John Banville - Mefisto

They turned, all three, and gazed at me for a moment in silence. Miss Hackett frowned. The professor shook his head again.

— And look at him, he said. Just look.

They might have been standing on the edge of a hole, peering in. Then Miss Hackett roused herself, and summoned up a last, steely smile.

— Well, she said to the professor, goodnight, no doubt you will be hearing from us, in due course.

Halfway to the door she halted, Leitch shambling at her heels almost collided with her. She looked about the room, wrinkling her nose, as if she were noticing the place for the first time. The printer nattered, the air hummed.

— What a dungeon this is, she said. How you can stand it …!

When she was gone Leitch looked at the professor with a vengeful eye.

— You’ve done it now, he said. Oh, you’ve done it now, all right.

Things were never to be the same again between Leitch and me after that night. It was as if we had been caught up together in some desperate, accidental drama, and the shared danger had forced on us an intimacy as awkward as it was inescapable. He became talkative. He complained about the professor, called him an old fucker, told me of other enormities he had committed before that night. He sat hunched over the console, fat and venomous, muttering. Somehow Miss Hackett’s visit had lanced the boil of his bitterness, now the poison all came pouring out. He had not been treated right, he had never been treated right. They were all against him, people, all against him, just because — but there he broke off, and cast at me a narrow, distrustful look. His eyes were haunted, sunk in their pools of violet shadow, turbid, and somehow sticky, like two brown water-snails. He talked about Miss Hackett too, softly, in a sort of reverie of disgust. He made up jokes in which she suffered the most intricate indecencies. His knowledge of female anatomy was impressive, Felix called him a spoiled gynaecologist. He would put a warm hand on my wrist, chuckling, and lean his head at my ear and whisper another good one. I could never manage more than a wan smile in response, but it did not matter, he hardly noticed, he only wanted to hear himself saying the words. When Felix was there, though, he kept silent. Felix watched him, delighted with him, his slippers and his cravat, his bloated belly, that wary, aquatic eye.

— I say, Basil, he would say, what’s a gay blade like you doing in this queer hole, eh?

And he would wink at me, with an artful smile, and put up his feet on the console and light a butt from his box.

We waited for what would follow Miss Hackett. Leitch expected the worst, though he never said exactly what he thought the worst would be. One night the telephone rang, until then I had not even noticed it was there. Professor Kosok answered it, and stood and listened to its tiny, irate voice for a long time, pulling at his lower lip and scowling. He said little, and at last slammed down the receiver. When it rang again he left it off the hook. Then the volume of transmissions began to slacken, it was hardly noticeable at first. Sometimes the printer would stop abruptly, in the middle of a line of figures, and sit in silence for minutes on end, with an uncanny air of smugness and knowing. Leitch insisted he could find no fault, that they must have stopped sending at the other end, and the professor would shout at him, until at last the printer started up again, as if nothing had happened. The day-people were staying later and later, once when I arrived they were just leaving, I spotted a hand closing the door, and heard them laughing on the stairs. The seats of the chairs were still warm.

Felix dropped in at all hours, arriving sometimes in the early morning, when we were finishing. He always looked as if he had been up all night, doing things. He and I would go out together into the dawn, and walk along by the grey river, in the mist. I remember those mornings with peculiar clarity, the silence over the city, the gulls wheeling, the pale spring sunlight struggling through the grime, that particular shade of lavender in the dense air above the rooftops. He talked about the professor, asked in an offhand way about the work we were doing. I think he thought I was keeping things from him, he would give me a long look, quizzically smiling, his head thrown back and one rufous eyebrow arched. I told him about Miss Hackett, and he laughed.

— So they’re on to him, eh? he said. Better take care, Philemon, that you don’t get washed away along with him.

IT WAS ON ONE OF those mornings with Felix that — no, he wasn’t there, it was just a morning, in April. The professor was away too, I don’t know where, it doesn’t matter. The flat was silent. There was the remains of a meal on the table in the front room, and a brimming ashtray. I stood at the window, not wanting to leave, not wanting to stay either. Pain had started up its thrumming tune, as it did at this weary hour every morning, I imagined something inside me, all knees and terrible elbows, plucking at my nerves. The street was deserted. In one of the houses opposite I could faintly hear a telephone ringing, it went on and on. The silence congregated at my back, it was like some large mute beast, nudging at me gently, with a kind of mournful insistence. I did not like to be alone like that, in a room not my own, I felt as if I were a stranger, I mean a stranger to myself, as if there were two of us, I and that other, that interloper standing up inside me, sharing in secret this pillar of frail flesh and pain. But then, I was not alone.

She was in the dingy bathroom on the landing, I found her when I tried to open the door and something was stopping it. She lay in a huddle with her knees drawn up to her chest and one bare arm flung out. She was wearing her plastic raincoat over her slip. One of her bare feet was wedged against the door, I had to hold my breath and squeeze sideways through the opening. When I knelt beside her she stirred and gave a fluttering, vaguely protesting sigh, like a sleeping child unwilling to be wakened from a dream. Her hands were icy, she must have been lying here for hours. There was a blue bruise turning yellow in the hollow of her elbow.

— Adele, I said. Adele.

It sounded foolish.

I gathered her up in my arms. She had wet herself. She was unexpectedly heavy, a chill, clammy limpness that I could hardly hold. Her raincoat squeaked and crackled when I lifted her. I got my foot around the door to open it, but lost my balance and swayed off to one side, like a caracoling horseman, and for a moment I was trapped there, with one foot in the air and my shoulder pressed to the wall. A tap was dripping in the handbasin. The window behind the lavatory was open, down in the garden a blackbird piped a repeated, liquid note, that too was like water dripping. When I turned my head a magnified eye, my own, loomed at me in a shaving mirror. I looked at things around me, that tap, an old razor, a mug with a toothbrush standing in it, their textures blurred and thickened in the ivory light of morning, and I felt for a second I was being shown something, it flashed out at me slyly and then was gone, like a coin disappearing in a conjuror’s palm.

I got her to the front room and put her on the sofa, propped against the armrest. Her head kept slipping down. I must have stood there for a long time, transfixed, just looking at her. Then I strode into the kitchen and back again, to the bedrooms, wringing my hands, looking for I don’t know what. I brought her ragged fur coat and wrapped it around her. I think I was talking to her all the while, I recall dimly the dull blare of a voice in the background, cajoling and hectoring, it can only have been mine. I recall too the Parisian delicacy of the spring morning, with faint traffic sounds and the clatter of pigeons, a puff of white cloud in the corner of the window, that big pale parallelogram of sunlight on the floor at my feet.