John Banville - Ghosts

Felix, then: it must be Felix.

Licht spoke a word under his breath.

‘What?’ the Professor said.

‘Flora,’ Licht answered and looked up at him defiantly. ‘That’s her name. Flora.’ Then he turned and skipped off swiftly down the stairs.

The room that Flora found herself in was small and had a low ceiling; everything in it seemed made on a miniature scale, so that she felt huge, with impossible hands and feet. Also the floor sloped; when she got up from the bed and walked to the window it was as if she were toppling backwards in slow motion. One of the panes in the little window was broken and a piece of cardboard was wedged in its place. Down in the sunlit yard a few scrawny chickens were picking halfheartedly in the dust and a fat old dog was asleep under a wheelbarrow. When she leaned down she could see fields and, beyond them, that sort of long ridge with trees on it. There was a fire going up there, weak flitters of white smoke were whipping in the wind above the treetops. She waded back to the narrow bed and sat down carefully with her arms pressed to her sides and her hands gripping the edge of the mattress. She could still feel the sway of the sea, a flaccid, teetering sensation, as if her limbs were brim-full of some heavy, sluggish liquid. She was not well, she did not want to be in this house, on this island. When Licht had brought her up here the bed had still been warm from someone sleeping in it. She had lain on top of the covers — a fawn blanket with a suspicious-looking stain in the middle of it and a sheet made, she was convinced, from old flour sacks — not daring to pull them back. The mattress sagged in the middle as if a heavy corpse had been left lying on it for a long time. On the little pine dressing-table there was a hairbrush with a few thin strands of reddish hair tangled in the bristles. A speckled mirror leaned from the wall at a watchful angle, reflecting a mysterious shimmer of grey and blue. She thought of searching the chest of drawers — she liked to poke about in other people’s stuff — but she had not the energy. A coloured reproduction of a painting torn from a book was tacked to the wall beside the mirror. She looked at it dully. Strange scene; what was going on? There was a sort of clown dressed in white standing up with his arms hanging, and people behind him walking off down a hill to where a ship was waiting, and at the left a smirking man astride a donkey.

Felix opened the door stealthily and put in his narrow head and smiled, showing a glint of jagged tooth.

‘Are you decent?’

She did not answer. She felt detached from things. Everything around her was sparklingly clear — the tilted mirror, the window with its sunny view, that little brass globe on the bedpost — but it was all somehow small and far away. She might have been standing at the back of a deep, narrow tunnel, looking out. Felix closed the door behind him and moved in that sinuous way of his to the window, seeming not to touch the floor but rather to clamber smoothly along the wall. He did not look at her but kept smiling to himself with a show of ease. Why had she let him into her room last night? She knew nothing about him, nothing; he had just turned up, suddenly there, like someone she had known once and forgotten who now had come back. That was the strange thing, that there had seemed nothing strange about it when he smiled at her in the hotel corridor and put a hand on the door to stop her shutting it and glanced all around quickly and stepped into the room sideways with a finger to his lips. He could have been anyone: anything could have happened. He was horrible with his clothes off, all skin and bone and sort of stretched, like a greyhound standing up on its hind legs. How white he had looked in the dark, coming towards her, glimmering, with that huge thing sticking up sideways like something that had burst out of him, blunt head bobbling and one slit eye looking everywhere for a way in again. He had squirmed and groaned on top of her, jabbing at her as if it were a big blunt knife he was sticking into her. When she moaned and rolled up her eyes she had felt him stop for a second and look down at her and give a sort of snicker and she knew he knew she was pretending. His hair down there was copper-coloured and crackly, like little tight coils of copper wire.

‘Nice view,’ he said now and for some reason laughed. ‘Lovely prospect. Those trees.’

He came towards her, and his reflection, curved and narrow and tinily exact, slid abruptly over the rim of the polished brass ball on the bedpost beside her. She sat without moving and looked at him and a pleasurable surge of fear made her throat thicken; it was like the panicky excitement she would feel as a little girl when in a game of hide-and-seek some surly, bull-faced boy was about to stumble on her in her hiding-place. She saw that Felix was going to try to kiss her and she stood up quickly, lithe as a fish suddenly, and twisted past him.

‘It’s hot,’ she said loudly. ‘Isn’t it hot?’

Her voice had a quaver in it. He would think she was frightened of him. A voice said mockingly in her head, You are, you are. She leaned down and tried to open the little window. He came up behind her and tapped the frame with his knuckles.

‘Painted shut,’ he said. ‘See?’ She could feel him thinly smiling and could smell his grey breath. He reached up and deftly plucked out a hairpin and her hair fell down; he took a thick handful of it and tugged it playfully and put his mouth to her ear. ‘Poor Rapunzel,’ he whispered. ‘Poor damsel.’

She closed her eyes and shivered.

‘Are you frightened?’ he whispered. ‘You must not be frightened. There is no danger. Everything is safe and sound. We have fallen flat on our feet here.’

In the yard the chickens scratched among the cobbles, stopped, stepped, scratched again. The dog was gone from under the wheelbarrow. Felix breathed hotly on her neck. Everything felt so strange. Her skin was burning.

‘Hmm?’

‘So strange,’ she said. ‘As if I …’

He let fall her hair and, suddenly full of tense energy, turned away from her and paced the little room, head down, his hands clasped behind his back.

‘Yes yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Everyone feels they have been here before.’

She heard the dog somewhere nearby barking half-heartedly.

‘That man,’ she said. ‘I thought he was going to …’

‘Who?’

‘That old man.’

He laughed silkily.

‘Ah, you have met the Professor, have you?’ he said. ‘The great man?’

‘He was standing on the stairs. He —’

‘Do you know who he is?’ He smiled; he seemed angry; she was frightened of him.

‘No,’ she said faintly. ‘Who?’

‘Ah, you would like to know, now, wouldn’t you.’ He glanced at her slyly. ‘He is famous.’

‘Is he?’

‘Or was, at least,’ he said and laughed. ‘I could tell you a secret about him, but I do not choose to.’

She pressed her back against the window-frame and folded her arms, cradling herself, and watched him where he paced. Yes, he would do anything, be capable of anything. She wanted him to hit her, to beat her to the floor and fall on her and feed his fill on her bleeding mouth. She pictured herself dressed in white sitting at a little seafront café somewhere in Italy or the south of France, where he had brought her, the hot wind blowing and the palms clattering and the sea a vivid blue like in those pictures, and she so cool and pale, and people glancing at her, wondering who she was as she sat there demurely in her light, expensive frock, squirming a little in tender pain, basking in secret in the slow heat of her hidden bruises, waiting for him to come sauntering along the front with his hands in his pockets, whistling.