Athena

by John Banville

  I know now I should have told her who I was, should have admitted I had been to the house already, had met Morden and seen the pictures. In other words, I should have come clean, but I did not, and so the whole thing started off in a fog of ambiguity and dissimulation. On the other hand, you, I mean she (I must try to stick to the third person, which is after all what you turned out to be), she too it seems was less than candid, for although she treated me that day as if I were no more than an amiable stranger whose burden of solitude she was prepared to lighten for an hour, she insisted later that she had known very well who I was, or that at least – her version of the matter varied – she had known that I was someone who was involved with Morden and the house. Why else would she have accosted me on the street like that, she demanded, in the chalk-on-blackboard shriek by which now and then she betrayed herself; did I think she was in the habit of picking up strange men? I did not answer that but instead diffidently made mention of Cupid and his arrow, which caused her to snort. Anyway, if I had owned up that first day it would have destroyed the clandestine intensity of the occasion. I believe the tone of all that was to happen between us was set in that first encounter with its sustained, hot hum of mendacity and secret knowing.

  It was odd to be shown the house for a second time in the same week. Everything was different, of course. This time the emphases fell on the off-beats. I followed her up the stairs through the cool stillness of afternoon and tried to keep my eyes off her narrow little rump joggling in front of me in its tight sheath of black silk; for reasons that were and continue to be obscure I felt it was incumbent on me not to acknowledge the possibilities of the situation. I think that despite everything I must be at heart a gentleman of the old school. I take this opportunity, before I have put both feet on the slippery slope and can still articulate a balanced sentence (there will be a lot of heavy breathing later on), to state that when it comes to what is called love and all that the word entails I am a dolt. Always was, always will be. I do not understand women, I mean I understand them even less than the rest of my sex seems to do. There are times when I think this failure of comprehension is the prime underlying fact of my life, a blank region of unknowing which in others is a lighted, well-signposted place. Here, in me, in this Bermuda Triangle of the soul, the fine discriminations that are a prerequisite for moral health disappear into empty air and silence and are never heard of again. I could blame the women I have consorted with – my mother, for instance – and of course my sometime wife, could accuse them of not having educated me properly, of not inducting me into at least the minor mysteries of their sorority, but to what avail? None. The lack was in me from the start. Maybe a chromosome went missing in the small bang out of which I was formed. Perhaps that’s it, perhaps that’s what I am, a spoilt woman, in the way that there used to be spoilt priests. That would explain a lot. But no, that is too easy; even if it should be the case, there is too much the possibility of exoneration in it. No, it is not the anima lost in me that I am after, but the ineffable mystery of the Other (I can hear your ribald snigger); that is what all my life long I have plunged into again and again as into a choked Sargasso Sea wherein I can never find my depth. In you I thought my feet at last would reach the sandy floor where I could wade weightlessly with bubbles kissing my shins and small things skittering under my slow-motion tread. Now it seems I was wrong, wrong again.

  We stopped on the circular landing at the top of the house and she lit a cigarette. She kept frowning about her in a vague, vexed sort of way, as if she thought she had lost something but did not know what it could be. Abstract: that is the word I always associate with her: abstract, abstracted, abstractedly, and then the variants, such as absently, and absent-minded, and now, of course, in this endless aftermath, with the clangour of a wholly new connotation, just: absent. She smoked with a schoolgirl’s amateurish swagger, dragging on the cigarette swiftly with hissing intakes of breath and puffing out big clouds of uninhaled blue smoke. Above us in the tall windows sunlight stood in blocks that looked as solid as blond stone. An aeroplane flew over, making the panes vibrate tinily, and as if in sympathy my diaphragm fluttered and with a faint shock I realised that what I was feeling most strongly was fear: not only of Morden and of being discovered here by him or his man or his man’s black dog, but of her, too, and of the house itself – of everything. Yet I do not know if fear is the right word. Something less definite, then? Alarm? Apprehension? Whatever it was it was a not unpleasurable sensation; there was something of childhood in it, of games played with giddy girls in the groin-warm glow of firelit parlours on winter Sunday evenings long ago. Yes, this is what struck me that first time, this sense of having been transported back to some gropingly tentative, confused and expectant stage of life. For you see, I did not know what was happening, why she had brought me here or who she was or why she was dressed in these slinky, silken weeds (come to think of it, I never did discover the explanation for that outlandish costume; was it your seduction suit?), and I was as wary and uncertain as an adolescent, and as sweatily excited. No, I did not know what was going on, but being essentially a trusting type I was content to assume that someone did.

  A., I shall call her. Just A. I thought about it for a long time. It’s not even the initial of her name, it’s only a letter, but it sounds right, it feels right. Think of all the ways it can be uttered, from an exclamation of surprise to a moan of pleasure or pure pain. It will be different every time I say it. A. My alpha; my omega.

  Her manner was a mixture of curiosity and impatience and a kind of defiant offhandedness, like that of a spoiled, dissatisfied, far too clever twelve-year-old. She seemed to – how shall I say? – to fluctuate, as if we were engaged in an improvised dance my part in which was to stand still while she flickered and shimmered in front of me, approaching close up and at once retreating, watching me covertly from behind that black veil which my overheated imagination has placed before her face. Then the next moment she would go limp and stand gawkily with one foot out of her shoe and pressed on the instep of the other, gazing down in a sort of stupor and holding a bit of her baby-pink lower lip between tiny, wet, almost translucent teeth. It was as if she were trying out alternative images of herself, donning them like so many slightly ill-fitting gowns and then taking them off again and dispiritedly casting them aside. It was not the house she had been showing me but herself – herselves! – moving against this big, blank-white, sombre background, successive approximations of an ultimate self that would, that must, remain forever hidden. And now, blood thudding in my ears with a jungle beat and my clenched palms beginning to sweat, I was waiting for her to make the final revelation, to let fall the final veil, and take me into the secret room. For I knew it must have been she I had glimpsed through the crumbling wall the first time I came here. Would she open that last door and let me in? I saw myself standing there, suspended in the slanted sunlight at the top of the stairs, and everything was shifting and shaking and thrummingly taut, as if the house were a ship running before the wind with all sails spread. I was, I realised, embarked on an adventure, no less.

  All this in my recollection of it takes place in a kind of ringing silence, but in fact she had kept a commentary going in her unfocused, smoky voice the whole way up through the house. I don’t recall the words. Her tone was vague yet touched with an odd, displaced vehemence; always it was to be like this with her, everything she said seemed no more than a way of not saying what she was thinking. Does that make sense? It does to me. Now and then she would pause and stand listening intently, not to the sounds of the world about her but as if to a voice coming from a great distance inside her own head, telling her things, advising her, upbraiding her. I remember her saying to me one day – I think of it as much later, in another age, but it can only have been a matter of weeks – I remember her saying how sometimes she got frightened when she thought about her mind and how she could not stop it working. In the toils of lovemaking we had rolled from the lumpy chaise-longue on to the
floor and were lying quietly now watching rain-clouds progressing like noble wreckage across the jumbled rooftops of the city. How sweetly poignant were those silent autumn afternoons with their quicksilver sheen and somehow friendly chilliness and the country smells of leaf and loam and wood-smoke that penetrated even here, in the depths of the city. She lay on her stomach with the moth-eaten blanket pulled to her shoulders and a cigarette trembling in her incongruously plump, pale fingers with their reddened knuckles. There was a smudge of lipstick like a fresh bruise at the corner of her mouth. What frightened her, she said, was the way it all kept spinning, just spinning and spinning, even when she was asleep, like a motor that could not be switched off even for an instant because if it was it would never start up again. She spoke as if she were alone in this predicament, as if it were only her mind that was perpetually in motion while the rest of us could turn ourselves into zombies whenever we felt like it. That was the way she conceived of everything to do with herself; all her experiences were unique. It wasn’t egotism, I believe, or even the kind of rueful self-absorption that I so often lose myself in; she simply could not imagine that the rest of humankind lived as she was forced to do, in such solitude, locked inside this racing, unstoppable consciousness; if it were so, surely something would have been done about it long ago? For unlike me she was a great believer in progress, and was firmly of the opinion that everything was improving all the time – for others, that is.

  Anyway, that first day, while we dawdled there on the landing, I convinced myself that I could sense her debating whether or not to betray what she must think was still Morden’s secret and show me the white room and the stacked pictures, but in the end she turned, regretfully, so I imagined, and led the way downstairs again. I felt a sort of slackening then, a general relaxation of flesh and fancy, and all at once I was impatient to be away from her and from the house, to be alone again, to be on my own: always it is there, you see, the yearning for solitude, for the cell. Then like a blow to the temple it struck me: it was Morden, of course, who had set her on to me (I was wrong, he had not), had led her to one of these high windows and pointed me out to her as I was passing by in the street below, a foreshortened, waddling figure, and said to her, Look, that’s him, go down there and do your stuff. Oh, the pander! Now in a rush I recalled him casually mentioning his wife, with an ironical twist of the lips (My wife, you know, my beautiful wife!), and chuckling. She, I told myself now, she was the final part of the deal, after the free hand and the cut of the profits he had offered me; she was the clincher. (Was he somewhere in the house even now, spying on us?) Oh, I had it all worked out in a flash. As I descended the stairs behind her, my gaze, heavy now with rekindled tumescence, fastened to the back of her neck with its straight-cut fringe and tapering wisp of dark down the shape of an inverted candle-flame, I was working up a fine head of indignation at Morden’s wiliness (by now I had conjured up his big face with its Cheshire Cat grin suspended before us in the stairwell), while in another, altogether shadier part of the forest something that had drunk the magic bottle was getting bigger and bigger as my mind, by itself, as it were, speculated in dark excitement on how broad might be the brief that he had given her. But at the same time I kept telling myself it was all nonsense, a fantasy made up out of my head and one or two other areas of my ice-encased anatomy, a story to tell myself to light the drabness in which I was sunk; if she had known who I was it was probably just boredom, or curiosity, or an impulsive wish to meddle in Morden’s affairs that had prompted her to address me there in the sun and shadow on that noisy street-corner where I stood dithering in gloomy, middle-aged dishevelment. Yet abruptly now, as if she had heard the rusty cogwheels of my long-disused libido squeakingly engage, she stopped and turned with one hand on the banister rail (I notice, by the way, that she has acquired elbow-length black gloves to match the little black hat and veil I have already imagined for her) and looked up at me from under her painted, soot-black lashes with a smile of complicity that fell upon those labouring meshed gears of mine like a warmed drop of amber oil, and it was as if it were we, and not Morden, who were the conspirators in some double double-cross too complicated to be grasped by my poor overburdened understanding.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I want to show you something.’

  How can I communicate the strangeness, the thrilling incongruity of that first hour with her? It was as if we were aloft on an ill-strung net which she was negotiating with careless ease while I was in danger of losing my footing at any moment and ending up in a hopeless tangle of trapped, flailing limbs. I kept waiting with foreboding for her to tell me why we were here and what it was she supposed we were doing (why, I wonder, did I assume that an explanation would inevitably mean disappointment?), but I waited in vain. She just went along in her flitting, abstracted way, pointing out this or that wholly unremarkable feature of the empty house, as if everything had already been understood and settled between us. She was half tour guide and half the bored madam welcoming an unprepossessing new client to this gaunt bordello. She made no mention of Morden (but then, did she ever speak of him directly, in so many words, in all the time I knew her?), didn’t tell me her name or ask mine. Did she know who I was? Perhaps when I saw her through that hole in the false wall she in turn caught a glimpse of me and wondered who and what I was and determined to find out. How calmly I pose these questions, yet what a storm of anxiety and pain they provoke in me – for I shall never know the answers for sure, no matter how long I brood on it all, no matter how many obsessed hours I spend turning over the scraps of evidence you left behind. Anyway, for her purposes, whatever they were, probably someone else would have done just as well as I, some needy other who, I suddenly realise, from this moment on will always be with me, now that I have conceived of him, a hopeful phantom lingering just beyond seeing in the corner of my mind’s jealous eye. I do not think she was lying, I mean I believe that as time went on she became convinced that of course she had known who I was, whether she had or not. (I am so confused, so confused!) Things like that got lost in her, dates, events, the circumstances of certain meetings, decisive conversations and their outcomes, they just dropped away silently into empty air and were gone; useless to dispute with her – if she believed something had been so then that was how it had been and that was that. Such conviction could make me doubt the simplest of simple facts, and when I had at last given in she would turn away, mollified, with a small, hard look of satisfaction. So now like an anxious naturalist unable to trust his luck I shuffled behind her down those endless, echoing stairs, watching the wing-cases of her shoulder-blades flexing under the brittle stuff of her dress, noting the fish-pale backs of her knees and the fine hairs pressed flat under her nylons like black grass splayed by rain, wincing at the state of her poor heels where those intolerable shoes had chafed them, and I felt myself carried off to other times and other, imaginary places: a spring day in Clichy (I have never been in Clichy), a hot, thundery evening on a road somewhere in North Africa (never been there, either), a great, high, panelled room in an ancient château with straw-coloured sunlight on the faded tapestries and someone practising on a spinet (though I have never seen a spinet or heard one played). Where do they come from, these mysterious, exalted flashes that are not memories yet seem far more than mere imaginings? You believed, you said, that we have all lived before; perhaps you were right. Are right; are. I cling to the present tense as to a sheer cliff’s last hand-hold.

  When we came to the ground floor she led me along the hall to the rear of the house. I thought she was taking me into the garden – in the barred glass of the low back door viridian riot was briefly visible – but instead she turned down yet another flight of stairs, this one narrow and made of black stone. I clattered after her. At the bottom was a dank, flagstoned basement passageway dimly illumined from the far end by a high lunette through which I could see the oddly mechanical-looking legs of people passing by outside in a sunlit street that from here seemed a place on another pl
anet. The air was chilly and damp and smelled strongly of lime. In the suddenly attentive silence A. slipped her arm through mine and I felt with a soft detonation along my nerves her wrist’s cool silkiness and the intricate bones of her elbow pressing against my ribs. Behind the spice of her perfume I detected a sharp, faint, foxy tang of sweat, and when she leaned her shoulder into the protection of my arm the low neck of her dress fell forward and revealed to me (picture an eyeball swivelling downward wildly, the bloodshot white showing) a glimmering pale slope of skin and a deckled edging of lace. I felt so large beside her, so unwieldy, a big, shambling, out-of-breath baboon. I imagined myself picking her up in my hooped, hairy arms and making off with her into the undergrowth, hooting and gibbering. We came to a door and she stopped, and a tiny tremor ran through her like the passage of an arrow through air, and she laughed softly. ‘Here,’ she whispered, ‘here it is.’