Athena

by John Banville

  He opened his mouth and laughed, a short, sharp bark. ‘What else would they be?’ he said.

  A large part of the pleasure of pedantry, I have discovered, is to pretend there is no pleasure in it at all. The low monotone, the neutral gaze, the faint edge of impatience and, of course, the touch of condescension, these are the things to cultivate. A picture done in the style of Vaublin, I explained slowly, even if it were a direct copy, does not pretend to be a Vaublin unless it is signed. ‘For, you see, the signature –’ I sketched a flourish on the air between us ‘– the signature is everything.’

  He scowled. I found them odd and disconcerting, these looks of almost loathing he would fix on me. Now, of course, I suspect they were his way to keep from laughing. What a show it was, and what fun he must have had, playing the bluff businessman with an eye for beauty and all the rest of it, that whole travesty.

  ‘No,’ he said, hawking up the word like phlegm, ‘I’ll tell you what everything is: everything is when you go to flog a fake and say that it’s the real thing.’

  He kept his scowling stare fixed on me for a moment, nodding his big bull-head, then flopped back in the armchair and stuck the cigar in his mouth and studied a far corner of the room through a rich flaw of smoke.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll probably give them away,’ he said carelessly. ‘To some gallery, maybe.’ At the thought of it a brief spark lit his sullen eye: The Morden Collection! ‘It’s just that I’m …’ He gestured impatiently and took a sip of his mineral water – no, I mean a puff of his cigar. ‘I’m just …’ He scowled again. There was a wrathful silence. The dog watched him keenly, expecting him, it seemed, to do something marvellous and mad at any moment.

  ‘Curious,’ Francie said flatly, and Morden and I turned and stared at him as if he were a foreigner who had suddenly spoken to us in our own language. He looked back at us with that air of boredom and wearied disenchantment, a cigarette dangling from his lip. Francie and his fags, his cap, his dog. Morden cleared his throat and said loudly, ‘Yes, that’s right, I’m curious.’ He glared at me again as if he thought I might attempt to contradict him. ‘I want to know, that’s all,’ he said. ‘If they’re fake they’re fake.’

  Did I believe him? It was a question that I used to put to myself over and over again, rolling on the floor of the prison cell of my anguish and shame, in the first days after the gimcrack edifice had all come crashing down. Futile, of course; it was never a matter of believing or disbelieving. Belief, trust, suspicion, these are chimeras that arise in hindsight, when I look back from the sad eminence of the knowledge of having been deceived. At the time I just tottered along as usual, like a drunk on a tightrope, trying to concentrate on the business in hand and not fall off despite the buzz of distractions around me, those trapeze artists whizzing past and the clowns cavorting down in the ring. Oh, of course, I must have known from the start that there was something fishy going on – but when is there not? Stick your nose into anything and you will get a whiff of brine and slime. I would catch one or other of them, even the dog, looking at me in what must have been incredulous wonderment, holding their breath, waiting for me to twig what was afoot. It was as if I had surprised them in the midst of a drunken carouse and now, sobered for a second, they were standing about and keeping a straight face, lips shut tight and cheeks bulging, trying not to catch each other’s eye for fear of bursting out in guffaws. Sometimes, when I walked out of a room where they were, I would have an uneasy vision, which I would immediately dismiss, of them throwing their arms about each other’s shoulders and collapsing into helpless mirth … But why do I torment myself like this, what does it matter any more? Is the loss of you not flame enough, that I must keep scorching myself over these embers? Yet I have nothing else, no packet of letters, no locket of bright hair, only these speculations that I turn over endlessly in my head like things on a spit. (Ich brenne in dir …) And I feel so foolish and pathetic, poor Mr Punch with his black eye and broken heart and his back humped with shame. I think of myself there in that hotel or wherever it was that day, talking about provenance and dating techniques and the history of oil-based pigments and the necessity for a detailed comparison of brushstrokes, and I squirm like a slug in salt. How could I allow myself to be so easily taken in? And the answer comes of course as pat as you please: because I wanted to be. Bang! go my fists on the cell floor, and bang! my forehead too, between them. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  How I talked in those days; when I think back I am aware of a ceaseless background buzz that is the noise of my own voice going on and on. Guilt, I mean the permanent, inexpungible, lifetime variety, turns you into a kind of earnest clown. They speak of guilt as something heavy, they talk about the weight of it, the burden, but I know otherwise; guilt is lighter than air; it fills you up like a gas and would send you sailing into the sky, arms and legs flailing, an inflated Grock, if you did not keep a tight hold on things. For years now talk had been my tether and my bags of ballast. Once I got going on the autodidact’s monody there was no stopping me. Art history, the lives of the painters, the studio system in the seventeenth century, there was no end to the topics at my command. And all for no purpose other than to keep suppressed inside me that ever-surging bubble of appalled, excoriating, sulphurous laughter, the cackle of the damned. That’s why I was so easily fooled, that’s how I could be so easily taken in: because I was always thinking of other things, struggling inwardly with those big burdensome words that had I had the nerve to speak them would have made you stare first and then laugh. Atonement. Redemption. That kind of thing. I was still in hell, you see, or purgatory, at least, and you were one of the elect at whom I squinnied up yearningly as you paced the elysian fields in golden light.

  Yet wait. That is not quite right, or not complete, at least, and gives altogether too worthy an impression. Those big words … Oh, leave it, I can’t be bothered.

  Suddenly, with a violent turn of the wrist, Morden crushed out his three-quarters unsmoked cigar and stood up briskly, startling the dog, and said, ‘Come on, we’ll go for a drive.’ I looked at Francie but he only shrugged and rose with an air of weary resignation and followed Morden, who was already halfway across the lobby. The girl with the grey eyes gave me a distracted smile and turned away. Here is the door of the pub, I mean the hotel, the revolving door of the St Gabriel Hotel which with a violent sigh deposited me on the sunlit pavement in the middle of a crisp September morning.

  Morden’s car, a low-slung black beast, was parked on a double yellow line in a street behind the hotel loud with the archaic voices of delivery men. There was a parking ticket clipped to the windscreen. Morden crushed it in his fist and tossed it into the gutter, from where Francie dutifully retrieved it. This little exchange had the look of an established routine. ‘I’ll drive,’ Morden said, and had the engine going before we were inside the car. I sat in the front while Francie lounged in the back with Prince beside him on the seat, ears up and breathing down the back of my neck. We travelled at high speed through the flashing streets. Morden drove with absent-minded violence, wrenching the wheel and stamping his foot furiously between the accelerator and the brakes. The river, then leafy avenues, then the canal, and then a broad cement road describing a long curve between acres of grim housing. Morden waved a hand. ‘All this was fields in my day,’ he said. We sped on in silence and sunlight over that sad, peopled plain under a high, thin blue sky. Behind me the dog moaned softly to itself, watching all that freedom flying past.

  We were almost in the country when Morden slowed abruptly and turned into a drab estate. He negotiated a bewildering maze of streets at high speed and at last stopped at a place where the road dipped between a fenced-off terrace of identical houses on one side and on the other a stark grey school building fastened to a bleak field. A wind had sprung up and the sunlight had taken on a milky tinge. No one spoke. Morden, slumped in his seat, gazed out morosely upon the scene. Houses, and more houses, rank upon mean rank. The dog licked its chops and trembled in antic
ipation and at last Francie leaned over with a grunt and opened the door and the animal bounded out and was off across the school field, going at a swift lope with its nose to the ground. Morden got out too and stood squinting about him. I made to follow but Francie from the back seat put a hand on my arm and said, ‘Hold on.’ We sat and listened to the wind in the overhead wires and the jumbled crackle and thrum of a distant radio. Morden crossed the road and walked a little way along by the houses and stopped at one and went in at the garden gate and knocked on the narrow, frosted-glass door. The door opened immediately, as if by remote control. He glanced about him once and stepped inside. I got out of the car, unhindered this time, and stood as Morden had stood, shading my eyes against the light. The air hereabouts had that particular smell that poverty generates, a mingling of unwashed clothes and peed-on mattresses and sodden tea-leaves. On the other side of the road a toddler on a tricycle came to the edge of the footpath and toppled slowly, shakily into the gutter. An upstairs window opened and a raw-faced woman leaned out and looked at me with interest, challengingly. The infant in the gutter began to cry, producing a curiously detached, ratcheted little whimpering noise. Behind me Francie got out and lounged against the bonnet of the car with his arms and ankles crossed. The door where Morden had entered opened again and a short, hard-looking young man with Popeye muscles and bandy arms and legs appeared and ambled down the garden path. He had cropped red hair and a pushed-in face, and wore a vest and army trousers and lace-up boots and sported a single gold earring in the shape of a crucifix. He stopped at the garden gate and folded his stubby arms and gave me a cold stare. I turned away and went into the school yard. The gin had produced in me a fluctuating, tottery sensation. From within the school I could hear a class raggedly chanting the two-times tables. How affecting and lonely it is to loiter like that where children are at their lessons; nowhere emptier than a playground during school hours. The field rose before me, humped and high, the dark grass wind-bent and greyly burnished in the bruised sunlight. Far off I could see Prince ranging in wide loops, and farther off again a boy galloping bareback in slow motion on a piebald pony. Presently without a sound Morden appeared at my side – how quietly he could move, for all his bulk – and stood rocking pensively on his heels with his face lifted and nostrils flared as if to catch some faint fragrance, the smell of the past, perhaps. I asked him, for the sake of saying something, if this was the place where he was born. He stared at me and laughed. ‘Here?’ he said. ‘No!’ He laughed again, skittishly. ‘I wasn’t born anywhere!’ And still laughing to himself he turned and set off back to the car with that curiously dainty, shuffling walk that he had, head down and hands in pockets, his trouser legs flapping in the wind. I lingered a while, gazing off across the field and thinking of nothing. The boy on the pony was gone. Behind me Francie gave a long, trilling whistle and the dog immediately ceased its circlings and came loping back, passing me by without a glance. A cloud covered the sun and a rippling shadow raced across the field towards me and all at once I was frightened, I don’t know why, exactly; it was just the look of things, I think, the vastness of the world, that depthless sky and the cloud-shadow running towards me, intangible, unavoidable, like fate itself. It is not the big occasions that terrify me most, when the car goes out of control or a wheel drops off the aeroplane, but the ordinary moments, like this one, when suddenly I lose my hold on things and the ground drops away from under me and I find myself staring aghast into empty air, like a character in a cartoon film who runs straight off the edge of a cliff and does not fall until he notices there is nothing under his feet but the long plunge to the canyon floor far below. Hurriedly I turned back towards the car and was almost running by the time I reached it. The tough at the gate had been joined now by a fat, unhealthy-looking fellow got up outlandishly in pink carpet slippers and a sort of kilt and a tasselled shawl that was wrapped tightly around his big belly and slung over his shoulder like an ancient Roman’s robe. He seemed to be studying me in particular, thoughtfully, with an eyebrow cocked, and as the car pulled away he drew a plump hand from under the shawl and lifted an index finger in a lax, ambiguous gesture, a sort of cautionary farewell, which neither Morden nor Francie acknowledged. ‘Master of disguise,’ Francie muttered and did his costive chuckle. I asked who was the fellow in the kilt but no one answered, and Morden glared at the space between his knees with an expression of angry boredom. The toddler sat beside its upturned tricycle, still whingeing.

  This time Francie drove, with the dog on guard beside him and Morden and me in the back. Morden was silent, sunk in himself with his chin on his chest and his arms tightly folded as if he were strapped into a strait-jacket. What was I thinking now? Still nothing. Is that not strange? I never cease to wonder at my capacity for passive participation, if participation is the word. As if just being there were itself a force, a kind of inertial action requiring only my presence for it to operate. To make sense of this flow of happenings that was carrying me along like a leaf on the flood I would have had to stop everything and step out of the picture altogether and stand back on some impossible, Archimedean platform in space and view the spectacle as a completed whole. But nothing is complete, and nothing whole. I suppose that is why deep down I have never been able fully to believe in reality as it is described by the science of physics, with its moments of motionless and lucid insight, as if it could be possible to take a cross-section of the moving world and put it between glass slides and study it in perfect stillness and silence. No, no, flux and flow, unstoppable, that’s all there is; it terrifies me to think of it. Yet more terrifying still is the thought of being left behind. Talk is one way of keeping up. Is that not what I’m doing? If I were to stop I’d stop.

  On a newsagent’s stand the noon editions, in headlines three inches deep, were announcing the first of the murders.

  ‘Look at that,’ Morden said and clicked his tongue. ‘Terrible.’ He sat back in the seat and let his gaze drift upward dreamily. ‘Who was that chap,’ he said, ‘that stole that picture from Binkie Behrens and killed the maid when she got in his way?’ A row of shops with delivery vans, dogs, defeated-looking women pushing prams; how little I know of what they call the real world. ‘Ten or twelve years ago it was,’ he said. ‘Anyone remember?’

  I kept my eyes on the passing streets. I have such a hunger in me for the mundane.

  ‘Some name beginning with M,’ Francie said and his shoulders shook.

  ‘That’s right,’ Morden said. ‘Montagu, or Montmorency, something like that.’ He tapped me lightly on the knee. ‘Do you recall? No? You were away, maybe – you’ve been away for a long time, haven’t you?’ He brooded, pretended to brood. ‘A Vermeer, was it, or a Metsu? One of those. Portrait of a Woman. Lovely thing. Hit her on the head with a hammer, whack, like that.’ He turned to me again. ‘Ever been to Whitewater House, the Behrens place?’ he said. ‘Magnificent. The pictures! You should go. Take a day trip. Do you good.’ He heaved himself up until he was sitting sideways on the seat and examined me critically. ‘You’re very pale, you know,’ he said. ‘Cooped up too much, that’s your trouble.’

  I began to talk about Aunt Corky, her history and present status, the nursing home, the Haddons. Babblebabblebabble. Why Aunt Corky? I have few topics, when all is said and done. Morden let me go on and when I had straggled to a stop he sat up and rubbed his hands and said he wanted to meet her. ‘Francie,’ he cried, ‘turn the car, turn the car!’ He waved aside my weak-voiced protests. He was enjoying himself. Soon we were bowling northwards along the coast road. The tide was out and the sun was resplendent on the mudflats and the verdant algae. A heron stood on a rusted spar with wings spread wide. ‘Flasher,’ Morden said and laughed. Presently his mood turned again and he became lachrymose. ‘I have no family, you know,’ he said. ‘I mean real family: aunts, uncles, brothers, that kind of thing.’ He turned and to my alarm seized me by the wrist and peered searchingly into my eyes. ‘Have you a brother?’ he said. I looked away fro
m him. Yes, just like me, a sentimentalist and a bully. This was awful. Francie rolled down the window and leaned out his elbow and began to whistle. The car climbed the hill road and at last we were pulling up at the gate of The Cypresses. ‘This it?’ Morden said, peering. I was picturing Mr Haddon’s face as Morden strode in shouting for Aunt Corky. But Morden had lost interest in my aunt and had already plunged back into himself again and sat looking off, dead-eyed and frowning. Then as I was starting to get out of the car he reached forward quickly and caught me by the wrist again and again demanded to know if I had a brother. No, I told him, eager to be away, no, I had no family. Searchingly he gazed into my eyes. ‘A sister?’ he said. ‘No one?’ He slowly nodded. ‘Same as me,’ he said; ‘an orphan.’ Then he let go of me with a wave and I stumbled out on to the road and the car roared away. I stood blinking. I felt as if I had been picked up and shaken vigorously before being tossed negligently aside.

  Aunt Corky had got religion. In her hospital clouts she sat up in bed in her big room and talked ecstatically of God and salvation and Father Fanning (I suppose we shall have to meet him, too, before long). I did not mind. Her voice was a soothing noise. I wanted to crawl under the covers with her and beg her protection. I was shaky and breathless and my legs felt wobbly, as if I had scampered the last few yards of the tightrope and were clinging now to the spangled pole in a sweat of rubber-kneed relief with the vast, dusty darkness yawning beneath me; presently I would have to retrace my quaking steps, back, back to where Morden stood waiting for me in his tights and his acrobat’s boots, grinning his dare-devil grin; but not yet. Aunt Corky’s breakfast tray was on the bedside locker: a porridge bowl with bent spoon, a smeared cup and mismatched saucer, a charred crust of toast. When she stopped talking I hardly noticed. How tired I was suddenly. She peered at me closely, frowning. ‘You,’ she said, and poked me in the chest, ‘what is the matter with you? You look as if you have seen a ghost.’ She was right; an all too familiar revenant, the ghost of an old self, had risen up before me again. If only there were a deed poll by which past deeds might be changed.