Athena

by John Banville

  That kiss. Well. The effect of it was to last for days – for weeks. I felt like something that had been shattered and yet was still of a piece, all run through with hairline cracks and fissures and rocking on my base, as if I were an effigy carved from ice and she had come running at me with a hammer and delivered me a ringing blow. I brooded ceaselessly on that brief contact in a state of gloomy joyfulness and misgiving, turning the memory of it this way and that, scrutinising it from every possible angle. At times I got myself into such a state of finicking speculation that I doubted it had happened at all. It was so long since I had kissed a woman I hardly knew how it should feel, and anyway I was always old-fashioned in these matters. Nowadays young people (I still thought her much younger than she was) seemed to kiss each other at the drop of a hat. Everywhere I looked they were at it, in the street, in motor cars, on bicycles, even. And it was not the demure, stiff-backed grappling of my day, but the real thing, open-mouthed, groin-grinding, noisy. I know. I watched them. (It is a wonder I wasn’t arrested.) And of course I could not believe it had meant as much to her as it had to me; the tongue of flame that had licked my middle-aged flesh and made it sizzle would hardly register, surely, on her hot young hide. Probably she was being kissed all the time and thought nothing of it. Yes, I would tell myself sternly, it was nothing at all to her, she hardly noticed it, and I would give myself a vigorous shake, like a dog out of water, and go on about my business, only to fall again immediately, with redoubled frenzy, into tormented, mad-eyed, hopeless speculation. Ice, did I say I was like shattered ice? – a mud pool, more like, hot and heaving, and the thought of her a bubble rising and steadily swelling and then breaking the surface and bursting with an awful plop while down in the depths another bleb of turbid speculation was already forming itself.

  I should say that A. herself was almost incidental to these swoony ruminations, which at their most concentrated became entirely self-sustaining. After all, what did I know of her? This was only the second time I had seen her, not counting the jigsaw-puzzle glimpse through the crumbling plaster of the false wall that first day I entered the house, and even after I had kissed her I could not summon up her face in my memory except in a general way. I know what I am saying here, I know how thoroughly I am betraying myself in all my horrible self-obsession. But that is how it was, at the start: as if in an empty house, at darkest midnight, I had stopped shocked before a gleaming apparition only to discover it was my own reflection springing up out of a shadowy, life-sized mirror. It was to be a long time before the silvering on the back of that looking-glass began to wear away and I could look through it and see her, or that version of her that was all she permitted me to see.

  I felt such a fool. I seemed to myself an absurd figure, something like a village idiot, sad and laughable and yet in a way pathetically endearing. My ribs ached from the effort of holding in check a constantly incipient cheer. The city opened like a rose under the steady radiance of my newfound euphoria. I found myself talking to people in the streets, complete strangers; I might have done anything, ordered drinks on the house in The Boatman or clapped Quasimodo on his hump and dragged him off to the St Gabriel to share a bottle of bubbly with me. And she was everywhere, of course, or phantom images of her, at least: a fleeting face in the crowd, a figure disappearing around a corner, or lone and motionless on the top deck of a bus and being borne away from me down the grey wastes of a broad, windy, leaf-strewn avenue. My powers of misrecognition were prodigious. I remember one occasion in particular, when in the street I ran up panting and clapped a hand on a black-clad shoulder I was certain was hers, only to find myself a moment later confusedly apologising to a short, fierce gentleman of military aspect with a waxed moustache. What strikes me now is how little of thought there was in all this. By thought I don’t mean deep and sober consideration, a weighing of matters upon the balance, that kind of thing, but just ordinary, everyday thinking, the half-conscious drone of instruction and admonition that seems an echo of the voice of a parent long ago teaching me to stand, to walk, to talk. My mind now had become a quaking marsh where if I tried to wade out over what seemed the shallowest margins I would promptly sink up to my crotch. And this, mark you, all this on the strength of a single and wholly ambiguous kiss. Oh, yes, what a fool!

  And yet you, she – both of you! – must have been in something at least of the same elated, twittery state of adolescent expectation and surmise that I was. Surely you were. Don’t say it was all false, or even if it was, say it was only so at the start and became real later. Please, do not deprive me of my delusions, they are all I have.

  Three days passed. I think of them as somehow glazed, the things and events in them fixed, unreal, glossily distinct, and me set down in their midst, stiff-gestured and madly, unstoppably smiling, a manikin in a shop-window display. (Ah, this plethora of metaphors! I am like everything except myself.) I was waiting for A. There was no sense of hurry, everything was proceeding at the heart’s excited but steady pace under a mysterious and ineluctable influence working on us in secret, a kind of aerial geometry that would bend us inevitably toward each other like lines of light in space. I basked in this time out of time as in one of those long Saturday mornings of childhood. She would come. We would be there together. Everything would happen.

  What came instead, however, was Aunt Corky.

  In fact, now that I think of it, it was a Saturday morning when I got the call. It was early and I was bleared after a fitful night and at first I could not understand what was being said. ‘This is Mrs Haddon at the home,’ a stranger’s shrill voice kept repeating, with a rising inflection of annoyance. All I could do was stand on the cold lino of the hall and nod dumbly into the receiver, as if it were the phone itself that was hectoring me. The letter box in the front door behind me opened with a clack and spat a sheaf of bills on to the mat; Hermes was having a busy morning. ‘Hello hello, can you hear me!’ the voice cried. ‘Your auntie has taken a turn!’ In the background I could hear a swooping, ululating noise, and the image came to me of Aunt Corky twirling like a dervish in that black-and-white tiled hallway at The Cypresses, her cerements flying. ‘She’s asking for you,’ Mrs Haddon said stridently. ‘She says she’ll only talk to you.’ The keening noise intensified and drowned her words; she seemed to be saying something about the sun. ‘Sharon,’ she shrieked, ‘Sharon, turn off that bloody thing!’ and the noise stopped abruptly. ‘I’ll come,’ I said, sounding to myself like a sulky child who has been summoned from play. ‘Well, I think you had better,’ Mrs Haddon said, in a bridling, head-tossing tone, as if to let me know she had the right to expect considerably more from me than mere acquiescence.

  She was a darting, nervy woman, oddly formed: thick and rounded in the middle but with thin arms and unexpectedly shapely legs that suggested tennis parties and pleated skirts and pink gins on the lawn. Her face was sharp and pale with a curiously moist sheen, and her washed-blue eyes were prominent and faintly fishy, which gave her something of the goggling look of one of Fragonard’s pop-eyed, milky-skinned ladies. While she talked she looked away fixedly and kept chafing her wrist with a finger and thumb as if she were giving herself a chinese burn. She met me in the glassed-in porch with an air of angry reproach, and although I had come with all speed I found myself mumbling apologetically about traffic and the infrequency of the hill bus. ‘She’s a terror,’ she said, cutting me off. ‘We don’t know what to do with her. And of course when she starts she gets the rest of them going. They’re like children, the lot of them.’ All this was delivered in a distracted mutter with her face firmly averted and her sharp white nose aquiver. She was so pale and unpronounced that she seemed to lack a dimension, and I had the impression that if she turned to me head-on she would contract into a vertical line, like a cardboard cut-out. She led me into the hall, where I spotted her other half, the ghostly Mr Haddon, heavy-jowled, stooped and circumspect, loitering in the shadows by a potted palm; he pretended not to see me and was in turn ignored by his wi
fe. ‘You are the son,’ she said to me; it sounded more like an accusation than a question. When I denied it she tightened her lips, in deprecation, it seemed, not only of me but of my entire irresponsible and unsupportive family. ‘Well,’ she said with a sniff, ‘she has been talking non-stop about him. ’

  That Aunt Corky had a son was news to me. As far as I was aware she was without issue, and the image of her dandling on her knee a small, male reproduction of herself smacked, I am afraid, of the comic. That day, however, what with the dizzy-making earliness of the hour and my mood of adolescent exaltation (that kiss still!), the notion seemed wonderfully piquant and right, somehow, and with a sort of bleary brightness I said, ‘Yes, well well, her son, I see!’ all the while grinning and nodding and making a sort of humming noise under my breath. Mrs Haddon, walking ahead of me up the stairs, threw back a dark and disapproving glance that landed in the region of my knees. As we reached Aunt Corky’s room the door opened and an untidy young man slipped out; seeing us he hesitated and looked about him wildly, ready it seemed to take to his heels. This was Doctor Mutter – I never did catch his name. He need not detain us here, we shall be meeting him again. He reminded me vaguely of a character out of Alice in Wonderland, the Rabbit, perhaps, or the Mad Hatter. Mrs Haddon gave him a hard glare of dismissal and with an awkward nod he sidled off, evidently much relieved.

  Aunt Corky was lying so still and flat on her big bed that at first I thought she was under restraint. She seemed perfectly calm, with her eyes closed, breathing lightly. Redheaded Sharon, today looking about twelve years old, sat beside the bed on a metal chair with her raw knees splayed, reading a comic-book (I caught a glimpse of the open page: slack blood-dark mouth and a big tear and a voice-bubble in the shape of a fat apostrophe: Oh Darren . . ! – such are the things gimlet-eyed Mnemosyne records). As I approached on tiptoe Sharon looked up at me and grinned and winked, and I noticed with a sharp tender shock my aunt’s hand like a big bundle of withered twigs resting in the girl’s extended, fat little paw. I must have looked like the smiling undertaker himself, with my pouched and shadowed eyes and deathbed leer and my mackintosh folded on my arm like a shroud. I leaned over the bed and at once, as on my first visit, Aunt Corky’s elasticated eyelids snapped open and she sat up in her white habit like the Bride of Frankenstein (come to think of it, she did bear a passing resemblance to Elsa Lanchester) and cried, ‘Oh, I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him!’ and clutched at me wildly with one hand while the other twitched agitatedly in Sharon’s clasp. It was a scene for one of the Victorian sentimentalists: The Dream, by Sir Somebody Somebody-Somebody: the stark old woman leaning forward in distress in her disordered bed and supported on one side by the smiling child-nurse, on the other by the ageing and faintly disreputable nephew, whose shabby coat and less than perfect linen bespeak an interest in the whereabouts of the will, while in the background hovers whey-faced Mistress Death. ‘She’s seeing things,’ Sharon confided to me cheerfully, and gently rattled Aunt Corky’s hand and shouted, ‘Aren’t you, love?’ My aunt ignored her and dug her dry old fingers into my arm. ‘He came to me,’ she whispered in a stricken voice, ‘he came to me and stood just there where you are standing now and looked at me. Oh, how he looked at me, with those eyes, his father’s eyes!’ There was a pause then, and something, a sort of shimmer, passed through the room, as if a light-reflecting surface somewhere had been tilted inwards suddenly. ‘You were only dreaming,’ Mrs Haddon shouted, and then, more loudly still, ‘I say, you were only dreaming, that’s all!’ Aunt Corky gave her the merest glance and looked at me again and shrugged. ‘Of course it was a dream,’ she said with airy disdain, and letting go of my hand she reached for her cigarettes on the bedside locker and brazenly lit up, releasing into the air in Mrs Haddon’s direction a big, bold balloon of rolling smoke.

  Yes, yes, there had been a child, so she insisted, a little boy. The story was confused, the details vague. He did not seem even to have had a name, this Wunderkind. She had lost him, she said. I took this to be a euphemism for another violent though unspecified removal such as had befallen her husband, but no, she meant it literally. One day, one terrible day in the midst of the exigencies of war, she had just lost him, his hand had slipped from hers and he was gone. ‘Such things happened, then,’ she said. ‘Such things happened.’ We were silent for a long moment, listening to the raucous cries of gulls and the soft, gastric gurgling of water in the radiator under the window. Sharon and Mrs Haddon had been dismissed so that Aunt Corky might make her confession in confidence. She sat before me wreathed in cigarette smoke with her face turned aside and the light of morning playing on her gilded wig, while I wrestled with the tricky question of how much, if anything, it might be possible to believe of this latest instalment in the convoluted tale of tragedy and loss that she claimed was her life. Would she, even she, invent such a tale? But then I thought, why not? I was in a tolerant mood; I felt positively parental. This was one of the effects that infatuation (for now, I shall put it no more strongly than that) was having on me, this feeling of being fully grown-up at last, an adult called in to deal with a world of children. Aunt Corky might have been a daughter whose cries in the night had summoned me to her bedside, so softly solicitous was my manner. I squeezed her hand, I smiled at her soothingly and nodded, letting my eyelids gravely fall and pursing up my lips, in a travesty of sympathy, full of self-regard. Yes, self-regard, for as usual it was I who was the real object of all this attentiveness, the new-made, sticky-winged I who had stepped forth from the cocoon that A.’s kiss had cracked. Half-heeded, meanwhile, poor Aunt Corky was pouring out the story of her little lost boy. I could see him, all alone on a cratered road under a hare’s-pelt sky in his ragged coat and too-big peaked cap, clutching a cardboard suitcase in his frightened hand. Those eyes, looking at me out of Europe. ‘The dead do not forgive,’ Aunt Corky said, shaking her head sadly and sighing. And then she smiled at me sweetly. ‘But you know that, of course,’ she said.

  Mrs Haddon was waiting for me outside the door, her white hands clasped under her bosom. I wondered if she had been listening at the keyhole. With her prominent, shiny eyes fixed on my adam’s apple she said in a flat voice, ‘She’s very bad.’ I did not know in what sense she was using the word and could not think how to frame the question, and so I just nodded vaguely and put on a troubled expression. In fact, in all those weeks with Aunt Corky I never did find out exactly what it was that ailed her. I think she was just dying of herself, if I can put it that way. I walked with Mrs Haddon in solemn silence down the stairs. I could feel her wrestling with something and at last she brought it out, though in a roundabout fashion. ‘Have you a family?’ she said. I was being asked that question with remarkable frequency these days. I shook my head vigorously, half realising, I suppose, what was coming. ‘Your auntie needs a home,’ she said, in the restrained tones of a great hostess whose patience is being sorely tried by a no longer welcome but distressingly tenacious house-guest. ‘You wouldn’t want her to die here.’ This was a shock in more ways than one. It was the first time I had heard it said in so many words that the old girl was dying; if it was true, and these were her last days, I could not decide what was more significant for me, that it increased the burden of my responsibility or promised a quick release – for me, I mean. I said nothing. I had begun seriously to take fright. What had seemed a harmless indulgence on my part had sprouted tendrils that were already wrapped around my ankles. I wanted to say that I could think of no more fitting place to die than this, but instead I muttered that I was living alone, that I had very little space and few facilities for an invalid, and that really I could not think of, I could not manage to, it would be impossible for … I’m sure I was blushing, my face felt as if it were on fire and there was a horrible thickening in my throat.

  Amazing how the world keeps on offering new opportunities for betrayal. I had thought I was finished with everything: desire and duty, compassion, the needs of others – in a word, life – yet here I
was, mooning after a girl and lumbered with a dying relative, up to my oxters again in the whole bloody shenanigans. No wonder I was in a funk. Slope-shouldered in his funereal dark suit Mr Haddon was waiting for us at the foot of the stairs with a carefully detached look in his eye. Beside me his wife called out to him grimly, ‘I was just saying to Mr Morrow that his auntie is in need of a home.’ He glanced at me with what seemed a melancholy hint of fellow-feeling; we were both afraid of this woman with her pale fish-eyes and candle-grease skin and air of screwed-down hysteria. I trotted out for him the same set of excuses I had given her, and plunged for the door, talking over my shoulder and fighting my arms into my mackintosh as if it were a pair of recalcitrantly flaccid wings I was trying to put on.