Ancient Light Read Online Free Page A

kitchen with my schoolbag, shuffling in like a hunchback. She was called Kitty, and indeed there was something feline in the way she would slit her eyes when she smiled at me, compressing her lips into a thin, colourless arc that seemed to stretch all the way between her intricately voluted, translucent, prominent pink ears. I wonder now if she, too, might have been sweet on me and all the snuffly amusement were a means of hiding the fact. Or is this just vanity on my part? I am, or was, an actor, after all. There was something the matter with her, she had some condition that was not spoken of that made her what in those days was called delicate. I found her unnerving, and was I think even a little afraid of her; if so, it was prescient of me.
    Mr Gray, the husband and father, was long and lean, and myopic, too, like his daughter—he was an optician, as it happens, a fact the high irony of which is unlikely to be lost on any of us—and wore bow-ties and sleeveless Fair Isle jumpers. And of course there were, presently, those two short stubby horns sprouting just above his hairline, the cuckold’s mark, which I regret to say were my doing.
    Was my passion for Mrs Gray, at the outset, at any rate, anything more than an intensification of the conviction we all had at that age that our friends’ families were so very much nicer, more gracious, more interesting—in a word, more desirable—than our own? At least Billy had a family, whereas there was only me and my widowed mother. She kept a boarding-house for travelling salesmen and other transients, who did not so much lodge in the place as haunt it, like anxious ghosts. I stayed out as much as I could. The Grays’ house was often empty in the latter part of the afternoons and Billy and I would lounge about there for hours after school. Where did the others, Mrs Gray and Kitty, for instance, where did they get to at those times? I can still see Billy, in his navy-blue school blazer and grubby white shirt from the collar of which he had just yanked one-handedly a stained school tie, standing in front of the fridge with the door open, gazing glassy-eyed into its lighted interior as if he were watching something engrossing on television. In fact there was a television set in the upstairs living room, and sometimes we would go up there and sit slumped in front of it with our hands plunged in our trouser pockets and our feet on our schoolbags, trying to watch the afternoon horse-racing from exotic-sounding places on the other side of the sea, such as Epsom, or Chepstow, or Haydock Park. Reception was poor, and often all we would see would be phantom riders cocked astride their phantom mounts, floundering blindly through a blizzard of static interference.
    In the desperate idleness of one of those afternoons Billy hunted out the key to the cocktail cabinet—yes, the Grays possessed such an exotic item, for they were among the town’s more well-to-do folk, though I doubt anyone in the house ever actually drank a cocktail—and we broke into a precious bottle of his father’s twelve-year-old whiskey. Standing at the window, cut-glass tumbler in hand, my pal and I felt like a pair of Regency rakes looking down in high disdain upon a drably sober world. It was my first drink of whiskey, and although I would never develop a liking for the stuff, that day the sullen, bitter reek of it and the scald of it on my tongue seemed portents of the future, a promise of all the rich adventures that life surely had in store for me. Outside in the little square the wan sunlight of early spring was gilding the cherry trees and making the black, arthritic tips of their branches glisten, and old Busher the rag-and-bone man on his cart went grinding past, a wagtail scurrying out of the way of the frilled hoofs of his horse, and at the sight of these things I felt a sharp sweet ache of yearning, objectless yet definite, like the phantom pain in an amputee’s missing limb. Did I see, or sense, even