John Banville - Mefisto

— I was looking for you, he said, and here you were in the temple, all the time.

He followed his head into the room, one hand in a pocket, scratching his groin. Mr Kasperl padded past him and went out, his silent back stooping through the doorway. Sophie turned to the window again. I put the notebook away.

Jack Kay fell ill. He sat at the range in his rocking-chair, a plaid rug about his knees. He was cold, he said, cold, glaring resentfully at the sunshine streaming in the kitchen window. His large white hands lay motionless in his lap, like a pair of clumsy implements fallen from his grasp. He would not eat. Amber puddles began to appear on the floor under his chair. The doctor was called, and ordered him to bed. We lifted him from the rocker, my father, Uncle Ambrose and I, and carried him upstairs. He lay against us stiffly, a big chalk statue, mute and furious. He was unexpectedly light. The years had been working away at him in secret, hollowing him out. We propped him in bed against a bank of pillows and stepped back, brushing our hands. He gazed up at us fearfully, like a child, his mouth working, his fingers clamped on the fold of blankets at his chest as if it were the rim of a parapet behind which he was slowly, helplessly falling. Days, the doctor said, a week at the most. But the weeks went past and still he lay there, watching the light in the window, the surreptitious sky. He would talk to no one, but raged in silence, like a man betrayed. He developed bedsores, I had to turn him on his side while my mother basted him with ointment. His skin was dry but supple, like wrapping paper with something soft inside it, and I thought of those soft parcels my mother would have me carry home for her from the butcher’s when I was a child. In the narrow bed he looked huge yet insubstantial, a great bleached dead husk, inside of which the living man still cowered, peering out through the eyes in panic and a kind of amazement. Summer was ending, but still the weather held, as if to mock him. His mind began to wander. He would lie for hours talking to himself in a furious undertone. Sometimes he shouted out suddenly, and threw himself from side to side, plucking at the bedclothes, like a footless drunkard trying to get up and fight. One day he fell out of bed, we found him on the floor in a tangle of sheets, waving his arms weakly as if to ward off an assailant. His pot was overturned.

— Oh, look what you’ve done, my mother said. Just look!

He glared at her, suspicious, bewildered, afraid.

— Mother, he said gruffly, are you there, mother?

He groaned. There was no way out of the huge confusion into which he had blundered. He let us lift him into bed, and lay back on the pillows meekly. He turned his eyes to the window, and one fat, lugubrious tear ran down his temple, over the livid vein pulsing there.

At the funeral my mother could not cry. She watched with melancholy interest as the coffin was lowered into the hole. My father stood to one side fingering his tie. The violet shadow of a cloud swept a far-off meadow. At the edge of the small circle of mourners a figure had appeared, half hidden among a cluster of headstones, his hands in his pockets, a lick of foxy hair plastered on his narrow brow. He smiled at me and winked, and made a little sign, raising three fingers and sketching a sort of rapid blessing. Behind him a stained seraph towered on widespread marble wings.

QUEER THE LANDSCAPES that memory, that old master, chooses for its backgrounds, the twilit distances with meandering rivers and mossy brown crags, and tiny figures in costume doing something inexplicable a long way off. When I think now of that autumn, in a flash I see the malt store, I don’t know why. It was a grey stone fortress with a slate roof, and a row of small, barred windows high up under the eaves. Through an opening over the arched entranceway a block and tackle stuck out, like the arm of a complicated gibbet. The malt was dried there before being sent to the breweries. Insinuations of steam escaped at the windows day and night, and the sour, beery stink of the simmering grain pervaded the air. My father’s job must have taken him there often, though I never saw him — indeed, now that I think of it, I never saw anyone at all there. Where it stood was known as the Folly, a windswept angle between the backs of two mean streets. The place wore an air of dejection, and a sort of weary knowing. It seems always an overcast and cold October there. Dry leaves like the hands of dead pianists skitter along the pavements with a scraping noise. The wind soughs in the trees, and panels of pale, lumpy cloud pour in silence down a tilted rectangle of sky. A dog is barking in the distance, something is monotonously creaking, and I halt and stand expectantly, as if everything might be about to gather itself together and address me.

School was grotesque now, an absurd and shameful predicament. I had outgrown all this, the noise, the smells, the tedium. Every afternoon when the bell went I set off at once for Ashburn. At Coolmine the gate had been mended, and a warning sign had been put up, with a skull-and-crossbones stencilled on it. From the road I could see the workmen over at the pit-head, toiling like ants. Sometimes I spotted Mr Kasperl too, pacing up and down, or with Felix poring over charts spread out on the bonnet of the lorry. The old women were no longer let in to hunt for coal, I would meet them, with their blurred faces, and their stumpy legs wrapped in rags, wandering dazedly along the road, by the new barbed-wire fence.

As the year darkened so the house grew sombre, standing stark against a knife-coloured sky, a ragged flock of rooks wheeling above the chimney-pots. The first gales of the season stripped half the trees in the park, opening unexpected vistas. Indoors it was like being on a great ship at sea, the windows in their warped frames banged and boomed, and a grey, oceanic glow suffused the ceilings. Beneath the creaks, the rattlings, there was a deep, undersea silence. This was Sophie’s medium. It was as if something had been left switched off, like the lights in a blind man’s house. She was so quiet it was hard to find her. I would steal upstairs and along the corridors, my heart unaccountably pounding, and come upon her in one of the empty rooms, standing motionless at the window, her arms folded and her forehead pressed to the glass, so still, it seemed she must have been there for hours, without moving. Sensing me behind her, she would turn slowly, and slowly smile, blinking her dark, doll’s eyes.

Often too I would find her with Mr Kasperl, sitting quietly in his room in an old deckchair, with her legs folded under her and her hands resting in her lap like a pair of pale birds, while he lay on the bed reading, or working at his charts. The room was dim and hot, like the lair of a large indolent carnivore. He would be in his waistcoat, collarless, his bootlaces untied. He took scant notice of me. His silence was profound, a far place where no one else could follow. Sometimes he worked in his notebook. He would frown over a page for a long time without stirring, then lean forward suddenly with a snort and inscribe a line or two, driving the pen heavily, with grim exactness. He let me see things, certain insoluble niceties, but in such elaborately casual, roundabout ways that it might all have happened by accident. He would leave the notebook open near me and wander off, padding here and there about the room, while I squinted avidly at the place where he had been working. It was always some paradox, some tautology. He was fascinated by things to which there could be at best only an inconclusive result. Strange geometries amused him, their curved worlds where no parallels are possible, where there is no infinity, where all perpendiculars to a line will meet in one mad point. He would come and stand beside me and consider these queer axioms, panting softly, and softly flexing his stubby fingers, and I would seem to hear, deep down within him, a faint, dark laughter.