Eclipse

by John Banville

  We turn away from the sunlight, from the squashed slug, the dirty picture, turn back to the house, and decades flash past.

  “Ever see a ghost here?” Quirke asked. “They used to say this place was haunted.”

  I looked at him. He was absorbed in his cards.

  “Haunted?” I said. “By what?”

  He shrugged.

  “Just old stories,” he said. “Old pishogues.”

  “What sort of stories?”

  He sat back on his chair, which gave a shriek, and squinted up into a far corner of the darkness beyond the candlelight. Now Lily was looking at him too, her mouth crookedly open a little way; I wish she would not do that, it makes her look like a retard.

  “Don’t remember,” Quirke said. “Something about a child.”

  “A child.”

  “That died. The mother, too. Probably one of the ones that was lodging here . . .” He looked at me and indicated the girl and let an eyelid flicker.

  “He means,” Lily said to me with ironic emphasis, “someone that got pregnant. I, of course, don’t know where babies come from.”

  Quirke ignored her.

  “Always queer goings-on, in an old house, like this,” he said mildly. “I’ll play the seven.”

  Life, life is always a surprise. Just when you think you have got the hang of it, have learned your part to perfection, someone in the cast will take it into her head to start improvising, and the whole damned production will be thrown into disorder. Lydia turned up today, unannounced. “Well, how could I let you know I was coming,” she snapped, “since you seem to have torn the telephone out of the wall?” When she arrived I was sitting in my eyrie, scribbling away. Have I described this little room, my hidey-hole and refuge? It is at the back of the house, up three high concrete steps, and through a little arched, green-painted door that gives a queer monastic effect. I judge that the room was built on after the house was finished, as a chambre de bonne, though any maid the builder had in mind would have had to be a midget. Only in the middle of the room is there space to stand upright, for the ceiling slopes down steeply, almost to the floor at one side. It is like being in a tent, or the attic of a big doll’s house. I have a little bamboo table at which I write, and a straw-bottomed chair brought up from the scullery. At my elbow, in the end wall opposite the door, a single small square window gives on to a sunny corner of the garden. Outside, just below the window, there is a clump of old geraniums, whose blossoms when the sun is at a certain angle throw a pinkish cast across the pages of my notebook. In the mornings I clamber in here as into a diving bell and shut myself away from the Quirkes, and brood, and dream, and remember, now and then setting down a sentence or two, a stray thought, a dream. There is a distinct rhetorical cast to the tone of these jottings, inevitable, I suppose, given my actor’s training, yet often I catch myself speaking the words aloud as I write them, as if I were addressing them directly to some known and sympathetic ear. Since I found out that the Quirkes are living in the house I have been spending more and more of my time here. I am happy, or happiest, at least, in this sealed chamber, suspended in the tideless sea of myself.

  My wife is a considerable person in many ways. She has been a staunch defence against whatever arrows and bomb-balls the world outside might sling into the compound of our lives together. You should have seen the first-night critics shrink when they beheld her descending on them armed with cigarette and wineglass. However, she is not at her best in emotional adversity. Daddy was too indulgent toward her, I believe, with the result that she has never lost the expectation that there will always be someone in charge who will deal with, for instance, the unanticipated eventualities of marriage and its inevitable woes. Not that she would be incapable of handling such things herself; as I say, she is far more formidable than I am when it comes to practical matters. It is just that she has the queenly conviction that she should not be compelled to spend from her store of strength, which she maintains as if for the commonweal, against the day when a real crisis shall arise, and she will be called upon to burst forth in breastplate and plumed helmet, all pennants flying. When I heard her voice today from far off beyond my little green door I experienced a moment of panic, as if I were a fugitive in hiding behind a false wall and she the head of the secret police. Venturing down from my lair I found her striding about the hall in an angry fluster. She was wearing black leggings and a bright-red, hip-length smock that gave her an ungainly and unbecomingly corpulent aspect. When she is angry a high warbling tearful note rises in her voice.

  “Where were you, for God’s sake?” she said when she saw me. “What’s going on? Who is this girl?”

  Lily, barefoot, in her crooked dress, was standing at a slouch some way behind her in the hall, chewing on a wad of gum and wearing a sullen look. The panic I had felt a minute ago was now replaced by a chilly calm. I have a gift, if gift it is, of quenching in myself at a stroke any fever of the blood or brain. There are, I mean there were, nights when I would cower in the wings, shaking, in a wet funk, as I awaited my cue, only a moment later to step forward in perfect poise, thundering out my lines without trace of tremor or fluff. A floating sensation comes over me at such moments, as if I were being buoyed up on some dense, fluent medium, a Dead Sea of the emotions. From out of this state of almost pleasant detachment I regarded Lydia now with a mild, enquiring air. I noticed my fountain pen was still in my fingers, cocked like a pistol. I almost laughed. Lydia stood with her head held up and to one side, in the attitude of a startled thrush, staring at me, her face set in a sort of rictus of baffled incredulity.

  “That’s Lily,” I said lightly. “She’s the housekeeper.”

  It sounded improbable even to me.

  “The what?” Lydia cried, an avian squawk. “Have you gone completely off your head?”

  “Lily,” I called, “this is Mrs. Cleave.” Lily said nothing, and did not stir, except to shift her slouch from one hip to the other, still rhythmically chewing. Lydia went on looking at me with that large surprised angry expression, leaning backward a little now as if to avoid the possibility of a wildly thrown punch.

  “Look at you, the state of you,” she said, wonderingly. “Is that a beard?”

  “Lily takes care of me,” I said. “Of the house, that is. She came most opportunely. I had been about to ask the nuns across the way if they might have a couple of orphans to spare.” This time I did laugh, an unfamiliar sound. “I could have dressed them up in knee breeches and powdered wigs,” I said, “my Justine and Juliette.” I once played the divine Marquis, in a headband and flounced shirt open to the navel; I quite fancied myself in the part.

  A hurt helpless something came into Lydia’s look and it seemed for a moment she might cry. Instead she sighed heavily down her nostrils and tightened her mouth into a grim line, and turned on her heel and stalked off into the parlour. Lily’s eyes met mine and she could not suppress a little grin, showing the glint of an eye-tooth.

  “Some tea, Lily,” I said softly, “for Mrs. Cleave and me.”

  When I followed her into the parlour Lydia was standing at the window as she had that first day we had come here, with her back to the room and one arm tightly folded across her chest, smoking a cigarette in short, violent puffs.

  “What are you doing, Alex?” she said, in a quavery voice. She did not turn. I hate it when she tries to act, it is embarrassing. She only addresses me by name when she is being theatrical. I let a moment lapse.

  “You’ll be glad to hear,” I said in a bright voice, “that the house is known to be haunted. So you see, I am not losing my marbles after all. Quirke says some child—”

  “Stop,” she said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to hear.” I shrugged. She turned to the room and looked about vaguely with a frown. “This place is filthy,” she murmured. “What does that girl do?”

  “I don’t pay her much,” I said. “In fact, since recently I haven’t been paying her at all.”

  I hoped she would as
k why this was, thus giving me the opportunity of breaking to her the delicate news of my uninvited houseguests, but she only sighed again, still with that preoccupied frown, and shook her head. “I’m not interested in your domestic arrangements here,” she said, with large but unconvinced disdain. She looked at the cigarette in her hand as if she had not noticed it before now. Her voice grew thick with breathy distress. “I take it you have left me and will not be coming back,” she said in a rush, still glaring at the cigarette with glistening eyes.

  I made a show of pondering hard.

  “Now, was that a line of anapaests, do you think,” I said, “or the rarer, shyer amphibrach? I ask out of professional interest. You really should be a poet.” I still had that bloody pen in my hand. I put it down on the mantelpiece, concentrating, so as not to forget later where I had left it; I am becoming very absent-minded, in the matter of small, inanimate things. I could see Lydia in the mirror above the mantelpiece, glaring at the back of my neck. “I’m content here, for the moment,” I said, in a considered tone, turning to her. “You see, it offers me a way of being alive without living.”

  “Of course,” she said. “You’ve always been in love with death.”

  “Spinoza says—”

  “Oh, fuck Spinoza,” she said, but with little force, almost wearily.

  She glanced about for an ashtray, and not finding one shrugged and dropped an inch of ash on the carpet, where it landed softly and did not crumble. I asked if she had heard again from Cass. She shook her head, but I could see she was lying. “Where is she, exactly?” I asked. Again that stubborn shake of the head, as if she were a child refusing to tell on a playmate who has been naughty in the nursery. I tried another approach. “What is the surprise you said she has for me?”

  “She told me not to tell you anything.”

  “Oh, did she.”

  One of the things, the very few things, I have learned, or realised, about myself since coming here is that I am always on the lookout for someone or something on whom to wreak revenge. I do not know what I might be seeking revenge for, or what form my vengeance would take, exactly. I am like my mother waiting for the world to apologise to her for the nameless wrongs she believed it had done her. Like her, I cannot rid myself of the conviction that there is indeed blame to be apportioned, a score to be settled. I am content to wait, to take things slowly, to bide my time, but I am always sure that I shall be avenged, somehow, sometime. Perhaps when that time comes I shall know what the original insult or injustice was. What confusion there is in me; I really am a stranger to myself.

  Out in the kitchen there was a sudden cacophonous blast from Lily’s radio, immediately silenced.

  Lydia was watching me sidelong now, waiting to see what I would do next. Sometimes, for instance at moments like this one, I allow myself to entertain the notion that for all her strengths she is a little afraid of me. I confess I like to keep her on her toes. I am unpredictable. Perhaps she really does think I am mad, and might do her violence. Behind her in the window the garden was an incongruously Edenic medley of gay greens and shimmering, petrol blues. High summer’s abundance is a continuous surprise. “She wants to come home,” she said, “but she can’t, at the moment.” This struck a false note of attempted appeasement, which I refused even to acknowledge. At the moment, indeed.

  “She confides in you, does she?” I said. “She never used to.”

  This is true; whatever differences there may be between my daughter and me, we have always been close enough to read each other’s minds—and it is always, always the two of us against poor Lydia.

  I heard Lily’s bare feet slapping along the corridor from the kitchen, and now she came in bearing a tin tray with a teapot and two unmatching mugs, and a plate piled high with thick, crooked slices of haphazardly buttered bread. I noticed Lydia noticing the crusted dirt on the child’s callused feet and etched into the wrinkled red backs of her heels. Lily, biting her lower lip at one side, carefully avoided looking at me, and set the tray down on the hearth, bending from the waist and deliberately showing the backs of her thighs, pale as a fish’s belly, right up to her narrow behind. “Will I pour?” she said from under her hanging hair in a voice strangulate with suppressed mirth.

  Lydia came forward quickly from the window. “I’ll do it.”

  “Suit yourself,” Lily said, and straightened, still not looking at either of us, and sauntered off, twitching her hips.

  To pour the tea Lydia was forced to sit on the hearth rug, leaning aslant with her legs draped together at an awkward angle to one side, which gave her the look, not unfetching, of a beached mermaid.

  “What age is that child?” she said, frowning at the teak-coloured tea as it glugged into the mugs.

  “Seventeen, she claims.”

  Lydia snorted.

  “Fifteen, more like,” she said, “if that.” There was something about the clumsy, helpless way she was sitting that set up a metronome beat in my blood. “You had better watch out.”

  “She’s practically an orphan,” I said. “Do you think I should make Quirke an offer for her? I’m sure it wouldn’t take more than a shrunken head and pouch of cowrie shells and she could be mine—ours, I mean. What do you say?”

  She brought her legs around in a quick, surprisingly graceful sweep and rose to her knees and offered me the mug. She was very close to me, almost kneeling between my knees. Taking the mug, I allowed my fingers to brush against hers. She went still, her calm gaze fixed on our two hands.

  “You already have a daughter,” she said quietly.

  I took a sip from my mug. I really must instruct Lily in the art of making tea. I am sure she uses tea bags, though I have told her I will not tolerate them, nasty things. Lydia knelt motionless before me, in the attitude of a supplicant, her head hanging.

  “I had,” I said. “Then she grew up. A woman can’t be a daughter.”

  “She needs help, you know.”

  “When has she ever not?”

  She sighed, and transferred her weight from one knee to the other. Thinking she might be about to embrace me I put down my tea mug quickly and rose and walked past her to the window— stepping over that oddly repellent grey worm of ash she had left on the carpet—and stood where she had stood, contemplating the sunlit garden. There is an archaic quality to certain summer days, the ones that come at the close of July especially, when the season has reached its peak and is already imperceptibly in decline, and the sunlight thickens, and the sky is larger and higher and of a deeper blue than before. On such days, autumn is already sounding its first horn-calls, yet the summer still blithely believes it will never end. In that dreamy stillness, like the stillness in the azure distances of a stage set, all the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge. A breeze will spring up, one of the weather’s half-formed thoughts, and something at the corner of your vision will flap once, languidly, and be still again. Confused soft noises mingle in the air, as of a distant revel. There are bee sounds, bird sounds, the needling buzz of a distant tractor. You will catch a fragrance, one that you know but cannot identify, it will remind you of somewhere else, a meadow, with poppies, beside a dusty road, and someone turning to meet you . . . I realised, there at the window, that something had changed, that I had crossed over into a different place. First there had been me, then me and the phantoms, then me and Quirke and Quirke’s girl, and now—I did not know what now, except that this now was new. Behind me I could hear Lydia rising from her knees, grunting a little from the effort.

  “The thing is, my dear,” I said, “I haven’t really got the energy to worry about anyone else, just now.”

  She gave a harsh little laugh.

  “When did you ever?”

  A slug-coloured cat was wading through the garden, batting aside the long grass with large deft subduing gestures of its paws. Life is everywhere, even in the stones, slow, secret, long-enduring. I turned
from the window. I have always disliked this room, this quintessential parlour; there is a touch of the manse about it, with its brownish shadows and lumpy furniture and its cowed, unmoving air. Too many people have been unhappy here. Lydia was sitting now in the old armchair by the fireplace with her joined hands clasped between her knees, staring sightlessly into the grate. In the minute my back was turned she had put on years; in another minute she would throw them off again; it is a thing she does. Those charred books were still in the fireplace. Ashes, ashes everywhere. Lily came in at the door and paused, taking an interested measure of the atmosphere. “Mrs. Cleave and I would like to adopt you,” I said to her, summoning up a big, bright smile. “We want to take you away from all this and give you a proper home and turn you into a little princess. What do you think of that?”

  Lily looked from me to Lydia and back again and smiled warily, then went forward quickly and picked up the tray. As she was leaving I winked at her and she bit her lip again and smirked again and ducked out the door. Lydia sat on in her chair for a moment, motionless, gazing into the grate, then stirred, and released her hands and clapped them on her knees and stood up briskly with the air of one who has come to a large decision.