John Banville - Ghosts

So there we are in the turret room, with the transparent sky of morning all around us, he seated in his sea-captain’s chair and I standing meekly before him, exchanging solemnities with him and trying to keep a straight face while with protruding lower lip he read over yet again my letter of introduction from the administrator of the Behrens Collection. I was still three-quarters drunk, but the hot, brassy taste of gathering sobriety was in my mouth and I could hear in the distance the dull tom-tom beat of an approaching headache. It was like being up before the beak — and I should know, after all. Presently, however, and most unexpectedly, another sensation came over me, a sort of burning flush, which it took me a moment to identify. It was shame. I mean the real thing, the sear, the scald, the pure, fat, fiery stuff itself: shame. Do you know what it is to feel like that, to cringe and writhe inside yourself as if your flesh were on fire? It is not given to every man to know without the shadow of a doubt that he is a scoundrel. (It takes more courage than you think to name yourself as you should be named. You do not know what it costs to bring yourself to that pass, I can tell you.) I wanted to abase myself before him, to cast myself down at his feet with cries and imprecations, drumming my fists and weeping, or wrap my arms around his knees and cry my sins aloud and beg forgiveness. Oh, I was in a transport. In the end, however, I only put my head back and snuffled up a deep breath, like a diver surfacing, and brought out with a certain ceremonial air the fact of our previous meeting, as if it were the broken half of the precious amulet that would identify me as the long-lost son of the palace, despite my rags and sores. He stiffened, I thought, and rolled his soft-boiled eyes at me suspiciously.

‘We met?’ he said. ‘Where was that?’

‘At Whitewater,’ I said. ‘Oh, twenty years ago. We were house-guests there one weekend. We walked together in the gallery, I remember; you spoke of Vaublin.’

Talk about another life! The windows of the great house filled with greenish summer light and the pictures on the walls like high doorways opening on to other, luminously peopled worlds. The Professor wore black that day, too; for all I know it may have been the same outfit as the one he was wearing now, the same rusty velvet jacket and tubular trousers and boots so old the uppers looked as if they were made of crěpe paper. He had reminded me, I remember, with his big body and little legs and great, round, suet-coloured head, of one of the mighty Germans, Hegel, perhaps, someone like that, someone solemn and ponderous and faintly, unconsciously ridiculous. It struck me how he managed to be both abstracted and sharply watchful. What did we talk about as we paced the polished timbers of that long, high gallery, stepping through blocks of sunlight streaming in the immense windows? I can’t remember, though I can see us there, clear as anything. The Professor, however, was firmly sceptical.

‘No no,’ he said brusquely, ‘you have mistaken me for someone else.’

I persisted gently, determined to establish my connection, however tenuous, with the great days of Whitewater when Helmut Behrens was still alive and I had not yet forfeited my place in the realm of light. I should have married his daughter, I would be master there now, would even have a Vaublin of my very own. Whitewater! I think of permed girls in old-fashioned tennis shoes and pleated skirts and slacks — remember slacks? — and the grass green as it only can be in memory, and gin-and-tonics on the terrace and everyone smoking, and all day long that general air of idleness shot through with languid lusts. When I conjure up those days I feel like old Adam pausing in anguish in the midst of the stony fields, mattock in hand, pierced by paradisal visions of a past now hardly to be believed in. The more I insisted, the more firmly the Professor denied we had ever met; a sort of tussle resulted, elaborately polite, of course, I pushing and he pulling, our teeth gritted. It was all very awkward and in the end embarrassing. We fell into a rueful silence and looked out of the windows for a while, he fiddling with things on his desk and I standing behind him with my hands plunged in the pockets of my jacket; we must have looked like something out of one of Munch’s more melancholic studies. A sea-fret had blurred the far dunes and clouds the colour of wood-smoke were piling up from the horizon, and as we watched, two thick, butter-coloured pillars of sunlight stepped slowly over the far, unmoving waves; sometimes even Dame Nature overdoes her effects. The Professor cleared his throat, huffing and frowning. He dropped Anna Behrens’s letter on the desk and sat brooding, palping his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger.

‘A very great collection,’ he said.

‘Yes, wonderful, wonderful,’ I said, with what I suppose must have seemed a horribly suggestive, pushy coyness. ‘There is that Vaublin, for instance.’

He shot me a rapid, sideways glance and cleared his throat. What had I said? His chair gave a stifled cry of protest under him as he rose. He walked heavily to the window and stood looking out, hunched and motionless, his fat, bloodless little hands clasped tight behind his back, the two stubby thumbs busily circling each other. Whenever I think of him this is how I see him, in the act of turning away from me like this, in the furtive way that he has, with one fat shoulder lifted and that great, round head bowed, like a man anticipating a hail of brickbats. Outside, rain fell glittering through sunlight.

‘Miss Behrens speaks highly of you,’ he said, and directed at me over his shoulder a sort of fishy rictus.

‘She’s very kind,’ I said. ‘We have known each other a long time.’

‘Ah.’ He sniffed.

‘I would like to have seen Le monde d’or ,’ I said. ‘It is the centrepiece of the collection, as you know.’ A definite plumminess was creeping into my tone; I was beginning to sound like the suave cat-burglar in the old movies — where was my silver cigarette case, my patent-leather pumps, my cummerbund? The Professor sniffed again, louder than before. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I would not go to Whitewater now. It would hardly be …’ I could not think of the word; the language is not commodious enough to encompass the notion of a return by me to — well, yes, to the scene of the crime. ‘I can’t go home either,’ I said and essayed a light, melancholy laugh. ‘I have burnt my boats, I’m afraid.’

He did not seem to be listening, standing motionless at the window with his back firmly set against me. At length he turned, frowning abstractedly at the floor between us.

‘There is a lot to be done,’ he said. ‘Papers, notes …’ He waved a hand over the disorder on his desk. ‘Secretarial work, really. Licht does what he can, but of course …’ He shrugged.

‘Then I can stay?’ I said.

It came out like a whoop. He flinched, as if he had been pounced upon by something large and heavy.

‘Yes,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders again, trying to extricate himself from the woolly embrace of my enthusiasm, ‘yes, I suppose you … I suppose …’

I thanked him. There was a catch in my voice, thick as it was with the pent of unshed tears; had I let them flow they would have come out forty per cent proof. Feeling the unabating waft of my gratitude he blinked and gave me one of his consternated, slow stares and turned away from me again uneasily. You must understand, this was a fraught moment for me, the commencement of my return from the wilderness into the place of humankind. I had come prepared to throw myself at his feet and here I was, still standing. Conceive of my joy, spiced though it was, I confess, with the actor’s secret triumph at having moved the house to tears (I have said it before, I shall say it again, the stage has lost a star in me). I went down the stairs and locked myself in the lavatory on the landing and sat on the bowl and gazed at the space between my knees, swaying a little and humming to myself, lost in a euphoric, unfocused introspection. I brought out my broad-shouldered comforter and took another good stiff nip of gin. My nose was running. Here I was, hardly a day out of prison and already a hand had come down from the clouds to haul me up to celestial heights. Why then, behind the euphoria, did I have the impression that something was being palmed off on me? Was there, I asked myself, a trace of dirt under the fingernails of that helping hand? Oh, not the greasy black stuff flecked with blood and hair that is lodged immovably under my splintered nails, but just the ordinary grime, the stuff that humans naturally accumulate as they claw their way through this filthy world. Would the Professor draw me up out of myself, or was I to help him to descend?