John Banville - Mefisto

SHE WAS BURIED IN the old cemetery at Ashburn, in the same plot as her mother and Jack Kay. I walked behind the hearse. It was a hot, hazy day, one of the first of summer. The hawthorn was heavy with may, and there was columbine in the ditches, and poppies, and wild honeysuckle. People turned up whom I had never seen before, big broad-beamed women in ugly hats and elasticated stockings, and gnarled old men, agile as woodsprites, who jostled for position among the overgrown tombstones, eager not to miss a thing. A shovel was stuck at an angle in the mound of clay beside the grave. The priest was a short, stout, florid-faced man. His voice rose and fell with a querulous cadence. All about us the fields sweltered. The air was laden with fragrances of hay and dust and dung. Aunt Philomena wept loudly, standing with shoulders hunched and her elbows pressed to her ribs, as if to keep something from collapsing inside her. My father and Uncle Ambrose stood side by side at the foot of the grave. Their bandaged foreheads gave them a faintly piratical air. Uncle Ambrose smiled to himself and murmured under his breath. The crash had damaged something in his head, it would never mend.

I looked about for Felix, but if he was there I did not see him.

They all came back to the house, the fat women and the old men, and sat in the parlour drinking stout and cups of tea and eating plates of cold meat that Aunt Philomena had prepared. There was an atmosphere of subdued levity. It was like a party from which the guest of honour had gone home early. Aunt Philomena had brought in a bunch of my mother’s roses from the garden and set them in a bowl on the table, they hung there in our midst, nude, labiate and damp, like the delicate inner parts of some fabulous, forgotten creature. Uncle Ambrose was perched on an upright chair in a corner, with his hands on his knees. He was like a big, amiable boy dressed up for the occasion in someone else’s three-piece suit. He kept peering about him with a crafty little smile, his lips moving silently. It was as if he had been let in at last on some great secret that everyone save he had always known.

— Gone soft , Aunt Philomena whispered, her eyes wide. She could not suppress a tremor of excitement in her voice. Here was drama more lavish than even she would have dared to dream up.

At last the mourners went away, and a huge, astounded silence settled on the house.

Aunt Philomena came up from Queen Street every day to take care of my father and me. At first she was all briskness, going at things with her sleeves rolled up, but soon the strain began to show. Uncle Ambrose was not getting better. They had taken the stitches out of his head, they told her he was all right, but still he would only sit and smile, communing with himself in a kind of happy wonderment. There were days when she had to get him up and dress him. He had bouts of incontinence. She fed him with a spoon.

— I don’t know what to do! she would say. I don’t know what to do.

And she would sit down suddenly, whey-faced, and light a cigarette with a hand that shook.

My father kept to the parlour now. Hours drifted past, white, slow, silent, like icebergs in a glassy sea. The bandage on his brow had been exchanged for a wad of lint stuck on with a criss-cross of pink sticking-plaster. His asthma was bad, the air whirred and clicked in his chest like the sound of a rusty clock preparing to chime. His hands gripped the armrests of his chair, his slippered feet were planted square on the floor. He was attentive, poised, as if he were waiting for someone to come along and explain things to him, how all this had happened, and why.

I sat at the table by the window in my room, with my head on my hand, as in the old days, what seemed to me now the old days. I lived up there. I would find scraps of forgotten food under my bed, or kicked under the wardrobe, rotted to an enormous pulp and sprouting tufts of blue-grey fur. The room developed a rancid, fulvous odour. I opened the window wide. Air of summer flowed over the sill, vague, silky, like air from another world. I worked, lost in a dream of pure numbers. How calm they were, how quiet, those white nights of June. I would look up and find the day gone, the night gathering intently around me, breathless and still aglow. I was a sleepwalker, waking in strange light in a garden of eyeless statues, confused, heartsore, wanting again the interrupted dream. There all had been harmony, the wilderness tamed, sundered things made whole. There too, somehow, I had not been alone.

Oh, I worked. Ashburn, Jack Kay, my mother, the black dog, the crash, all this, it was not like numbers, yet it too must have rules, order, some sort of pattern. Always I had thought of number falling on the chaos of things like frost falling on water, the seething particles tamed and sorted, the crystals locking, the frozen lattice spreading outwards in all directions. I could feel it in my mind, the crunch of things coming to a stop, the creaking stillness, the stunned, white air. But marshal the factors how I might, they would not equate now. Everything was sway and flow and sudden lurch. Surfaces that had seemed solid began to give way under me. I could hold nothing in my hands, all slipped through my fingers helplessly. Zero, minus quantities, irrational numbers, the infinite itself, suddenly these things revealed themselves for what they really had been, always. I grew dizzy. The light retreated. A blackbird whistled in the glimmering dusk. I held my face in my hands, that too flowed away, the features melting, even the eyeholes filling up, until all that was left was a smooth blank mask of flesh.

The weather turned strange, mists all day and not a breath of wind, the sun a small pale disc stuck in the middle of a milky sky. At evening the mist became drizzle, covering everything with a seamless coating of grey froth. All night the foghorns boomed and groaned out at sea. Something was happening underground. Tar melted in the streets, fine cracks appeared in the pavements. Gardeners turned up smoking clods of earth seething with grubs and fat slugs and ganglia of thick, pink worms. Vegetation ran riot. Huge mushrooms appeared everywhere, on lawns, under hedges, in the troughs between potato drills, pushing their way blindly up through the tepid clay like silvery, soft skulls. A rank smell clung in the air. Miasmas hid the salt marsh at Coolmine. When the tides were high the pit-mouth spouted geysers of blackened steam. Rumours went around of sudden fires, mysterious subsidences. A child playing in his grandmother’s garden fell into a flaming hole that opened in the ground beneath him, and was found, singed and shrieking, clinging to the exposed roots of a tree, his legs dangling over the burning maw.

I traipsed the town, day after day. I saw D’Arcy’s car, and then one day D’Arcy himself, sitting grimly by the window in Black’s, in the place where Mr Kasperl used to keep his morning vigil. I began to go out the Coolmine road again. I saw the spot where Uncle Ambrose had crashed the car, halfway to Ashburn. A stone was knocked out of the wall, a telegraph pole was grazed. It was so little damage, I was surprised. The lorries were using the dump again. The gates had fallen down, the old women with their sacks were at work once more among the slag-heaps.

I went to Ashburn, of course. I skulked about the grounds, avoiding the house, as I used to do. Then one day I met Sophie, as I knew I would. She was walking under the trees. She had a straw basket on her arm, covered with a cloth. She was thinner, her face was paler, the eyes sunken. But she smiled at me as brightly as ever, as if she had seen me only yesterday. We walked up to the house. I carried her basket. It was filled with nettles.

Felix was sitting at the kitchen table, with his back to the doorway, singing.