John Banville - Ghosts

Long ago it was painted red but the years and the salt winds have turned it to a light shade of pink. The roof is steep with high chimneys and gay scalloping under the eaves. The delicate octagonal turret with the weathervane on top is a surprise, people see its slender panes flashing from afar and say, Ah! and smile. On the first floor there is a balcony that runs along all four sides, with french windows giving on to it, where no doubt before the day is done someone will stand, with her hand in her hair, gazing off in sunlight. Below the balcony the front porch is a deep, dim hollow, and the front door has two broad panels of ruby glass and a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s paw. Details, details: pile them on. The windows are blank. Three steps lead from the porch to a patch of gravel and a green slope that runs abruptly down to a stony, meandering stream. Gorse grows along the bank, and hawthorn, all in blossom now, the pale-pink and the white, a great year for the may. Behind the house there is a high ridge with trees, old oaks, I think, above which seagulls plunge and sway. (Oaks and seagulls! Picture it! Such is our island.) This wooded height lowers over the scene, dark and forbidding sometimes, sometimes almost haughty, almost, indeed, heroic.

The house is a summer house; at other seasons, especially in autumn, it wheezes and groans, its joints creaking. But when the weather turns warm, as now, in May, and the fond air invades even the remotest rooms, something stirs in the heart of the house, like something stirring out of a long slumber, unfolding waxen wings, and then suddenly everything tends upwards and all is ceilings and wide-open windows and curtains billowing in sea-light. I live here, in this lambent, salt-washed world, in these faded rooms, amid this stillness. And it lives in me.

Sophie pointed her camera, deft and quick.

‘Looks like a hotel,’ she said.

‘Or a guesthouse, anyway,’ said Croke, doubtfully.

It is neither. It is the home of Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his faithful companion, Licht. Ha.

They had come to the little wooden bridge but there they hesitated, even Felix, unwilling to cross, they did not know why, and looked up uncertainly at the impassive house. Croke took off his boater, or do I mean panama, yes, Croke took off his panama and mopped his brow, saying something crossly under his breath. The hat, the striped blazer and cravat, the white duck trousers, all this had seemed fine at first, a brave flourish and just the thing for a day-trip, but now he felt ridiculous, ridiculous and old.

‘We can’t stand here all day,’ he said, and glared accusingly at Felix, as if somehow everything were all his fault. ‘Will I go and see?’

He looked about at the rest of them but all wanly avoided his eye, indifferent suddenly, unable to care.

‘I’m hungry,’ Hatch said. ‘I want my breakfast.’

Pound the bespectacled fat boy muttered in agreement and cast a dark look at the adults.

‘Where’s that picnic that was promised us?’ Croke said testily.

‘Fell in the water, didn’t it,’ Hatch said and snickered.

‘Pah! Some bloody outing this is.’

‘Listen to them,’ Felix said softly to Flora, assuming the soft mask of an indulgent smile. ‘Rhubarb rhubarb.’

His smile turned fawning and he inclined his head to one side as if imploring something of her, but she pretended to be distracted and frowned and looked away. She felt so strange.

Sophie turned with an impatient sigh and took Croke’s arm.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘We will ask.’

And they set off across the bridge, Sophie striding and the old boy going carefully on tottery legs, trying to keep up with her, the soaked and sand-caked cuffs of his trousers brushing the planks. The stream gurgled.

Licht in the turret window watched them, the little crowd hanging back — were they afraid? — and the old man and the woman advancing over the bridge. How small they seemed, how distant and small. The couple on the bridge carried themselves stiffly, at a stately pace, as if they suspected that someone, somewhere, was laughing at their expense. He was embarrassed for them. They were like actors being forced to improvise. (One of them is an actor, is improvising.) He pressed his forehead to the glass and felt his heart racing. Since he had first spotted them making their meandering way up the hillside he had warned himself repeatedly not to expect anything of them, but it was no use, he was agog. Somehow these people looked like him, like the image he had of himself: lost, eager, ill at ease, and foolish. The glass was cool against his forehead, where a little vein was beating. Silence, deep woods, a sudden wind. He blinked: had he dropped off for a second? Lately he had been sleeping badly. That morning he had been awake at three o’clock, wandering through the house, stepping through vague deeps of shadowed stillness on the stairs, hardly daring to breathe in the midst of a silence where others slept. When he looked out he had seen a crack of light on the leaden horizon. Was it the day still going down or the morning coming up? He smiled sadly. This was what his life was like now, this faint glimmer between a past grown hazy and an unimaginable future.

The woman on the bridge stumbled. One moment she was upright, the next she had crumpled sideways like a puppet, all arms and knees, her hair flying and her camera swinging on its strap. Licht experienced a little thrill of fright. She would have fallen had not the old boy with surprising speed and vigour caught her in the crook of an arm that seemed for a second to grow immensely long. His hat fell off. A blackbird flew up out of a bush, giving out a harsh repeated warning note. The woman, balancing on one leg, took off her sodden shoe and looked at it: the heel was broken. She kicked off the other shoe and was preparing to walk on barefoot when Felix, as if he had suddenly bethought himself and some notion of authority, put down his bag and fairly bounded forward, shot nimbly past her and set off up the slope, buttoning the jacket of his tight, brown suit.

‘Who is that,’ the Professor said sharply. ‘Mind, let me see.’

Licht turned, startled: he had forgotten he was not alone. The Professor had been struggling with the telescope, trying in vain to angle it so he could get a closer look at Felix coming up the path. Now he thrust the barrel of the instrument aside and lumbered to the window, humming unhappily under his breath. When Licht looked at him now, in the light of these advancing strangers, he noticed for the first time how slovenly he had become. His shapeless black jacket was rusty at the elbows and the pockets sagged, his bow-tie was clumsily knotted and had a greasy shine. He looked like a big old rain-stained statue of one of the Caesars, with that big balding head and broad pale face and filmy, pale, protruding eyes. Licht smiled to himself hopelessly: how could he leave, how could he ever leave?

Felix was mounting the slope swiftly, swinging out his legs in front of him and sawing the air with his arms.

‘Look at him,’ Croke said, chuckling. ‘Look at him go.’

From the bridge it seemed as if he were swarming along on all fours. The nearer he approached to the house the more it seemed to shrink away from him. Licht was craning his neck. The Professor turned aside, patting his pockets, still humming tensely to himself.

Below, the lion’s peremptory paw rapped once, twice, threefour times.

Here it is, here is the moment where worlds collide, and all I can detect is laughter, distant, soft, sceptical.

At that brisk and gaily syncopated knock the house seemed to go still and silent for a moment as if in alarmed anticipation of disturbances to come. Licht lingered dreamily at the turret window, watching the others down at the bridge. Then another knock sounded, louder than before, and he started and turned and pushed past the Professor and rattled down the stairs in a flurry of arms and knees. In the hall he paused, seeing Felix’s silhouette on the ruby glass of the door, an intent and eerily motionless, canted form. When the door was opened Felix at once produced a brilliant smile and stepped sideways deftly into the hall, speaking already, his thin hand outstretched.

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