Free Ancient Light by John Banville Page A

more practised, and less worried about the imminent return of the rest of the family, I would have hustled her backwards down the stairs to the laundry room and pulled off her clothes and mine and pushed her on to that pallet-bed or mattress and started all over again. She mistook my suddenly louring aspect for a scowl of resentful scepticism, and said she had truly meant it, that I was good-looking, and that I should be pleased. I could think of no reply, and turned from her in a tumult of emotions and stumbled off swollenly into the rain.
    I did go to confession. The priest I settled on, after much hot-faced agonising in the church’s Saturday-evening gloom, was one I had been to before, many times, a large asthmatic man with stooped shoulders and a doleful air, whose name by happy chance, though perhaps not so happy for him, was Priest, so that he was Father Priest. I worried that he would know me from previous occasions, but the burden I was carrying was such that I felt in need of an ear that I was accustomed to, and that was accustomed to me. Always, when he had slid back the little door behind the grille—I can still hear the abrupt and always startling clack it used to make—he would begin by heaving a heavy sigh of what seemed long-suffering reluctance. This I found reassuring, a token that he was as loath to hear my sins as I was to confess them. I went through the prescribed, singsong list of misdemeanours—lies, bad language, disobedience—before I ventured, my voice sinking to a feathery whisper, on the main, the mortal, matter. The confessional smelt of wax and old varnish and uncleaned serge. Father Priest had listened to my hesitant opening gambit in silence and now let fall another sigh, very mournful-sounding, this time. ‘Impure actions,’ he said. ‘I see. With yourself, or with another, my child?’
    ‘With another, Father.’
    ‘A girl, was it, or a boy?’
    This gave me pause. Impure actions with a boy—what would they consist of? Still, it allowed of what I considered a cunningly evasive answer. ‘Not a boy, Father, no,’ I said.
    Here he fairly pounced. ‘—Your sister?’
    My sister , even if I had one? The collar of my shirt had begun to feel chokingly tight. ‘No, Father, not my sister.’
    ‘Someone else, then. I see. Was it the bare skin you touched, my child?’
    ‘It was, Father.’
    ‘On the leg?’
    ‘Yes, Father.’
    ‘High up on the leg?’
    ‘Very high up, Father.’
    ‘Ahh.’ There was a huge stealthy shifting—I thought of a horse in a horse-box—as he gathered himself close up to the grille. Despite the wooden wall of the confessional that separated us I felt that we were huddled now almost in each other’s arms in whispered and sweaty colloquy. ‘Go on, my child,’ he murmured.
    I went on. Who knows what garbled version of the thing I tried to fob him off with, but eventually, after much delicate easing aside of fig leaves, he penetrated to the fact that the person with whom I had committed impure actions was a married woman.
    ‘Did you put yourself inside her?’ he asked.
    ‘I did, Father,’ I answered, and heard myself swallow.
    To be precise, it was she who had done the putting in, since I was so excited and clumsy, but I judged that a scruple I could pass over.
    There followed a lengthy, heavy-breathing silence at the end of which Father Priest cleared his throat and huddled closer still. ‘My son,’ he said warmly, his big head in three-quarters profile filling the dim square of mesh, ‘this is a grave sin, a very grave sin.’
    He had much else to say, on the sanctity of the marriage bed, and our bodies being temples of the Holy Ghost, and how each sin of the flesh that we commit drives the nails anew into Our Saviour’s hands and the spear into his side, but I hardly listened, so thoroughly anointed was I with the cool salve of absolution. When I had promised never to do wrong again and the priest had blessed me I went up and knelt before the