John Banville - Mefisto

— This is not satisfactory, D’Arcy said almost mildly, as if to himself. This is not satisfactory, at all.

He turned to Felix.

— Is it? he said. Nothing done, no repairs, filth everywhere, people going about in rags, barefoot.

Felix smiled, holding out his empty hands.

— It’s not paradise, I grant you, he said. But it does for us, sir.

— I’m not interested in what does for you , D’Arcy said, with a terrible stare.

We all went downstairs again, trooping in D’Arcy’s wake. He stopped in the hall and took off his glasses and polished them on a spotless white handkerchief. His eyes sprang back into his skull, two tiny, bright beads. He peered at us sightlessly, the lenses flashing in his hands.

— And there have been reports, he said. Something or other about money, some sort of freelance dealing. I shall be making inquiries.

He put on his glasses solemnly and looked hard at each of us.

— You will hear from us, I don’t doubt.

He advanced to the front door. Sophie was there before him, she opened it slowly, smiling eagerly into his face. He avoided her eye, and stepped out into the sodden dusk. His car waited on the gravel, a large, gaudy, gold machine, the roof stippled with rain. He buttoned his overcoat.

— Tell your Mr Kasperl, he said over his shoulder. He’ll be hearing from us.

— Oh, I will, Felix said seriously, I’ll tell him.

D’Arcy lingered, looking at Sophie’s tailcoat, at Felix’s attentive smile, at the traces of lipstick on my mouth. He was about to say something more, but a fat drop of rain from the guttering got down the back of his collar and he shuddered, his shoulder-blades twitching like wings. He turned and went quickly down the steps. Sophie waved until the rear lights of his car were out of sight down the drive. Felix scowled, grinding the fist of one hand into the palm of the other.

— How did he get in here, he muttered, that …

He saw me watching him, and grinned.

— Trouble up mine, eh? he said, winking. And up theirs, too.

I HAD A DREAM OF D’Arcy, a huge figure descending slowly through a hole in the roof at Ashburn, swaddled in his rich, blond coat, his glazed eyes staring and his arms clasped on his breast. Rain fell after him through the gaping hole, and dead songbirds and twigs and bits of paper. Now, I thought, now everything will change, will end. But nothing happened. One day a letter came for Mr Kasperl, in a thick white envelope with D’Arcy’s name and the address of a firm of solicitors embossed on the flap. Felix held it to his ear and shook it gingerly, in mock trepidation. Mr Kasperl read it impassively and tossed it aside. Sophie reverently retrieved it. Among the marionettes lined up along the wall in her room, one had acquired an overcoat and pain ted-on glasses, and a rudimentary wig of black wool slicked down with glue.

My mother heard of D’Arcy’s visit from Uncle Ambrose. She nodded grimly. He would soon settle their hash, she said. Oh yes. She looked about her for agreement, then frowned, and turned away. Everyone was against her. First Aunt Philomena had deserted her, then Uncle Ambrose. Jack Kay’s dying had been a dereliction too. And now she was alone. She never mentioned Ashburn or its tenants by name, it was always that place , and them , her tensed mouth turning white. Then people fell silent, and looked at their hands, as if she had said something foolish, or tasteless, and they were embarrassed for her. How could they not understand? Something was being destroyed, trodden underfoot. She thought of the past. As a girl she had worked in a draper’s shop in the town. She had been happy in that dim sanctuary. The raw texture of life as she knew it in the cottage at Ashburn had given way here to the softness of silks and stuffs. The polished counters, the brass fittings, even the mirrors, had a satin feel under her fingers, sumptuous and cool. She had liked best the early afternoons, when business was slow, and she was free just to stand in the midst of all that peace, listening to the hushed voices of the other assistants gossiping in the linen department, while at the far end of the shop the draper, a plump man with half-glasses, drew out bolt after bolt of cloth and unfurled them with a deft flick of one white hand, beaming over his spectacles at the customer before him, who stood, in seamed stockings and a feathered toque, humming thoughtfully, a finger pressed to her cheek. But she liked too the Saturday late openings, when everything was noise and bustle, and the wooden cylinders on the overhead cables whizzed back and forth from the cash office, and the air was laced with a genteel tang of sweat. Haberdashery had been her department. She had a counter to herself, fitted with many minute drawers and glass panels and velvet display cases, like an elaborate toybox. She would finger dreamily the trinkets in her care, the spools of thread, the buttons, of ivory, bone, mother-of-pearl, the packets of pins and ranked, gleaming needles, and think of that paradise of grace and ease she had glimpsed across the green lawns of Ashburn.

Then she had married, and one day at the beginning of spring the draper called her into his private room behind the cash office. She stood motionless before his desk, trying to hold in her already burgeoning stomach. She watched his lips move. He would not meet her eye. When he had finished she said nothing. He threw his pencil down on the desk.

— After all, he broke out petulantly, this is a fashion shop, my girl, and look at you!

She walked the long length of the shop, trailing her finger on the counter, to the door and the grey, March day, feeling a flash of pain inside her like a flaming sword.

These are the things she thought about, these are the things she remembered.

On my way out to Ashburn I would stop sometimes at Coolmine. I liked to wander among the dust-hills and the lakes of broken glass, there was something grimly satisfying in such a wide expanse of waste. The lorries from the factories had built up a ramp of sand and rubble, down the steep sides of which I would wade, feeling a thrill of panic as the whole bank for yards around began to shift and slide. All sorts of things surfaced in these slippages and slowly sank again into the churning rubble, rusty springs and die-punched metal plates, and volutes of steel shavings with pleated edges and a nude, subterranean gleam. The tinkers had got in again. Something had happened to them, though. They did not hunt for scrap metal any more, but sat about in dazed huddles, fighting and weeping, and drinking out of big brown bottles. They would shout at me as I went past, calling me a fucking cunt and offering me a drink. They had ravaged faces, and maddened, bloodshot eyes. Occasionally one of them would heave himself up and hobble after me, trying to tell me something, waving a ragged arm. I remember their mouths, soft, shapeless holes, like half-healed wounds.

Work at the mine was going slowly. There had been roof-falls and flooding. The men were not happy, I would meet them trudging home at evening, begrimed and sullen, the whites of their eyes flashing. Felix was fed up.

— Time to move on, he said. Nothing left here. Look at it.

We stood on the edge of the ramp, above the pit-head. Men were coming up out of the hole, others were going down. The lorry sat drunkenly at the side of a dirt track, where it had broken down one day, never to go again. We could see Mr Kasperl sitting in the cab, with his charts and his cigar. A grey wind swarmed up the ashen slope, bringing us a whiff of sulphur from the railway yards beyond the road. Off in front of us there was a broad salt marsh, and beyond that, in the distance, the sea. All wrong, though, surely, this geography, or do I mean topography? It doesn’t matter. Felix beat his hands together in the cold.