Ghosts

by John Banville

  He began cautiously to descend the stairs, wincing on each step as the boards squeaked. If it was Felix, how had he found his way here? Chance? He smiled to himself bitterly. Oh, of course – pure chance. He could feel the past welling up around him, a smoking, sulphurous stuff.

  At the window on the first-floor landing he paused again and looked out at the distant sea. How clear it was today: he could see the burnished tufts of grass on the slopes of the dunes tossing in the wind. He liked mornings, the cold air and immensities of light, the raw, defenceless feel of things. This was the time to work, when the brain was still tender from the swoons and mad alarms of sleep and the demon flesh had not yet reasserted its foul hegemony. Work. But he no longer worked. He could feel the wind pummelling the house, pounding softly on the window-panes. On the sill a fly was buzzing itself to death, fallen on its back and spinning madly in tiny, spiralling circles. He leaned against the window-frame and at once the old questions rose again, gnawing at him. How can these disparate things – that wind, this fly, himself brooding there – how can they be together, continuous with each other, in the same reality? Incongruity: disorder and incongruity, the grotesqueries of the always-slipping mask, these were the only constants he had ever been able to discern. He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a tiny sip of darkness. Stay here, never stir again, gradually go dry and hollow, turn into a brittle husk a breath of wind would blow away. He imagined it, everything quiet and the light slowly changing and evening coming on, then the long dark, then rain at dawn and the gull’s wing, then shine again, another bright day declining towards dusk, then another night, endlessly.

  Suddenly there was a muffled cataclysm and the door behind him opened and Flora came out. At first he saw her only as a silhouette against a haze of white light in the lavatory window at her back. She shimmered in the doorway as if enveloped in some dark, flowing stuff, an angled shape flexing behind her shoulder like a wing being folded.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and, so it seemed to him, laughed.

  She closed the door behind her with one hand while with the other she held up her long hair in a bundle at the nape of her neck. He touched a hand to his crooked bow-tie. A hairpin fell to the floor and she crouched quickly to retrieve it. He looked down at her knees pressed tightly together, pale as candle-wax, and saw the outlines of the frail bones packed under the skin and caught for a second her warm, dark, faintly urinous smell. She was barefoot. As she was rising she swayed a little and he put out a hand to steady her, but she pretended not to notice and turned from him with a blurred, stiff smile, murmuring something, and went away quickly down the stairs, still holding up the flowing bundle of her hair. When she was gone the only trace of her was the borborygmic grumbling of the cistern refilling, and for a moment he wondered if he might have dreamed her. Suddenly the image of his mother rose before him. He saw her as she had been when he was a child, turning from shadow into light, a slight, small-boned woman in a black dress with a bodice, her heavy dark hair, which gave her so much trouble and of which she was so vain, done up in two braided shells over her ears and parted down the middle with such severity he used to think it must hurt her, the white weal scored from brow to nape like a bloodless wound. Das Mädel, his father used to call her, with a bitter, mocking smile, das kleine Mädel. Father in his white suit standing under the arbour of roses, idly drawing figures on the pathway with the tip of his cane, gay and disappointed and dreamily sinister, like a character out of Chekhov. Where was that? Up on the Baltic, the summer house. In the days when they had a summer house. The past, the past. He faltered, as if he had been struck a soundless blow, and closed his eyes briefly and pressed his fingertips to the window-sill for support, and a sort of hollow opened up inside him and he could not breathe.

  Licht came up the stairs. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, sounding annoyed. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  The Professor blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘She said you were …’

  They looked at each other. Licht was the first to turn away his eyes.

  ‘Who is that,’ the Professor said after a pause.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That girl.’

  Licht shrugged and hummed a tune under his breath, tapping one foot. The Professor lifted his weary eyes to the window and the shining day outside. The wind was still blowing, the fly still buzzed. He turned to Licht again.

  ‘What did you say to them?’ he said. ‘Have they asked to stay?’

  Licht frowned blandly and went on humming as if he had not heard, picking with a fingernail at a patch of flaking paint on the wall in front of him. The Professor descended a step towards him menacingly and paused. He could feel it suddenly, no mistaking it, the tiny but calamitous adjustment that had been made in their midst.

  Felix, then: it must be Felix.

  Licht spoke a word under his breath.

  ‘What?’ the Professor said.

  ‘Flora,’ Licht answered and looked up at him defiantly. ‘That’s her name. Flora.’ Then he turned and skipped off swiftly down the stairs.

  The room that Flora found herself in was small and had a low ceiling; everything in it seemed made on a miniature scale, so that she felt huge, with impossible hands and feet. Also the floor sloped; when she got up from the bed and walked to the window it was as if she were toppling backwards in slow motion. One of the panes in the little window was broken and a piece of cardboard was wedged in its place. Down in the sunlit yard a few scrawny chickens were picking halfheartedly in the dust and a fat old dog was asleep under a wheelbarrow. When she leaned down she could see fields and, beyond them, that sort of long ridge with trees on it. There was a fire going up there, weak flitters of white smoke were whipping in the wind above the treetops. She waded back to the narrow bed and sat down carefully with her arms pressed to her sides and her hands gripping the edge of the mattress. She could still feel the sway of the sea, a flaccid, teetering sensation, as if her limbs were brim-full of some heavy, sluggish liquid. She was not well, she did not want to be in this house, on this island. When Licht had brought her up here the bed had still been warm from someone sleeping in it. She had lain on top of the covers – a fawn blanket with a suspicious-looking stain in the middle of it and a sheet made, she was convinced, from old flour sacks – not daring to pull them back. The mattress sagged in the middle as if a heavy corpse had been left lying on it for a long time. On the little pine dressing-table there was a hairbrush with a few thin strands of reddish hair tangled in the bristles. A speckled mirror leaned from the wall at a watchful angle, reflecting a mysterious shimmer of grey and blue. She thought of searching the chest of drawers – she liked to poke about in other people’s stuff – but she had not the energy. A coloured reproduction of a painting torn from a book was tacked to the wall beside the mirror. She looked at it dully. Strange scene; what was going on? There was a sort of clown dressed in white standing up with his arms hanging, and people behind him walking off down a hill to where a ship was waiting, and at the left a smirking man astride a donkey.

  Felix opened the door stealthily and put in his narrow head and smiled, showing a glint of jagged tooth.

  ‘Are you decent?’

  She did not answer. She felt detached from things. Everything around her was sparklingly clear – the tilted mirror, the window with its sunny view, that little brass globe on the bedpost – but it was all somehow small and far away. She might have been standing at the back of a deep, narrow tunnel, looking out. Felix closed the door behind him and moved in that sinuous way of his to the window, seeming not to touch the floor but rather to clamber smoothly along the wall. He did not look at her but kept smiling to himself with a show of ease. Why had she let him into her room last night? She knew nothing about him, nothing; he had just turned up, suddenly there, like someone she had known once and forgotten who now had come back. That was the strange thing, that there had seemed nothing strange about it when he smiled at her in the hotel corridor and put a hand on the door to
stop her shutting it and glanced all around quickly and stepped into the room sideways with a finger to his lips. He could have been anyone: anything could have happened. He was horrible with his clothes off, all skin and bone and sort of stretched, like a greyhound standing up on its hind legs. How white he had looked in the dark, coming towards her, glimmering, with that huge thing sticking up sideways like something that had burst out of him, blunt head bobbling and one slit eye looking everywhere for a way in again. He had squirmed and groaned on top of her, jabbing at her as if it were a big blunt knife he was sticking into her. When she moaned and rolled up her eyes she had felt him stop for a second and look down at her and give a sort of snicker and she knew he knew she was pretending. His hair down there was copper-coloured and crackly, like little tight coils of copper wire.

  ‘Nice view,’ he said now and for some reason laughed. ‘Lovely prospect. Those trees.’

  He came towards her, and his reflection, curved and narrow and tinily exact, slid abruptly over the rim of the polished brass ball on the bedpost beside her. She sat without moving and looked at him and a pleasurable surge of fear made her throat thicken; it was like the panicky excitement she would feel as a little girl when in a game of hide-and-seek some surly, bull-faced boy was about to stumble on her in her hiding-place. She saw that Felix was going to try to kiss her and she stood up quickly, lithe as a fish suddenly, and twisted past him.

  ‘It’s hot,’ she said loudly. ‘Isn’t it hot?’

  Her voice had a quaver in it. He would think she was frightened of him. A voice said mockingly in her head, You are, you are. She leaned down and tried to open the little window. He came up behind her and tapped the frame with his knuckles.

  ‘Painted shut,’ he said. ‘See?’ She could feel him thinly smiling and could smell his grey breath. He reached up and deftly plucked out a hairpin and her hair fell down; he took a thick handful of it and tugged it playfully and put his mouth to her ear. ‘Poor Rapunzel,’ he whispered. ‘Poor damsel.’

  She closed her eyes and shivered.

  ‘Are you frightened?’ he whispered. ‘You must not be frightened. There is no danger. Everything is safe and sound. We have fallen flat on our feet here.’

  In the yard the chickens scratched among the cobbles, stopped, stepped, scratched again. The dog was gone from under the wheelbarrow. Felix breathed hotly on her neck. Everything felt so strange. Her skin was burning.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘So strange,’ she said. ‘As if I …’

  He let fall her hair and, suddenly full of tense energy, turned away from her and paced the little room, head down, his hands clasped behind his back.

  ‘Yes yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Everyone feels they have been here before.’

  She heard the dog somewhere nearby barking half-heartedly.

  ‘That man,’ she said. ‘I thought he was going to …’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That old man.’

  He laughed silkily.

  ‘Ah, you have met the Professor, have you?’ he said. ‘The great man?’

  ‘He was standing on the stairs. He –’

  ‘Do you know who he is?’ He smiled; he seemed angry; she was frightened of him.

  ‘No,’ she said faintly. ‘Who?’

  ‘Ah, you would like to know, now, wouldn’t you.’ He glanced at her slyly. ‘He is famous.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Or was, at least,’ he said and laughed. ‘I could tell you a secret about him, but I do not choose to.’

  She pressed her back against the window-frame and folded her arms, cradling herself, and watched him where he paced. Yes, he would do anything, be capable of anything. She wanted him to hit her, to beat her to the floor and fall on her and feed his fill on her bleeding mouth. She pictured herself dressed in white sitting at a little seafront café somewhere in Italy or the south of France, where he had brought her, the hot wind blowing and the palms clattering and the sea a vivid blue like in those pictures, and she so cool and pale, and people glancing at her, wondering who she was as she sat there demurely in her light, expensive frock, squirming a little in tender pain, basking in secret in the slow heat of her hidden bruises, waiting for him to come sauntering along the front with his hands in his pockets, whistling.

  Then somehow she was sitting on the bed again looking at her bare feet on the blue and grey rug on the floor and Felix was sitting beside her stroking her hand.

  ‘I can give you so much,’ he was saying fervently, in a voice thick with thrilling insincerity. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’

  She sighed. She had not been listening.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And then, more distantly: ‘Yes.’

  What was he talking about? Love, she supposed; they were always talking about love. He smiled, searching her eyes, scanning her face all over. Behind his shoulder, like another version of him in miniature in a far-off mirror, the man on the donkey in the picture grinned at her gloatingly.

  ‘Will you be my slave, then, and do my bidding?’ he said with soft playfulness. He lifted a hand and gently cupped her breast, hefting its soft weight. ‘Will you, Flora?’ His dark eyes held her, lit with merriment and malice. It was as if he were looking down at her from a little spyhole, looking down at her and laughing. He had not said her name before. She nodded in silence, with parted lips. ‘Good, good,’ he murmured. He touched his mouth to hers. She caught again his used-up, musty smell. Then, as if he had tested something and was satisfied, he released her hand and stood up briskly and moved to the door. There he paused. ‘Of course,’ he said gaily, ‘where there is giving there is also taking, yes?’

  He winked and was gone.

  She looked at her hand where he had left it lying on the blanket. Her breast still felt the ghost of his touch. She shivered, as if a cold breeze had blown across her back, her shoulder-blades flinching like folded wings. The day around her felt like night. Yes, that was it: a kind of luminous night. And I am dreaming. She smiled to herself, a thin smile like his, and pulled back the covers and laid herself down gently in the bed and closed her eyes.

  When Professor Kreutznaer came down to the kitchen at last the stove was going and Licht was frying sausages on a blackened pan. The Professor stopped in the doorway. The blonde woman sat with her black jacket thrown over her shoulders and an elbow on the table and her head on her hand, regarding him absently, her camera on the table before her. A cloud of fat-smoke tumbled slowly in mid-air. The smaller of the boys was gnawing a crust of bread, the little girl sat red-eyed with her hands in her lap. And that ancient character in the candy-striped coat, what was he? What were they all? A travelling circus? Felix had outdone himself this time. Licht was saying something to him but he took no notice and advanced into the room and sat down frowningly at a corner of the table. The one in the striped blazer cleared his throat and half rose from his chair.

  ‘Croke’s the name,’ he said heartily, then faltered. ‘We …’ He looked at Sophie for support. ‘Damn boat ran aground,’ he said. ‘That captain, so-called.’

  The Professor considered the raised whorls of grain in the table and nodded. The silence whirred.

  ‘We were in a boat,’ Sophie said loudly, as if she thought the Professor might be deaf. ‘It got stuck on something in the harbour and nearly capsized.’ She pointed to their shoes on the stove. ‘We had to walk through the water.’

  The Professor nodded again without looking at her. He appeared to be thinking of something else.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The tides hereabouts are treacherous.’

  ‘Yes.’ She caught Croke’s eye and they looked away from each other quickly so as not to laugh.

  Licht brought the pan from the stove and forked the charred sausages on to their plates, smiling nervously and nodding all around and making as much clatter as he could. He did not look at the Professor. There was a smell of boiled tea.

  Felix came bustling in, rubbing his hands and smiling, and sat down besi
de Pound and picked up a sausage from the boy’s plate and bit a piece off it and put it back again.

  ‘Yum yum,’ he said, chewing. ‘Good.’

  Something tilted wildly for a second. All waited, looking from Felix to the Professor and back again, feeling the air tighten between them across the table. The Professor, frowning, did not lift his eyes. Pound regarded his bitten sausage with sullen indignation.

  ‘Well,’ Sophie said to break the silence, ‘how is Beauty?’

  Felix looked blank for a moment and then nodded seriously.

  ‘She is not well,’ he said. ‘She has an upset head. A certain dizziness, you know.’

  Croke nudged Sophie under the table and whispered hoarsely into her ear:

  ‘Struck down by our friend Poison-Prick.’

  Sophie let her lids droop briefly and she faintly smiled.

  Suddenly, as if he had been rehearsing it in his head, Felix jumped up and leaned across the table and thrust out his hand to the Professor.

  ‘So good of you to take us in,’ he said with a breathy laugh, avoiding the Professor’s eye, ‘so good, yes, thank you.’ The old man looked without expression at the hand that was offered him and after a second Felix snapped it shut like a jack-knife and withdrew it. ‘May I introduce – ? This is Mr Croke, and Sophie here, and little Alice, and Patch –’