John Banville - Long Lankin - Stories

He followed her at a distance up the hill. When he reached the garden he stopped to look back down to the beach, the flashing sea. Then he went into the cottage.

The shutters were drawn against the fierce light, and she sat on the bed among shadows, her head bent, gazing into her cupped hands as if she held there some small part of a great desolation. He sat beside her, and she fell against him, her arms about his neck.

— There now, he said, and patted her shoulder.

They lay now together on the bed, and he lit a cigarette. She said:

— Why does everything have to end?

— What are you talking about?

— You’re going to leave me. I know it.

She lifted her head to look at him, but he said nothing, and would not meet her eyes. She lay down again, sighing.

— What will I do? she asked helplessly. What will I do? I used to be happy. Being happy is all I’m good for.

Suddenly she punched his shoulder hard, and buried her face in the pillow.

— Why are you doing this to me? she cried. Why?

— I don’t know.

He looked up into the shadows, at the smoke from his cigarette twisting in blue wreaths. Through a chink in the shutters a gold sword of light pierced the shadows and embedded itself in the floor beside him.

— You can only dance as long as the music lasts, he said.

— You and your music. I’ll never forgive you, Ben. Not ever. You have ruined me.

— No I haven’t. One tune is ended. Something stopped it.

— Which is a fancy way of saying you’re fed up. You always call a spade a shovel. I hate you.

For a time they were quiet, then she raised herself on her elbows and said:

— I should have known before we started. I should have known. Because I’m too … too …

She paused, searching for the word.

— I’m too innocent for you. Too easy to understand. I’ve never killed anyone.

He turned his head and stared at her, and she looked away from him and bit her knuckles. Shadows stirred about them, strange shapes moved silently around the bed. After a long time she whispered:

— I’m afraid, Ben.

— Yes.

The cicadas sang about the scorched fields, through the shutters they could hear the brittle music. Outside the day trembled with white heat, but the sun had fallen past its highest point, and the afternoon was beginning its slow descent.

The old man was hosing the garden when the acrobats appeared. They were unexpected, to say the least. Elves, now, would not have surprised him, or goblins. But acrobats! Still, he got used to them, and in the last weeks came to value them above all else the world could offer. Glorious weeks, the best of the year, sweltering dog days drenched with sun and the singing of skylarks. He spent them in the garden, thrashing about in the waist-high grass, delirious with the heat and a suffocating sense of the countless lives throbbing all around him, the swarming ants, the birds in the trees, glittering bright blue flies, the lizards and spiders, his beloved bees, not to mention the things called inanimate, the earth itself, all these, breeding and bursting and killing. Sometimes it all became too much, and then he would take the hose and saturate the garden, howling in a rapture of mad glee and disgust. It was at the end of one of these galas that he first saw the acrobats.

George and Lucy hardly recognised him. If they had met him in the garden they might have taken him for a tree, burned mahogany as he was, with that long beard like grizzled ivy. He had stopped using the cutthroat for fear that it would live up to its name some morning, and he had no intention of giving them by accident an excuse for an orgy of mourning. Anyway, at that time it looked as if he would soon starve to death. Then he discovered that the garden was rich with food, cabbages and rhubarb, potatoes, raspberries, all manner of things flourishing under the weeds. There were even roses, heavy bloodred blooms, unsettling. His fits of fury with the hose helped all this growth. What a silence there was after the deluge, and in the silence the stealthy drip of water slipping from leaf to limb to root, into the parched earth.

The acrobats appeared through a mist of sparkling light, a troupe of short stout fellows in black striped leotards, with furred bandy legs and leather straps on their arms and incongruously dainty black dancing pumps. An hallucination, he said, sure that in a moment they would vanish, leaving nothing behind but a faintly reverberating ping ! But he was wrong. They set up their trampoline and parallel bars in the clearing at the bottom of the orchard and began to leap and prance about, clapping their hands and urging each other on with enthusiastic squeaks and cries. Allez up! There was one woman only, fat, with hot dark eyes, who managed to be the undisputed centre of the show even though she did nothing more than pose, and toss her hair, and flash those brimming eyes. The first performance was brief, and they went away puffing and sweating.

Next day they were back. He was tending the hives when he saw through the trees a figure sailing up and down with leisurely grace on the trampoline. Already he detected a distinct improvement in their act. They rounded it off with a human pyramid, a wobbly edifice fraught with unacknowledged hilarity. He sat in the shade of an apple tree and watched them bouncing and tumbling, wondering if he was expected to applaud. To the third show he brought along a saucepan and a pair of forks, with which he produced a tattoo as of a snare drum during those moments of stillness and suspense before the last daring splendour of a stunt was attempted. The woman waddled forward, smiling haughtily, and swept him a low bow.

He poured rapturous accounts of their antics into crazed messianic letters which he stuffed stampless in the postbox in the village at dead of night, laughing in the dark at the thought of the storm and panic they would precipitate on the breakfast tables of his family and friends. No replies came, which surprised and annoyed him, until he realised that all to whom he had written were dead, save his son and daughter-in-law, who arrived in the heart of the country one burning noon and laid siege to his sanctuary.

— He must be really bad this time, said George.

— No stamp, said Lucy. Typical.

The house was silent, the windows blind, the doors barricaded against them. They hammered on it with their fists, and heard within the sound of muffled laughter. They called to him, pleaded, and were turning away when suddenly there erupted a plangent discord of piano music, followed by a shriek of castors rolling on stone. The door collapsed slowly into the hall, and there was the old man grinning at them from behind the piano, his little blue eyes glinting in the gloom. His clothes were in tatters, his feet bare and crusted with grime. He looked more than anything like a baby, the bald dome and bandy legs, the eyes, the gums, an ancient mischievous baby.

— My god, Lucy murmured, appalled.

— That’s right! that’s me! the old man cried. He executed a brief dance on the flagstones, capering and gesticulating, then stopped and glared at them.

— What do you want?

George stepped forward, stumbled over the fallen door, and blushed.

— Hello there! he yelled. How are you …?

The heartiness fell sickeningly flat, and he blanched. Although well into middle age, George had the air of a gawky, overgrown schoolboy. His long thin frame gave an impression first of all of paleness, pale eyes and hands, pale dusty hair. When he smiled, the tip of a startlingly red tongue appeared between his teeth. There was an eggstain like a bilious sunburst on his tie. The old man eyed him unenthusiastically and said with heavy sarcasm: