impassively against me. Instead, I pictured in my mind, concentrating fiercely, as though by force of imagination I might make it be so, the battered station wagon, my accommodating, faithful old friend, standing at the kerb as always, and the front door of the house ajar and every window open, and in one of them a penitent Mrs Gray leaning far out and smiling radiantly down at me with welcoming arms flung wide. But then I was there, and had to look, and no station wagon was to be seen, and the house was shut, and my love had gone away and left me standing here in a puddle of grief.
How did I get through the rest of that day? I drifted, outwardly listless yet all aquiver within. My world yesterday with Mrs Gray in it had the lightness and glossy tension of a freshly inflated party balloon; now, today, with her gone, everything was suddenly slack, and tacky to the touch. Anguish, this constant, unremitting anguish, made me tired, terribly tired, yet I did not know how I might rest. I felt dry all over, dry and hot, as if I had been scorched, and my eyes ached and even my fingernails pained me. I was like one of those big sycamore leaves, resembling parched claws, that scuttled and scratched their way along the pavements, driven by the autumn gusts. What am I saying? It was not autumn, it was summer, there were no dead leaves on the ground. Yet that is what I see, the caducous leaves, and dust-eddies in the gutters, and my suffering self facing into a bitter wind portending the onset of winter.
Late in the afternoon, however, came the great revelation, followed by the greater resolution. In my wanderings I found myself outside Mr Gray’s glasses shop. I do not think I went there intentionally, although throughout the day I had lingered deliberately in this or that place with which for me my departed darling was associated, such as the tennis courts where I had once seen her play, and the boardworks where we had so fearlessly paraded ourselves and our love. The shop, like its proprietor, was unremarkable. There was a room at the front with a counter and a chair that customers could sit in to admire their new eyewear in a magnifying mirror in a circular silver frame set at a convenient angle on the counter. At the back was a consulting room, I knew, where the walls were fitted with stacks of shallow wooden drawers containing spectacle frames, and there was a machine with two big, round, startled-looking lenses, like the eyes of a robot, that Mr Gray tested his patients’ vision with. To supplement the optical business—remember how few people wore glasses in those days?—Mr Gray sold pricey trinkets and items of cosmetics, and even retorts and test tubes, in various sizes, if I am not mistaken. Looking at these things displayed in the window, I was not in such an extreme of agony that I did not recall Kitty’s birthday present that I still coveted and the thought of which now only added to my suffering and my sense of injury.