John Banville - Mefisto

I came away from these occasions in a sort of fever, my head humming, as if from a debauch. Things shook and shimmered minutely, in a phosphorescent glow. Details would detach themselves from their blurred backgrounds, as if a lens had been focused on them suddenly, and press forward eagerly, with mute insistence, urging on me some large, mysterious significance. A wash of sunlight on a high white wall, rank weeds spilling out of the windows of a tumbledown house, a dog in the gutter nosing delicately at a soiled scrap of newspaper, such things would strike me with strange force. They were like memories, but of things that had not happened yet. Walking home through the town on those smoky autumn evenings, past lighted pubs, and factory workers on bikes, and the somehow sinister bonhomie of fat shopkeepers standing in their doorways, I would feel a shiver of anticipation, not for what would be there now, the cosy hopelessness of home, but for that vast, perilous sea that lay all before me, agleam and vaguely shifting, in the dim distance.

One afternoon in November I spied Uncle Ambrose’s car coming down the drive at Ashburn. I hid behind a tree while he went past. When I got home he was there, sitting bolt upright at the tea-table, looking about him with a stunned smile, his small shiny head swivelling slowly and his adam’s apple bouncing.

— A what? my father was saying, with what in him passed for a laugh. A chauffeur?

Uncle Ambrose nodded, still dazedly smiling, amazed at his own audacity. He said:

— From Ashburn to Black’s, just, and then out to the mine.

My mother had stopped behind him, and was staring at the back of his head.

— What? she said sharply. What? When is this?

Uncle Ambrose jerked his chin forward, working a finger in under the collar of his shirt.

— Oh, every day, he said. Monday to Friday. And bring him home again in the evening.

— Home, my mother said. Ha!

He took up duty straight away. He drove out to Ashburn each morning prompt at nine, and pulled up at the front door with a discreet toot on the horn. He would not venture into the house, but waited patiently in the car, sitting motionless behind the wheel and gazing off impassively through the windscreen, with an air of disinterested rectitude which he wore like a uniform. Often an hour or more would pass before Mr Kasperl appeared. Uncle Ambrose did not mind. He was nowhere more at ease than in his car. It was a huge, black, old-fashioned sedan with a long sloped bonnet and a humped back, like a hearse. On a few evenings, returning early from the mine, he stopped — it must have been at Mr Kasperl’s bidding — and picked me up on my way out to the house after school. I sat in the back seat with the fat man, my satchel pressed on my knees. No one spoke. Mr Kasperl looked out his window, his arms folded and his stout legs crossed, puffing on a cigar. Now and then I would catch Uncle Ambrose’s eye in the rearview mirror, and immediately we would both look away, with a guilty start. He drove very slowly, turning the wheel with judicious attention, like a safe-cracker. Each time he changed gear he would hold in the clutch for a moment, and the car would billow forward in a sleek, brief bound, rolling a little, and Mr Kasperl and I would be lifted up an inch and then dropped back gently on the high, soft seat. As soon as we had drawn to a stop at the house, Uncle Ambrose would slide out smartly and turn, in one continuous movement, twirling on his heel in the gravel, and snatch open Mr Kasperl’s door, while I scrambled out the other side and hared off up the steps. Sometimes Felix made him drive me home as well. Those trips were the worst. I sat in the front seat, sweating, while Uncle Ambrose clung to the wheel in an excruciated silence, like a stammerer stuck in the middle of a word.

Felix seldom travelled in the car, preferring to walk, even in winter weather, with his hands in his pockets and his coat swinging open. But he was delighted with Uncle Ambrose, and studied him enthusiastically, this large swarth moist man, with his queasy smile and his tight suits and his aura of talcum powder and pain. On mornings when Mr Kasperl was late, Felix would come down and lean in the window of the car and hector him gaily, with roguish winks and jabs. Uncle Ambrose responded with a befuddled, panic-stricken grin, nodding and mumbling. Felix looked at me wide-eyed, in mock wonder.

— So many relatives you have! he said. Why, they’re everywhere.

Aunt Philomena did not know whether to be jealous of Uncle Ambrose now, or proud of him. Ambrose, at Ashburn! Who would have thought it? Emboldened, she intensified her assaults on Mr Kasperl’s stony solitude, but in vain, he sat alone with his thoughts by the window in the hotel dining room as he had always done, taking no notice of anyone. She turned to Felix then, lying in wait for him in secluded spots about the hotel, sitting up very straight with her neck stretched out and her lips pursed, a cup of coffee at her elbow, a cigarette with an inch of ash on it clipped tightly between two tensed, tremulous fingers. Felix listened to her attentively, with a bland, dreamy smile.

— Oh, Ambrose! she would say, with a dismissive sniff. The things I could tell you about poor Ambrose …

And she would gabble on, in rising tones of vehement sincerity, while a puckered skin formed on her coffee, and the ashtray on the low table before her sprouted a thicket of incarnadined butts, the least damaged of which Felix would save, and store away pensively in his tobacco tin.

The photographic studio, a winter afternoon, the gas fire hissing. I liked it here, the clutter, the quiet, the chemical smell, the grainy light that seemed, at this dead end of the year, to drift down from the ceiling, a strange, dense element, like pale smoke. Another world lay all around me here, a jumble of images. How sharp they were, how clear, these pictures from the land of the dead. I examined them minutely, one by one, as if searching for someone I knew, a known face, with blurred grin and unfamiliar quiff, looking up from that picnic table, in summer, in sunlight, among trees. I would not have been surprised, I think, if that face had been my own, so real did that world seem, and so fleeting, somehow, this one. Sophie, sitting by the fire, turned her gaze towards the door with an expectant smile. I had not heard a sound. Felix came in.

— Hello, Hansel, he said. Why, and Gretel too!

He looked from one of us to the other, grinning. He was carrying a white gown draped voluminously over his arm.

— See what I found, he said.

It was a wedding dress, elaborately embroidered, the heavy silk frayed and rusted with age. Sophie with a joyful yelp rose and took it from him, and held it against herself and laughed, turning this way and that. Felix put a hand to his heart and cried:

— Ah, thou still unravished bride of quietness!

He produced a crumpled white veil and placed it on her head with a flourish. She laughed again, her tongue rolling on her lower lip, and ran from the room. We heard her racing up the stairs and through the bedrooms, searching for a mirror. Felix chuckled, and crossed to the gas fire and rubbed his hands before the flame, his eyes lifted to the window. A fistful of rain swept against the glass with a muffled clatter. Rooks were squabbling outside in the darkening trees. He hummed the Wedding March, and grinned at me over his shoulder and softly sang:

Here comes the bride,

Contemplating a ride …

He chuckled again, and wandered idly about the room, picking up things and tossing them aside. He glanced at me slyly and said:

— What are you thinking about, bird-boy?

— Nothing.

I was thinking that I would always be a little afraid of him.

— Nothing, eh? he said. Well that’s a lie, I know. You’re thinking dirty things, aren’t you?