Ghosts

by John Banville

  ‘Hatch,’ said Hatch.

  ‘Hatch I mean. Ha ha! And Pound – Pound? Yes.’ A mumbling, a shuffling of feet. He sat down. ‘Ouf! what a business,’ he said. ‘I believe that captain was drunk. I said to him, I did, I said to him, You will be responsible, remember! A tour of the islands, we were told; a pleasure cruise. What pleasure, I ask, what cruise? Look at us: we are like the Swiss family Robertson!’ He laughed excessively, his shoulders shaking, and paused for a moment, licking his lips with a glistening tongue-tip. ‘This house, sir,’ he said softly, in an almost confidential voice, ‘the garden, those trees up there,’ pointing, ‘I have to tell you, it is all very handsome, very handsome and agreeable. I hope we do not inconvenience you. We shall be here only for a very little time. A day. Less than a day. An afternoon. Perhaps an evening, no more. Dusk, I always think, is so lovely in these latitudes: that greying light, those trembling shadows. I am reminded of my favourite painter, do you know the one I mean?’ He mused a moment, smiling upwards, displaying his profile, then looked at the Professor again and smiled. ‘You will hardly know we are here at all, I think. Our wings –’ he made an undulant movement with his hands ‘– our wings will scarcely stir the air.’

  Another silence settled and all sat very still again, waiting for the Professor to speak. But the Professor said nothing, and Felix shrugged and winked at Sophie and made a face of comic helplessness. Licht turned to the stove with a wincing look, his shoulders hunched, as if something had fallen and he were waiting for the crash. A little leftover breathy sob took Alice by surprise and she gulped, and glanced at Hatch quickly and blushed. Felix drummed his fingertips on the table and softly sang:

  Din din!

  Don don!

  The sun shone in the window, the wind rattled the back door on its latch.

  ‘This milk is sour,’ Pound said. ‘Jesus!’

  The lounge, as it is called, is a long, narrow, low-ceilinged, cluttered room with windows looking out to sea. It smells like the railway carriages of my youth. Here, in the unmoving, brownish air, big, indistinct lumps of furniture live their secret lives, sprawled armchairs and an enormous, lumpy couch, a high, square table with knobbled legs, a roll-top desk sprouting dog-eared papers so that it looks as if it is sticking out a score of tongues. Everything is stalled, as though one day long ago something had happened and the people living here had all at once dropped what they were doing and rushed outside, never to return. Still the room waits, poised to start up again, like a stopped clock. I have my place to sit by the window while I drink my morning tea, wedged in comfortably between a high bookcase and a little table bearing a desiccated fern in a brass pot; behind me, above my head, on a bureau under a glass dome, a stuffed owl is perched, holding negligently in one mildewed claw a curiously unconcerned, moth-eaten mouse. From where I sit I can see a bit of crooked lawn and a rose bush already in bloom and an old rain barrel at the corner of the house.

  I think to myself, My life is a ruin, an abandoned house, a derelict place. The same thought, in one form or another, has come to me at least once a day, every day, for years; why then am I surprised anew by it each time?

  I have my good days and my bad. Guess which this one is.

  Tea. Talk about tea. For me, the taking of tea is a ceremonial and solitary pleasure. I prefer a superior Darjeeling; there was a firm of merchants in Paris, I remember – what were they called? – who did a superb blend, an ounce or two of which they would part with in exchange for a lakh of rupees. Otherwise a really fine Keemun is acceptable, at a pinch. Then there is the matter of the cup: even the worst of Licht’s stewed sludge will taste like something halfway decent if it is served in, say, an antique fluted gold-rimmed piece of bird’s-egg-blue Royal Doulton. I love bone china, the very idea of it, I want to take the whole thing, cup and saucer and all, into my mouth and crack it lingeringly between my teeth, like meringue. Tea tastes of other lives. I close my eyes and see the pickers bending on the green hillsides, their saffron robes and slender, leaf-brown hands; I see the teeming docks where half-starved fellows with legs like knobkerries sticking out of ragged shorts heave stencilled wooden chests and call to each other in parrot shrieks; I even see the pottery works where this cup was spun out of cloud-white clay one late-nineteenth-century summer afternoon by an indentured apprentice with a harelip and a blind sister waiting for him in their hovel up a pestilential back lane. Lives, other lives! a myriad of them, distilled into this thimbleful of perfumed pleasure –

  Oh, stop.

  The philosopher asks: Can the style of an evil man have any unity?

  The lounge.

  The day outside was darkening. A bundled, lead-coloured cloud burning like magnesium all along its edge had reared up in the window. A crepitant stillness gathered, presaging rain. I wonder what causes it, this expectant hush? I suppose the air pressure alters, or the approaching rain damps down the wind somehow. I should have studied meteorology, learned how it all works, the chaotic flood and flow of things, air currents, wind, clouds, these vast nothingnesses tossing to and fro over the earth.

  Flora is dreaming of the golden world.

  Worlds within worlds. They bleed into each other. I am at once here and there, then and now, as if by magic. I think of the stillness that lives in the depths of mirrors. It is not our world that is reflected there. It is another place entirely, another universe, cunningly made to mimic ours. Anything is possible there; even the dead may come back to life. Flaws develop in the glass, patches of silvering fall away and reveal the inhabitants of that parallel, inverted world going about their lives all unawares. And sometimes the glass turns to air and they step through it without a sound and walk into my world. Here comes Sophie now, barefoot, still with her leather jacket over her shoulders, and time shimmers in its frame.

  She stopped inside the door and looked about her at the big dark pieces of furniture huddled in the brownish gloom, and immediately there started up in her head the rattly music of a barrel organ and she saw a little girl standing at a window above a wide avenue, with grey light like this lingering and dead leaves in the wind stealthily scurrying here and there over the pavement. Assailed, she sank down into a corner of the sagging couch, drawing up her legs and folding them under her and gingerly massaging her bruised instep. There were so many things she was tired of remembering, the happy as well as the bad. The apartment on Kirchenallee, the upright piano by the window where she practised scales through the endless winter afternoons, her fingers stiff from the cold and her kneecaps numb. Smell of almonds and ersatz coffee, of the dust in the curtains where she leaned her head, looking down on the people passing by on the broad, bare pavements of the ruined city, hunched and hurrying, carrying bags or clutching parcels under their arms, like people in a newsreel. Her mother in the kitchen selling silk stockings and American cigarettes from a suitcase open on the table, talking and talking in that high, fast voice that sounded always as if at any moment it might break and fly off in pieces like a shattering lightbulb. The customers were furtive, timid, resentful, Frau Müller who limped, the sweaty, grey-faced man in the tight suit, that skinny girl from the café across the street. They glanced at her guiltily with weak, somehow beseeching smiles as they crossed the living room, hiding their purchases; how quietly, how carefully they would shut the door behind them, as if they were afraid of breaking something. She had thought she had managed to forget all that, she had thought she had banished it all, and now here it was again. The past mocked her with its simplicities, its completedness.

  You see how for them too the mirror turns transparent and that silver world advances and folds them in its chill embrace?

  She longed to be in her darkroom, in that dense, red, aortic light, watching the underwater figures darken and take shape, swimming up to meet her. Things for her were not real any longer until they had been filtered through a lens. How clear and small and perfectly detailed everything looked inside that little black box of light!

  Humbly the first d
rops of rain tapped on the window.

  All out there, oh, all out there.

  What if, I ask myself, what if one day I were to wake up so disgusted with my physical self that my flesh should seem no longer habitable? Such torment that would be: a slug thrashing in salt.

  Sophie.

  Sophie sighed and

  Sophie looked at her hands and sighed and closed her eyes for a second. She felt dizzy. There was a sort of whirring in her head. It was as if she had been spinning in a circle and had suddenly stopped. When she was a little girl her father would take her hands and whirl her round and round in the air until her feet seemed to fill with lead and her wrists creaked. It was like flying in a dream. Afterwards, when he let go of her and she stood swaying and hiccuping, everything would keep on lurching past her like a vast, ramshackle merry-go-round. And sometimes she grew frightened, thinking it was the movement of the earth she was seeing, the planet itself, spinning in space. She had never really lost it, that fear of falling into the sky. There were still moments when she would halt suddenly, like an actor stranded in the middle of the stage, lines forgotten, staring goggle-eyed and making fish-mouths. She took a cigarette from the packet in the pocket of her leather jacket and struck a match. She paused, watching the small flame creep along the wood, seeing the tiny tremor in her hand. Corpsing: that was the word. She imagined being in bed here, in an anonymous little room up at the very top of the house, just lying at peace with her hands resting on the cool, turned-down sheet, looking at the sea-light in the salt-rimed windows and the gulls wheeling and crying. To be there, to be inconsequential; to forget herself, even for a little while; to stop, to be still; to be at peace.

  She entertained the notion that her father was alive somewhere, a fugitive in the tropic south, on some jungly islet, perhaps; she pictured him, immensely old by now, shrivelled and wickedly merry, sitting at his ease in the shade outside an adobe shack, tended hand and foot by a flat-nosed Indian woman while naked children brown and smooth as mud gambolled at his feet, with the broad, cocoa-coloured river at his back, and beyond that the enormous forest wall, screeching, green-black, impenetrable. She wanted him to have been important, terrible, a hunted man; it was her secret fantasy. They had waited for him day after day in the icy apartment (strange how heavy the cold felt, a sort of invisible, stony substance standing motionless in the air), then week after week, then the weeks became months, the months years, and he did not come. She thought of him as she had seen him for the last time, going down the stairs with a kit-bag on his shoulder. She could not remember his face now, but she recalled how lightly he had skipped down the steps, whistling, his head with its oiled hair and neat white parting sinking from sight. The pain, the outrageous pain of being abandoned had surprised her, the way all pain always surprised her in those days, like news from another world, the big, the real one, where she did not want to go but to which each day brought her a little closer. She was six years old when he left. Her mother lay in bed at night and cried; night after night, Sophie could hear her from across the hall, moaning and gulping, stuffing the pillow into her mouth, trying to stop herself, trying not to be heard, as if it were something shameful she was doing, some shameful act.

  There was a scrabbling at the door and Croke came in cautiously, first a big, liver-spotted paw, then bigger head, then knees, then last of all the bowed back. He glanced about the room and did not see her curled up in the shadowed corner of the sofa. He advanced to the window, stepping over the carpet with a camel’s ponderous slouch, seeming to lag half a pace behind his legs, his long head swaying on its drooped stalk. The rain was coming down heavily now, like a fall of dirty light. He stood with his hands behind his back and stared out bleakly, his loose lips pursed as if he were trying to remember how to whistle.

  ‘The golden world!’ he muttered, in a tone of deep disgust.

  He farted, closing one eye and scrunching up his face at the side. At Sophie’s soft laugh he started in fright and peered wildly at her over his shoulder.

  ‘Jesus!’ he cried. ‘Do you want to kill me?’ He waggled his fingers at her as if he were sprinkling water. ‘Sitting there like a ghost!’

  She laughed again. He was a game old brute: when she had stumbled on the bridge and he caught her his big hands had been all over her. She shivered, remembering the feel of his old man’s arm, the slippery, fishy flesh inside the sleeve and beneath it the bone hard and sharp as an ancient weapon. Now he paced agitatedly in a little circle, mumbling to himself and shaking his head. He halted, looking down at his feet.

  ‘My shoes are wringing still,’ he said and did his phlegmy laugh. ‘Leaky as an unstanched wench. Ha!’ He peered at her but she said nothing and he resumed his pacing. He stopped at the window and looked out again balefully at the rain. The world out there had turned to an undulant grey blur.

  Silence. Picture them there, two figures in rainlight. Something, something out of childhood.

  ‘I was trying to think,’ Croke said, ‘of the name of that thing they keep the host in to show it at Benediction. What do they call that? The thing shaped like the sun that the priest holds up. Did you ever see it? What is it, now. I’ve been trying to remember all morning.’ He sighed. ‘And I was an altar boy, you know.’ He turned to her stoutly, expecting her to laugh. ‘I was.’

  But she was not listening. She sat and rocked herself in her arms, her eyes fixed on the floor. Croke shrugged and turned away and fiddled with the knobs of a huge, old-fashioned radio standing on a low table beside the window. The green tuning light came on, a pulsing eye, and as the valves warmed up a distant crackling swelled, as if it were the noise of the past itself that was trapped in there among the coils and the glowing filaments. He spun the dial, and out of the crackling a faint voice emerged, speaking incomprehensible words, distantly. Croke listened slack-eyed for a moment and then switched it off.

  Felix came in. When he saw Sophie he hesitated and let his gaze go blank and wander about the room. Croke he ignored.

  ‘What a place!’ he said. ‘You know there is no telephone?’

  She watched him, her eyes narrowed against the smoke of her cigarette. She had heard him creeping about in the hotel corridor last night, until that little bitch had let him in, she was sure of it. She had been using her cupped hand as an ashtray and now she held the swiftly smoking stub of her cigarette aloft and looked about her with a frown. Felix stepped smartly to the mantelpiece and found a saucer there and brought it to her. He watched with what seemed almost fondness as she leaned forward and crushed out the butt. The last, acrid waft of smoke was like something swift and bitter being said. She raised her eyes briefly and then looked away.

  ‘You know who he is,’ he said, ‘the Professor? You recognised him?’ She shrugged, and he shook his head at her reprovingly. ‘O Fama …!’ He heaved a histrionic sigh.

  ‘Tell me, then,’ she said, stung. ‘Tell me who he is.’

  ‘Someone famous. A famous man.’

  She looked sceptical.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  He nodded with mock solemnity and laid a finger to the side of his nose. She felt herself flush. She said brusquely:

  ‘Should you not go and see if the Princess is sleeping soundly?’

  Still he leaned above her in his buttoned brown suit and stringy tie, a pent-up, parcelled man, his smile twitching and one eyebrow arched, studying her. She drew the collar of her jacket tight about her throat.

  ‘Am I,’ he said, ‘the charming Prince, I wonder, or the Beast?’ She did not answer and he advanced his smiling face close to hers and softly asked: ‘Are you jealous?’

  She laughed out loud.

  ‘What, of her?’

  He shook his head once.

  ‘I meant of me,’ he said.

  She opened wide her eyes and looked at him steadily with a formless smile and said nothing. Croke stood motionless with his head lifted as if he were listening to something in the distance, an echo of that voice out of the ether. (Th
at gold thing, like a sort of sunburst, with the big gold knobs on the handle and the big square base, and the price tag still on the instep of the priest’s shoe when he genuflected; smell of incense and of candle-grease, the fleshy stink of lilies – what was it called?) There was a gust of wind, and the rain whispered softly like blown sand against the glass. Felix turned from Sophie with a flourish and strolled up the room and down again at an equine prance, seeming pleased with himself, humming lightly under his breath and smirking. He stopped to examine the stuffed owl, his narrow head lifted at an angle and his lips pursed. A spot of silver light gleamed in the hollow of his temple. He took a dented, flat gold case from his breast pocket and extracted from it a black cheroot and lit it carefully, holding it clipped between the second and third fingers of his left hand.

  ‘I see you kept your baccy dry, anyhow,’ Croke at the window said, and still was ignored.

  ‘We have not had a real talk, you and I,’ Felix said to Sophie over his shoulder, making a frowning face at the owl. A ribbon of harsh smoke trickled out at the corners of his mouth. The bird stared back at him with apoplectic fixity. ‘We should, I think, don’t you?’

  Abruptly the rain stopped and the sun came out shakily and everything outside shimmered and dripped.

  ‘Talk?’ Sophie said. ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘Oh, anything. Everything. I am trying to be friendly, you see.’

  Sophie considered his narrow back for a moment thoughtfully.

  ‘Who is he?’ she said. ‘That old man.’

  ‘What? I told you: a famous person. From the past. A professor of fine arts.’ He seemed to find that very funny. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, laughing without sound, one bony shoulder shaking, ‘a great appreciator of the fine arts!’