John Banville - Ghosts

‘That skipper,’ Felix was saying. ‘What a fellow! Listing? I said to him, listing? More like we are in danger of turning tortoise, I believe!’ And he laughed his laugh.

I was thinking how strangely matters arrange themselves at times, as if after all there were someone, another still, whose task it is to set them out just so.

Licht from across the room gave me one of his mournfully accusing glares.

‘It’s all right,’ he called out loudly, ‘it’s all right, don’t trouble yourself, I’ll light the stove.’

PROFESSOR KREUTZNAER in his eyrie sat for a long time without stirring, hearing only the slow beat of his own blood and the spring wind gusting outside and now and then the hoarse baby-cry of a gull, startlingly close. Strain as he might he could hear nothing from downstairs. What were they doing? They had not left, he would have seen them go. He pictured them standing about the dim hallway, magicked into immobility, glazed and mute, one with a hand raised, another bending to set down a bag, and Licht before them, stalled at the foot of the stairs, nodding and twitching like a marionette, as usual.

He fiddled with the telescope and sighed. Surely he had been mistaken, surely it was not who he thought it was?

He went to the door. It had a way of sticking and was hard to open quietly. Sure enough it gave its little eek! and shuddered briefly on its hinges. A flare of irritation made his heart thud hotly. He stood a moment on the landing with an ear cocked. Not a sound. Out here, though, he could feel them, the density of their presence, the unaccustomed fullness in the air of the house. His heart quietened, settling down grumpily in his breast like a fractious babe. The stairs at this level were narrow and uncarpeted. On the return a little circular window, greyed with dust and cobwebs, looked out blearily on treetops and a bit of brilliant blue, it might be sea or sky, he could never decide which. Again he found himself listening to his own heartbeat, with that occasional delicate tripping measure at the systole that made him think of rippling silk. If he were to pitch headlong down these stairs now would he feel it, his face crumpling, knees breaking, his breastbone bumping from step to step, or would he be gone already, a bit of ectoplasm floating up into the dimness under the ceiling, looking back with detached interest at this sloughed slack bag of flesh slithering in a comic rush on to the landing? When he was young he had thought that growing old would be a process of increasing refinement by which the things that mattered would fall away like little lights falling dark one by one, until at last the last light winked out. And it was true, things that had once seemed important had faded, but then others had taken their place. He had never paid much attention to his body but now it weighed on him constantly. He felt invaded by his own flesh, squatted upon by this ailing ape with its pains and hungers and its traitorous heart. And he was baffled all the time, baffled and numb.

He began cautiously to descend the stairs, wincing on each step as the boards squeaked. If it was Felix, how had he found his way here? Chance? He smiled to himself bitterly. Oh, of course — pure chance. He could feel the past welling up around him, a smoking, sulphurous stuff.

At the window on the first-floor landing he paused again and looked out at the distant sea. How clear it was today: he could see the burnished tufts of grass on the slopes of the dunes tossing in the wind. He liked mornings, the cold air and immensities of light, the raw, defenceless feel of things. This was the time to work, when the brain was still tender from the swoons and mad alarms of sleep and the demon flesh had not yet reasserted its foul hegemony. Work. But he no longer worked. He could feel the wind pummelling the house, pounding softly on the window-panes. On the sill a fly was buzzing itself to death, fallen on its back and spinning madly in tiny, spiralling circles. He leaned against the window-frame and at once the old questions rose again, gnawing at him. How can these disparate things — that wind, this fly, himself brooding there — how can they be together, continuous with each other, in the same reality? Incongruity: disorder and incongruity, the grotesqueries of the always-slipping mask, these were the only constants he had ever been able to discern. He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a tiny sip of darkness. Stay here, never stir again, gradually go dry and hollow, turn into a brittle husk a breath of wind would blow away. He imagined it, everything quiet and the light slowly changing and evening coming on, then the long dark, then rain at dawn and the gull’s wing, then shine again, another bright day declining towards dusk, then another night, endlessly.

Suddenly there was a muffled cataclysm and the door behind him opened and Flora came out. At first he saw her only as a silhouette against a haze of white light in the lavatory window at her back. She shimmered in the doorway as if enveloped in some dark, flowing stuff, an angled shape flexing behind her shoulder like a wing being folded.

‘Oh,’ she said, and, so it seemed to him, laughed.

She closed the door behind her with one hand while with the other she held up her long hair in a bundle at the nape of her neck. He touched a hand to his crooked bow-tie. A hairpin fell to the floor and she crouched quickly to retrieve it. He looked down at her knees pressed tightly together, pale as candle-wax, and saw the outlines of the frail bones packed under the skin and caught for a second her warm, dark, faintly urinous smell. She was barefoot. As she was rising she swayed a little and he put out a hand to steady her, but she pretended not to notice and turned from him with a blurred, stiff smile, murmuring something, and went away quickly down the stairs, still holding up the flowing bundle of her hair. When she was gone the only trace of her was the borborygmic grumbling of the cistern refilling, and for a moment he wondered if he might have dreamed her. Suddenly the image of his mother rose before him. He saw her as she had been when he was a child, turning from shadow into light, a slight, small-boned woman in a black dress with a bodice, her heavy dark hair, which gave her so much trouble and of which she was so vain, done up in two braided shells over her ears and parted down the middle with such severity he used to think it must hurt her, the white weal scored from brow to nape like a bloodless wound. Das Mädel , his father used to call her, with a bitter, mocking smile, das kleine Mädel. Father in his white suit standing under the arbour of roses, idly drawing figures on the pathway with the tip of his cane, gay and disappointed and dreamily sinister, like a character out of Chekhov. Where was that? Up on the Baltic, the summer house. In the days when they had a summer house. The past, the past. He faltered, as if he had been struck a soundless blow, and closed his eyes briefly and pressed his fingertips to the window-sill for support, and a sort of hollow opened up inside him and he could not breathe.

Licht came up the stairs. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, sounding annoyed. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

The Professor blinked. ‘What?’

‘She said you were …’

They looked at each other. Licht was the first to turn away his eyes.

‘Who is that,’ the Professor said after a pause.

‘Who?’

‘That girl.’

Licht shrugged and hummed a tune under his breath, tapping one foot. The Professor lifted his weary eyes to the window and the shining day outside. The wind was still blowing, the fly still buzzed. He turned to Licht again.

‘What did you say to them?’ he said. ‘Have they asked to stay?’

Licht frowned blandly and went on humming as if he had not heard, picking with a fingernail at a patch of flaking paint on the wall in front of him. The Professor descended a step towards him menacingly and paused. He could feel it suddenly, no mistaking it, the tiny but calamitous adjustment that had been made in their midst.