Ancient Light by John Banville Page A

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