Eclipse

by John Banville

  So began our liaison, if that is not too large a word. It was hardly more than a matter of a few crushed kisses, a tremulous brushing of hands, a flash of whey-white thigh in the gap between two cinema seats, a silent tussle ending in a hissed No! and the melancholy snap of released elastic. I suppose she could not take me entirely seriously, callow youth that I still was. “I’m a cradle-snatcher,” she would say, shaking her head and heaving an exaggeratedly rueful sigh. I never felt I had her full attention, for she seemed always faintly preoccupied, as if she were listening past me, intent on some hoped-for response from elsewhere. When I held her in my arms I would have the eerie sensation that she was looking past my shoulder at another presence standing behind me, someone there whom only she could see, watching us in anguish, it might be, or helpless fury. She had too an unsettling way of smiling to herself when we were alone together, her lips twitching and eyes slitted, as if she were enjoying a secret, spiteful joke. I think now there must have been something in her past—dashed hopes, betrayal, an absconded fiancé—for which through me she was taking a phantom revenge.

  She would tell me nothing about herself. She lived in the north end of town, in a rough hinterland of council houses and Saturday-night fights. Only once did she allow me to walk her home. It was deep winter by now, and there was a heavy frost and the darkness glistened and everything was very still and silent, and our footsteps rang on the iron of the frozen pavements. There was hardly a soul abroad. The few night walkers we met seemed to me the very picture of loneliness, huddled into their coats and mufflers, and I felt an uneasy sense of pride, going along with this mysterious warm provoking woman on my arm. The icy air was like a shower of tiny needles against my face, and I was reminded of the slap my mother had given me all those years before, on the day of my father’s death. When we were near her house Dora made me stop and kissed me brusquely and hurried on alone. In the stillness of the vast cold night I stood and heard the scrape of coins as she fished in her purse for her key, heard the key going into the lock, heard the door open and then close behind her. A wireless set was playing somewhere, dance band melodies, a tinny music, quaint and mournful. Above me a shooting star whizzed through its brief arc and I fancied I heard it, a rush, a swish, a sigh.

  It was for Dora, offstage, that I gave my first real performances, filled my first authentic roles. How I posed and preened in the mirror of her sceptical regard. Onstage, too, I saw my talent reflected in her. One night I turned in the midst of my curtain speech—“And which of us, brother, will Ballybog remember?”—and caught the flash of her specs in the wings from where she was watching me narrowly, and under the heat of her sullen envy something opened in me like a hand and I stepped at last into the part as if it were my own skin. Never looked back, after that.

  The curtain goes down, the interval bar is invaded, and in the space of the huge silence that settles on the briefly emptied auditorium, thirty years fleet past. It is another first night and, for me, a last. I am at what the critics would call, reaching down again into their capacious bag of clichés, the height of my powers. I have had triumphs from here to Adelaide and back. I have held a thousand audiences in the palm of my hand, ditto a bevy of leading ladies. The headlines I have made!—my favourite is the one they wrote after my first American tour: Alexander Finds New World to Conquer. Inside his suit of armour, however, all was not well with our flawed hero. When the collapse came, I was the only one who was not surprised. For months I had been beset by bouts of crippling self-consciousness. I would involuntarily fix on a bit of myself, a finger, a foot, and gape at it in a kind of horror, paralysed, unable to understand how it made its movements, what force was guiding it. In the street I would catch sight of my reflection in a shop window, skulking along with head down and shoulders up and my elbows pressed into my sides, like a felon bearing a body away, and I would falter, and almost fall, breathless as if from a blow, overwhelmed by the inescapable predicament of being what I was. It was this at last that took me by the throat onstage that night and throttled the words as I was speaking them, this hideous awareness, this insupportable excess of self. Next day there was a great fuss, of course, and much amused speculation as to what it was that had befallen me. Everyone assumed that drink was the cause of my lapse. The incident achieved a brief notoriety. One of the newspapers—in a front-page story, no less—quoted a disgruntled member of the audience as saying that it had been like witnessing a giant statue toppling off its pedestal and smashing into rubble on the stage. I could not decide whether to feel offended or flattered by the comparison. I should have preferred to be likened to Agamemnon, say, or Coriolanus, some such high doomed hero staggering under the weight of his own magnificence.

  I see the scene in scaled-down form, everything tiny and maniacally detailed, as in one of those maquettes that stage designers love to play with. There I am stuck, in my Theban general’s costume, mouth open, mute as a fish, with the cast at a standstill around me, appalled and staring, like onlookers at the scene of a gruesome accident. From curtain-up everything had been going steadily awry. The theatre was hot, and in my breastplate and robe I felt as if I were bound in swaddling clothes. Sweat dimmed my sight and I seemed to be delivering my lines through a wetted gag. “Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?” I cried—it is now for me the most poignant line in all drama—and suddenly everything shifted on to another plane and I was at once there and not there. It was like the state that survivors of heart attacks describe, I seemed to be onstage and at the same time looking down on myself from somewhere up in the flies. Nothing in the theatre is as horribly thrilling as the moment when an actor dries. My mind was whirling and flailing like the broken belt of a runaway engine. I had not forgotten my lines—in fact, I could see them clearly before me, as if written on a prompt card—only I could not speak them. While I gagged and sweated, the young fellow playing Mercury, who in the guise of Amphitryon’s servant Sosia was supposed to be cruelly taunting me on the loss of my identity, stood transfixed behind plywood crenellations, looking down at me with terrified eyes in which I am convinced I could see myself doubly reflected, two tiny, bulbous Amphitryons, both struck speechless. Before me, in the wings, my stage-wife Alcmene was trying to prompt me, reading from the text and frantically mouthing my lines. She was a pretty girl, preposterously young; since the beginning of rehearsals we had been engaged behind the scenes in an unconvinced dalliance, and now as she writhed there in the looming half-darkness, her mouth working mutely like the valve of an undersea creature, I felt embarrassed less for myself than for her, this child who that very afternoon had lain in my arms weeping sham tears of ecstasy, and I wanted to cross the stage quickly and put a restraining finger tenderly to her lips and tell her that it was all right, that it was all all right. At last, seeing in my face, I suppose, something of what I was thinking, she let the text fall to her side and stood and looked at me with a mixture of unconcealable pity, impatience and contempt. The moment was so grotesquely apt to the point we had arrived at in our so-called love affair— both silent, lost for words, confronting each other in dumb hopelessness —that despite my distress I almost laughed. Instead, with an effort, and with more fondness than I had managed to show to her even in the intensest toils of passion, I nodded, the barest nod, in apology and rueful gratitude, and looked away. Meanwhile, behind me in the auditorium the atmosphere was pinging like a violin string screwed to snapping point. There was much coughing. Someone tittered. I glimpsed Lydia’s stricken white face looking up at me from the stalls, and I remember thinking, Thank God Cass is not here. I turned about and with funereal tread, seeming to wade into the very boards of the stage, made a grave, unsteady exit, comically creaking and clanking in my armour. Already the curtain was coming down, I could feel it descending above my head, ponderous and solid as a stone portcullis. From the audience there were jeers now, and a scattering of half-heartedly sympathetic applause. In the dimness backstage I had a sense of figures running to and fro. One of the actors behind
me spoke my name in a furious stage whisper. With a yard or two still to go I lost my nerve entirely and made a sort of run for it and practically fell into the wings, while the gods’ vast dark laughter shook the scenery around me.

  I should have had another Dora, to mock me out of my malady of selfness. She would have grasped my neck in a wrestler’s hold—she could be rough, could Dora—and rubbed her rubbery breasts against my back and laughed, showing teeth and gums and epiglottis with its quivering pink polyp, and I would have been cured. As it was, I had to flee, of course. How could I show my face in public, to my public, after the mask had so spectacularly slipped? So I ran away, not far, and hid my head here in shame.

  Before I fled I did seek help in discovering what might be the exact nature of my malady, though more out of curiosity, I think, than any hope of a cure. In a drinking club late one gin-soaked night I met a fellow thesp who some years previously had suffered a collapse similar to mine. He was far gone in drink by now, and I had to spend a grisly hour listening to him pour out his tale of woe, with many slurs and wearisome repetitions. Then all at once he sobered up, in that disconcerting way that unhappy drunks sometimes manage to do, and said that I must see his man—that was how he put it, in a ringing, cut-glass voice that silenced the surrounding tables, “Cleave, you must see my man!” —and wrote down on the back of a cardboard beer mat the address of a therapist who, he assured me, tapping a finger to the side of his nose, was the very soul of discretion. I forgot all about it, until a week or two later I found the beer mat in my pocket, and looked up the telephone number, and found myself one glassy April evening at the unmarked door of a nondescript red-brick house in a leafy suburb, feeling inexplicably nervous, my heart racing and palms wet, as if I were about to go onstage in the most difficult part I had ever played, which was the case, I suppose, since the part I must play was myself, and I had no lines learned.

  The therapist, whose name was Lewis, or Louis—I never did discover whether it was a first or surname—was an oldish young man with very beautiful, dark-brown, haunted eyes. He gave me an undertaker’s handshake and led me up carpeted stairs that made me think of my mother’s lodging house, and deposited me in a cramped and faintly smelly waiting room looking through net curtains down into a yard with dustbins and a cat. A quarter of an hour passed. The house around me had a funereal, tensely waiting atmosphere, as if in certain expectation of frightful occurrences about to take place. Not a sound stirred the silence. I imagined Lewis locked in terrible, wordless commune with some hapless wretch far sicker than I was, and I saw myself a fraud, and was tempted to run away. Presently he came and fetched me to his consulting room on the first floor—gunmetal desk, two armchairs, porridge-coloured carpet—and I launched at once into a gabbling and faintly hysterical confession of how fraudulent I felt. He held up a fine, hairless hand and smiled, closing his eyes briefly, and shook his head. I suppose it was the kind of thing he heard from all first-timers. I could not let it go, however, and said I really did not know why I was there, and was startled when he agreed and said that he did not know, either. I had not realised he was being humorous. “Why don’t you try to tell me,” he said gently, “and then maybe we’ll both know.” My wariness deepened, for I suspected he knew very well who I was, and what the matter was, for it was only a week or two since my disgrace had been splashed, liked vomit, all over the newspapers. I supposed it might be bad manners on his part, professionally speaking—indeed, bad ethics—to admit to any knowledge gathered outside this room. Anyway, so far as our hour together was concerned there was no outside. The therapist’s room, where even the silence is different, is a world to itself. Certainly, my experiences with Cass were of no help to me here. Indeed, Cass did not enter my thoughts at all. One’s troubles are always unique.

  We sat in the armchairs, facing each other, with the desk to one side of us like a watchful referee. I have only the haziest recollection of what things I told him. There were frequent, awkward silences. At one point, to my annoyance, though not unexpectedly, tears came into my eyes. He contributed little, in the way of words, though his attendance on mine had a marked if enigmatic eloquence. Two things that he said I do clearly remember. I had complained that I was not happy, and hastened to laugh and say I supposed he was about to ask me why I thought I should be, but to my surprise he shook his head, and turned aside and looked out through the bay window behind the desk into the boughs of the chestnut tree outside that was coming into leaf, and said that no, on the contrary, he believed that joy is the natural state of human beings. He went on to refine this statement, acknowledging that of course we do not always know what is natural or best for us, but I was hardly listening, for the notion was so amazing to me it left me speechless, literally, and the session ended early that day.

  The other thing I remember him saying is that I seemed to him to be overwhelmed—that was the word he used. I thought this fanciful, even a touch melodramatic, and said so. He persisted, however, by which I mean that he did not argue or protest, but only sat in silence, watching me with an alert, calm gaze, and after a moment’s consideration I had to agree with him, and said, yes, overwhelmed, that was exactly how I felt. “But what is it that is overwhelming me?” I said, more in impatience than entreaty. “That is what I want to know.” Needless to say, he did not offer an answer. I did not go to him again after that, not because I was disappointed, or angry that he had not been able to help me, but simply because there seemed nothing more for me to say to him. I suspect he felt this too, for when I was leaving that day he shook my hand with a warmer pressure than usual, and his smile was weighed with melancholy sadness; it was the smile of a father seeing his troubled son step out into the world to fend for himself. I think of him with nostalgia, almost with a sense of loss. Perhaps he did help me, without my realising it. The silence in that room of his was like a balm. I wrote to Cass and told her about him. It was a kind of confession, ill-masked with facetious humour; a kind of apology, too, as I took my place shamefacedly in the lower ranks of the high consistory of which she was an adept of long standing. She did not reply. I had signed myself The Overwhelmed.

  What am I to do about this girl, this Lily? She preys on my mind, which has, I know, too little to occupy it. I feel like an impotent satrap presented by his subjects with yet another superfluous concubine. Her presence makes the house seem impossibly overcrowded. She has upset the balance of things. My phantom woman and her more phantasmal child were quite enough without this all too corporeal girl to dog my doings. I edge around her presence as though it might explode in my face at any moment. On her first full day in my employ she scrubbed half the kitchen floor, took everything out of the refrigerator and put it all back again, and did something to the downstairs lavatory so that even still it will not flush properly. After these labours her enthusiasm for housework waned. I could get rid of her, of course, could tell Quirke I do not need her, that I can care for the house myself, but something prevents me. Is it that I have been unconsciously pining for company? Not that Lily could be said to be companionable, exactly. She sulks about the place as if she were under house arrest. Why does she stay, if she is so discontent? I pay her a pittance, hardly more than pocket money, so there is no profit in it for her, or for Quirke, either. And anyway, why did he foist her on me in the first place? Perhaps he feels guilty for the years of neglect of the house, although I suspect guilt is not one of the more burdensome affects under which Quirke chafes. She stays late into the evening, asprawl in an armchair in the parlour reading glossy magazines, or brooding chin on fist beside a window, following with inexpectant gaze the few passers-by in the square. It is twilight by the time Quirke comes to fetch her, wobbling to the door on his bike and looming in the hallway in his bicycle clips, uneasy and humble-seeming as a poor relation. I note the heavy hand he lays on her shoulder and the way she tries half-heartedly to squirm out from under his grasp. I do not know where it is they go to at close of day; they trail off aimlessly together into t
he night, seemingly without fixed direction. I watch the fitful glow of the rear light of Quirke’s bicycle dwindling in the darkness. What sort of life do they lead away from here? When I enquired one day about her mother, Lily’s expression went blank. “Dead,” she said flatly, and turned away.

  She is constantly bored; boredom is her mode, her medium. She gives herself up to inaction almost sensuously. She is a voluptuary of indolence. In the midst of performing some common task—sweeping the floor, polishing a windowpane—she will droop gradually to a stop, her arms falling limp, her cheek languishing toward her shoulder, her lips gone slack and swollen. At those moments of stillness and self-forgetting she takes on an unearthly aura, exudes a kind of negative radiance, a dark light. She reminds me of Cass, naturally; in every daughter I see my own. They could not be more different, in almost all ways, this dull slattern and my driven girl, and yet there is something essential that is common to them both. What can it be? There is the same deadened, disenchanted glance, the same way of slowly blinking, and focusing with a frowning effort, that Cass at Lily’s age would turn on me when I tried to cajole or hector her out of one of her melancholy moods. But there must be more than that, there must be something deeper than a look, that makes me tolerate this invasion of my solitude.