Authors: John Banville
Her lovely boy. I do think she thought of me, or made herself think of me, as somehow a sort of long-lost son, a prodigal delightfully returned, feral from his sojourn among the swine and in need of her womanly, indeed matronly, attentions to soothe and civilise him. She indulged me, of course, indulged me beyond an adolescent’s maddest imaginings, but she kept a monitoring eye on me, too. She made me promise to bathe more often and more thoroughly and to brush my teeth regularly. I was to wear a clean pair of socks every day, and to ask my mother, though without rousing her suspicions, to buy me some presentable underwear. One afternoon at Cotter’s place she produced a suede folder tied in the middle with a leather thong and unwrapped it and laid it out on the mattress to reveal a gleaming set of barber’s implements, pairs of scissors and a straight razor and tortoise-shell combs and gleaming silver shears with a superimposed double set of tiny and very sharp teeth. The thing was a sort of older sibling of the manicure set Billy had given me for Christmas. She had once done a hairdressing course, she told me, and at home she cut everyone’s hair, even her own. Despite my whines of complaint—how was I to explain this to my mother?—she made me sit on an old cane chair in the sunny doorway and went at my tussocky mop with professional dispatch, singing to herself while she worked. When she was done she let me see myself in the miniature mirror of her powder compact; I looked like Billy. As to my mother, by the way, I need not have worried, for in her usual foggy way she did not even notice my unexplained shorn hair—that was my mother, all over.
I remember suddenly where these things came from, the manicure set and the barber’s tool-kit and probably that compact, too: Mr Gray sold them, in his shop, of course!—how could I forget? So they were got at cost price. The thought of my beloved as a cheapskate is something of a let-down, I must say. How harshly I judge her, even yet.
But no, no, she was generosity itself; I have said that already and I say it again. Certainly she granted me full freedom of her body, that opulent pleasure garden where I sipped and sucked, dazed as a bumble-bee in full-blown summer. Elsewhere there were limits, though, beyond which I was forbidden to stray. For instance, I could talk all I liked about Billy, make fun of him, if I wished, betray his secrets—to these tales told of her suddenly strangered son she listened with unblinking attention as though I were a traveller of old returned with news from fabulous Cathay—but of her delicate Kitty no scathing mention was permitted, or, especially, of her pathetically short-sighted husband. Need I say this made me itch to pour mockery and scorn upon them both in her hearing, though I did not, since I knew what was good for me. Oh, yes, I knew what was good for me, all right.
Looking back now I am surprised at how little I learned about her and her life. Is it that I was not listening? For certainly she loved to talk. There were times when I suspected that a sudden intensification of passion on her part—a rake of her nails across my shoulder-blades, a hot word panted in my ear—was merely a manoeuvre to make me have done more quickly so that she might lie back and set to chatting at her blissful ease. Her mind was littered with all sorts of odds and ends of arcane and curious information, gleaned from her wide reading in
Tit-Bits
and the ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not!’ column in the newspapers. She knew about the dance that bees do when they are harvesting honey. She could tell me what the scribes of old made their ink from. One afternoon at Cotter’s place with the sun angling down on us through a high-up cracked pane she explained to me the principle of a householder’s right to ancient light—the sky must be visible at the top of a window viewed from the base of the opposite wall, if memory serves—for she had once worked as a clerk in the offices of a company of chartered surveyors. She knew the definition of mortmain, could rattle off the signs of the Zodiac in their order. What are glacé cherries made from? Seaweed! What is the longest word that can be typed on the top row of the keys of a typewriter? Typewriter! ‘You didn’t know
that
, did you, smarty-pants?’ she would cry, and laugh for delight, and dig me in the ribs with her elbow. But of herself, of what the popular psychologists would have called her inner life, what things did she tell me? Gone, all gone.
Or not all, not quite. I remember what she said one day when I complacently remarked that of course she and Mr Gray could no longer be doing together what she and I so frequently did. First she frowned, not understanding exactly what I meant, then she smiled at me very sweetly and sadly shook her head. ‘But I’m married to him,’ she said, and it was as if this simple statement should tell me all I needed to know about her relations with a man whom I had made it my business to hate and despise. I felt as if I had been delivered a haphazard yet swift, hard blow to the solar plexus. First I sulked, then I sobbed. She held me like a baby to her breast, murmuring
ssh, ssh
against my temple and rocking us both gently from side to side. I endured this embrace for a while—what sweetly vindictive pleasure is masked behind love’s pain—then tore myself away in a fury.
We were in Cotter’s house, on the mattress on the floor in what had been the kitchen, both of us naked, she sitting tailor-fashion with her ankles crossed—I was not so upset that I did not notice the glinting dewy pearls that I had left sprinkled through the wiry floss between her legs—and I kneeling before her, face contorted in jealous rage and all smeared over with mingled tears and snot, shrieking at her for her perfidy. She waited until I had worn myself out, then made me lie down against her, still sniffling, and began to play distractedly with my hair—what locks, what tresses, I had then, my God, despite those barber’s shears she wielded—and after a number of hesitations and false starts, with much sighing and troubled murmuring, she said that I must try to understand how difficult all this was for her, being married and a mother, and that her husband was a good man, a good, kind man, and that she would die rather than hurt him. My sole response to this parroting of the romantic claptrap from the women’s magazines she was so partial to was an angrily dismissive wriggle. She stopped, and was silent for a long while, and her fingers too left off worrying my hair. Outside, thrushes were making the woods round about ring with their manic whistling, and the sun of early summer shining through a broken casement was hot on my bare back. We must have made a striking composition there, the two of us, a profane pietà, the troubled woman nursing in her embrace a heartsick young male animal who was not and yet somehow was her son. When she began to speak again her voice sounded far-off, and different, as if she had changed into someone else, a stranger, pensive and calm: in other words, alarmingly, an adult. ‘I was married young, you know,’ she said, ‘barely nineteen—what’s that, only four years older than you? I was afraid I’d be left on the shelf.’ She laughed with bitter rue and I could feel her shaking her head. ‘And now look at me.’
I took this as an admission of profound unhappiness with her married lot, and consented to be mollified.
This is I think the point at which to say a word or two about our secret place of rendezvous. How proud of myself and my resourcefulness I was when I first took Mrs Gray to see it. I met her on the roadside above the hazel wood as we had arranged, stepping out from under the trees and feeling gratifyingly like a fellow in the pictures who is obviously up to no good. She came driving along in that negligent way that always gave me a thrill to see, one hand loosely gripping the big, worn, polished cream-coloured steering wheel and the other holding a cigarette, her freckled elbow stuck out at the rolled-down window and that curl behind her ear spinning in the wind.
She stopped a little way off from me and waited until another car going in the opposite direction had passed by. It was an overcast May morning with a metallic glare in the clouds. I had not gone to school, but had crept off here, and my schoolbag was hidden under a bush. I told her that I had the day free because of an appointment at the dentist’s later. For all that she was technically my lover she was a grown-up, too, and often I found myself fibbing to her like this, as I would to my mother. She was wearing her light, flowered frock with the wide skirt, knowing by now how much I enjoyed watching her take it off—lifting it over her head with her arms straight up and her breasts in their white halter huddling fatly against each other—and a pair of black velvet pumps that she had to slip out of and carry, to save them from the woodland mire. She had pretty feet, all at once I see them, pale and unexpectedly long and slender, very narrow at the heel and broadening gracefully towards the toes, which were quite straight and almost as prehensile as fingers, each one separate to itself, and which she wiggled now as she walked, digging them luxuriantly into the leaf-mould and the wet loam and squealing faintly for pleasure.
I had thought of making her wear a blindfold, to sharpen the surprise of what I had to show her, but had been afraid she might trip and break something: I had a horror of her suffering an injury when she was with me and of my having to run for help to someone, my mother, say, or even, God forbid, Mr Gray. She was childishly excited, dying to know what was the surprise that I had for her, but I would not tell, and the more she pressed the more stubborn I grew, and even began to be a little annoyed by her importuning, and strode ahead of her so that she had to hurry at almost a stumbling run, barefoot as she was, just to keep up with me. The path wound its sombre way under the unleaving trees—see, it has suddenly become autumn again, impossibly!—and by now I was full of vexed misgiving. I am struck, looking back, by how volatile my temper was when I was with her, how quickly I would fly into a rage over a trifle, or for no reason at all. I seemed permanently suspended over a pit of smouldering, sulphurous fury the fumes of which made my eyes smart and took my breath away. What was the cause of this sullen sense of being put upon and unfairly used that never stopped tormenting me? Was I not happy? I was, but underneath I was angry, too, all the time. Perhaps it was that she was too much for me, that love itself and all it demanded of me was too heavy a burden, so that even as I writhed rapturously in her embrace I longed in my secret heart for the old complacencies, the old and easy ordinariness of things before they had suffered her transforming touch. I suspect that in my heart I wanted to be a boy again, and not whatever it was my desire for her had made of me. What a thing of contradictions I was, poor, addled Pinocchio.
But, oh dear, how her face fell when at last she saw what I had brought her to, I mean Cotter’s old house, in the woods. It was a matter of a moment only, her faltering, and at once she rallied and put on her broadest, bravest, head-girl’s smile, but in that moment even a creature as self-absorbed and unobservant as I could not have missed the look of sharp distress that crazed the skin of her cheeks and pinched her mouth and drew her eyes down at their corners, as if what she was confronted with, a house once foursquare and handsome now laid waste by time, its walls falling and its paltry timbers all on show, were the very image of all the folly and danger she had indulged in by taking for her lover a boy young enough to be her son.
To distract us both from her dismay she busied herself putting on her absurdly dainty shoes, propping an ankle on a knee and using her index finger for a shoehorn, maintaining her balance by holding on tightly to my arm with a hand that trembled from more than merely the effort of keeping herself upright. Affected by her disillusionment I too was disillusioned now, and saw the tumbledown old place for what it was and cursed myself for bringing her there. I freed my arm from her grasp and drew away from her brusquely, and went forwards and gave the mildewed front door a hard, angry push, sending it yawing wildly with a screech on the single hinge that was all that was holding it up, and stepped inside. The walls in places were hardly more than a mesh of laths, stuck in patches here and there with crumbling plaster, and wallpaper most of which hung down in lank strips, like lianas. There was a smell of rotting wood and lime and old soot. The staircase had collapsed, and there were holes in the ceilings, and in the bedroom ceilings above, too, and in the roof above that again, so that when I looked up I could see clear through two storeys and the attic to the sky, glinting in spots through the slates.
Of Cotter I knew nothing except that he must have been long gone, and all the other Cotters with him.
A floorboard creaked behind me. She cleared her throat delicately. Sulking, I refused to turn. We stood there in the dusty hush, amid pallid beams of radiance from above, I facing into the empty house and she at my back. We might have been in church.
‘It’s a grand place,’ she said apologetically, in a softly subdued voice, ‘and you were very clever to find it.’
We walked about, with a sober and thoughtful mien, saying nothing and avoiding each other’s eye, like a pair of newlyweds dubiously pacing the lines of their prospective first home while the bored estate agent loiters outside on the step smoking a cigarette. We did not so much as kiss, that day.
It was she who on a later day found the lumpy, stained old mattress, folded in two and squashed into a dank and reeking cupboard under the stairs. Together we dragged it out, and to air it we set it over two kitchen chairs under the only window that still had glass in it and where we judged the sun would shine in most strongly. ‘It’ll do,’ Mrs Gray said. ‘I’ll bring sheets, next time.’
In fact, over the coming weeks she brought all sorts of things: an oil lamp, never to be lit, with a bulbous chimney of marvellously fine spun glass that made me imagine old Muscovy; a teapot and an unmatched pair of teacups and saucers, also never to be used; soap and a bath towel and a bottle of eau-de-Cologne; various foodstuffs, too, including a jar of potted meat and tinned sardines and packages of crackers, ‘in case,’ she said with a low laugh, ‘you might get peckish.’
She delighted in this parody of home-making. When she was little, she said, she had loved to play house, and indeed as I watched her producing one toy-like goody after another from her shopping basket and arranging them on sagging shelves about the room she seemed of the two of us by far the younger. I pretended to disdain this feeble simulacrum of domestic bliss that she was assembling piece by piece, but there must have been something in me, an enduring strain of childishness, that would not allow me to hold back but led me forwards, as if by the hand, to join her in her happy games.