John Banville - Mefisto

— Who’s that, now, I wonder? he said. Looks familiar, I think.

Jack Kay was climbing the steps, then we heard his distant knock at the front door. Felix put a finger to his lips. He sat down on the bed, and Sophie knelt behind him, leaning eagerly over his shoulder. He reached into a pocket of his jacket, then turned up his hand to her and opened it slowly. A tiny brown mouse crouched in his palm, its whiskers and the pink tip of its nose aquiver. It turned this way and that, sniffing the air with little jerks of its head. Sophie, delighted, tried to take the creature in her hand, but Felix held it teasingly out of her reach, until she made a lunge and captured it. She lifted it level with her face, and mouse and girl studied each other. Then she leaned forward quickly and touched her pursed lips lightly to the quivering snout. Felix laughed.

— Oho! he cried, look, beauty and the beast!

Jack Kay was hammering at the front door down there. Felix heaved a sigh.

— All right, all right! he muttered.

He went out, and presently I heard him below on the steps with Jack Kay. The old man’s voice was raised. Sophie sat on her heels on the bed, with the mouse in her lap, stroking it rhythmically with her fingertip, from head to tail, pressing a groove into the fine fur. At each gently dragging stroke the pink cleft at the tip of the creature’s sharp little snout opened a fraction and closed again wetly. Sophie bowed her head, her dark hair falling about her face. Her fingernail, gliding amid the parted fur, gleamed like an oiled bead. The room was still. Jack Kay was shouting. The front door slammed. Sophie looked up at me with an intent, attenuated smile, as if she were vaguely in distress. The mouse lay meekly in her lap, minutely throbbing. I took a step forward, it seemed a kind of lurching fall, and reached out a hand to touch the tiny creature. Immediately it sprang from her lap and scurried down the side of the bed. Felix, coming into the room again, said lightly:

— Ah, you haven’t the knack. We’ll have to teach you, won’t we?

He bent down by the bed and coaxed the mouse back on to his palm. He wandered with it to the window and peered out.

— There he goes, he said. Fierce old boy, I must say. He was looking for you, you know, cob. Told him we’d never heard of you. No Swan here, my man , I said, our swans are all geese. Did I do right?

He looked from me to Sophie and back again. There was silence. I could hear faintly the sound of Jack Kay’s boots crunching away over the gravel. Sophie rose from the bed, brushing at her skirt. She glanced at me vaguely, as if she could not quite remember who I was. Felix offered her the mouse, but she walked past him like a sleepwalker, out of the room. He watched her go, then turned his sly glance on me.

— All these my creatures, he whispered gaily, making his eyeballs roll.

He opened his hand and showed me the mouse, lying motionless on its side, its front paws folded, a bubble of ruby blood in its snout.

At home I found Jack Kay sitting sideways at the kitchen table, ashen with rage, one fist planted among the tea-things and the other clamped on the crook of his stick. For the second time in his life he had been put out of Ashburn Park. Who did they think they were, that fat foreigner and that other, red-headed bastard? What right did they have? He glared about him, knuckles whitening, daring anyone to answer. Felix had laughed at him — laughed, at him, Jack Kay!

— God blast him for a whore’s melt, he muttered thickly, and dealt the floor a crack with his cane.

He fixed me with a blood-filled eye and grunted, scowling. My mother was silent. It was she, of course, who had sent him out to Ashburn. Now she wore a chastened, thoughtful air. She brought my tea to the table and stood over me, incensed, and yet unnerved. She had felt today the touch of something cold and cruel, a kind of malignancy, as if an illness had taken hold in her. She too had twice lost Ashburn, once as a girl when she left home, and then a second time with the advent of Mr Kasperl and his familiar. Now they were trying to take me from her too. But she would not let them — no, she would not let them! Her hand shook, the cup and saucer rattled, she set them down hurriedly, with a little crash.

I RELIVED THAT moment on Sophie’s bed so often in my mind that the details wore out, became hollow, leached of solidity. I alone was always real there, always intensely present. Suddenly I had a vivid sense of myself. I held myself poised, balanced in air, as if I were some precious, polished thing that had been put with ceremonial care into my hands. It was not the kiss that mattered so much, but what it seemed to signify. A world had opened up before me, disordered, perilous and strange, and for the first time in my life I felt almost at home.

But when I next saw Sophie I experienced a tiny jolt of surprise. She had so throbbed in my imagination that now, when I confronted the real she, it was as if I had just parted from her more dazzling double. She must have caught a flicker of that shock in my eyes, for she smiled strangely, and turned and walked away slowly, looking back at me over her shoulder. That was the day she took me to Mr Kasperl’s room.

I did not notice her taking me there. We were just trailing aimlessly about the house, as we so often did. But when she pushed open his door I remember feeling a vague, almost pleasurable qualm, as if I were being seduced, gently, with sly blandishments, into hazard. He was not there, he was at the mine. The room was vast, high-ceilinged, crowded with big ugly pieces of furniture, bureaux, a chest of drawers, his enormous, rumpled bed. There was a hushed, watchful atmosphere, as if something had been going on, and had stopped when we came in. It was raining outside, a summer storm was on the way. Sophie wandered to the streaming window and stood with her forehead against the glass, looking out dreamily into a green, liquid world. I glanced at Mr Kasperl’s papers strewn on the bed, his books, his ordnance maps, his charts of the underground workings at Coolmine. There was a big black notebook, thick as a wizard’s codex, with a worn cloth cover and dog-eared pages. I picked it up idly and opened it, and at once it began to speak to me in a strong, clear, familiar voice. I sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

It was the work of years. Page after page was crammed with calculations, diagrams, algebraic formulas, set out in a minute, square script. Much of it I could not understand. Quaternions, matrix theory, transfinite numbering, I had barely heard of such things. I noticed there were things we had in common, however, a particular fondness for symmetries, for example, for mirror equivalences, and palindromic series. But his was a grandmaster game, and I was a novice. Such intricacy, such elegance! I read on, enraptured. Everything beyond the bed became blurred, as if a kind of luminous dusk had fallen. The girl seemed to flit about the room, there one moment, gone the next, like a vague attendant seen from a sick-bed. For a while she was standing beside me, her hip negligently touching my shoulder, but when she went away it was as if I had imagined it, that warmth, her shadow, her hand resting at her side. The storm arrived, peals of thunder rolled across the sky, rattling the window-frames. The air had a sulphurous glow. Then suddenly it was calm again, and I looked up in undulant rain-light and found Mr Kasperl standing in the doorway, in his drenched dustcoat, watching me.

He entered the room heavily, mopping the rain on his brow with a large red kerchief. He took off his coat, and, without looking at her, handed it to Sophie. The rain stopped, and the sun came out suddenly, with an almost audible swish, blazing in the window. I closed the notebook quietly and laid it back on the bed. Mr Kasperl paid me no heed, yet his manner was not unfriendly. Sophie fetched a hanger for his coat, and hung it in the window to dry in the sun. He moved here and there about the room, with that slow, deliberate walk, rolling on the balls of his feet. He opened a box of cigars that stood on top of a bureau, selected one, sniffed it, trimmed the end, and lit up. I thought of sidling away quietly. He worked at his cigar unhurriedly, getting it going evenly, then turned at last and came towards the bed. I stood up. He stopped, not looking at me still, and drew a bead on the black notebook, one eye half shut, as if it were a distant target, then picked it up and riffled through the pages. He found what he was looking for, and turned to me, tapping a finger on the page. It was a series of field equations, elegant but enigmatic, their solutions all dissipating towards infinity. He contemplated them for a moment with what seemed a grim satisfaction, then put the open notebook into my hands and walked away from me, leaving cigar smoke, and a faint smell of damp cloth and coal. I sat down on the bed again. The door opened and Felix put in his head. He looked at me with his thin smile, narrowing his eyes.