Athena

by John Banville

  I said that I had been doing some work; it was all I could think of that would be vague and businesslike at once. It sounded preposterous. My voice was abnormally loud and unconvincing, as if I were speaking for the benefit of some concealed eavesdropper. Hackett nodded in a thoughtful way. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was what I wanted to have a word about.’

  This was a surprise. I had thought he was just another of the functionaries the authorities like to send periodically to remind me that I am not a free man (life means life: how often has that deceptively tautological-sounding caution rung in my ears).

  I invited him to step into the hall and wait while I fetched my coat.

  A. was gone from the room. I stood a moment gazing about the place in helpless distress, panting, then clattered down the stairs again, in a panic that Hackett would have started nosing about the place, though I’m sure I don’t know what I feared he might uncover; his kind can turn the most trivial of things into a clue to a crime you were not even aware of having committed. I need not have worried, though; he was the soul of punctiliousness. I found him standing to attention in the hall with his hands clasped behind him, blamelessly smiling, like a big gawky schoolboy waiting at the side of the stage on prize-day.

  We walked in the direction of the river. Hackett turned up the collar of his jacket against the drizzle. ‘Forgot my mac,’ he said ruefully; he had a way of injecting into everything he said a note of humorous apology.

  I was in a strange state, unable fully to acknowledge the alarming potentials of this encounter. On the contrary, still swollen and hazy with the thought of A., I seemed to bounce along, like a dirigible come loose from its moorings and softly, hugely adrift, puffed up on heedless bliss. And there was something else, another access of almost-pleasure, which it took me a while to identify: it was relief. To harbour a secret is to have power, says the philosopher, but it is a burden, too. I had not realised, or had forgotten, that the effort of pretending to be someone other than I was was a great, an intolerable weight, one that I was glad to be allowed to put down, if only for a brief while, and by one who claimed to have been amongst those who had loaded it on to my back in the first place. When I told him I had changed my name he smiled indulgently and nodded. ‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘But I don’t mind that. Leopards and spots, Mr M., leopards and spots.’

  The rain was intensifying, big drops were dotted like pearls on his glossy crown.

  I suggested we might go for a drink, or was he on duty? He took this for a joke and laughed appreciatively, crinkling up his eyes. ‘Still a card, I see,’ he said.

  His motor car, a dented red Facade with a nodding plastic dog in the back window, was parked up a narrow street behind the cathedral close. Hackett opened the door for me and we got in. Inside it smelled of pine air-freshener, synthetic leather, sweat; I have travelled many times in the back seats of cars like this, pinned between big, tense, heavy-breathing men in blazers and blue shirts. At once the sheep-stink of our wetted clothes overpowered the tang of pine and the windows began to fog up.

  ‘Terrible about that murder,’ Hackett said. ‘Stabbed her through the eye and cut her diddies off. Like some sort of a ceremony. He’ll do it again, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Wouldn’t I what?’ I said.

  ‘Say he’ll do it again. They always do.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘Ah.’

  After that brief skirmish something that had been standing rigidly between us sat down and folded its arms. I have nothing against the police, you know. I have always found them polite and attentive, with a couple of notable exceptions. One of the first things that struck me about them, at the time when I had to deal with them in the plural, so to speak, was their remarkable curiosity. They were like schoolgirls crowding round one of their number who has finally managed to lose her virginity. Details, they wanted all the dirty details. How they sweated, leaning over me and softly snorting, their nostrils flared, as I recklessly embroidered my squalid little tale for their delectation. But hold on there, they would say, laying a blunt paw softly but urgently on my arm, the last time round you told it different, and I would have to revise practically the entire plot in order to accommodate whatever new twist it was that my imagination, working in overdrive, had just dreamed up. And always at the end of the session there was that rustling and creaking as they sat back on their plastic chairs with a wistful, faraway look in their bruised and pouchy eyes; and then that release of breath, a soft, drawn-out ahh with a grace-note in it of what I can only think was envy. It is true, what has been said, that we get to know a man most intimately when he represents a threat to us. I believe I knew my interrogators better than their wives did. All the more strange, then, that I could not place Hackett. ‘I was there the first time they brought you in,’ he said. ‘Do you not remember?’ No, I did not remember, and to this day I do not know whether he was telling the truth or making it up for some shady and convoluted purpose of his own. I took him for a fool at first; it is one of my failings, that I judge people by appearance. He had, as I would discover, a way of playing with things that made me think of a big, slow, simple-looking cat toying with a captured mouse. He would approach a subject and then take a soft jump back and turn and pretend to fix his attention elsewhere, though one restraining paw remained always extended, with its claws out.

  ‘Them paintings,’ he said dreamily, frowning out at the rain. ‘What do you think of them?’

  The very tip of a thin blade of panic pricked my inflated consciousness and the last of the gas hissed out of the balloon of my euphoria and I came to earth with a bump.

  ‘What paintings?’ I said, too quickly, I’m sure, my voice quivering.

  He laughed softly and shook his head and did not look at me. For a moment he said nothing, letting the silence tighten nicely.

  ‘Tell me this,’ he said, ‘did you recognise them, at all?’

  At that he turned his head and gave me a straight look. At least, it was as near to straight as he could manage, for his nose was pushed somewhat aside (early days on the beat, perhaps, scuffle outside a pub, a punch from nowhere, stars and blood), and that, along with his mismatched, pinhead eyes, made me think of those moon-headed stick figures with combined full-face and profile that Picasso in old age drew on the walls of that château of his at Cap d’Antibes or wherever it was. I almost laughed for fright.

  ‘Recognise?’ I said shrilly. ‘What do you mean, recognise?’

  His face took on a distant, unfocused expression, like that of a very old tortoise, and he sat for a long moment in silence tapping the rhythm of a tune with his fingertips on the steering-wheel. The light inside the fogged-up car was grainy and dense, as if the sky had descended on us. The rain ticked on the roof.

  ‘They say,’ Hackett said at last, pensively, ‘that lightning never strikes the same place twice. But it does. And it has.’ He chuckled. ‘You were the first flash, so to speak.’ I waited, baffled. Inside the silence small, tinny things seemed to tinkle. He glanced at me and grinned slyly and the tip of a purplish tongue appeared between his teeth. ‘You wouldn’t have heard,’ he said softly. ‘The insurance crowd asked us to keep it quiet for a while.’ He paused, still grinning; he seemed to be enjoying himself hugely, in his quiet way. ‘Whitewater House was robbed again,’ he said.

  I turned away from him as if I had been slapped. Breathe slowly. With my sleeve I wiped the window beside me. Three laughing girls with linked arms passed by in the rain. Above the street there was a tightening in the air and the great bell of the cathedral produced a single, reverberant dark stroke. I lowered my eyes in search of shadows and rest. The toes of Hackett’s shoes gleamed like chestnuts. Twill; I had not seen a pair of twill trousers in thirty years. I went to school with the likes of Hackett, farmers’ sons bent on bettering themselves, tough, shrewd, unloquacious fellows with an affecting streak of tentativeness, not my type at all. I treated them with indifference and scorn, but in secret I was made uneasy by
them, daunted by their sense of themselves, the air of dogged authenticity they gave off. Real people: I am never at ease in the presence of real people.

  ‘Half a dozen or more this time,’ Hackett said, ‘frames and all. They backed a van up to the side of the house and handed them out through the window. Knew what they were after, too.’ He pondered the matter briefly and then glanced at me sideways and did his circus clown’s smile. ‘Must have had the help of an expert.’ I was thinking of the Three Graces laughing in the rain. ‘We know who they were, of course,’ he said, thoughtful once more. ‘They as good as left their calling card. It’s a question now of … evidence.’ He paused again, then chuckled. ‘Oh, and you’ll be interested in this,’ he said. ‘One of them gave the security guard a belt of a hammer and damn near killed him.’

  A country road and a big old car weaving from side to side and veering to a halt in the ditch. The scene is in black and white, scratched and jerky, as in an old newsreel. All is still for a moment, then the car rocks suddenly, violently, on its springs and a voice cries out in agony and anguish. Welcome to my nightmares. I am always outside the car, never in it. Is that not strange? Hackett was watching me with quiet interest. I experienced then a flash of that old malaise that seizes on me now and then in moments of stress and extremity, bringing with it a dizzying sense of dislocation, of being torn in two; for a second I was someone else, passing by and glancing in through the window of my self and recognising nothing in this other’s commonplace and yet impenetrably mysterious surroundings.

  ‘Has he a wife?’ Hackett said. I looked at him blankly. ‘Morden,’ he said gently and tapped me once smartly on the knee with his knuckle.

  The rain stopped with a sort of swish.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was the truth.

  Suddenly then, and inexplicably, I experienced a sort of mild, mournful elation. Very strange. Hackett brightened too. In rapid succession he passed a finger under his shirt-collar, grinned, and plucked convulsively at the knees of his trousers. Three tics in a row: somehow I had hit the jackpot.

  We parted then, as if we had settled something between us and for the moment there was nothing left to say. ‘Toodle-oo now, Mr M.,’ Hackett said, ‘and good luck to you.’ As I was getting out of the car he leaned across the seat and laid a hand on my arm. ‘We’ll have a talk again,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we will.’

  I walked back slowly to the house through the shining streets. A molten rip had appeared in the clouds low above the roofs but the rain had started up again and fell about me in big awkward drops like flashing spatters of steel. There are times when I feel drunk though I have not touched a drop for days; or rather, I feel as if I have been drunk and now have begun to sober up, and that the fantasias and false perspectives due to inebriation are about to clear and leave me shocked and gulping in the face of a radically readjusted version of what I had taken the world to be. It never quite arrives, that state of pluperfect sobriety, and I stumble on baffled and deluded amidst a throng of teetotallers who turn from me coldly, tight-lipped, sweeping their skirts aside from my reeling path. As I walked through the rain now my mind raced throbbingly on a single thought. The thought was you. You had the power to push everything else aside, like an arm sweeping across a littered table-top. What did Morden and his pictures, or Hackett and his evidence, what did any of that matter, compared with the promise of all you represented? You see? – you see how I was lost already, careless even of the prospect of the dungeon once again?

  As always, you had left your mark on the house, it resonated with your absence like a piano slammed shut. I climbed to the room, which already I thought of as our room, and sat on the chaise-longue in my wet mac with my knees apart and hands drooping between my thighs and gazed through the window for a long time at the rain spattering raggedly across the rooftops. Have I described the view from our eyrie? Spires and curlicues and beautiful rusted fire-escapes, and a big green copper dome that always reminded me of a cabbage; directly below, on the other side of the road, behind a hoarding and hidden from the street, was a vacant site with flourishing greenery where sometimes, at twilight, a fox appeared, stepping delicately over the rubble with brush down and snout up; beyond that there was a large, stately building, a church or meeting-house or something, foursquare and imposing, that I never could manage to locate when I was at street level. I was cold. Draggingly I turned myself about, a stone statue turning on its plinth, and walked with granite tread to where the pictures were stacked. Of course I had recognised them. I could close my eyes and see the walls of Whitewater House where they had hung, interestingly gapped now in my mind’s eye, like a jigsaw puzzle with half a dozen pieces missing. I had recognised them and at the same time I had not. Extraordinary, this knack the mind has of holding things, however intimately connected, on entirely separate levels, like so many layers of molten silt. I turned and went to the couch and got between the sheets, wet coat and shoes and all, and lay on my side curled up with a hand under my cheek and felt my eyelids fall as if ghostly fingertips had closed them. Gradually the cold seeped out of my bones and I lay swaddled in my own fug, breathing my own smell, a mixture of wet wool, flesh, sweat and damp shoe-leather.

  And here memory, that ingenious stage director, performs one of its impossible, magical scene-changes, splicing two different occasions with bland disregard for setting, props or costumes. It is still Saturday afternoon, it is still raining, there is still that rent in the clouds bright as a magnesium flare, and I am still lying between the smooth new crackly sheets on the chaise-longue, but now I have been divested of my clothes, and A. is in my arms, naked also, or nude, I should say, for she was never merely naked, my pearly, damp darling. That was the first time, as they say; very chaste it was, I can think of no better word, and almost absent-minded, as if we were outside ourselves, half looking away from this strange, laborious act in which our bodies were conjoined; looking away and listening in a kind of subdued astonishment to the far, small noises of a no longer quite recognisable world. The first time, yes, and in a way the last: never again that luxurious, doomed sense of something final, complete, done.

  What do I remember? Tears at the outer corners of her eyes, her sticky lashes; the little hollow at the base of her spine, with its dusting of burnished, fair hairs; the hollow of her throat, too, a tiny cup full of her that I drank to the dregs; the sudden flash of her thigh, fish-belly white, with its thick, lapis-blue artery through which her very life was pulsing. She muttered things under her breath, words I could not catch, and I had the eerie sensation of there being a third with us for whose benefit she was keeping up a breathless running commentary. And once she said No, very loud, not to me but to herself, and went rigid, with her eyes screwed shut and teeth bared, and I waited in alarm, holding myself poised above her on arms quivering like bent bows, and slowly whatever it was went out of her and she gave a hoarse, falling sigh and clung to me, grinding her moist brow against mine. Then she fell asleep.

  Once more I am lying on my side, facing as before towards the window and the dwindling rain, cradling her in my arm now as she snuffles and twitches, and my arm has gone numb but I will not shift it for fear of disturbing her, and besides, I feel heroic here, young Tristan watching sleepless over his Irisch Kind; heroic and foolish, unreal, anxious, exultant. And slowly there unfolded in me a memory from the far past, when as a child one summer afternoon on a holiday at the seaside I stepped out of a tin-roofed cinema expecting rain, fog, boiling clouds, and found myself instead standing in the midst of rinsed and glistening sunlight with a swollen cobalt sea before me upon which a boat with a red sail leaned, making for the hazed horizon, and I felt for once, for one, rare, mutely ecstatic moment, at home in this so tender, impassive and always preoccupied world.

  The rain stopped altogether and the rent in the clouds turned into a broad sash of marian-blue sky and A. woke with a start and frowned as if she did not know who I was. ‘Look,’ I said to her softly, ‘look what we have done
to the weather!’ She peered at me closely to see if I was joking and, deciding I was not, laughed.

  If ever I get round to writing that work of philosophy which I am convinced I have in me, curled up in the amnion of my imagination with its thumb in its mouth, it will be on the subject of happiness. Yes, happiness, believe it or not, that most mysterious because most evanescent of conditions. I know there are those – the mighty Prussians, for instance – who say it is not a condition at all, in any positive sense, holding it to be nothing more than the absence of pain. I do not fall in with this view. Don’t ask me to compare the state of mind of two animals one of which is engaged in eating the other; the happiness I speak of has nothing to do with nature’s fang and claw, but is exclusive to humankind, a by-product of evolution, a consolation prize for us poor winded runners in the human race. It is a force whose action is so delicate and so fleeting we hardly feel it operating in us before it has become a thing of the past. Yet a force it is. It burns in us, and we burn in it, unconsumed. I cannot be now as I was then – I may recall but not experience again the bliss of those days – yet I must not be led by embarrassment and sorrow and pain to deny what I felt then, no matter how shaming or deluded it may seem to me now. I held her to me, this suddenly familiar stranger, and felt her heart beating and listened to the rustle of her breathing and thought I had come at last to my true place, the place where, still and at the same time profoundly stirred, feverish yet preternaturally calm, I would at last be who I was.