John Banville - Ghosts

‘She said to say that she’s asleep,’ she said. He nodded pleasantly and smiled, quite baffled. ‘Flora,’ she said with firmness.

‘Ah. Flora.’ Nodding. ‘Yes.’ His gaze shied uncertainly. He was thinking there was something he should think. The noise of the wind had made him feel dizzy, as if a crowd had been shouting in his ear for hours, and he could not clear that awful buzzing sensation in his head. For an instant he saw himself clearly, sitting here in the broad, headachey light of morning, an indistinct, frail figure. Over the oak wood a double rainbow stood shimmering, one strong band and, lower down, its fainter echo. ‘Flora,’ he said again. Dimly in the dark of his mind the lost thought swirled.

Alice imagined taking him by the shoulders and shaking him; she wondered if his head would rattle.

‘She said to say she’s still not well,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ Childe Someone to the dark tower came. ‘I hope she …’

The unwashed crockery was still in the sink, the breakfast things were on the table.

‘Will we wash up?’ Alice said.

Licht shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, ‘leave that, that’s someone else’s job.’ He looked at her sidelong with a crafty smile. ‘We had a maid one time who had a dog called Water, and when my mother complained that the plates were dirty, Mary always said, Well, ma’am, they’re as clean as Water can make them.’ He laughed, a sudden, high whoop, and slapped the table with the flat of his hand and then grew solemn. ‘Poor mama,’ he murmured. He stood up. Hop, little man, hop. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you something.’

The rainbows were fading already in the window.

The house was quiet as they climbed up through it and she imagined figures lurking unseen all around her with their hands pressed to their mouths and their eyes slitted, trying not to let her hear them laughing. She walked ahead of Licht and had a funny sensation in the small of her back, as if she had grown a little tail there. She could hear him humming busily to himself. The thought of her mother was like a bubble inside her ready to burst. Everything was so awful. On the boat that morning Pound had come into the lavatory when she was there and offered her sweets to pull down her pants and let him look at her. She was a little afraid of him, but she felt sorry for him, too, the way he bared his front teeth when he frowned and had to keep pushing his glasses up on his sweaty nose. His breath smelled of cheese.

On the first landing Licht stopped and cocked his head and listened, his smile fixed on nothing. Who did he look like, in that long sort of frock-coat thing and those tight trousers? ‘All clear!’ he whispered, and winked and shooed her on. The White Rabbit? Or was it the March Hare. For she was Alice, after all.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘was the boat trip nice?’

She was not sure what she should answer. She thought he might be making fun of her. He was walking beside her now, leaning around so that he could look into her face. There were little webs of wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes, very fine, like cracks in china.

‘It was all right,’ she said carefully. ‘Then it ran on to that sandbank thing and we all fell down. I think —’

‘Ssh!’

They crept past the room where Flora was asleep. He wondered if she had taken off her clothes. A slow, dull ache of longing kindled itself anew in his breast.

Again he stopped and listened.

All clear.

They gained the topmost storey.

In the turret room Alice stood with her hands clasped before her and her lips pressed shut. Everything tended upwards here. The windows around her had more of sky in them than earth and huge clouds white as ice were floating sedately past. Something wobbled. She had a sense of airy suspension, as if she were hovering a foot above the floor. She imagined that as well as a tail she had sprouted little wings now, she could almost feel them, at ankle and wrist, little feathery swift wings beating invisibly and bearing her aloft in the glassy air. She could see all around, way off to the sea in front and behind her up to the oak wood. It seemed to her she was holding something in her hands, a sort of bowl or something, that she had been given to mind.

‘This is Professor Kreutznaer’s room,’ Licht said, with a hand on his heart, panting a little after the climb. ‘This is his desk, see — and his stuff, his books and stuff.’

She advanced a step and bent her eyes dutifully to the muddle of yellowed papers with their scribbled hieroglyphs and the big books lying open with pictures of actors and musicians and ladies in gold gowns. It all seemed set out, arranged like this, for someone to see. There was dust on everything.

‘Does he look at the stars?’ she said.

‘What?’ He had turned his head and was gazing out of the windows into the depths of the sky.

‘The stars,’ she said, louder. ‘At night.’

Reluctantly he came back from afar. Alice pointed to the telescope.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘And the sea.’ He gestured vaguely. ‘The clouds.’

She stood before him, blank and attentive, waiting. He touched a fingertip to the back of the swivel chair and it flinched.

‘He used to only look at pictures,’ he said, frowning. ‘He was an expert on provenance.’

She nodded.

‘Providence,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘No no: provenance. Where a painting comes from, who owned it, and so on. You have to know that sort of thing to prove it’s not a fake. The painting, I mean.’

‘Oh.’

A helpless silence fell. Faintly from the garden below came the sound of voices; in a rush both stepped at once to the window and peered down, their foreheads almost touching. The boys were down there, wrestling half-heartedly on the grass.

‘Look at them,’ said Alice softly, with soft contempt.

Licht from the corner of his eye studied her in sudden wonderment. He had not been able to look at her this closely before now. She might have been a new species of something that had alighted at his side. He could hear her breathing. Each time that she blinked, her eyelashes rested for an instant on the soft rise of her cheek. She had a smell like the mingled smell of milk and pencil shavings. Distinctly they heard Hatch say, Oh, fuck! Silence, dark woods, that wind again, like a river running through the glimmering leaves. He closed his eyes. A nerve was twitching in his jaw.

‘Do you ever think,’ he said softly, ‘that you are not here. Sometimes I have the feeling that I have floated out of myself, and that what’s here, standing, talking, is not me at all.’ He turned his troubled eyes away from her and bit his lip. Alice gazed intently down through the glass, hardly breathing. Something swayed between them and then gently settled. He sighed. Of late he had been experiencing the strangest things, all sorts of strange noises and reverberations in his head, pops and groans and sudden, sharp cracks, as if the world were surreptitiously disintegrating around him. One night when he was on the very brink of sleep something had gone off with a bang and a flash of white light, like a pistol being fired inside his skull, and he had started awake in terror but there was nothing, not the faintest sound or echo of a sound. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘I wonder is there something the matter with my brain.’ He saw himself elsewhere, running down a street, or crouched at a school desk in dusty sunlight under a ponderously ticking clock. ‘Do you think we just die, Alice?’ he murmured. ‘That everything just … ends?’

The shadow of a bird, stiff-winged and plunging, skimmed slantwise across the window.

‘I think that captain really was drunk,’ she said suddenly, still looking down through the glass.