John Banville - Ghosts

‘I’ll be on my way now,’ he said, firmly, as if someone were seeking to detain him. He walked heavily to the back door and paused to set his cap carefully on his large head. Before him the afternoon stood trembling in the yard. ‘If you do see that chap,’ he said, ‘the one I mentioned, tell him I’m on the look-out for him.’ He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘You know the one I mean?’

The Professor was looking away at nothing. Licht turned from the stove and nodded and did not speak.

‘Well,’ the Sergeant said, hitching up his belt, ‘good day to you both.’

He tipped a finger to the peak of his cap and made his way almost daintily down the back step. They listened to the noise of his boots crossing the yard. The dog growled.

Licht halted on the landing and sneezed hugely, bending forward at the waist and spraying his shoes with spit. ‘Bugger!’ he cried, fumbling for his handkerchief. He waited, peering slackly before him, hankie at the ready, and then sneezed again and shuddered. Perhaps it was Flora’s cold he had caught. The thought brought him a crumb of melancholy comfort. Heavy footsteps sounded below him and presently the Professor appeared, rising up in the stairwell dark-browed and brooding, like an effigy, being borne aloft on unseen shoulders. When he saw Licht he stopped with his foot on the top step and they stood confronting each other with a sort of weary animosity. Suddenly Licht understood that something had happened, that something had shifted, that things would never be again as they had been before. He experienced a pang of regret. He had wanted change and escape but this felt more like an end than a beginning.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what was all that about?’

He could even hear the new note in his voice, that touch of imperiousness and impatience. The Professor turned aside and looked hard out of the window at the dunes and the far sea.

‘I think I may have to leave,’ he said, in a distant voice, as if in his mind he were already on his way.

‘Yes?’ Licht said, surprised at himself, at how cold his own voice sounded. The Professor opened his mouth to speak, fumbling the words as if they were coin, but in the end said nothing and shrugged and moved past Licht and went on up the stairs. Licht looked after him as he ascended, like a bundled, flying figure on a painted ceiling, and watched until he was gone from sight, and then listened until his footsteps were no longer to be heard, and even then he lingered, gazing upwards almost wonderingly, imagining the old man rising steadily through higher and still higher reaches of luminous, washed-blue air, and dwindling to a point, and vanishing.

Listening at the door of what already he thought of as Flora’s room Licht could hear no sound. As the grave. The shadows on the landing seemed to gather about him like other, ghostlier listeners. He tried the doorknob; the tumblers played a sinister phrase on their tiny clavier: locked. He listened again and then tapped a knuckle gently on the wood. He wanted to say her name but did not dare. He knocked again and leaped in fright when at once a muffled voice spoke directly behind the door.

‘Who’s there?’

He looked about him wildly, thrilled with panic. It was as if he had put his hand into a trap and had been invisibly seized and held.

‘It’s me,’ he said squeakily. ‘Licht.’ She said nothing. He stood listening to his heart beating itself against the bars of its cage. He felt foolish and at a loss, and inexplicably expectant. ‘Are you all right?’

There came a sigh and then a faint, silky slithering; when she spoke, her voice was at the level of his knees; she must be sitting on the floor, or kneeling there, perhaps, with her forehead against the door.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

He squatted on his heels and lost his balance and had to steady himself. Clearly, yet with a curious, dreamy sense of inconsequence, and not for the first time, he saw his life for what it was. In the end nothing makes sense.

‘There was a guard here,’ he said.

Briefly he entertained an image of Sergeant Toner marching off down the hill, thumbs hitched in his belt and his big feet splayed, a wind-up, mechanical man with cheery painted cheeks and fixed grin and a huge key slowly rotating between his shoulder-blades.

‘A guard?’ Flora said dully through the door.

‘Yes. A policeman. He was looking for … he was looking for someone.’

She said nothing for a long time. He waited and presently she asked him what time it was. He heard her sigh and rise and walk away from the door, her bare feet making a fat, slow little slapping patter on the floorboards, and then the mattress-springs jangled and after that there was stillness again. Shakily he stood up, stiff-kneed and grimacing. He listened for another moment, then sighed and went on down the stairs.

*

Everywhere was silence. She lay still and listened but could hear nothing except the far soft gasping of the sea and the gulls crying and that strange booming in the distance. The day glared with a brassy radiance. She felt shaky; her mind was vague yet she had an impression of openness and clarity, as of light falling into a vast, empty room. She remembered Licht coming to the door; was there another after him or had she dreamed it, the timid little knock, the whisperings, the soft noise of breathing as whoever it was stood out there, listening? Alice, was it, or someone else again? Now there was only this silence and a sort of hollowness everywhere. She had made a journey through a dark place: water, seasurge and sway, a dull, repeated rhythm, then a reddening, and then the sudden astonishment of light. Sticky-eyed, with a coppery taste in her mouth and her skin smeared, she struggled from the bed and stood trembling, looking about her at nothing she could recognise, the hot key clutched in her damp hand. Something was starting up, she could sense it. Someone was waiting for her, content to wait, biding his time. She unlocked the door and stepped on to the landing, a blanket clutched about her, and paused a moment to listen again. She heard a step below her on the stairs and drew back, waiting, half in fear and half in fascinated, breathless expectation.

Nothing could have prepared me for it. After all these weeks, out of nowhere, as if, as if, I don’t know. This morning, not half an hour ago, I, that is Flora and I, that is Flora, when I … Easy. Go easy. What happened, after all, except that she began to talk? Yet it has changed everything, has transfigured everything, I don’t know how. Let me try to paint the scene, paint it as it was and not as it seemed, in washes of luminous grey on grey. The kitchen, midsummer morning, eight o’clock. Grey is not the word, but a densened whiteness, rather, the sky all over cloud and the light not falling but seeming to seep out of things and no shadows anywhere. Think of the particular thick dulled shine on the cheek of a tin teapot. Breakfast time. Frail smoke of morning in the air and a sort of muffled hum that is not sound but is not silence either. An ordinary day. My mind does not work very well at that early hour; that is to say, it works, all right, but on its own terms, as if it were independent of me, as if in the night it had broken free of its moorings and I had not yet hauled it back to shore. So I am sitting there at the old pine table, in that light, with the breakfast things set out and a mug of strong tea in one hand and a book in the other and my mind rummaging idly through its own thoughts. Licht and the Professor are still abed — they are late risers — and I am, I suppose, enjoying this hour of solitude, if enjoyment is the word for such a neutral state of simple drift. Enter Flora. She was barefoot, with her shoulders hunched as usual and her hands buried deep in the pockets of Licht’s old raincoat. She sat down at the table and in dumb show I offered her the teapot and she nodded and I poured her out a mug of tea. The usual. We often meet like this at breakfast time; we do not speak at all. How eloquent at these times the sounds that humble things make, the blocky slosh of tea being poured, the clack and dulled bang of crockery, the sudden silver note of a spoon striking the rim of a saucer. And then without warning she began to talk. Oh, I don’t know what about, I hardly listened to the sense of it; something about a dream, or a memory, of being a child and standing one summer afternoon on a hill road under a convent wall and looking across the roofs of the town to the distant sea while a boy who was soft in the head capered and pulled faces at her. The content was not important — to either of us, I think. What interested her was the same thing that interested me, namely … namely what? How the present feeds on the past, or versions of the past. How pieces of lost time surface suddenly in the murky sea of memory, bright and clear and fantastically detailed, complete little islands where it seems it might be possible to live, even if only for a moment. And as she talked I found myself looking at her and seeing her as if for the first time, not as a gathering of details, but all of a piece, solid and singular and amazing. No, not amazing. That is the point. She was simply there, an incarnation of herself, no longer a nexus of adjectives but pure and present noun. I noticed the little fine hairs on her legs, a scarp of dried skin along the edge of her foot, a speck of sleep in the canthus of her eye. No longer Our Lady of the Enigmas, but a girl, just a girl. And somehow by being suddenly herself like this she made the things around her be there too. In her, and in what she spoke, the world, the little world in which we sat, found its grounding and was realised. It was as if she had dropped a condensed drop of colour into the water of the world and the colour had spread and the outlines of things had sprung into bright relief. As I sat with my mouth open and listened to her I felt everyone and everything shiver and shift, falling into vividest forms, detaching themselves from me and my conception of them and changing themselves instead into what they were, no longer figment, no longer mystery, no longer a part of my imagining. And I, was I there among them, at last?