John Banville - Ghosts

Then somehow she was sitting on the bed again looking at her bare feet on the blue and grey rug on the floor and Felix was sitting beside her stroking her hand.

‘I can give you so much,’ he was saying fervently, in a voice thick with thrilling insincerity. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’

She sighed. She had not been listening.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And then, more distantly: ‘Yes.’

What was he talking about? Love, she supposed; they were always talking about love. He smiled, searching her eyes, scanning her face all over. Behind his shoulder, like another version of him in miniature in a far-off mirror, the man on the donkey in the picture grinned at her gloatingly.

‘Will you be my slave, then, and do my bidding?’ he said with soft playfulness. He lifted a hand and gently cupped her breast, hefting its soft weight. ‘Will you, Flora?’ His dark eyes held her, lit with merriment and malice. It was as if he were looking down at her from a little spyhole, looking down at her and laughing. He had not said her name before. She nodded in silence, with parted lips. ‘Good, good,’ he murmured. He touched his mouth to hers. She caught again his used-up, musty smell. Then, as if he had tested something and was satisfied, he released her hand and stood up briskly and moved to the door. There he paused. ‘Of course,’ he said gaily, ‘where there is giving there is also taking, yes?’

He winked and was gone.

She looked at her hand where he had left it lying on the blanket. Her breast still felt the ghost of his touch. She shivered, as if a cold breeze had blown across her back, her shoulder-blades flinching like folded wings. The day around her felt like night. Yes, that was it: a kind of luminous night. And I am dreaming. She smiled to herself, a thin smile like his, and pulled back the covers and laid herself down gently in the bed and closed her eyes.

When Professor Kreutznaer came down to the kitchen at last the stove was going and Licht was frying sausages on a blackened pan. The Professor stopped in the doorway. The blonde woman sat with her black jacket thrown over her shoulders and an elbow on the table and her head on her hand, regarding him absently, her camera on the table before her. A cloud of fat-smoke tumbled slowly in mid-air. The smaller of the boys was gnawing a crust of bread, the little girl sat red-eyed with her hands in her lap. And that ancient character in the candy-striped coat, what was he? What were they all? A travelling circus? Felix had outdone himself this time. Licht was saying something to him but he took no notice and advanced into the room and sat down frowningly at a corner of the table. The one in the striped blazer cleared his throat and half rose from his chair.

‘Croke’s the name,’ he said heartily, then faltered. ‘We …’ He looked at Sophie for support. ‘Damn boat ran aground,’ he said. ‘That captain, so-called.’

The Professor considered the raised whorls of grain in the table and nodded. The silence whirred.

‘We were in a boat,’ Sophie said loudly, as if she thought the Professor might be deaf. ‘It got stuck on something in the harbour and nearly capsized.’ She pointed to their shoes on the stove. ‘We had to walk through the water.’

The Professor nodded again without looking at her. He appeared to be thinking of something else.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The tides hereabouts are treacherous.’

‘Yes.’ She caught Croke’s eye and they looked away from each other quickly so as not to laugh.

Licht brought the pan from the stove and forked the charred sausages on to their plates, smiling nervously and nodding all around and making as much clatter as he could. He did not look at the Professor. There was a smell of boiled tea.

Felix came bustling in, rubbing his hands and smiling, and sat down beside Pound and picked up a sausage from the boy’s plate and bit a piece off it and put it back again.

‘Yum yum,’ he said, chewing. ‘Good.’

Something tilted wildly for a second. All waited, looking from Felix to the Professor and back again, feeling the air tighten between them across the table. The Professor, frowning, did not lift his eyes. Pound regarded his bitten sausage with sullen indignation.

‘Well,’ Sophie said to break the silence, ‘how is Beauty?’

Felix looked blank for a moment and then nodded seriously.

‘She is not well,’ he said. ‘She has an upset head. A certain dizziness, you know.’

Croke nudged Sophie under the table and whispered hoarsely into her ear:

‘Struck down by our friend Poison-Prick.’

Sophie let her lids droop briefly and she faintly smiled.

Suddenly, as if he had been rehearsing it in his head, Felix jumped up and leaned across the table and thrust out his hand to the Professor.

‘So good of you to take us in,’ he said with a breathy laugh, avoiding the Professor’s eye, ‘so good, yes, thank you.’ The old man looked without expression at the hand that was offered him and after a second Felix snapped it shut like a jack-knife and withdrew it. ‘May I introduce —? This is Mr Croke, and Sophie here, and little Alice, and Patch —’

‘Hatch,’ said Hatch.

‘Hatch I mean. Ha ha! And Pound — Pound? Yes.’ A mumbling, a shuffling of feet. He sat down. ‘Ouf! what a business,’ he said. ‘I believe that captain was drunk. I said to him, I did, I said to him, You will be responsible, remember! A tour of the islands, we were told; a pleasure cruise. What pleasure, I ask, what cruise? Look at us: we are like the Swiss family Robertson!’ He laughed excessively, his shoulders shaking, and paused for a moment, licking his lips with a glistening tongue-tip. ‘This house, sir,’ he said softly, in an almost confidential voice, ‘the garden, those trees up there,’ pointing, ‘I have to tell you, it is all very handsome, very handsome and agreeable. I hope we do not inconvenience you. We shall be here only for a very little time. A day. Less than a day. An afternoon. Perhaps an evening, no more. Dusk, I always think, is so lovely in these latitudes: that greying light, those trembling shadows. I am reminded of my favourite painter, do you know the one I mean?’ He mused a moment, smiling upwards, displaying his profile, then looked at the Professor again and smiled. ‘You will hardly know we are here at all, I think. Our wings —’ he made an undulant movement with his hands ‘— our wings will scarcely stir the air.’

Another silence settled and all sat very still again, waiting for the Professor to speak. But the Professor said nothing, and Felix shrugged and winked at Sophie and made a face of comic helplessness. Licht turned to the stove with a wincing look, his shoulders hunched, as if something had fallen and he were waiting for the crash. A little leftover breathy sob took Alice by surprise and she gulped, and glanced at Hatch quickly and blushed. Felix drummed his fingertips on the table and softly sang:

Din din!

Don don!

The sun shone in the window, the wind rattled the back door on its latch.

‘This milk is sour,’ Pound said. ‘Jesus!’

The lounge, as it is called, is a long, narrow, low-ceilinged, cluttered room with windows looking out to sea. It smells like the railway carriages of my youth. Here, in the unmoving, brownish air, big, indistinct lumps of furniture live their secret lives, sprawled armchairs and an enormous, lumpy couch, a high, square table with knobbled legs, a roll-top desk sprouting dog-eared papers so that it looks as if it is sticking out a score of tongues. Everything is stalled, as though one day long ago something had happened and the people living here had all at once dropped what they were doing and rushed outside, never to return. Still the room waits, poised to start up again, like a stopped clock. I have my place to sit by the window while I drink my morning tea, wedged in comfortably between a high bookcase and a little table bearing a desiccated fern in a brass pot; behind me, above my head, on a bureau under a glass dome, a stuffed owl is perched, holding negligently in one mildewed claw a curiously unconcerned, moth-eaten mouse. From where I sit I can see a bit of crooked lawn and a rose bush already in bloom and an old rain barrel at the corner of the house.