Ancient Light Read Online Free Page B

then, away down the tunnel of time, tiny in the distance yet growing steadily more substantial, the figure of my future love, chatelaine of the House of Gray, already making her abstracted, dallying way towards me?
    What used I call her, I mean how did I address her? I do not remember saying her name, ever, though I must have. Her husband sometimes called her Lily, but I do not think I had a pet-name, a love-name, for her. I have a suspicion, which will not be dismissed, that on more than one occasion, in the throes of passion, I cried out the word Mother ! Oh, dear. What am I to make of that? Not, I hope, what I shall be told I should.
    Billy took the whiskey bottle into the bathroom and topped up the telltale gap with a gill of water from the tap, and I dried and polished the glasses as best I could with my handkerchief and put them back where they had been on the shelf in the cocktail cabinet. Partners in crime, Billy and I were suddenly shy of each other, and I took up my schoolbag hurriedly and made my getaway, leaving my friend slumped on the sofa again, watching the unwatchable racers pounding through the electric snow.
    I would like to be able to say it was that day, because I remember it so particularly, that I came face to face with Mrs Gray for the first, real, time, at the front door, perhaps, she coming in as I was going out, her face flushed from the thrilling air of outdoors and my nerves tingling still after the whiskey; a chance touch of her hand, a surprised, lingering look; a thickening in the throat; a soft jolt to the heart. But no, the front hall was empty except for Billy’s bicycle and an unpartnered roller-skate that must have been Kitty’s, and no one met me in the doorway, no one at all. The pavement when I stepped on to it seemed farther away from my head than it should be, and tended to tilt, as though I were on stilts and the stilts had squashy springs attached to the ends of them—in short, I was drunk, not seriously so, but drunk nevertheless. Just as well, then, that I did not encounter Mrs Gray, being in such a state of soggy euphoria, for there is no telling what I might have done and thereby ruined everything before it had even started.
    And look! In the square, when I come out, it is, impossibly, autumn again, not spring, and the sunlight has mellowed and the leaves of the cherry trees have rusted and Busher the rag-and-bone man is dead. Why are the seasons being so insistent, why do they resist me so? Why does the Mother of the Muses keep nudging me like this, giving me what seem all the wrong hints, tipping me the wrong winks?
    My wife just now climbed all the way up here to my eyrie under the roof, unwillingly negotiating the steep and treacherous attic stairs that she hates, to tell me that I have missed a telephone call. At first, when she put her head in at the low door—how smartly I encircled this page with a protective arm, like a schoolboy caught scribbling smut—I could hardly understand what she was saying. I must have been concentrating very hard, lost in the lost world of the past. Usually I hear the phone ringing, down in the living room, a far-off and strangely plaintive sound that makes my heart joggle anxiously, just as it used to do long ago when my daughter was a baby and her crying woke me in the night.
    The caller, Lydia said, was a woman, whose name she did not catch, though she was unmistakably American. I waited. Lydia was looking dreamily beyond me now, out through the sloped window in front of my desk, to the mountains in the distance, pale blue and flat, as if they had been painted on the sky in a weak wash of lavender; it is one of the charms of our city that there are few places in it from which these soft and, I always think, virginal hills are not visible, if one is prepared to stretch. What, I asked gently, had this woman on the phone wished to speak to me about? Lydia with an effort withdrew her gaze from the view. A film, she said, a movie, in which