Free Ancient Light by John Banville

That it had happened once was hard enough to credit, that it should be repeated was inconceivable. It was essential therefore that every detail be fetched up, verified, catalogued and stored in memory’s lead-lined cabinet. Here, however, I experienced frustration. Pleasure, it turned out, was as difficult to relive as pain would have been. This failure was no doubt part of the price for being shielded from the imagination’s re-enactive powers, for had I been allowed to feel again with the same force, every time I thought of it, all that I had felt as I was bouncing up and down on top of Mrs Gray, I think I should have died. Similarly, of Mrs Gray herself I was unable to call up a satisfactorily clear and coherent image. I could remember her, certainly I could, but only as a series of disparate and dispersed parts, as in one of those old paintings of the Crucifixion in which the implements of torture, the nails and hammer, spear and sponge, are laid out in a close-up and lovingly executed display while off to the side Christ is dying on the cross in blurred anonymity—dear God, forgive me, compounding bawdry with blasphemy as I do. I could see her eyes of wet amber, unnervingly reminiscent of Billy’s, brimming under half-closed lids that throbbed like a moth’s wings; I could see the damp roots of her hair that was drawn back from her forehead, already showing a greying strand or two; I could feel the bulging side of a plump and polished breast lolling against my palm; I could hear her enraptured cries and smell her slightly eggy breath. But the woman herself, the total she, that was what I could not have over again, in my mind. And I, too, even I, there with her, was beyond my own recall, was no more than a pair of clutching arms and spasming legs and a backside frenziedly pumping. This was all a puzzle, and troubled me, for I was not accustomed yet to the chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done, and it would take practice and the resultant familiarity before I could fix her fully in my mind and make her of a piece, in total, and me along with her. But what does it mean when I say in total and of a piece? What was it I retrieved of her but a figment of my own making? This was a greater puzzle, a greater trouble, this enigma of estrangement.
    I did not want to face my mother that day, not solely because I thought my guilt must be writ plain all over me. The fact was, I would not look at any woman, even Ma, in quite the same way ever again. Where before there had been girls and mothers, now there was something that was neither, and I hardly knew what to make of it.
    As I was leaving the house that day Mrs Gray had stopped me on the front-door mat and quizzed me as to the state of my soul. She was herself devout in a hazy sort of way and wished to be assured that I was on good terms with Our Lord and, especially, with his Holy Mother, for whom she had a particular reverence. She was anxious that I should go to confession without delay. It was apparent she had given the matter some consideration—had she been thinking it over when we were still grappling on that improvised bed in the laundry room?—and said now that while certainly I must lose no time in confessing the sin I had just committed, there would be no need to reveal with whom I had committed it. She too would confess, of course, without identifying me. While she was saying these things she was briskly straightening my collar and combing my horrent hair with her fingers as best she could—I might have been Billy being seen off to school! Then she put her hands on my shoulders and held me at arms’ length and looked me up and down with a carefully critical eye. She smiled, and kissed me on the forehead. ‘You’re going to be a handsome fellow,’ she said, ‘do you know that?’ For some reason this compliment, although delivered with an ironical cast, straight away set my blood throbbing again, and had I been