John Banville - Mefisto

There was little to do there now. The transmissions from abroad had ceased altogether. The professor paced and scowled in furious silence, a man betrayed. The telephone was left permanently off the hook. Some nights he did not appear at all, and Leitch and I were left alone in a fraught, uneasy intimacy. Leitch was restless too, he prowled about softly in his slippers, his hands stuck in the drooping pockets of his trousers. No matter where he was in the room I fancied I could hear him breathing. He told me his jokes, and offered me choice tidbits from his foodbag. I had preferred the old animosity to this somehow menacing warmth. I felt as if I were holding on to a tether in the dark, at any moment what was at the other end might rear up and savage me. He tended the machine now with a kind of frenzied vigilance, watching over it like a thwarted, jealous parent, cursing it, kicking it, throwing crusts of bread at it. The thing suffered these affronts in silence, dully, its attention somehow averted, as if it were thinking about something else entirely. It maddened him, its imperturbability, its complete, ponderous, irredeemable stupidity.

— It knows nothing, the professor said, nothing it has not been told.

Leitch drew his great head down into his shoulders, his bruised dark gaze wandering here and there about the room.

— Yes, he said bitterly under his breath, just like us.

One night he came up behind me in the lavatory and put his arms around my waist. I tried to free myself, and we tussled briefly, rolling from side to side in a sort of laborious hornpipe. We staggered out the door into the corridor, where our grunts and gasps echoed like the sounds of a real fight. I got an elbow into his chest at last and gave him a tremendous push. He fell back, winded, and leaned against the wall with his mouth open and a hand pressed to his breastbone. His cravat was twisted under one ear, and he had lost a slipper. He glowered at me with a smeared eye.

— What’s up with you! he said. He told me …

He paused.

— He told you what, I said. He told you a lie.

I wanted to kick him, I could almost feel my foot sinking into that soft belly, could see him on all-fours puking up his sticky supper. I was angry not because he had laid hands on me, but because I knew that now I could not be there any more.

— Look at you, he was saying, Jesus, what a freak.

He turned his face to the wall and wept, in sorrow and in rage, his chubby shoulders shaking. I went out into the night. The air was black and wet, foghorns were blaring in the bay. The building towered above me, seeming to topple slowly in the drifting mist, all windows dark. No one was about. I walked away. Another sanctuary was gone.

Adele sat on a chair beside her bed, brushing her hair with slow, stiff strokes. She was wearing an old dressing-gown tied with a frayed cord. Her face, bare of make-up, was pale and blurred, as if she had scrubbed at it so hard the features had become worn. She gazed before her dully. Father Plomer stood at the window, facing the room, with his arms folded and his head thrown back. Behind him the sun shone on the flat roof and the smoking funnel, and far away a tiny aeroplane glinted, crawling athwart a clear blue sky. His face was in shadow, the silvery lenses of his spectacles gleaming like coins. Matron was there too, standing behind Adele, quite still, and leaning forward a little, in that way she had, her arms hanging. They seemed posed, the three of them, as if they had been placed just so, for a group portrait. Adele did not look at me, as if she did not know that I was there. I had brought cigarettes for her. Matron put out a hand silently and took them.

— Adele has given up smoking, Father Plomer said. Haven’t you, my dear? A new life. She’s going to lead a new life.

And he smiled, blank-eyed and bland. Adele went on pulling the brush through her hair, stroke by stroke. Matron continued to look at me for a moment, then turned away, for the last time.

When I went to the chapel that evening Adele was not there. I was not surprised. She was in her room, asleep, stranded among the tangled sheets as if a wave had deposited her there. I sat for a while in the stillness, watching her. It was bright yet outside, but the blind was shut, a grey half-light suffused the room. Twilight, her hour. Hers too that lost, wan, tender shade of grey. Her lips were open, one hand lay on the pillow beside her cheek. I put the ampoules into the pocket of her dressing-gown and went out quietly and shut the door behind me.

The bus swayed and pitched along the narrow roads, wallowing on the bends, the gears roaring. Trees advanced at a rush into the headlights, their branches thrown up in astonishment, then plunged past us into the darkness again. I was in the seat by the door, near the driver, a lean, pale, taciturn man who sat with his bony knees splayed, turning the big flat steering wheel with a rolling motion of his arms, as if he were hauling in a rope. At the stops he would lean forward and rest his elbows on the wheel, his wrists crossed, and suck his teeth and gaze out at the road. We went through a village, and halted at a dark crossroads where an old man with a crutch got on. He paused on the step and looked at me, panting, his old mouth open toothlessly at one side. We climbed for a long time, then bounced across an open plateau, I could see faint stars low down to right and left, and a gibbous moon perched on the point of a far peak. Sometimes too, when the road wound back on itself, I caught a glimpse of the lights of the city far off in the distance behind us. Then we rolled down into a hollow and stopped, and the driver looked at me.

Different air, and the smell of pines, and a crisp wind, and stars. I watched the bus depart, the rear-lights weaving slowly up the side of the hill. Then quiet, and the sound of water. A dim light burned over the door of the pub, and there was a light in the dirty window too. I walked across the gravel. He must have heard the bus stopping, or maybe he was watching from the window. He hung back in the darkness of the doorway until he had got a good look at me, then he came forward with a hand lifted in greeting.

— Ah, Melmoth, he said softly. We’ve been expecting you.

When I think of that second visit to the Goat I imagine a long, low, turf-brown tavern with oil lamps and glinting copper mugs, and hams and things hanging from the rafters. The picture only needs a pot-boy in an apron and a merry old codger with curly side-whiskers and a meerschaum warming his shanks in the inglenook. Where do they come from, these fantasies? When I entered first the place seemed deserted. Fat Dan stood behind the bar, picking his side teeth delicately with the nail of a little finger. He wore a shirt without a collar, and a green sleeveless pullover, tight as a harness, that stopped halfway down his belly. He greeted me with a large, slow wink, involving less the closing of an eye than the opening sideways of his mouth.

— A hot toddy, Dan, for the traveller, Felix said.

We sat on stools at the bar. As I became accustomed to the gloom I picked out a few other customers here and there, big silent countrymen in caps and long, buttonless overcoats, whose eyes veered away like fish when they met mine. Felix watched me as I supped the steaming liquor. He was wearing plus-fours and argyle socks, and a cloth cap with a button in the crown.

— I’m glad you’ve come down, he said, really I am. It gets awfully monotonous here.

I told him Tony’s body had been found. He put a finger quickly to his lips and cast a meaning glance in Dan’s direction.

— Yes, he said quietly, I saw that too. Most sad. I was shocked, I can tell you.

I said nothing. He studied me with a rueful little grin.

— I say, he said, I hope you don’t think I was to blame, do you? I didn’t lead them to Chandos Street, after all. It wasn’t me they followed.