Eclipse

by John Banville

  I think that was the day Cass cut off her hair, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, with her mother’s big sempstress’s scissors. It was I who found the shorn tresses strewn on the tiles; I would not have been more shocked had they been splashes of blood. I went to her bedroom to find her but the door was locked. By this stage of early womanhood she had discovered scholarship, and spent the most part of her days shut away in her room overlooking the garden and the harbour, reading in her histories, rummaging back and forth in relentless pursuit of facts—I can still hear the flap and shirr of the heavy pages turning—and writing furiously in her notebooks. The labour was at once a torment to her and a palliative. All that summer she had been engaged on a scheme to plot in maniacal detail Kleist’s last three hours on earth, then abruptly one day she abandoned that and began instead researching the lives of the five children that Rousseau had by his Thérèse, all of whom, for their own good, he had consigned to foundling hospitals. We spent a pleasant week together in Paris, where I strolled the boulevards and sat at sidewalk cafés while she tried to trace the orphans’ fate through old books and documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale. How restful it was to be there, in the autumnal city, with her immured in these safe and pointless labours; I felt like the worldly wise duenna in an Edwardian novel of international manners. In the evenings Cass would come back to our hotel with inky fingers and library dust in her hair, and we would change, and drink an aperitif, and stroll out to a restaurant, the same one every night, run by a studiedly irascible Basque— what a shoulder-shrugging old fraud he was—where we would dine together in companionable silence, making a handsome couple, I don’t doubt, me with my profile, and she sitting upright like a watchful sphinx, that fine heart-shaped head of hers poised on its pale and slender neck. Afterwards we would go to the cinema, or is it the Comédie Française, where she would translate the lines for me in a stage whisper that on one occasion almost got us thrown out of the theatre. In the end, of course, her project on the philosopher’s misfortunate children came to nothing; the offspring of the great leave scant trace upon the page of history. I still have a bundle of foolscap sheets scrawled with notes in her disordered, very black, barbed-wire hand. They are already decaying at the edges.

  Lily has been scrabbling at my door, wanting me to take her to the circus. I can hear faintly the tinny music that has been blaring out from tannoys this past hour, interspersed with frantically enticing announcements of the Grand Opening Performance, which is to begin at noon. I told her repeatedly to go away. The circus, indeed—what next? Perhaps she thinks I really do want to adopt her, not realising that my heart is as hard as Jean Jacques’s ever was. She whined and wheedled for a time, then went off muttering. She is a little wary of me, I think, when I am up here in my alchemist’s cell, busy about these mysterious scribblings. There is something at once unsettling and tantalising about a locked door with someone sitting behind it hour on hour in silence. When I knocked at Cass’s room that day, standing in the corridor clutching a hank of her hair, I had the feeling that I always had on such occasions, a mingling of dread and vexation, and a peculiar, stifled excitedness—Cass, after all, is capable of anything. And I felt foolish, too. A buttery lozenge of late sunlight lay fatly on the carpet runner at my feet. I spoke through the door to her and got no response. There was the circus music—no, no, that is now, not then; things are running together, collapsing into each other, the present into the past, the past into the future. My head feels full of something. It must be the effect of the heat. I wish this oppressive weather would break.

  My phantoms were my own, exclusively mine, that was the point of them. We were a little family together, the three of us, the woman, child, and me the surrogate father. And what a fatherhood it was, absolute and unquestioned, for everything, their very existence, depended on me. Why now have they deserted me? More— why have they deserted me and left this air of accusation behind them, as if it were I who had exorcised them, instead of, as it feels to me, the other way about? I know, I know, I let others in, first the Quirkes, now Lydia, but what of it? These interlopers are merely the living, while what we shared was a communion of the dead. For I have died, that is what has happened to me, I have just this moment realised it. The living are only a species of the dead, someone has written somewhere, and a rare species, at that. I believe it. Come back, sweet shades! come back.

  She cut off all her russet hair and threw it on the floor for me to find. Eventually she unlocked the bedroom door, I heard her do it, and I waited a moment, taking a breath. Inside, she had returned to her table by the open window, and was pretending to write, with books and papers stacked around her in a semicircle on the floor, her little crenellated keep. Bent there over the page she was for me in a flash a child again. I stood behind her. She writes with violent thrusts of her fist, as if she were not writing but, on the contrary, endlessly crossing out. The tufts of hair stood out from her skull like a fledgeling’s ruffled feathers. How defenceless seemed the suddenly bared back of her neck. The day had hazed over, and the garden beyond the window lay in silence, leadenly. High up in the dully luminous sky, immensely far, the swifts, those sharks of the air, were acrobatically at feed. At last she paused and looked up, not at me, but at the world outside, her pen suspended aloft like a dart she was about to throw. When she frowns, the pale patch of skin above each ear develops a wrinkle, an effect I had not seen since she was an infant. The swathe of hair I was holding had a cold, silken, inhuman texture; I laid it on the table beside her elbow.

  “Did you tell her?” she said.

  “Your mother? No.”

  I was remembering, I am not sure why, the afternoons when I used to collect her from the music academy. She was nine that year. She had decided she wanted to learn to play the piano, it was one of her whims. She had no aptitude. She kept at it through a whole winter, though. I would wait for her in the draughty vestibule, vacantly reading the announcements on the notice board, while other pupils came and went, the quiffed mama’s boys with their violin cases like miniature coffins, the girls pasty and glowering, in awkward shoes. Every time the swing door opened a flurry of damp wind would burst in and make a rowdy scene for a moment before being subdued by the gauntly disapproving atmosphere. Now and then one of the teachers would come wandering through, dowdy in tweed skirts and sensible shoes or fingering a despondent tie, distracted, bored, irritable, all of them always seemingly in search of something they had mislaid. There was a touch of bedlam to the place. A soprano’s sudden shriek from some high chamber within would rip the air redly, or a drum-roll would come pounding down the stairs like the footfalls of a rotund inmate making a bid for freedom. Five-finger exercises tinkled, precise, monotonous and insane. At the end of her lesson Cass somehow always contrived to appear from an unexpected direction, up the narrow basement steps when I was watching the double doors of frosted glass that led to the concert room, or from the concert room itself when I had thought she would have been upstairs. How small she looked in those surroundings, under the dusty chandelier, glared at from their shadowy niches by laurel-wreathed busts of the great composers. She would advance with a quick yet somehow hesitating step, shyly, wearing an unfocused dreamy smile, as if she had been doing something not quite proper, her music case gripped tightly under her arm. She would slip her hand into mine almost conspiratorially and lead me firmly from the place, and then stop on the granite step outside and look about her in the wintry twilight, seeming to have been half expecting it all not to be there and enchanted that it was, the lighted shop windows, and seal-like cars plunging past, the hurrying office workers making their way head-down for the train station. Then the spring came, and after the Easter break she did not go back to her lessons. No tenacity, that was always Cass’s problem, one of her problems. We did not try to force her to continue; provocation was the thing to be avoided above all, even in those early days. I found to my surprise that I missed my twice-weekly dawdles there in that cold bleak ante-room. Wha
t is it about such occasions of timeless time that afterwards makes them seem touched with such a precious, melancholy sweetness? Sometimes it seems to me that it is in those vacant intervals, without my being aware of it, that my true life has been most authentically lived.

  Cass was watching the swifts. To be in her presence, even when she is at her most calm, is to be always a little on edge. But no, calm is the wrong word, she is never calm. It is as if she is filled to the brim with some highly volatile substance that must not be interfered with, or even subjected to overly close scrutiny. One must watch her sidelong, as it were, drumming one’s fingers and nonchalantly whistling; I have been doing it for so long I have developed a cast in my eye, I mean the eye of my heart. In childhood her inner turmoil would manifest itself in a series of physical ailments and minor mishaps; she suffered constantly from nose-bleeds, earaches, chilblains, verrucas; she burned herself, scalded herself; she fell down. All this she bore with amused impatience, as if these inflictions were a price she must pay for some eventual blessing, the conferring of which she is awaiting even yet. She bites her nails so deeply that the quicks bleed. I want to know where she is. I want to know where my daughter is and what she is doing. There is something going on, something no one will tell me, I am convinced of it. I shall get it out of Lydia, I shall beat it out of her, if that is what it takes.

  “Remember,” Cass said, leaning forward a little at the table to get a better look at the bird-specks swooping, “remember the stories you used to tell me about Billy in the Bowl?”

  I remembered. She was a bloodthirsty child, was my Cass, as bad as Lily, worse. She loved to hear the ferocious escapades I used to invent for that fabled legless wretch who in olden times went about the city streets at night in a cut-off barrel with wheels and drank the blood of babies, it was said.

  “Why do you think of that, now?” I asked.

  She rubbed a hand on her shorn pate, making a raspy sound.

  “I used to make believe that I was him,” she said, “Billy in the Bowl.” At last she looked at me. Her eyes are green; my eyes, so they tell me, although I cannot see the resemblance. “Do you like it, my haircut?”

  Faintly from on high I could hear the cries of the gorging swifts. One day when she was small she climbed into my lap and gravely said that there were only three things in the world she was not afraid of, toothpaste, ladders, and birds.

  “Yes, Cass,” I said. “I like it.”

  Lily is scratching at my door again. The circus is about to start, she says. Well, let it.

  When eventually I came down from my ivory tower I found Quirke on his knees in the kitchen, shirtsleeves and trouser bottoms rolled, going at the floor with a scrubbing brush and a bucket of suds. I stood and stared, and he sat back on his heels and gave me back a wry look, not at all abashed. Then Lydia came through from the hall with her hair tied up in a scarf and carrying a mop— yes, a mop—looking every inch the cockney charlady; there was even a cigarette dangling from a corner of her mouth. This really is becoming ridiculous. She frowned at me absently. “When are you going to shave off that awful beard?” she said, the cigarette joggling and letting fall a light spray of ash. If Lydia were ever to become lost, the search party could simply follow her cigarette droppings. Quirke was grinning now. Without a word I turned aside from this absurd scene of domestic industry and went in search of Lily, the only one left in this house, seemingly, whom I can depend on to be as irresponsible as I am. She was in her room—I think of it as hers now, no longer my mother’s, which is progress, I suppose, though toward what, exactly, I cannot say— lying on her belly on the bed with her legs up and ankles crossed, reading an inevitable magazine. She was in a sulk, and would not look at me, hesitant in the doorway. Her bare feet were filthy, as usual; I wonder if the child ever bathes. She swayed her legs lightly from side to side in time to some dreamy rhythm in her head. The window was a big gold box of light; the far hills shimmered, dream-blue. I asked if she would care to come for a walk with me.