John Banville: Mefisto

And he would laugh, his thin lips curling in a kind of snarl and the tip of his tongue darting out.

The class began to call me Pender’s pet. But I did not welcome this cloying and somehow perilous connection. The beatings that I used to get were less embarrassing, less difficult to manage, than Mr Pender’s furtive patronage. I tried retreating from him, made deliberate mistakes, pretended bafflement, but he saw through me, and smiled, with pursed mouth and cocked eyebrow, and pinched the back of my neck, and passed on blandly to other things.

Then one afternoon he appeared unannounced at our house. He sported a louche felt hat and carried a cane. Away from school he had the raffish, edgy air of an out-of-work actor.

— Mrs Swan? I was passing, and …

He smiled. She backed away from him, wiping her hands on her apron. Our square, she knew, was not a part of town Mr Pender would find himself in by chance. Sudden strangers worried her. She put him in the parlour and gave him a glass of sherry, bearing the thimble of tawny syrup from the sideboard with tremulous care.

— Ah, so kind.

She stood as in a trance, her hands clasped, not looking at him directly, but absorbing him in bits, his hat, his slender fingers, the limp bow-tie. He spoke quietly, with intensity, his eyes fixed on the table. She hardly listened, captivated by his delicate, attenuated presence. She had an urge to touch him. He sat, one narrow knee crossed on the other, fingering the stem of his glass. He had the faintly sinister self-possession of a priceless piece among fakes. Around him the familiar succumbed to a dispiriting magic. The flowered carpet, the wrought-iron firescreen, the plaster ducks ascending the wall, these things would never be the same again.

— An extraordinary phenomenon, Mrs Swan. Such a brilliant gift. A miracle, really. What can I say? One feels privileged.

An eager light glowed in his glaucous eye, and flecks of serum gathered at the corners of his mouth. She noticed the jumbled wreckage of his teeth. He stopped, and watched her, spreading the silence before her as a salesman would a sample of some wonderful costly stuff. She listened to him holding his breath. There was a wickerwork darn on the heel of his sock. She had a fleeting vision of what his rooms would be, the dust, the worn patch in the carpet, the tired light motionless in the corners. She roused herself.

— Yes, she said, smoothing her apron on her knee. Yes I see.

I sat on the sofa, looking at Mr Pender in silent amaze. His presence was an enormous and somehow daring violation. He smiled nervously when he glanced in my direction, and raised his voice and spoke rapidly, as if to hold something at bay. My mother looked at me as at an exotic, bright-plumed bird that had alighted suddenly in her parlour. First there was Father Barker and his high hopes, and now this. She felt a familiar, angry bafflement. The things he was saying, these plans, these propositions, she did not like them, she was frightened of them. They were incongruous here, like that expensive hat on the table, the cane he was twisting in his chalk-white hands. At last he rose. She showed him to the door.

— So glad, so glad to have met you, Mrs Swan.

She was suddenly tired of him and his precious manner, his smile, his gestures, the way he said her name, pressing it softly upon her like a blandishment. Outside the door he hesitated, eyeing the tender trees in the square. He should try once more, he knew, to impress this dim little woman, to wring a promise from her, but she looked so fearsome, with her arms folded and her mouth set, and he did not relish the prospect of a scene. But oh, did she realize, did she, what an extraordinary — what an amazing —? Anger and frustration reared up in him like a wave and broke, leaving a wash of sadness in their wake. How do I know these things? I just do. I am omniscient, sometimes. He smiled bleakly and turned away, lifting a finger from the knob of his cane in melancholy farewell.

When he was gone a hectic gaiety flourished briefly, as if the house like a frail vessel had brushed against disaster and survived. Then a thoughtful silence descended.

Uncle Ambrose called. He hesitated inside the door, sniffing at the strained atmosphere. He was a larger version of my father. His body was too big for the small head perched on it. He had close-set eyes and crinkly hair, and a raw, protuberant chin, deeply cleft and mercilessly shaved, like a tiny pair of smarting buttocks. He treated his ugliness with jealous attention, dressing it richly, pampering and petting it, as a mother with a defective child. Still his suits were always a shade too tight, his shoes a little too shiny. Silence came off him in wafts, like an intimation of pain. He seemed always on the point of blurting out some terrible, anguished confession. His reticence, his air of pained preoccupation, lent him a certain authority in our house. His opinion was respected. My mother told him of the teacher’s visit, flaring her nostrils and almost shouting, as if she were recounting an insult. Put him in my hands , Mr Pender had urged her, smiling his tense, toothed smile. Uncle Ambrose nodded seriously.

— Is that so? he said with care.

She waited. Uncle Ambrose continued to avoid her eye. She turned angrily to the stove, taking down a frying pan from a nail on the wall. My father had risen quietly and was making for the door. Bang went the pan. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at her over his glasses. He was in shirt-sleeves and braces, with the weekly paper in one hand and the doorknob in the other. He sighed.

— What? he said dully. What is it?

— Nothing! she cried, without turning, and laughed grimly. Not a thing!

She slapped a string of sausages on the pan, and a whoosh of smoke and flying fat shot up. My father stood breathing. Their squabbles were like that, a glitter in air, over in a flash, like a knife-throwing act.

Jack Kay, dozing by the range, started awake with a grunt. He cast a covert glance about him, licking his lips. He despised old age, its hapless infirmities. He drew himself upright, muttering. He had not liked the sound of Mr Pender at all.

My father returned from the door and sat down heavily, cracking the newspaper like a whip. Uncle Ambrose cleared his throat and considered the carious rim of the sink.

— New people out at Ashburn, he said mildly to no one in particular. Queer crowd.

Uncle Ambrose knew the comings and goings of the town. He drove a hackney motor car, and sat behind the wheel outside the railway station all day waiting for the trains.

My mother would not be diverted. She swept the room with a withering glance and laughed again harshly.

— Put him in my hands , indeed! she said.

No one responded. She stood irresolute a moment, flushed and angry, then turned back abruptly to the seething pan. There was another uneasy silence. Uncle Ambrose drummed his fingers on the table, whistling soundlessly. Jack Kay gazed upwards out of a vacant, milky eye, his mouth ajar. My father, moving his lips, scanned the newspaper intently. They seemed ill at ease, trying to suppress something, as if a ghost had walked through their midst and they were pretending they had seen nothing. I looked about at them with interest. Why should they be alarmed? It was at me the spectre had pointed its pale, implacable hand.

IN THE END IT was Mr Pender himself who was spirited away. One day simply he was gone, no one knew where. He had vanished, from school, from his digs, without a trace. Father Barker too was quietly removed. He fell ill, and was sent to the sanatorium. These things came to me like secret signals, indecipherable yet graphic. The summer holidays had begun. I woke in the mornings with a start, as if my name had been called out. The weather, seeming to know something, laid on its loveliest effects. I walked under drowsing trees, through the dreamy silence of sunstruck afternoons, and was so acutely conscious of being there and at the same time almost elsewhere, in a present so fleeting it felt like pure potential, that I seemed to be not so much myself as a vivid memory of someone I had once been. I stood in salt-sharpened sunlight before the glide and glitter of the sea, and the great steady roar of wind in my face was like the future itself bellowing back at me, berating me for being late already.