John Banville - Ghosts

‘I think we’re in for a fine spell,’ the Sergeant said.

Licht nodded distractedly. He paused with the grumbling kettle in his hand and frowned at the wall in front of him.

‘I spend my life making tea,’ he said darkly to himself.

Sergeant Toner nodded seriously but made no comment. Licht picked up the spoon from the floor and wiped it on his trousers and spooned the tea into the pot and poured the seething water over the leaves and banged the lid back on the pot, then carried pot and a cracked white mug to the table and set them down unceremoniously beside the Sergeant’s hat. Milk, sugar, the same spoon. The Sergeant surveyed the table hopefully.

‘A heel of bread would be the thing,’ he said, ‘if you had it.’

Licht, unseen by the Sergeant, cast his eyes to the ceiling and went to the sideboard and came back with a biscuit tin and opened it and put it on the table with a tinny thump. The fawn smell of biscuit-dust rose up warmly on the air. Sergeant Toner smiled and nodded thanks. Judiciously he poured the tea, raising and lowering the pot with a practised hand, watching with satisfaction the rich, dark flow and enjoying the joggling sound the liquid made filling up the mug. Licht fetched cutlery from a drawer and began to set out places at the table while the Sergeant looked on with placid gaze.

‘Visitors?’ he said. Licht did not answer. From the dresser he brought soup bowls and dealt them out. The Sergeant idly counted the places, his lips silently moving. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the time we had the devil-worshippers?’ He glanced up enquiringly. His white eyelashes were almost invisible. ‘Do you remember that?’

Licht looked at him blankly in bafflement.

‘What?’ he said. ‘No.’

‘Your mother, God rest her, was still with us then.’

The Sergeant lifted the brimming mug with care and extended puckered lips to the hot brim and took a cautious slurp. ‘Ah,’ he said appreciatively, and took another, deeper draught and then put down the mug and turned his attention to the biscuit tin, rising an inch off the chair and peering into the mouth of the tin with lifted brows. ‘A bad lot, they were,’ he said. ‘They used to cut up cats.’

Licht went to the sink, where the line of sunlight, thinned to a rapier now, smote him across the wrists. The sink was still piled with unwashed crockery; he stood and looked helplessly at the grease-caked plates and smeared cutlery.

‘Locals, were they?’ he said absently.

The Sergeant was biting gingerly on a ginger nut. ‘Hmm?’

Licht sighed. ‘Were they locals, these people?’

‘No, no,’ the Sergeant said. ‘They used to come over on the boat from the mainland when their feast days or whatever they were were coming up. The solstices, or whatever they’re called. They’d start off by making a big circle of stones down on the strand, that’s how I’d know they were here. Oh, a bad crowd.’

Licht plunged his hands into the greasy water.

‘Did you catch them?’ he asked.

Sergeant Toner smiled to himself, drinking his tea.

‘We did,’ he said. ‘We always get our man, out here.’

The Professor came in. Seeing the Sergeant he stopped and stood and all went silent. The Sergeant half rose from his chair in respectful greeting and subsided again.

‘I was just telling Mr Licht here about the devil-worshippers,’ he said equably.

The Professor stared.

‘Devil-worshippers,’ he said.

‘They killed cats,’ Licht said from the sink, and snickered.

‘Oh, more than cats,’ said the Sergeant, unruffled. ‘More than cats.’ He lifted the teapot invitingly. ‘Will you join me in a cup of this tea, Professor?’

Licht came forward bustlingly and put the lid back on the biscuit tin, ignoring the Sergeant’s frown of weak dismay.

‘We’re a bit busy,’ Licht said pointedly. ‘I’m making the lunch.’

Sergeant Toner nodded understandingly but made no move to rise.

‘For your visitors,’ he said. ‘That’s grand.’

For a moment all three were silent. Licht and the Professor looked off in opposite directions while the Sergeant thoughtfully sipped his tea.

‘I seen the ferry out on the Black Bank, all right,’ he said. ‘Ran aground, did it?’ He paused. ‘Is that the way they came?’ Then, softly: ‘Your visitors?’

Licht lifted a streaming plate from the sink and rubbed it vigorously with a dirty cloth.

‘The skipper was drunk, apparently,’ he said. ‘That ferry service is a joke. Someday somebody is going to be drowned.’ It sounded a curiously false note; too many words. He rubbed the plate more vigorously still.

The Sergeant nodded, pondering.

‘I was talking to him, to the skipper,’ he said. ‘The eyes were a bit bright, right enough.’ He nodded again and then sat still, thinking, the mug lifted halfway to his mouth. ‘And where would they be now, tell me,’ he said, ‘these castaways?’

Licht looked at the Professor and the Professor looked at the floor.

‘Oh,’ Licht said with a careless gesture, ‘they’re around the house, getting ready.’

The Sergeant frowned. ‘Ready?’

‘To leave,’ Licht said. ‘They’re waiting for the tide to come up.’

He could feel his voice getting thick and his eyes prickling. He wished now they had never come, disturbing everything. Blast them all. He thought of Flora.

‘Just over for the day, then, were they?’ the Sergeant said.

Licht turned away and muttered something under his breath.

‘Beg pardon?’ Sergeant Toner said pleasantly, cupping a finger behind his ear.

‘I said,’ Licht said, ‘maybe they came to say a black mass.’

A brief chill settled. Sergeant Toner was not a man to be mocked. Licht turned to the sink again, head down and shoulders hunched.

The Professor cleared his throat and frowned. The Sergeant with a musing air inspected a far corner of the ceiling.

‘Was there a chap with them,’ he said, ‘thin chap, reddish sort of hair, foreign, maybe?’

Licht turned from the sink.

‘Red hair?’ he said. ‘No, but —’

‘No,’ the Professor said heavily, and Licht glanced at him quickly, ‘there was no one like that.’

Sergeant Toner nodded, still eyeing the ceiling. From outside came the faint buzz of a tractor at work far off in the fields. Licht dried his hands, not looking at anyone now. The Sergeant made a tube of his fist and confided to it a soft, biscuity belch, then poured himself another cup of tea. The sun had left the window but the room was still drugged with its heat.

‘Grand day,’ the Sergeant said. ‘A real start to the summer.’

The Professor looked on as the Sergeant put two spoonfuls of sugar into his tea, hesitated, added a third, and picked up the mug in both large hands and leaned back comfortably on his quietly complaining chair. ‘Did you ever wonder, Professor,’ he said, ‘why people do the things they do?’ The Professor raised his eyebrows and said nothing. ‘I see a lot of it,’ the Sergeant went on, ‘in my line of work.’

The Professor regarded him with a level stare.

‘A lot of what?’ he said.

‘Hmm?’ The Sergeant looked up at him smilingly with his head at an enquiring tilt. ‘Oh, anything and everything.’ He drank the last draught of tea and set down the mug firmly on the table and looked at it, smiling to himself. ‘People think we’re out of touch out here,’ he said. ‘That we don’t know what’s going on in the big world. But I’ll tell you now, the fact is we’re no fools at all.’ He looked up laughing in silence. ‘Isn’t that so, Mr Licht?’

Licht, at the stove peering into the soup-pot, pretended not to hear.

The Professor turned aside slowly, like a stone statue turning slowly on a pivot. The Sergeant made a show of rousing himself. He slapped himself on the knees and took up his cap and stood up from the table.