John Banville - Mefisto

Then the ambulance arrived, and a curious, dreamy lentor took hold of everything. I suppose I expected a great commotion, sirens and the screech of brakes, boots on the stairs, shouts. Instead there was a polite ring on the bell, and two cheerful, burly men in uniform came in, carrying a rolled-up stretcher. They had an air of having known exactly what they would find. They went to work calmly, one wrapping Adele in a red blanket while the other unrolled the stretcher. Then together they lifted her deftly from the sofa, and fastened a leather strap across her shoulders and another across her knees, and one of them leaned down and brushed a damp strand of hair from her cheek. She was so pale, so peaceful now, like an effigy of a martyred child. Down in the street the radio in the ambulance muttered at intervals. They set the stretcher on the pavement while they got the back doors open. Adele woke up and looked about her wildly. She clutched my sleeve.

— What have you done? she said in a hoarse, weak wail. Oh, what have you done …

They put her in the ambulance then and took her away. In the building opposite that telephone was ringing again.

There was only one hospital she could go to, of course. I walked, silent as memory, along those familiar corridors. All was still. There were moments like that, I remembered them, when things would go quiet suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the busiest morning, and calm would spread like ether through the wards. A radio somewhere was playing softly, and down in the kitchens a skivvy was singing. They told me Adele was sleeping, that’s how they said it, she’s sleeping now, as if sleep here were a special and expensive kind of therapy. And they gave me a cold look. But when I came back that evening she was awake, sitting up straight in a white bed, like an eager bird tethered to a perch, with her thin hands clenched on the counterpane and her neck stretched out. The room smelled of milk and violets, her smell. Felix was there, and Professor Kosok. The professor sat with his legs crossed, drumming his fingers on his knee and looking at the ceiling. I paused in the doorway.

— Here’s bonny sweet Robin, said Felix. What, no sweetmeats for the fair maid, no flowers fresh with dew?

Adele’s eyes were feverishly lit, and she kept laughing.

— Look at this place, she said, what am I doing here, I’m perfectly all right.

Her gaze slid past me, it would fix on nothing. There was an angry patch of red at the corner of her mouth, she scratched it with her fingernails, scratched and scratched. She was still in her slip, with her fur coat thrown over her shoulders. She had been pulling at her hair, it stuck out, blue-black and gleaming, like a tatter of feathers. Felix spoke to me behind his hand with mock solemnity.

— She is importunate, indeed distract.

He chuckled. Light of evening glowed in the window. Outside was the top of a brick wall, and a flat expanse of roof with a chimney like a ship’s funnel, belching white smoke. The professor shifted on his chair and sighed.

— It’s late, he said to no one in particular. I have to go.

But still he sat there, with eyes upcast, his fingers drumming, drumming. A moment passed, like something being carried carefully through our midst. Then Felix laughed again softly and said:

— Yes, boss, come on, it’s time we went.

At the door the professor hesitated, pretending to search for something in his pockets. He frowned. Adele would not look at him. Felix gave him a playful shove, and winked at me over his shoulder, and then they were gone.

I watched the blown smoke outside. The evening sky was pale. In the distance I could see the faint outlines of mountains. Adele kept her face averted. I tried to touch her hand but she took it away, not hastily, but with firmness, like a child taking away a toy.

— I have no peace, you see, she said. No peace. And what will I do here?

She sighed, and shook her head, with an air of mild annoyance, as if all this were just something that had got in the way of other, infinitely more important matters that now would have to wait.

— I’m sorry, I said.

Distantly in the sky a great flock of birds soared and wheeled, dark flashing suddenly to light as a thousand wings turned as one. Icarus. Adele looked about her vaguely.

— They took away my cigarettes, she said. You’ll have to bring me some.

And for the first time since I had come there she looked at me directly, with that fierce, strabismic stare.

— Won’t you? she said. You’ll have to …

The door behind me opened, I turned, and matron stopped on the threshold and looked at us.

Order, pattern, harmony. Press hard enough upon anything, upon everything, and the random would be resolved. I waited, impatient, in a state of grim elation. I had thrown out the accumulated impedimenta of years, I was after simplicity now, the pure, uncluttered thing. Everywhere were secret signs. The machine sang to me, for was not I too built on a binary code? One and zero, these were the poles. The rushings of spring shook my heart. I could not sleep, I wandered the brightening streets for hours, prey to a kind of joyless hilarity. I was in pain. When I lay down at last, exhausted, watching the sky, the fleeting clouds, a dull, grey ache would lodge in the pit of my stomach, like a grey rat, lodging there. At ashen twilight I would rise, my eyelids burning, and something thudding in my head, and set off for the hospital.

There too a frantic mood held sway. I would arrive in Adele’s room and find her with Felix and Father Plomer, all three of them bright-eyed and breathless somehow, as if at the end of some wild romp. The priest was a frequent visitor, he would put his head around the door with a conspiratorial smile, and enter on tiptoe, plump and large in his black suit and embroidered stole, his glasses flashing. He clasped his hands and laughed, showing his white teeth and gold fillings. He was like a big awkward excited girl. He loved to be there. Let’s have a little party! he would say, and he would get one of the kitchen girls to bring up a pot of tea and plates of bread and butter. Before he sat down he would remove his stole reverently and kiss it, closing his eyes briefly. Then he would lift his hands heavenwards and softly say:

— Ah, freedom!

Felix he treated with a sort of tremulous familiarity, prancing around him nervously and tittering at his jokes.

— Oh, you have a wicked wit, he would say. A wicked wit!

And Felix would look past the priest’s shoulder and catch my eye, smiling, his thin lips stretched tight.

Adele sat up in our midst, with her stark white face and her fright of hair. She had changed her slip for a satin tea-gown with roses and birds, it made the room seem more than ever like an aviary. She laughed more and more too, but more and more her laughter sounded like the first startled screeches of something that had blundered on widespread wings into a net. Her eyes grew dull, a faint, whitish film was spreading over the pupils. She complained about the light, it was not bright enough, but when the venetian blinds were drawn up, or another lamp was brought, she covered her face and turned away from the glare.

Outside her door after one of our visits Father Plomer hung back with an air of solemn excitement and spoke to Felix and me.

— I mean to save her, you know, he said. Oh yes, she’s agreed to take instruction.

Felix reared back from the priest in wide-eyed wonder.

— Oi vay! he breathed, and put up a hand to hide the thin little mocking smirk he could not stifle.

Then for a while that romping air I used to find when I arrived in her room gave way to a tense, reverential atmosphere, in which something seemed to vibrate, as if a little bell had just stopped ringing. Once I even came upon them in the act of prayer, the priest down on one knee, a hand to his forehead and his missal open, and Adele lying back on the pillows with her hands folded on her breast and her eyes cast upwards, wan and waxen in her satin gown, like a picture of a drowned maiden laid out on the flower-strewn bank of a brook. But it did not last. One day she snatched the prayerbook from him with a laugh and flung it across the room, and although he hung about in the corridor with a wounded look she would not consent to see him any more.