John Banville - Ghosts

*

Thus I had alighted at last in what I suppose I may as well call my destination. I had a feeling of weightlessness, a floating sensation, which I recognised; I always feel like this when I first come to a new place, as if something of me were lagging behind the physical arrival, some part of myself hanging back, out on the ocean, or in the air, dazed by speed and change. Thus the angel when he came to Mary must have felt, trembling on one knee with his wings still spread in this other, denser azure, stammering out his amazing message. But what annunciation did I bring, what grotesque incarnation did I herald? What word? What flesh?

We ate our tea in the kitchen, the Professor frowning at his plate and Licht eyeing me narrowly and saying things under his breath. I felt like the interloper that I was. Interloper: what an apt word: as if I had run up quietly and pressed myself between them. I had an awkward sense of myself caught up in a sort of antique dance, smiling and wincing and mouthing excuse-me’s as together they trod out the measures of their ancient minuet, their eyes fixed on something elsewhere and their feet dragging leadenly.

Licht could not contain himself.

‘Why don’t we open a hostel?’ he said at last, loudly, his voice shaking.

The room cringed. The Professor put on a bland expression and did not lift his eyes, and Licht, white-faced and furious, glared across the table at his inclined, broad bald pate. ‘Why not turn the place into a doss-house?’ he cried. ‘We could take in every tinker and drunkard that happens to be passing by.’

A long and weighty silence followed. Licht sat and stared before him with livid fixity, his knife and fork clutched in his fists and his knuckles white and one leg going like a sewing-machine under the table, making the cruets rattle.

‘How was the crossing?’ the Professor enquired of me at last, in a resonantly courteous tone.

The effects of the gin were wearing off and the faint buzzing of a hangover had started up. My eyes felt as if they had been toasted and my breath came out in furnace blasts.

‘There’s the extra work,’ Licht shouted. ‘There’s the cooking, for instance. Am I expected to do all that? — because I won’t.’ He beat a fist softly on the table; there were tears in his eyes, big, shining drops brimming on the lids. ‘You never tell me anything!’ he cried. ‘You never consult me!’

Professor Kreutznaer fixed his eye on a patch of the tablecloth beside his plate and sighed.

I fell to quiet contemplation, as is my wont at times of social awkwardness such as this. How shyly chance portions of the world dispose themselves — a bit of yard spied through a doorway at evening, clouds crowding in the corner of a window — as if to say, Look at us! we mean something!

The dog came waddling in from the yard (yes, yes! — Mr Tighe will make a full appearance yet, arm in arm with Miss Broaders the postmistress, and a winged horse will put its head over the half-door, and there will be no mysteries left). Licht took our plates and set them on the floor for the beast to finish off the scraps. Its name was Patch; all dogs are Patch, to me. It had a bad case of pink-eye. As it gulped and gasped Licht talked to it loudly in angry good humour that was meant to sound a general rebuke, tousling its rank fur and slapping it on the rump, raising a cloud of brownish dust.

Another prison, I was thinking, its walls made of air, and the old self inside me still in its white cell snarling for release.

‘Good dog,’ Licht said heartily. ‘Good old dog!’

That’s me.

*

In time of course we got used to each other. Even Licht in the end reconciled himself, not without a lingering and occasionally eruptive resentment, to my invasion of his little world. What an oddly assorted trio we would have seemed anywhere else; the island, however, with its long tradition of inbreeding and recurring bouts of internecine strife, was well used to peculiar and contingent arrangements such as ours. We were like a family of orphaned, elderly siblings, the resentments and rivalries of childhood calcified inside us, like gallstones. When I think of it I am surprised at myself for the brazen way in which I insinuated myself here — it is not like me, really it’s not — but the truth is I had nowhere else to go. The house, the Professor, the work on Vaublin, all this represented for me the last outpost at the border; beyond were the fiery, waterless wastes where no man or even monster could survive.

Eventually the house too in its haughty way accommodated itself to my coming, though there were still times when the whole place seemed to twang like a spider’s web under the weight of my unaccustomed tread. I suspect it was not any noise that I made but on the contrary the uncanny quiet of my presence that was most unsettling. I have always moved gingerly, excessively so, perhaps, among the furniture of other people’s lives, not for fear of disturbing things but out of an obscure terror of being myself somehow caught out, of being surprised among surprised surroundings, red-handed. At times I fancied I could hear everything going silent suddenly for no particular reason, listening for me, and then of course I too would stop and stand with held breath, straining to catch I knew not what, and so the silence would stretch and stretch until it could bear the strain no longer and snapped of its own accord when a floorboard groaned or a door banged in the wind. At moments such as that I sympathised with the aboriginal tenants as they too stood stock-still, Licht in the kitchen and the Professor in his tower, straining despite themselves to catch the faint, discordant note of my presence. It must have been as if some large and softly padding animal had got into the house and was hiding somewhere, in the dark under a bed, or behind a not quite closed door, breathing and waiting, half fierce and half afraid. Licht in particular seems unable to prevent himself from listening for me, from the moment I wake in the morning until I drag myself up to my room again at dead of night. He wants to ask me things, I know, but cannot formulate the questions. He is like a child longing to learn all the thrilling, dirty secrets of the big world. He listens to the beast stirring, and smells blood.

Poor Licht. I seem unable to utter his name without that adjective attached to it. He keeps himself busy; that is his aim, to keep busy, as if he fears dissolution, a general and immediate falling apart, should he stop even for a moment in his headlong stumble. He cleaves to the principle of the perfectability of man, and gives himself over enthusiastically to self-improvement programmes. He sends off for things advertised in the newspapers, kitchen utensils, hiking boots, patented remedies for this or that deficiency of the blood or brain; he possesses books and manuals on all sorts of matters — how to set up a windmill or grow mushrooms commercially, how to draw and paint, or do wickerwork; he has piles of pamphlets on bee-keeping, wine-making, home accountancy, all of them eagerly thumb-marked for the first few pages and in pristine condition thereafter. He writes letters to the newspapers, does football competitions, labours for days over prize crossword puzzles. Always busy, always in motion, frantically treading the rungs of his cage-wheel. Nor does he neglect the outer man: at morning and evening, unfailingly, he strips down to his vest and drawers and spends a quarter of an hour ponderously bending knees and flexing arms and touching fingertips to toes; on occasion, looking up from the garden, I catch a glimpse of him in his room engaged in these shaky callisthenics, his strained little face yo-yoing slowly behind the shadowed glass like a lugubrious moon. He aims to get in shape, he says — but what shape, I wonder, is that? I suspect that, like me, he is convinced that large adjustments need to be made before he can consider himself to have reached the stage of being fully human.