John Banville - Ghosts

All this, the garden and so on, why does it remind me so strongly of boyhood days? God knows, I was never a tow-haired child of nature, ensnared with flowers and romping on the grass. Cigarettes and dirty girls were my strongest interests. Yet when I trail out here with my hoe I feel the chime of an immemorial happiness. Is it that the past has become pastoral, as much a fancy as in my mind this garden is, perpetually vernal, aglow with a stylised, prelapsarian sunlight such as that which shines with melancholy radiance over Vaublin’s pleasure parks? That is what I am digging for, I suppose, that is what I am trying to uncover: the forfeited, impossible, never to be found again state of simple innocence.

So picture me there in this still-springlike early summer weather, in my peasant’s blouse and cracked brogues, delving among the burdocks, an unlikely Silvius, striving by harmless industry to do a repair job on what remains of my rotten soul. The early rain has ceased and the quicksilver air is full of flash and chill fire; a surprise, really, this drenched brilliance. There is a sort of ringing everywhere and everything is damp and silky under a pale, nude sky. We had a wet winter, summer has made a late start, and the clay is sodden still, a rich, dark stuff that heaves and slurps when I plunge my blade into it. All moves slowly, calmly, at a mysteriously ordained, uniform pace; I have the sense of a vast clock marking off the slow strokes, one by one by one. I pause and lean on the handle of the hoe with my face lifted to the light, ankles crossed and feet in the clay (which is their true medium, after all) and think of nothing. There is a tree at the corner of the garden, I am not sure what it is, a beech, I believe, I shall call it a beech — who is to know the difference? — a wonderful thing, like a great delicate patient animal. It seems to look away, upwards, carefully, at something only it can see. It makes a restless, sibilant sound, and the sunlight trapped like bright water among its branches shivers and sways. I am convinced it is aware of me; more foolishness, I know. Yet I have a sense, however illusory, of living among lives: a sense, that is, of the significance, the ravelled complexity of things. They speak to me, these lives, these things, of matters I do not fully understand. They speak of the past and, more compellingly, of the future. They are urgent at times, at times so weary and faded I can scarcely hear them.

I have discovered the source of those flies: a bunch of flowers that lovelorn Licht left standing for too long on the window-sill above the sink. Another attempt to brighten the place; that is his great theme these days, the need to ‘brighten up the place’. Chrysanthemums, they were, blossoms of the golden world. Among the petals there must have been eggs that hatched in the sun. The water they were standing in has left behind a sort of greeny, fleshy smell. But imagine that: flies from flowers! Ah Charles, Charles — wait, let me strike an attitude: there — Ah, Charles, mon frère mélancholique! You held that genius consists in the ability to summon up childhood at will, or something like that, I can’t remember exactly. I have lost mine, lost it completely. Childhood, I mean. Versions of it are all I can manage. Well, what did I expect? Something had to be forfeited, for the sake of the future; that is where I am pinning my hopes now. The future! Ah.

Flora is sleeping on her side with one glossy knee exposed and an arm thrown out awkwardly, her hand dangling over the side of the bed. See the parted lips and delicately shadowed eyelids, that strand of damp hair stuck to her forehead. A zed-shaped line of sunlight is working its imperceptible way towards her over the crumpled sheet. She murmurs something and frowns.

‘Are you all right?’ Alice says softly and touches her lolling arm.

‘What?’ Flora sits up straight and stares about her blankly with wide eyes. ‘What?’

‘Are you all right?’ People waking up frighten Alice, they look so wild and strange. ‘They sent me up to see if you were better.’

Flora closed her eyes and plunged her hands into her hair. She was hot and damp and her hair was hot and damp and heavy. She took a deep breath and held it for a moment and then sighed.

‘I’m not better,’ she said. ‘I feel shivery still. I must have got a chill. Will you bring me a drink of water?’

She flopped back on the bed and stared vexedly at the ceiling, her dark hair strewn on the pillow and her arms flung up at either side of her face. The undersides of her wrists are bluish white.

‘It was raining but it’s lovely now,’ Alice said.

‘Is it?’ Flora answered from the depths. She was trying to remember her dream. Something about that picture: she was in that picture. ‘Yes,’ she said, staring at the print pinned on the wall beside her, that strange-looking clown with his arms hanging and the one at the left who looked like Felix, grinning at her.

Alice had the feeling she often had, that she was made of glass, and that anyone who looked at her would see straight through and not notice her at all. She is in love with Flora; in her presence she has a sense of something vague and large and bright, a sort of painful rapture that is all the time about to blossom yet never does. She wished now she could think of something to say to her, something that would make her start up in excitement and dismay. She could hear the wind thrumming in the chimneys and the gulls crying like babies. She thought of her mother. A cloud switched off the sunlight. In the sudden gloom she began to fidget.

‘That man made sausages for us,’ she said.

A faint smell of frying lingered.

‘Who?’ Flora said. Not that she cared. She lifted her knees under the blanket and hugged them; she reclined there, coiled around the purring little engine of herself, with the restless and faintly aggrieved self-absorption of a cat. Suddenly she sat up and laughed. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Did he cook — Felix?’

Alice put her hands behind her back and swivelled slowly on one heel.

‘No,’ she said witheringly. ‘The one that lives here. That little man.’

The sunlight came on again and everywhere there was a sense of running, silent and fleet. Flora pulled the coarse sheet over her breast and snuggled down in the furry hollow of the mattress, inhaling her own warm, chocolatey smells. She no longer cared whose bed it was, what big body had slept here before her. Blood beat along her veins sluggishly like oil.

‘Tell them I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Tell them I’m asleep.’ The soft light in the window and the textured whiteness of the pillow calmed her heart. She was sick and yet wonderfully at ease. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the day around her, birdsong and far calls and the wind’s unceasing vain attempt to speak. She was a child again, adrift in summer. She saw the sun on the convent wall and the idiot boy on the hill road making faces at her, and below her the roofs shimmering, the harbour beyond, and then the sea, and then piled clouds like coils of dirty silver lying low on the hot horizon. ‘Tell them I … ’

*

Outside the door Alice paused. Through the little window above the landing she could see the shadows of clouds skimming over the distant sea and the whitecaps that from here looked as if they were not moving at all. Outside the window on the next landing there was a big tree that shed a greenish light on the stairs. She glanced down through the shifting leaves and thought she saw someone in the garden looking up at her and she turned hot with fright. Hatch had said this place was surely haunted. She hurried on.

The kitchen had the puzzled, lost look of a place lately abandoned. Only Licht was there, sitting at the strewn table with his head lifted, dreaming up into the wide light from the window. At first when he saw her he did not stir, then blinked and shook himself and sat upright.