John Banville - Ghosts

He gave in in the end. At first he drove hunched over the wheel, frowning worriedly out at the road, but as we got away from the city centre he cheered up. He has, like me, a fondness for the suburbs. What is it about these tidy estates, these little parks and shopping malls, that speaks so eloquently to us? What is still living there that in us is dead? The miniature trees were tenderly in leaf and the little clouds fleeted and the streets shimmered and swayed with pale swoops of sunlight. As we bowled along Billy talked, between long, thoughtful pauses, about his girl. She was, he confided, an apprentice hairdresser. She did not mind about his crimes, he said, even that rape business, regarding them it seemed as no more than the follies of youth. In fact, she rather fancied the idea of being a lifer’s girl: Billy was a bit of a celebrity round their way, having cut out the tripes of a fellow on the street one night for making a remark about his sister. He was all for getting married right off, but she had said no, they should wait: when he got into the army they would have a place of their own at the camp and she would open a salon for the camp wives. I listened happily, slumped in my seat like a child at bedtime, as he filled in with loving strokes the colours — olive-drab, eiderdown-pink — of his dream of the future. This is how we used to while away the time inside, spinning each other stories of the life to come. In return now I told him my plans, how I was going to redeem myself through honest labour and all the rest of it; it must have sounded as much of a fairytale to him as his talk of a rosy future seemed to me. I even showed him my letter of introduction to Professor Kreutznaer, written for me by a kindly and forgiving woman. I was troubled to see that although I had kept it carefully it had already taken on that grubby, greyed, dog-eared look that prison somehow imparts to all important papers; how many such tired documents have I handled — my opinion was much sought after, inside — while young bloods such as Billy sat on the edge of their bunks twisting their hands and watching me with eyes in which anxiety and hopefulness struggled for command. Believe me, you do not know the tenderness of things in there, the strange mingling of violence and sorrow and unshakeable optimism.

‘Anna who?’ Billy said, squinting at the letter where I held it out for his inspection.

‘Behrens,’ I said. ‘An old friend. Her late father was a very rich man who collected pictures. I borrowed one of them, once.’ Billy quietly sniggered. ‘They were very understanding about it, I must say. Anna has quite forgiven me. See what she says: Please give him any help you can as he has lost everything and wants to make a new start. Isn’t that fine of her? I call that very fine, I must say.’

The van rattled and shook, lurching to the left every time Billy pressed the brakes, yet it felt as if we were flying swiftly through the soft, spring air. I love to travel like this, it is one of my secret joys. Any motorised mode of conveyance will do, car, bus, van — black maria, even. It is not the speed or the womby seclusion that works the magic, I think, but the fact of being enclosed on all sides by glass. The windscreen is for me one of the happiest inventions of humankind. Looked at through this moulded curve of light the travelling world outside seems itself made of crystal, a toylike place of scattering leaves and skimming shadows, where trees flash past and buildings rise up suddenly and as suddenly collapse, and staring people loom, standing at a tilt, impossibly tall, like the startled manikins in the shop-windows of my childhood. If I were to believe in the possibility of anything other than endless and unremitting torment in store for me after I die — if, say, a power struggle on Mount Olympus were to result in a general amnesty for mortal sinners, including even me — then this is how I see myself travelling into eternity, reclining like this, with my arms folded, in a sort of happy fuddlement, at the warm centre of this whirling, glassy globe.

It must have been Billy’s talk of his girl that got me thinking about my wife again. Idly I pictured her there in the hall after I had been cut off, listening to the hum of the dead line and then putting down the receiver and standing with a hand to her face in that sombre way she has when something unexpected happens. This time, however, as she stood there in my musings, I gave her, without really intending it, a companion. He was indistinct at first, just a man-shape hovering at the edge of fancy, but as my imagination — bloodshot, prehensile — took hold of him in fierce scrutiny the current crackled in the electrodes and a shudder ran through him and at once he began to walk and talk, with awful plausibility. Where do they come from, these sudden phantoms that stride unbidden into my unguarded thoughts, pushy and smug and scattering cigarette ash on the carpet, as if they owned the place? Invented in the idle play of the mind, they can suddenly turn treacherous, can rear up in a flash and give a nasty bite to the hand that fashioned them. This one was taking on attributes by the instant. He was tall and lean, with lank fair hair and a square jaw, togged out in tweeds and a checked shirt and scuffed, oxblood brogues. He would have a pipe about him somewhere, and strong, coarse tobacco in a fine, soft pouch. He cultivates an air of faint disdain, behind which lurks a crafty-eyed watchfulness. There is a touch of the rake about him. He drives a sports car and rides a large horse. He is probably a Protestant. And he is fucking my wife.

I had forgotten about the gin but now with trembling hands I fished the bottle out of my jacket pocket hurriedly and got it open. I love that little click when the metal cap gives; it is like the noise of the neck of some small, toothsome creature being snapped. I took a swig and gasped at the chill scald of the liquor on my tongue and an entire world came flooding back, silvery-blue and icily atinkle. I felt immediately drunk, as if that first mouthful had stirred up a sediment left over in me from the gallons of the stuff I used to drink in the old days. Billy glanced at me with a deep frown of disapproval; I know what he is thinking — that a gent like me should not be seen rattling along in a rusty jalopy and slugging from the neck of a gin bottle at ten-thirty in the morning. I would be in spats and a monocle if he had his way.

We were in the country now, lurching down a leafy road, with a preposterously lovely view before us of rolling fields and silver streams and vague, mauve mountains. Not once in all the years I endured inside had it occurred to me to be jealous. Oh, I knew that most likely I had lost my wife, yet I had thought of her all along as somehow safe, chained to the rock of my absence, like one of those mysteriously afflicted, big-eyed Pre-Raphaelite maidens. The idea of her cavorting with some hard-faced horseman of the kind who in the old days were always hanging around her struck me with the force of a blow to the heart. I sat aghast, hot all over, blushing in pain, and saw the whole thing. They are in a hotel on the market square of some small, nondescript midland town. The bedroom looks out on the square, where his roadster is discreetly parked under blossoming trees. Soft light of the deserted afternoon falls from the high window. She looks about her in faint surprise and a kind of amusement at the bed, the bureau, the worn rug on the floor: so, she thinks, what had seemed like accident was really something willed, after all, and here she is, on this blank Tuesday, in this anonymous room in a strange town miles away from her life. He stands awkwardly, not looking at her, a little nervous now despite all his easy talk on the way here, and takes things from his pockets and lines them up neatly on the bedside table: change, keys, that thing he uses to scrape the ash out of his pipe. The back of his neck is inflamed. The sight of that childish patch of pink makes something thicken in her throat. He turns to her, talking to cover his awkwardness, and stops and stares at her helplessly. She hears him swallow. They stand a moment, poised, listening to themselves, to that swelling inner buzz. Then a hand is lifted, a face touched, a breath indrawn. This is what shakes my heart, the thought of this wordless moment of surrender. All that will follow is terrible too — there is no stopping this imagination of mine — but it is here, when his fingers brush her cheek and her mouth softens and her eyes go vague, that my mind snags like a broken nail. Yet I know too there is something in me that wants it to have happened, wants to lean over them with face on fire and feed in sorrow on their embraces and drink deep their cries. What awful need is this? Am I the ghost at their banquet, sucking up a little of their life to warm myself? Her phantom lover is more real than I: when I look into that mirror I see no reflection. I am there and not there, flitting in panic this way and that in the torture chamber of my imaginings, poor, parched Nosferatu.