Eclipse act-1

by John Banville

  See how I parry and duck, like an outclassed boxer? I begin to speak of the ancestral home and within a sentence or two I have moved next door. That is me all over.

  The incident with the animal on the road in the wintry gloaming was definitive, though what it was that was being defined I could not tell. I saw where I was, and I thought of the house, and knew that I must live there again, if only for a little while. So came the April day when I drove with Lydia down those familiar roads and found the keys, left under a stone beside the doorstep by an unknown hand. Such seeming absence of human agency was proper also; it was as if…

  “As if what?” my wife said.

  I turned from her with a shrug.

  “I don’t know.”

  Once I had made my arrangements—a contract brusquely broken, a summer tour abandoned—it took no time at all, one Sunday afternoon, to move my things down here, the few necessities of what I insist on thinking will be no more than a brief respite from life, an interval between acts. I loaded my bags and books into the boot and the back seat of the car, not speaking, while Lydia looked on with folded arms, smiling angrily. I shuffled from house to car and back again without pausing, afraid that if I stopped once I would not start up again, would dissolve into a puddle of irresolution on the pavement. It was summer by now, one of those vague hazy days of early June that seem made half of weather and half of memory. A soft breeze stirred the lilac bush by the front door. Across the road a pair of poplars were excitedly discussing something dreadful, their foliage tinkling. Lydia had accused me of being a sentimentalist. “All this is just some kind of ridiculous nostalgia,” she said, and laughed unsteadily. She stopped me in the hallway, planted herself and the barrier of her folded arms in front of me and would not let me pass. I stood breathing, burdened with baggage, staring morosely at the floor by her feet, saying nothing. I pictured myself hauling off and hitting her. This is the kind of thing that comes into my head nowadays. It is strange, for I was never a brawler: the word was always weapon enough. It is true that when we were younger and our relations more tempestuous Lydia and I would sometimes resort to fisticuffs to settle a difference, but that was less from anger than other things—how erotic is the sight of a woman winding up her fist to deliver a punch!—for all that one or other of us might come out of the fray with a ringing ear or a chipped tooth. These new thoughts of violence are alarming. Is it not right that I should have put myself out of harm’s way? The harm of others, that is; the harm to others.

  “Be honest,” Lydia said. “Are you leaving us?”

  Us.

  “Listen, my dear—”

  “Don’t call me my dear,” she cried. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that.” I was, I realised, bored. Boredom is the brother of misery, that is something I have been discovering. I gazed away from her, into the soft, unresting air. There were moments even then when the very light seemed thronged with figures. She waited; still I would not speak. “Oh, go, then,” she said, and turned away in disgust.

  But when I was in the car and about to drive off she came out of the house with her coat and her keys and got in wordlessly beside me. Soon we were bowling along through the countryside’s slovenly and uncaring loveliness. We passed by a circus, going in our direction, one of the old-fashioned kind, rarely to be seen any more, with garishly painted horse-drawn caravans, driven by gypsy types with neckerchiefs and earrings. A circus, now, this was surely a good sign, I thought, and began to feel quite gay. The trees were puffs of green, the sky was blue. I recalled a page from my daughter’s homework book I had kept since she was a child, hidden at the back of a drawer in my desk, along with a clutch of yellowed first-night programmes and one or two clandestine love letters. The Bud is in flower, she had written, in the big, wide-eyed hand of a five-year-old. Mud is brown. I feel as fit as a Flea. things can go wrong. A spasm of sweetish sadness made my mind droop; I thought perhaps Lydia was right, perhaps I am a sentimentalist. I brooded on words. Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was. I remarked aloud the smoothness of the road. “When I was young this journey took three hours, nearly.” Lydia threw up her eyes and sighed. Yes, the past, again. I was thinking of my Easter-morning dream. I still felt invaded, as I had that day out in the fields: invaded, occupied, big with whatever it was that has entered me. It is still here; I feel I am pregnant; it is a very peculiar sensation. Before, what I contained was the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be. Now, that essential self has been pushed to the side with savage insouciance, and I am as a house walked up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger. I am all inwardness, gazing out in ever intensifying perplexity upon a world in which nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly what it is. And the thing itself, my little stranger, what of it? To have no past, no foreseeable future, only the steady pulse of a changeless present—how would that feel? There’s being for you. I imagine it in there, filling me to the skin, anticipating and matching my every movement, diligently mimicking the tiniest details of what I am and do. Why am I not writhing in disgust, to feel thus horribly inhabited? Why not revulsion, instead of this sweet, melancholy sense of longing and lost promise?

  The house too had been invaded, someone had got in and had been living here, some tramp or fugitive. There were crusts of bread on the kitchen table and used tea bags in the sink, obscene, squashed brown things. A fire had been lit in the parlour, in the grate were the charred remains of books the intruder had pulled from the shelves and used for fuel. Some titles and parts of titles were still legible. I leaned down and tried to make them out, intent as a scryer: The Revenant, My Mother’s House—apt, that one—something called Heart’s Needle, and, most badly burned, The Necessary… with a final word obscured by a scorch mark that I thought might have been Angel. Not your run-of-the-mill book-burner, evidently. I sat back on my heels and sighed, then rose and picked my way from room to room, frowning at the grime, the faded furnishings, the sun-bleached curtains; how could I stay here? Lydia called to me. I went and found her standing in the lime-smelling lavatory under the stairs, a wrist on her hip, in the pose of Donatello’s David, pointing disgustedly into the bowl, where a gigantic turd was wedged. “Aren’t people lovely,” she said.

  We cleaned up as best we could, gathered the rubbish, opened windows, flung bucketfuls of water down the lavatory pan. I had not dared to venture upstairs yet.

  “I heard from Cass,” Lydia said without looking at me, wringing the neck of a bulging plastic bag.

  I felt the usual constriction in my chest. Cass is my daughter. She has been living abroad.

  “Oh, yes?” I said, cautiously.

  “She says she will be coming home.”

  “The harpies gather, eh?” I had intended it lightly, but Lydia’s brow grew red. “Harpazein,” I said hastily, “to seize. Greek, that is.” Playing the fussy old professor, remote but kindly; when in difficulty, act.

  “Of course, she’ll take your side,” she said.

  I followed her into the parlour. Large dark masses of furniture stood sullenly at attention in the dimness of the gaunt room like almost living things. Lydia walked to the window, lighting a cigarette. On her delicate pale long feet she wore a pair of crimson velvet slippers suggestive of Araby. I marvel to think there was a time when I would have fallen on my face before her in the sand and covered those Arabian feet with kisses, caresses, adoring helpless tears.

  “I didn’t know that there were sides,” I said, too innocently.

  She gave a full cold laugh.

  “Oh, no,” she said, “you know nothing.” She turned, her head swathed in a swirl of ash-blue cigarette smoke, the garden’s menacing greenery crowding in the window behind her, and, between the green, a patch of the sky’s delicate summer azure. In this light the shock of silver in her hair was stark, undulate, ashine. Once in one of our fights she called me a black-hearted bastard and I experienced a warm little thrill, as at a pretty piece of flattery—
that is the kind of black-hearted bastard that I am. Now she gazed at me for a moment in silence, slowly shaking her head. “No,” she said again, with a bitter, weary sigh, “you know nothing.”

  The moment came, which I had been both impatient for and dreading, when there was nothing left for her to do but leave. We loitered on the pavement outside the front door in the milky light of late afternoon, together yet already apart. The day was without human sound, as if everyone else in the world had gone away (how can I stay here?). Then a motor car came fizzing across the square and passed us by, the driver glaring at us briefly, in angry surprise, so it seemed. The silence returned. I lifted a hand and touched the air by Lydia’s shoulder.

  “Yes, all right,” she said, “I’ll go.”

  Her eyes turned glossy and she ducked into the car and slammed the door. The tyres skidded as she drove away. The last I saw of her she was leaning forward over the wheel with a knuckle stuck into an eye. I turned back to the house. Cass, I was thinking. Cass, now.

  Things to do, things to do. Store the kitchen supplies, set out my books, my framed photographs, my lucky rabbit’s paw. Too soon it was all done. There was no avoiding upstairs any longer. Grimly I mounted the steps as if I were climbing into the past itself, the years pressing down on me, like a heavier atmosphere. Here is the room looking out on the square that used to be mine. Alex’s room. Dust, and a mildew smell, and droppings on an inside sill where birds had got in through a broken windowpane. Strange, how places, once so intimate, can go neutral under the dust-fall of time. First there is the soft detonation of recognition, and for a moment the object throbs in the sudden awareness of being unique—that chair, that awful picture—then all composes itself into the drear familiar, the parts of a world. Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averting itself from my unwelcome return. I lingered a moment, feeling nothing except a heavy hollowness, as if I had been holding my breath—as perhaps I had—then I turned and went down a flight, to the first floor, and entered the big back bedroom there. It was light still. I stood at the tall window, where that other day I had seen my not-wife not-standing, and looked out at what she had not-seen: the garden straggling off into nondescript fields, then a huddle of trees, and beyond that, where the world tilted, an upland meadow with motionless miniature cattle, and in the farthest distance a fringe of mountains, matt blue and flat against the sky where the sun was causing a livid commotion behind a heaping of clouds. Having used up the outside, I turned to the in: high ceiling, the sagging bed with brass knobs, a night table with wormholes, a solitary, resentful-looking bentwood chair. The floral-patterned linoleum—three shades of dried blood—had a worn patch alongside the bed, where my mother used to pace, unsubduably, night after long night, trying to die. I felt nothing. Was I here at all? I seemed to be fading in face of these signs, the hollow in the mattress, the wear in the lino; a watcher outside the window would hardly see me now, a shadow only.

  There were traces here too of an intruder; someone had been sleeping in my mother’s bed. Outrage flared briefly, then faded; why should not some Goldilocks lay down her weary head where my poor mother would never again lay hers?

  I loved to prowl the house like this when I was young. Afternoons were my favourite time, there was a special quality to afternoons indoors, a wistfulness, a sense of dreamy distance, of boundless air all around, that was at once tranquil and unsettling. There were hidden portents everywhere. Something would catch my attention, anything, a cobweb, a damp patch on a wall, a scrap of old newspaper lining a drawer, a discarded paperback, and I would stop and stand gazing at it for a long time, motionless, lost, unthinking. My mother kept lodgers, clerks and secretaries, schoolteachers, travelling salesmen. They fascinated me, their furtive and somehow anguished, rented lives. Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves. When one of them moved out I would slip into the vacated room and breathe its hushed, attentive air, turning things over, poking into corners, searching through drawers and mysteriously airless cupboards, diligent as a sleuth hunting for clues. And what incriminating leavings I came up with—a set of horribly grinning false teeth, a pair of underpants caked and brittle with blood, a baffling contraption like the bellows of a bagpipes made of red rubber and bristling with tubes and nozzles, and, best of all, pushed to the back of a wardrobe’s highest shelf, a sealed jar of yellowish liquid in which a preserved frog was suspended, its slash of mouth blackly open, its translucent toes splayed and touching delicately the clouded glass walls of its tomb…

  Anaglypta! That was the name of that old-fashioned wallpaper stuff, stiff with layers of yellowed white paint, with which every other wall in the house is covered to the height of the dado. I wonder if it is manufactured any more. Anaglypta. All afternoon I had been searching for the word and now I had found it. Why glyp not glyph? This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.

  Eight o’clock. The curtain would be going up and I not there. Another absence. I would be missed. When an actor walks out of a performance no understudy can entirely fill his place. He leaves the shadow of something behind him, an aspect of the character that only he could have conjured, his singular creation, independent of mere lines. The rest of the cast feel it, the audience feels it too. The stand-in is always a stand-in: for him there is always another, prior presence, standing in him. Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?

  I heard a noise from downstairs and a shock of fright passed through me, making my shoulder blades quiver and my head feel momentarily hot. I have always been a timid soul, for all the blackness of my heart. I went out creakingly on to the landing and stood amid the standing shadows and listened, clutching the banister rail, registering the clammy texture of old varnish and the oddly unresistant hardness of the wood. The noise came faintly again up through the stairwell, an intermittent, brittle scratching. I recalled the strange animal on the road that night. Then a surge of indignation and impatience made me frown and shake my head. “Oh, this is all completely… !” I began to say, and stopped; the silence took my words and tittered over them. Down there, someone uttered a low, guttural oath, and I went still again. I waited—scratch scratch—then stepped backwards cautiously into the bedroom doorway, squared my shoulders, took a breath, and marched out on to the landing once more, but differently this time—for whose benefit did I think I was putting on this dumb show?—slamming the door behind me, all bluff business now, a man at home in his world. “Hello?” I called out grandly, actorily, though my voice had a crack in it. “Hello, who is there?” This brought a startled silence, with a suggestion of laughter. Then the voice again, calling upwards:

  “Ah, it’s only me.”

  Quirke.

  He was in the parlour, on his hunkers in front of the grate, with a blackened bit of stick in his hand. He had been poking among the remains of the charred books. He turned up his head, an amiable eyebrow cocked, and watched me as I entered.

  “Some tinker must have got in here,” he said without rancour. “Or was it you was burning the books?” This amused him. He shook his head and made a clicking noise in his cheek. “You can’t leave a thing untended.”

  Stalled at the foot of the stairs I nodded, for want of better. Quirke’s sardonical composure is both annoying and unchallengeable. He is the superannuated office boy a solicitor in the town appointed years ago at my request to look after the house. That is, I requested a caretaker: I did not bargain on it being Quirke. He tossed the stick into the fireplace and rose to his feet with surprising agility, brushing his hands. I had already noticed those unlikely hands: pale, hairless, plump in the palm, with long, tapering fingers, the hands of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden. The rest of him is shaped like a sea elephant. He is large, soft-skinned, sandy-haired, in his middle forties, with the ageless aspect of
a wastrel son.

  “There was someone living here, some intruder,” I said, with a heavy emphasis of reproof, wasted on him, as I could see by his unruffled look. “He left more than burned books.” I mentioned, with a qualm of disgust, the thing Lydia had found in the lavatory. Quirke was only the more amused.

  “A squatter is right,” he said, and grinned.

  He was quite at his ease, standing on the hearth rug—another furrow there, kin to the one beside the bed upstairs—and looking about him with an expression of arch scepticism, as if the things in the room had been arranged to deceive him and he was not deceived. His protuberant pale eyes reminded me of a virulent kind of boiled sweet much fancied when I was a boy. There was a raw patch on his chin where the morning razor had scraped too closely. From the pocket of his balding corduroy jacket he brought out a bottle in a brown-paper bag. “Warm the house,” he said, with a lopsided leer, showing the whiskey.

  We sat at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen and drank while the day died. Quirke was not to be got rid of. He squirmed his big backside down on a kitchen chair and lit up a cigarette and planted his elbows on the table, regarding me the while with an air of high expectancy, his boiled eyes roaming speculatively over my face and frame like those of a rock climber searching for a handhold on a not very serious but tricky piece of cliff. He told of the history of the house before my family’s time—he had gone into it, he said, it was a hobby of his, he had the documents, the searches and affidavits and deeds, all done out in sepia copperplate, beribboned, stamped, impressed with seals. I meanwhile was recalling the first time I had found myself weeping in the cinema, soundlessly, unstoppably. It was the ache in my constricted throat that I registered first, then the salt tears that were seeping in at the corners of my mouth. It was deep winter, the middle of a sleety afternoon. I had ducked out of a matinée performance—young Sniveling my understudy’s impossible dream come true—and sloped off on my own to the pictures, feeling foolish and elated. Then when the film started there were these inexplicable tears, hiccups, stifled wails, as I sat shuddering with fists clenched in my lap, the hot drops plopping off my chin and wetting my shirt-front. I was baffled, and mortified, too, of course, afraid the afternoon’s other shadowy voyeurs around me would notice my shameful collapse, yet there was something glorious too in such abandon, such childish transgression. When the picture ended and I skulked out red-eyed into the cold and the early dark I felt emptied, invigorated, rinsed. It became a shameful habit then, twice, three times a week I would do it, in different picture-houses, the dingier the better, with still no notion of what I was weeping for, what loss I might be mourning. Somewhere inside me there must be a secret well of grief from which these springs were pouring. Sprawled there in the phantasmally peopled darkness I would sob myself dry, while some extravaganza of violence and impossible passions played itself out on the vast screen tilted above me. Then came the night when I dried onstage—cold sweat, mute helpless fish-mouths, the works—and I knew I must get away.