John Banville - Ghosts

We each of us have our ceremonies. There is the Professor’s nightly bath, for instance, which has all the solemn trappings of a royal balneation. I hear him in the cavernous bathroom on the second-floor return, vigorously sluicing and sloshing; then for a long time all goes quiet except for an occasional aquatic heave or the sudden, echoing plop of a big drop falling from chin or lifted elbow. I picture him sitting up in the tub like a big, mottled frog, just sitting there with the steam rising around him, quite still, water-wrinkled, hardly breathing, the lids dropping abruptly now and then over those little bulging black eyes and as abruptly lifting again. Afterwards I discover his damp trail on the stairs, dumbbell-shaped footprints dark in the moonlight, at once comic and sinister, winding their splayed way upwards to the mysterious fastness of his bedroom.

Strange, now that I think of it, how many of the rituals of the house involve water; we are a little Venice here, all to ourselves. There are the plants to be watered, the kettle to be kept simmering on the stove for the endless pots of tea the house requires, the washings-up, the launderings. I do our clothes, the girl’s and mine, in an old tin bath in the scullery; there is an antiquated washing-machine I could use, but like all lifers I am set in my ways. I used to hang the laundry in bits and pieces out of the window of my room to dry, until Licht complained (‘We’re not living in a tenement here, you know’), and then I rigged up a line in a corner of the garden. Still Licht was not pleased — he is pained I suppose by the sight of my flapping shirts excitedly embracing the girl’s slip. I confess I derive a certain wan pleasure from annoying him; it is wrong of me, I know, but somehow he invites cruelty. He patronises me, seeing in my ruin an encouragement to lord it over me. I do not mind, moth-eaten old lion that I am, and obligingly open wide my toothless jaws and let him put in his head as far and for as long as he likes. He confides in me, despite himself, under cover of a blustering anger that does not convince either of us, telling me how he loathes the life here, the harshness of it, the isolation. The villagers laugh at him, Mr Tighe cheats him on the grocery bill, Miss Broaders listens in when he goes to the post office to use the telephone. He professes to hate the house, too, speaking of it with deep disgust, in a furious, spitting undertone, as if he thinks the walls might be eavesdropping; it bears him along like a big old broken-down ship, its ancient timbers shuddering; he looks forward to the day when it will founder at last. He is convinced it plays tricks on him. Inanimate things rear up at him, trip him up, give way under his feet, fall on his head. He will put down something and return an hour later and find it gone. Door handles come away in his hand, curtains when he tries to draw them will collapse suddenly in a muffled cascade of dust and jangling brass rings. He retaliates, letting the rain come in through open windows, allowing filth to gather in hidden corners of the kitchen, neglecting things until they break, or get scorched, or overflow. He dreams of escape, of getting up one morning before dawn and sneaking off like a hotel guest doing a flit. He has no idea where he would go to, yet flight, just flight itself, is a constant theme, a kind of hazy, blue and gold background to everything he does. I could tell him about freedom, but I have not the heart; let him dream, let him dream.

How at a word things shift suddenly, the whole pattern falling apart and reassembling itself in a new way out of the old pieces. I had been here some time before I discovered that it is not Professor Kreutznaer who owns the house, but Licht. This was a great surprise. I had, naturally, I believe, taken it for granted that the Professor was the man of property and Licht his vassal, but not so; in fact, the Professor is as much the parvenu as I am. Licht has lived here since he was a child — he may even have been born here. I would not have thought of him as a native, mind you, he is not exactly the craggy, weatherbeaten type one would expect an islandman to be. His mother it seems was a widow of many years; I pictured her as a scattered, birdlike creature with wild white hair and demented eyes, a sort of anile, genderless version of her son, but then Licht showed me a picture of her and she was nothing like my imagining, but a big strapping termagant with an implacable stare and a boxer’s biceps. It is not clear when she died, or even that she did die; an inexplicably imperative sense of delicacy prevents me from enquiring too closely. He may have her in the cellar, or boarded up in the attic, for all I know. He speaks of her, on the rare occasions when he does speak of her, with the startled, heart-in-mouth air of a man stepping over a gaping crevice that has suddenly opened up before him in the pavement, frowning, his eyes cast down in alarmed despondency. I understand, however, that she had been long gone, by whatever means of departure she had chosen, by the time the Professor turned up, like me, looking for shelter. It seems he came over on the boat and climbed up here to enquire after lodgings and has been here ever since. In retirement from life, just like me.

Thus the days passed, the weeks. I walked the island, taking consolation from stray things, a red geranium in a blue window, a white sail in the bay, the suspense and then the sudden plummet of a hawk. In the evenings I lay on the frowsty bed in my room with my back against the wall and my hands behind my head and watched the dusk deepen in the window and the world out there fade from green to grey and turn at last to glossy black. I felt nothing, almost nothing. All my life I had been on my way elsewhere, despising the present, pressing always into the future, wanting the next thing, always the next thing; now at last I had come to rest, if that is what it can be called, as sometimes in my dreams I land with unexpected lightness after a long, tumbling, heart-stopping plunge through emptiness and dark air. I had sailed the sea and come to Cythera. That much I could say. Now I was waiting. The days would whiten and then flutter to the floor like so many leaves torn from a calendar; I would write my notes, do my chores, eat, sleep, be. And then one day, a day much like any other in that turning season between spring’s breathless imminences and the first, gold flourishings of summer, I would look out the window and see that little band of castaways toiling up the road to the house and a door would open into another world. Oh, a little door, hardly high enough for me to squeeze through, but a door, all the same. And out there in that new place I would lose myself, would fade and become one of them, would be another person, not what I had been — or even, perhaps, would cease altogether. Not to be, not to be: the old cry. Or to be as they, rather: real and yet mere fancy, the necessary dreams of one lying on a narrow bed watching barred light move on a grey wall and imagining fields, oaks, gulls, moving figures, a peopled world. I think of a picture at the end of a long gallery, a sudden presence come upon unexpectedly, at first sight a soft confusion of greens and gilts in the calm, speechless air. Look at this foliage, these clouds, the texture of this gown. A stricken figure stares out at something that is being lost. There is an impression of music, tiny, exact and gay. This is the end of a world. Birds unseen are fluting in the trees, the sun shines somewhere, the distances of the sea are vague and palely blue, the galliot awaits. The figures move, if they move, as in a moving scene, one that they define, by being there, its arbiters. Without them only the wilderness, green riot, tumult of wind and the crazy sun. They formulate the tale and people it and give it substance. They are the human moment.