I sensed her presence before I glanced to my right to find her standing beside me, facing out, as I was, also with a paper cup clutched in her cupped hands. All women for me have an aura but the Dawn Devonports, scarce as they are, fairly flare. The Invention of the Past, in its movie version, has a dozen characters but really there are only two parts worth speaking of, me as Vander and she as his Cora, and already, as is the way of these things—she is probably no more immune than I am to the envy of others—a bond of sorts had begun to forge itself between us, and we found ourselves quite easy together there, or as easy as two actors standing in each other’s light could hope to be.
I have known many leading ladies but I had never been thus close up to a real film star before and I had the odd impression of Dawn Devonport as a scaled-down replica of her public self, expertly fashioned and perfectly animate yet lacking some essential spark—duller, slightly dowdier, or just human, I suppose, just ordinarily human—and I did not know if I should feel disappointed, I mean disenchanted. I cannot remember any more of what we talked about on this second encounter than I can of what was said when we were introduced in the hall downstairs. There was something about her, about the combination in her of frailty and faint mannishness, that was a sharp reminder of my daughter. I do not believe I have seen a single film in which Dawn Devonport stars, but it does not matter: her face, with that teasing pout, those depthless, dawn-grey eyes, was as familiar as the face of the moon, and as distant, too. So how, standing there under that tall, light-filled window, would I not be reminded of my lost girl?
Every aurate woman I have loved in my life, and I use the word loved in its widest sense, has left her impression on me, as the old gods of creation are said to have left their thumbprints on the temples of the men that they fashioned out of mud and turned into us. Just so do I retain a particular trace of each one of my women—for I think of them all as mine still—stamped indelibly on the underside of my memory. I will glimpse in the street a head of wheat-coloured hair retreating among the hurrying crowd, or a slender hand lifted and waving farewell in a certain way; I will hear a phrase of laughter from the far side of a hotel lobby, or just a word spoken with a recognised, warm inflection, and on the instant this or that she will be there, vividly, fleetingly, and my heart like an old dog will scramble up and give a wistful woof. It is not that all the attributes of all these women are lost to me save one, only the one that remains most strongly is most characteristic: is, it would seem, an essence. Mrs Gray, though, despite the years that have elapsed since I last saw her, has stayed with me in her entirety, or as much of an entirety as one may have of a creature not oneself. Somehow I have gathered up all the disparate parts of her, as it is said we shall do with our own remains at the Last Trump, and assembled them into a working model sufficiently complete and life-like for memory’s purposes. It is for this reason that I do not see her in the street, do not find her summoned up in the turn of a stranger’s head, or hear her voice from the midst of an indifferent crowd: being so amply present to me, she does not need to send out fragmentary signals. Or perhaps, in her case, my memory works in a special way. Perhaps it is not memory at all that thinks it holds her fast inside me, but some other faculty altogether.
Even in those days themselves she was not always my she. When I was in their house and the family was there she was Mr Gray’s wife, or Billy’s mother, or, worse, Kitty’s. If I called for Billy and had to come in and sit down at the kitchen table to wait for him—he really was a tardy soul—Mrs Gray would let her not quite focused gaze slide over me, smiling in a remote fashion, and take up some vague chore as though the sight of me had reminded her of it. She moved more slowly than usual at those times, with an unwonted, telltale dreaminess that the others, had they really been others and not her family, would surely have taken suspicious note of. She would pick up something, anything, a teacup, a dishcloth, a butter-smeared knife, and look at it as if it had presented itself to her of its own volition, demanding her attention. After a moment, though, she would set the object down again, with an intensified air of abstractedness. I can see her there at the kitchen table, the thing put back where it had been yet not quite relinquished, her hand still resting lightly on it as if to retain the exact feel of it, the exact texture, while with the fingers of her other hand she twisted and twisted that unruly spring of hair behind her ear.
And I, what did I do on those occasions, how did I comport myself? I know it will seem fanciful, or just plain tendentious, when I say I believe that it was in those fraught intervals in the Grays’ kitchen that, without knowing it, I took my first, groping steps out on to the boards; nothing like an early clandestine love to teach one the rudiments of the actor’s trade. I knew what was required of me, knew the part I had to play. It was imperative above all to appear innocent to the point of idiocy. With what skill, therefore, did I adopt the protective cover of doltish adolescence and exaggerate the natural awkwardness of a fifteen-year-old, stumbling and mumbling, pretending not to know where to look or what to do with my hands, trotting out inappropriate observations and knocking over the salt cellar or slopping the milk in the milk jug. I even managed, when addressed directly, to make myself blush, not guiltily, of course, but as if out of an agony of shyness. How proud I was of the polish of my performance. Though I am sure I over-acted wildly, I believe neither Billy nor his father noticed that I was acting at all. Kitty, as usual, was the one who worried me, for every so often, in the midst of one of my little pantomimes, I would catch her eyeing me with what seemed a knowing and sardonic glint.
Mrs Gray for all her worked-at air of hazy detachment was, I have no doubt, permanently on tenterhooks, fearful that sooner or later I was bound to go too far and take a pratfall and send us both sprawling in the disarray of our perfidy at the feet of her astonished loved ones. And I, I am ashamed to say, teased her heartlessly. It amused me to let the mask drop now and then, just for a second. I would wink at her sultrily when I judged the others were not looking, or in passing would softly bump against some part of her as if by accident. I found endearingly erotic the way in which if, say, I touched her leg under the breakfast table she would try to cover up her start of fright, reminding me of the flustered, helpless attempts at modesty she used to make in our earliest days together when I would bundle her into the back seat of the station wagon and claw at her clothes in my haste to get at this or that high or hollow of her bared flesh as it shrank from me and at the same time enticed me onwards. What a pressure she must have been under at those times, in her own kitchen, what a panic-fright she must have felt. And how callous I was, how careless, to put her through such trials. Yet there was a side to her, the wanton side, that cannot but have thrilled, however fearfully, to these prods that I so cavalierly gave to the blandly domestic surface of her day.
I am thinking of the occasion of Kitty’s party. How did I come to be there, who invited me? Not Kitty herself, I know, nor Billy, and certainly not Mrs Gray. Curious, these holes one encounters when one presses over-insistently upon the moth-eaten fabric of the past. Anyway, for whatever reason, I was there. The little monster was celebrating her birthday, I do not remember which one—she always seemed ageless to me. It was an occasion of wild misrule. The guests were all girls, a score of undersized hoydens who romped unchecked in a pack through the house, elbowing each other and grabbing at each other’s clothes and screaming. One of them, a whey-faced creature, neckless and fat, displayed an alarmingly adhesive interest in me, and kept popping up at my elbow with a congested, insinuating smile; Kitty must have been talking about me. There were party games all of which ended in violent scuffles, with hair pulled and blows exchanged. Billy and I, whom Mrs Gray, before taking refuge in the kitchen, had charged with keeping order, waded into these mêlées shouting and slapping, like a bo’sun and his mate struggling to quell a riot among a gang of drunken sailors on shore leave in a dockside tavern of an unlicensed Saturday night.