John Banville - Ghosts

‘What?’

‘The captain of the boat. He had a bottle under a shelf. First he cursed and then laughed and told that Felix fellow to go to hell.’

She sighed.

‘Is that right?’ he said. He watched her as she stood on tiptoe peering down through the window, the shell-pink rim of one ear showing through her hair and a tongue-tip touching her upper lip.

‘I’m staying in a hotel, you know,’ she said. She gestured in the direction where she thought the mainland lay. ‘My mammy …’

A tremulous frown passed over her face and he was afraid she was going to cry again.

‘Come on,’ he said.

Outside the turret room three deep steps led up to a door so low that even Alice had to stoop going through it. Here is the attic, a long, broad, tent-shaped, shadowed place with a dazzling pillar of sunlight suspended at an angle from a grimy mansard window in the roof. Smell of dust and apples and the sweetish stink of decaying timbers. It is hot up here under the roof and the air is thick. There were things piled everywhere, bits of furniture, old bottles, croquet mallets, an antique black bicycle, all standing like their own ghosts under a soft, furry outline of dust. ‘The Emperor Rudolf,’ Licht was saying, ‘the Emperor Rudolf …’ but the odd acoustics of the place took the rest of his words and made of them an unintelligible booming. They stood a moment, struck, listening to the echoes ricochet and fall like needles. A draught came in from the stairs and a door somewhere cried tinily on its hinges. The heat pressed on their eardrums. Unseen pigeons murmured lasciviously in the eaves and a mouse under the floorboards softly scurried. I have been here before.

‘A great collector,’ Licht said softly, as if someone else might be listening. ‘Did you ever hear of him?’

Alice glanced sideways worriedly at his knees. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said slowly.

‘He had such things! — a magic statue, for instance, that sang a kind of song when the sun shone on it.’ He looked uncertain for a moment. ‘At least, that’s what I read in a book somewhere.’

She turned and took a step away from him carefully, teetering. The thing she seemed to be holding in her hands now felt as if it were brimming over with some precious, volatile stuff. Suddenly he laughed behind her and the echoes flew up.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen,’ and came forward with a finger lifted. ‘What shape is a dead parrot?’ She made a pretence of thinking hard. He watched her gloatingly, nodding, his eyebrows rising higher and higher. ‘Give up?’ She got ready to laugh. ‘A polygon!’ He quivered with glee, teeheeing soundlessly. She smiled as hard as she could, nodding. She had heard it before.

In a corner the floor was strewn with shrivelled apples. When his eye fell on them Licht grew morose.

‘My pippins,’ he said. ‘I forgot about them.’ He picked one up and sniffed it wistfully. ‘Gone.’ He gave her a mournful smile. ‘Like poor Polly.’

He knelt before a brassbound chest. There were costumes in it, he told her, fancy-dress things from long ago, ballgowns and helmets and an officer’s uniform with a cocked hat. He tugged at the catches but could not get them undone. After a brief effort he gave up; leave them, leave them there, the gaudy centuries. He sat down on the lid of the chest and rocked himself back and forth, hugging one knee, while Alice stood, swaying a little, looking away. Another cloud swept over and the sunlight in the window above their heads died abruptly with a sort of click.

‘He was famous, you know,’ Licht said. ‘Oh yes. He was in books, and people came from all over the world to get his opinion on pictures.’ His face darkened and he looked like a vexed child. ‘Then they said that he —’ He paused and lifted a warning finger, listening.

Eek.

The sunlight returned. Distantly they heard again from the garden the raucous voices of the boys.

‘Where was he emperor of?’ Alice said.

Licht looked at her and blinked. ‘Eh? No, no, not him — I mean Professor Kreutznaer.’

‘Oh.’

He looked more vexed than ever. He stood up from the chest and paced the floor moodily with his hands at his back and the corners of his mouth pulled down. Alice felt the invisible bowl tilting in her hands.

‘I was his assistant, you know,’ he said airily, pointing to the papers on the desk. ‘I used to type up what he wrote.’ He waggled his fingers, tapping invisible keys. ‘I was the only one who could read his handwriting.’

He stood and frowned, scratching his head with one finger.

‘Did they write about you in the books, too?’ she asked.

He glanced at her sharply. ‘Of course not!’ he snapped, and she felt the ghost of a quicksilver splash fall at her feet. He broke off and lifted a hand again, frowning, his rabbity nostrils flared. A stair creaked; then silence. (The Professor is out there, poised like a voyeur, listening.) I watch them, outlined in dusty sunlight against the soft dark, an emblem of something, and my heart contracts.

‘What is it?’ Alice whispered.

‘What? Oh, I thought I heard — ssh!’

They listened. No sound. Licht shrugged and started to speak, but suddenly Alice turned to him and said:

‘I’m afraid!’

And as soon as it was said it ceased to be true. Licht stepped back, staring, cradling in his startled palms the invisible vessel she had handed him.

When Alice had run off down the stairs and Licht came stooping through the little doorway Professor Kreutznaer was there at the landing window with his fists sunk in the sagging pockets of his old black jacket. Licht flushed angrily.

‘What are you doing?’ the Professor said.

‘Nothing!’ Licht cried. It came out as a squeak. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Nothing. What do you mean? Are you spying on me?’

From below came the abrupt thud of the front door slamming; the house quivered and after a second a ghostly draught came wafting up the stairs.

‘I told you you shouldn’t let them stay,’ the Professor said. ‘Why did you let them in?’

Licht strode past him to the window and stood looking out. Tears of anger and resentment welled up in his eyes.

‘Why do you blame me?’ he cried. ‘You blame me for everything, and spy on me, creeping around and listening at doors. It’s you they’re after, it’s you that fellow came to find!’ How gay and carefree everything outside seemed, the sun on the dunes and the grass waving and the unreal blue of the sea in the distance. At moments such as this he felt the world was rocking with laughter, jeering at him. He beat his fists softly on the window-sill and wept, his shoulders shaking. ‘I have to get away from here,’ he said as if to himself and heaved a juicy sob, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and a big bubble of spit formed on his blubby lips and burst with a tiny plop. ‘I have to get away!’

The Professor regarded him in silence, frowning. Licht, pawing at his eyes and muttering something, pushed past him and blundered away down the stairs.

The front door banged again and the Professor felt the tiny tremor under his feet. He waited and presently he heard another sound, closer at hand, and when he looked over the banisters he saw Felix on the landing below, leaning at the door of the bedroom there with one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his head inclined, smiling to himself, listening for a sound from within. The Professor drew back quickly, his heart joggling, but too late. For a moment there was silence and then from below he heard Felix laugh softly and softly sing up the stairwell:

‘Helloo-oo!’ Pause. ‘Professor?’ Pause; again a laugh. ‘Are you there, Truepenny?’

The Professor closed his eyes briefly and sighed. There were things he did not wish to recall. Black nights by the river, the lamps on the quayside shivering in the wind and the gulls wheeling in the darkness overhead like big, blown sheets of paper, and the boys standing in the shadows, all silk and sheathed steel, shuffling their feet in the cold, the tips of their cigarettes flaring and their soft cat-voices calling to him as he walked past them on the pavement for the third or fourth time, trying to appear distracted, trying to look like what at other times he thought himself to be. How are you, hard? Are you looking for it, are you? They all had the same, quick eyes, like the eyes of half-tamed animals. He was frightened of them. And yet behind all the toughness and the insolent talk how tentative they were; alone with him at last in a dark doorway or down a back lane they laughed self-consciously and ducked their heads, avoiding his furtive, beseeching eyes, pretending not to be there, just like him. It was that mixture of menace and vulnerability he found irresistible. And then stumbling away through the rain-slimed streets, light-headed, shaking with a sort of sated glee. Never again! he would cry out in his heart, never, I swear it! addressing a phantom version of himself that stood over him with arms folded and lips shut tight in terrible accusal. And Felix there always, lord of the streets, popping up out of nowhere, horribly knowing, making little jokes and smiling his malign, insinuating smile. They all knew Felix, with his cartons of contraband cigarettes off the boats and his little packets of precious powder. The Pied Piper, Professor, that’s me. And that laugh.