Ghosts

by John Banville

  Somewhere in the house someone loudly sneezed.

  A very large bumble-bee flew in through the back door and did a staggering circle of the room and settled on the window-sill. Sergeant Toner studied it with interest as it throbbed there in its football jersey. He thought how it would feel to be a bee in summertime, drunk on the smell of clover and of gorse, and for a moment his mind reeled in contemplation of the prospect of other worlds.

  Licht came hurrying in from the hall and skidded to a stop and stared at the Sergeant and sneezed.

  ‘God bless you!’ Sergeant Toner said largely, with broad good humour.

  Blinking rapidly and gasping Licht fumbled in his trouser pocket and brought out a greyed handkerchief and stood with his mouth open weakly and his red-rimmed nose tilted back.

  ‘Ah … ah … ahh,’ he said expectantly on a rising scale, but this time nothing happened and amid a general sense of anti-climax he put away his handkerchief. ‘Getting a cold,’ he said thickly. He looked as if he had been weeping. He lifted the lid of the simmering pot on the stove and peered squintingly through the steam.

  The bee with an angry buzzing rose up from the window-sill and flew straight out the door and was gone.

  ‘I was just passing by,’ the Sergeant said, quite at his ease.

  ‘Oh,’ Licht said flatly and nodded, avoiding the other’s eye. He sniffed. ‘Will you take something?’

  The Sergeant considered.

  ‘Glass of water?’ he said, without conviction.

  Licht centred the big black kettle on the hob; a thread of steam was already rising from the spout. Sergeant Toner watched him as he had watched the bumble-bee, with interest, calmly. Licht’s hands were unsteady. He let fall a spoon and tried to catch it and knocked over the tea caddy and spilled the tea. The spoon bounced ringingly on the tiles. The kettle came to the boil.

  ‘I think we’re in for a fine spell,’ the Sergeant said.

  Licht nodded distractedly. He paused with the grumbling kettle in his hand and frowned at the wall in front of him.

  ‘I spend my life making tea,’ he said darkly to himself.

  Sergeant Toner nodded seriously but made no comment. Licht picked up the spoon from the floor and wiped it on his trousers and spooned the tea into the pot and poured the seething water over the leaves and banged the lid back on the pot, then carried pot and a cracked white mug to the table and set them down unceremoniously beside the Sergeant’s hat. Milk, sugar, the same spoon. The Sergeant surveyed the table hopefully.

  ‘A heel of bread would be the thing,’ he said, ‘if you had it.’

  Licht, unseen by the Sergeant, cast his eyes to the ceiling and went to the sideboard and came back with a biscuit tin and opened it and put it on the table with a tinny thump. The fawn smell of biscuit-dust rose up warmly on the air. Sergeant Toner smiled and nodded thanks. Judiciously he poured the tea, raising and lowering the pot with a practised hand, watching with satisfaction the rich, dark flow and enjoying the joggling sound the liquid made filling up the mug. Licht fetched cutlery from a drawer and began to set out places at the table while the Sergeant looked on with placid gaze.

  ‘Visitors?’ he said. Licht did not answer. From the dresser he brought soup bowls and dealt them out. The Sergeant idly counted the places, his lips silently moving. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the time we had the devil-worshippers?’ He glanced up enquiringly. His white eyelashes were almost invisible. ‘Do you remember that?’

  Licht looked at him blankly in bafflement.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘No.’

  ‘Your mother, God rest her, was still with us then.’

  The Sergeant lifted the brimming mug with care and extended puckered lips to the hot brim and took a cautious slurp. ‘Ah,’ he said appreciatively, and took another, deeper draught and then put down the mug and turned his attention to the biscuit tin, rising an inch off the chair and peering into the mouth of the tin with lifted brows. ‘A bad lot, they were,’ he said. ‘They used to cut up cats.’

  Licht went to the sink, where the line of sunlight, thinned to a rapier now, smote him across the wrists. The sink was still piled with unwashed crockery; he stood and looked helplessly at the grease-caked plates and smeared cutlery.

  ‘Locals, were they?’ he said absently.

  The Sergeant was biting gingerly on a ginger nut. ‘Hmm?’

  Licht sighed. ‘Were they locals, these people?’

  ‘No, no,’ the Sergeant said. ‘They used to come over on the boat from the mainland when their feast days or whatever they were were coming up. The solstices, or whatever they’re called. They’d start off by making a big circle of stones down on the strand, that’s how I’d know they were here. Oh, a bad crowd.’

  Licht plunged his hands into the greasy water.

  ‘Did you catch them?’ he asked.

  Sergeant Toner smiled to himself, drinking his tea.

  ‘We did,’ he said. ‘We always get our man, out here.’

  The Professor came in. Seeing the Sergeant he stopped and stood and all went silent. The Sergeant half rose from his chair in respectful greeting and subsided again.

  ‘I was just telling Mr Licht here about the devil-worshippers,’ he said equably.

  The Professor stared.

  ‘Devil-worshippers,’ he said.

  ‘They killed cats,’ Licht said from the sink, and snickered.

  ‘Oh, more than cats,’ said the Sergeant, unruffled. ‘More than cats.’ He lifted the teapot invitingly. ‘Will you join me in a cup of this tea, Professor?’

  Licht came forward bustlingly and put the lid back on the biscuit tin, ignoring the Sergeant’s frown of weak dismay.

  ‘We’re a bit busy,’ Licht said pointedly. ‘I’m making the lunch.’

  Sergeant Toner nodded understandingly but made no move to rise.

  ‘For your visitors,’ he said. ‘That’s grand.’

  For a moment all three were silent. Licht and the Professor looked off in opposite directions while the Sergeant thoughtfully sipped his tea.

  ‘I seen the ferry out on the Black Bank, all right,’ he said. ‘Ran aground, did it?’ He paused. ‘Is that the way they came?’ Then, softly: ‘Your visitors?’

  Licht lifted a streaming plate from the sink and rubbed it vigorously with a dirty cloth.

  ‘The skipper was drunk, apparently,’ he said. ‘That ferry service is a joke. Someday somebody is going to be drowned.’ It sounded a curiously false note; too many words. He rubbed the plate more vigorously still.

  The Sergeant nodded, pondering.

  ‘I was talking to him, to the skipper,’ he said. ‘The eyes were a bit bright, right enough.’ He nodded again and then sat still, thinking, the mug lifted halfway to his mouth. ‘And where would they be now, tell me,’ he said, ‘these castaways?’

  Licht looked at the Professor and the Professor looked at the floor.

  ‘Oh,’ Licht said with a careless gesture, ‘they’re around the house, getting ready.’

  The Sergeant frowned. ‘Ready?’

  ‘To leave,’ Licht said. ‘They’re waiting for the tide to come up.’

  He could feel his voice getting thick and his eyes prickling. He wished now they had never come, disturbing everything. Blast them all. He thought of Flora.

  ‘Just over for the day, then, were they?’ the Sergeant said.

  Licht turned away and muttered something under his breath.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ Sergeant Toner said pleasantly, cupping a finger behind his ear.

  ‘I said,’ Licht said, ‘maybe they came to say a black mass.’

  A brief chill settled. Sergeant Toner was not a man to be mocked. Licht turned to the sink again, head down and shoulders hunched.

  The Professor cleared his throat and frowned. The Sergeant with a musing air inspected a far corner of the ceiling.

  ‘Was there a chap with them,’ he said, ‘thin chap, reddish sort of hair, foreign, maybe?’

  Licht turned fr
om the sink.

  ‘Red hair?’ he said. ‘No, but –’

  ‘No,’ the Professor said heavily, and Licht glanced at him quickly, ‘there was no one like that.’

  Sergeant Toner nodded, still eyeing the ceiling. From outside came the faint buzz of a tractor at work far off in the fields. Licht dried his hands, not looking at anyone now. The Sergeant made a tube of his fist and confided to it a soft, biscuity belch, then poured himself another cup of tea. The sun had left the window but the room was still drugged with its heat.

  ‘Grand day,’ the Sergeant said. ‘A real start to the summer.’

  The Professor looked on as the Sergeant put two spoonfuls of sugar into his tea, hesitated, added a third, and picked up the mug in both large hands and leaned back comfortably on his quietly complaining chair. ‘Did you ever wonder, Professor,’ he said, ‘why people do the things they do?’ The Professor raised his eyebrows and said nothing. ‘I see a lot of it,’ the Sergeant went on, ‘in my line of work.’

  The Professor regarded him with a level stare.

  ‘A lot of what?’ he said.

  ‘Hmm?’ The Sergeant looked up at him smilingly with his head at an enquiring tilt. ‘Oh, anything and everything.’ He drank the last draught of tea and set down the mug firmly on the table and looked at it, smiling to himself. ‘People think we’re out of touch out here,’ he said. ‘That we don’t know what’s going on in the big world. But I’ll tell you now, the fact is we’re no fools at all.’ He looked up laughing in silence. ‘Isn’t that so, Mr Licht?’

  Licht, at the stove peering into the soup-pot, pretended not to hear.

  The Professor turned aside slowly, like a stone statue turning slowly on a pivot. The Sergeant made a show of rousing himself. He slapped himself on the knees and took up his cap and stood up from the table.

  ‘I’ll be on my way now,’ he said, firmly, as if someone were seeking to detain him. He walked heavily to the back door and paused to set his cap carefully on his large head. Before him the afternoon stood trembling in the yard. ‘If you do see that chap,’ he said, ‘the one I mentioned, tell him I’m on the look-out for him.’ He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘You know the one I mean?’

  The Professor was looking away at nothing. Licht turned from the stove and nodded and did not speak.

  ‘Well,’ the Sergeant said, hitching up his belt, ‘good day to you both.’

  He tipped a finger to the peak of his cap and made his way almost daintily down the back step. They listened to the noise of his boots crossing the yard. The dog growled.

  Licht halted on the landing and sneezed hugely, bending forward at the waist and spraying his shoes with spit. ‘Bugger!’ he cried, fumbling for his handkerchief. He waited, peering slackly before him, hankie at the ready, and then sneezed again and shuddered. Perhaps it was Flora’s cold he had caught. The thought brought him a crumb of melancholy comfort. Heavy footsteps sounded below him and presently the Professor appeared, rising up in the stairwell dark-browed and brooding, like an effigy, being borne aloft on unseen shoulders. When he saw Licht he stopped with his foot on the top step and they stood confronting each other with a sort of weary animosity. Suddenly Licht understood that something had happened, that something had shifted, that things would never be again as they had been before. He experienced a pang of regret. He had wanted change and escape but this felt more like an end than a beginning.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what was all that about?’

  He could even hear the new note in his voice, that touch of imperiousness and impatience. The Professor turned aside and looked hard out of the window at the dunes and the far sea.

  ‘I think I may have to leave,’ he said, in a distant voice, as if in his mind he were already on his way.

  ‘Yes?’ Licht said, surprised at himself, at how cold his own voice sounded. The Professor opened his mouth to speak, fumbling the words as if they were coin, but in the end said nothing and shrugged and moved past Licht and went on up the stairs. Licht looked after him as he ascended, like a bundled, flying figure on a painted ceiling, and watched until he was gone from sight, and then listened until his footsteps were no longer to be heard, and even then he lingered, gazing upwards almost wonderingly, imagining the old man rising steadily through higher and still higher reaches of luminous, washed-blue air, and dwindling to a point, and vanishing.

  Listening at the door of what already he thought of as Flora’s room Licht could hear no sound. As the grave. The shadows on the landing seemed to gather about him like other, ghostlier listeners. He tried the doorknob; the tumblers played a sinister phrase on their tiny clavier: locked. He listened again and then tapped a knuckle gently on the wood. He wanted to say her name but did not dare. He knocked again and leaped in fright when at once a muffled voice spoke directly behind the door.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  He looked about him wildly, thrilled with panic. It was as if he had put his hand into a trap and had been invisibly seized and held.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said squeakily. ‘Licht.’ She said nothing. He stood listening to his heart beating itself against the bars of its cage. He felt foolish and at a loss, and inexplicably expectant. ‘Are you all right?’

  There came a sigh and then a faint, silky slithering; when she spoke, her voice was at the level of his knees; she must be sitting on the floor, or kneeling there, perhaps, with her forehead against the door.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said.

  He squatted on his heels and lost his balance and had to steady himself. Clearly, yet with a curious, dreamy sense of inconsequence, and not for the first time, he saw his life for what it was. In the end nothing makes sense.

  ‘There was a guard here,’ he said.

  Briefly he entertained an image of Sergeant Toner marching off down the hill, thumbs hitched in his belt and his big feet splayed, a wind-up, mechanical man with cheery painted cheeks and fixed grin and a huge key slowly rotating between his shoulder-blades.

  ‘A guard?’ Flora said dully through the door.

  ‘Yes. A policeman. He was looking for … he was looking for someone.’

  She said nothing for a long time. He waited and presently she asked him what time it was. He heard her sigh and rise and walk away from the door, her bare feet making a fat, slow little slapping patter on the floorboards, and then the mattress-springs jangled and after that there was stillness again. Shakily he stood up, stiff-kneed and grimacing. He listened for another moment, then sighed and went on down the stairs.

  *

  Everywhere was silence. She lay still and listened but could hear nothing except the far soft gasping of the sea and the gulls crying and that strange booming in the distance. The day glared with a brassy radiance. She felt shaky; her mind was vague yet she had an impression of openness and clarity, as of light falling into a vast, empty room. She remembered Licht coming to the door; was there another after him or had she dreamed it, the timid little knock, the whisperings, the soft noise of breathing as whoever it was stood out there, listening? Alice, was it, or someone else again? Now there was only this silence and a sort of hollowness everywhere. She had made a journey through a dark place: water, seasurge and sway, a dull, repeated rhythm, then a reddening, and then the sudden astonishment of light. Sticky-eyed, with a coppery taste in her mouth and her skin smeared, she struggled from the bed and stood trembling, looking about her at nothing she could recognise, the hot key clutched in her damp hand. Something was starting up, she could sense it. Someone was waiting for her, content to wait, biding his time. She unlocked the door and stepped on to the landing, a blanket clutched about her, and paused a moment to listen again. She heard a step below her on the stairs and drew back, waiting, half in fear and half in fascinated, breathless expectation.

  Nothing could have prepared me for it. After all these weeks, out of nowhere, as if, as if, I don’t know. This morning, not half an hour ago, I, that is Flora and I, that is Flora, when I … Easy. Go easy. What happene
d, after all, except that she began to talk? Yet it has changed everything, has transfigured everything, I don’t know how. Let me try to paint the scene, paint it as it was and not as it seemed, in washes of luminous grey on grey. The kitchen, midsummer morning, eight o’clock. Grey is not the word, but a densened whiteness, rather, the sky all over cloud and the light not falling but seeming to seep out of things and no shadows anywhere. Think of the particular thick dulled shine on the cheek of a tin teapot. Breakfast time. Frail smoke of morning in the air and a sort of muffled hum that is not sound but is not silence either. An ordinary day. My mind does not work very well at that early hour; that is to say, it works, all right, but on its own terms, as if it were independent of me, as if in the night it had broken free of its moorings and I had not yet hauled it back to shore. So I am sitting there at the old pine table, in that light, with the breakfast things set out and a mug of strong tea in one hand and a book in the other and my mind rummaging idly through its own thoughts. Licht and the Professor are still abed – they are late risers – and I am, I suppose, enjoying this hour of solitude, if enjoyment is the word for such a neutral state of simple drift. Enter Flora. She was barefoot, with her shoulders hunched as usual and her hands buried deep in the pockets of Licht’s old raincoat. She sat down at the table and in dumb show I offered her the teapot and she nodded and I poured her out a mug of tea. The usual. We often meet like this at breakfast time; we do not speak at all. How eloquent at these times the sounds that humble things make, the blocky slosh of tea being poured, the clack and dulled bang of crockery, the sudden silver note of a spoon striking the rim of a saucer. And then without warning she began to talk. Oh, I don’t know what about, I hardly listened to the sense of it; something about a dream, or a memory, of being a child and standing one summer afternoon on a hill road under a convent wall and looking across the roofs of the town to the distant sea while a boy who was soft in the head capered and pulled faces at her. The content was not important – to either of us, I think. What interested her was the same thing that interested me, namely … namely what? How the present feeds on the past, or versions of the past. How pieces of lost time surface suddenly in the murky sea of memory, bright and clear and fantastically detailed, complete little islands where it seems it might be possible to live, even if only for a moment. And as she talked I found myself looking at her and seeing her as if for the first time, not as a gathering of details, but all of a piece, solid and singular and amazing. No, not amazing. That is the point. She was simply there, an incarnation of herself, no longer a nexus of adjectives but pure and present noun. I noticed the little fine hairs on her legs, a scarp of dried skin along the edge of her foot, a speck of sleep in the canthus of her eye. No longer Our Lady of the Enigmas, but a girl, just a girl. And somehow by being suddenly herself like this she made the things around her be there too. In her, and in what she spoke, the world, the little world in which we sat, found its grounding and was realised. It was as if she had dropped a condensed drop of colour into the water of the world and the colour had spread and the outlines of things had sprung into bright relief. As I sat with my mouth open and listened to her I felt everyone and everything shiver and shift, falling into vividest forms, detaching themselves from me and my conception of them and changing themselves instead into what they were, no longer figment, no longer mystery, no longer a part of my imagining. And I, was I there among them, at last?