I hesitate, aware of a constraint, as if the prudish past were plucking at my sleeve to forestall me. Yet that day’s little dalliance—there is the word!—was child’s play compared with what was to come later.
Anyway, here goes.
Lord, I feel fifteen again.
It was not a Saturday, certainly not a Sunday, so it must have been a holiday, or a holyday—the Feast of St Priapus, perhaps—but at any rate there was no school, and I had called at the house for Billy. We had a plan to go somewhere, to do something. In the little gravelled square where the Grays lived the cherry trees were shivering in the wind and sinuous streels of cherry blossom were rolling along the pavements like so many pale-pink feather boas. The flying clouds, smoke-grey and molten silver, had great gashes in them where the damp-blue sky shone through, and busy little birds darted swiftly here and there or settled on the ridges of the roofs in huddled rows, fluffing up their feathers and carrying on a ribald chattering and piping. Billy let me in. He was not ready, as usual. He was half dressed, in shirt and pullover, but still had on striped pyjama bottoms and was barefoot, and gave off the woolly odour of an unfresh bed. He led the way upstairs to the living room.
In those days, when no one but the very rich could afford to have central heating, our houses on spring mornings such as this one had a special chill that gave a sharp, lacquered edge to everything, as if the air had turned to waterglass overnight. Billy went off to finish dressing and I stood in the middle of the floor, being nothing much, hardly even myself. There are moments like that, when one slips into neutral, as it were, not caring about anything, often not noticing, often not really being, in any vital sense. My mood that morning was not one of absence, however, not quite, but of passive receptivity, as I think now, a state of not quite conscious waiting. The metal-framed oblong windows here, all shine and sky, were too bright to sustain my gaze, and I turned from them and cast idly about the room. How quick with portent they always seem, the things in rooms that are not ours: that chintz-covered armchair braced somehow and as if about to clamber angrily to its feet; that floor-lamp keeping so still and hiding its face under a coolie’s hat; the upright piano, its lid greyed by an immaculate coating of dust, clenched against the wall with a neglected, rancorous mien, like a large ungainly pet the family had long ago ceased to love. Clearly from outside I could hear those lewd birds doing their wolf-whistles. I began to feel something, a vague, flinching sensation down one side, as if a weak beam of light had been trained on me or a warm breath had brushed my cheek. I glanced quickly towards the doorway, but it was empty. Had there been someone there? Was that a skirl of fading laughter I had caught the end of?
I crossed quickly to the door. The corridor outside was empty, although I seemed to detect the trace of a presence there, a wrinkle in the air where someone had been a moment before. Of Billy there was no sign—perhaps he had gone back to bed, I would not have been surprised. I ventured along the corridor, the carpet—what colour, what colour was it?—muffling my tread, not knowing where I was going or what I was looking for. The wind was whispering in the chimneys. How the world talks to itself, in its own dreamy, secretive fashion. A door was halfway open, I did not notice it until I had almost passed by. I see myself there, glancing sideways and back, and everything slowing down suddenly with a sort of a lurch and a bump.
That carpet, now I remember: it was a pale blue or bluey-grey strip, what is called a runner, I think, and the floorboards at the sides were varnished an unpleasant dark shade of brown and glistened like sucked, sticky toffee. See what can be called up, all manner of thing, when one concentrates.
Time and Memory are a fussy firm of interior decorators, though, always shifting the furniture about and redesigning and even reassigning rooms. I am convinced that what I looked into through that open doorway was a bathroom, for I recall distinctly the chilly gleam of porcelain and zinc, yet what caught my gaze was the kind of looking-glass that dressing-tables in women’s bedrooms had in those days, with a curved upper edge and wings at the sides and even—can this be right?—little triangular flaps set atop the wings that the lady seated at her toilet could draw forwards at an angle to give her a view of herself from above. More confusingly still, there was another mirror, a full-length one, fixed to what would have to have been the outwards-facing side of the inwards-opening door, and it was in this mirror that I saw the room reflected, with at its centre the dressing-table, or whatever it was, with its own mirror, or I should say mirrors. What I had, therefore, was not, strictly speaking, a view of the bathroom, or bedroom, but a reflection of it, and of Mrs Gray not a reflection but a reflection of a reflection.
Bear with me, through this crystalline maze.
So there I am, paused outside that doorway, gaping at an angle into the full-length looking-glass fixed, improbably, to the outside of the door that stood opened inwards. I did not register at once what it was I was seeing. Up to then the only body I had known at close quarters was my own, and even with that still evolving entity I was not on particularly intimate terms. What I would have expected a woman with no clothes on to look like I am not sure. No doubt I had pored hotly over reproductions of old paintings, ogled this or that old master’s pink-thighed frump fighting off a faun or classical matron enthroned in pomp among, in Madame Geoffrin’s happy formulation, a fricassee of children, but I knew that even the nakedest of these strapping figures, with their tundish breasts and perfectly bald and grooveless deltas, gave a far from naturalistic representation of woman in the raw. Now and then in school an antique dirty postcard would be passed from hand to fumbling hand under the desks, but as often as not the daguerreotyped cocottes showing off bare bits of themselves would be obscured behind smeared thumbprints and a filigree of white creases. In fact, my ideal of mature womanhood was the Kayser Bondor lady, a foot-high, cut-out cardboard beauty propped on the hosiery counter of Miss D’Arcy’s haberdashery shop at the near end of our Main Street, arrayed in a lavender gown and showing off an excitingly chaste fringe of petticoat above a pair of lovely and impossibly long legs sheathed in fifteen-denier nylon, a svelte sophisticate who came swishing imperiously into many a nocturnal fantasy of mine. What mortal woman could match up to such presence, such stately poise?
Mrs Gray in the mirror, in the mirrored mirror, was naked. It would be more gallant to say she was nude, I know, but naked is the word. After the first instant of confusion and shock I was struck by the grainy look of her skin—I suppose she must have had gooseflesh, standing there—and by the dull glimmer of it, like the sheen on a tarnished knife-blade. Instead of the shades of pink and peach that I would have expected—Rubens has a lot to answer for—her body displayed, disconcertingly, a range of muted tints from magnesium white to silver and tin, a scumbled sort of yellow, pale ochre, and even in places a faint greenishness and, in the hollows, a shadowing of mossy mauve.
What was presented to me was a triptych of her, a body as it were dismembered, or I should say disassembled. The mirror’s central panel, that is, the central panel of the mirror on the dressing-table, if that is what it was, framed her torso, breasts and belly and that smudge of darkness lower down, while the panels at either side showed her arms and her elbows, oddly flexed. There was a single eye, somewhere at the top, fixed on me levelly and with the hint of a challenge, as if to say, Yes, here I am, what do you make of me? I know very well this jumbled arrangement is unlikely, if not impossible—for one thing, she would have needed to be positioned close up to and directly in front of the mirror, with her back turned to me, for me to be able to see her reflected like that, but she was not there, only her reflection was. Could she have been standing some way away, at the opposite side of the room, and hidden from me in the angle of the open door? But in that case she would not have bulked so large in the mirror, would have appeared more distant and much smaller than she did. Unless the two mirrors, the one on the dressing-table in which she was reflected and the one on the door reflecting her reflection, produced in combination a magnifying effect. I do not think so. Yet how can I account for all these anomalies, these improbabilities? I cannot. What I have described is what appears in my memory’s eye, and I must say what I see. Later, when I asked her, Mrs Gray herself denied such a thing had ever happened, and said I must take her for a fine rawsie—her word—if I thought she would show herself off in that fashion to a stranger in the house, and a boy, at that, and her son’s best friend. But she lied, I am convinced of it.