John Banville - Long Lankin - Stories

She looked at him closely. Was he making fun of her? His pale eyes slid away from her gaze. She changed course.

— George, please, I can’t stand it here. Can you not see that? I’ll go mad, I’ll be like him, worse.

He looked at her directly then, for the first time, it seemed, since they had arrived, and she saw in his face the realisation dawning that she was indeed in pain. She smiled, and touched his hand. The door burst open and the old man came bounding in, waving his arms.

— They’re swarming, they’re swarming! Come on!

She held George’s arm. He smirked at her in a travesty of appeasement, and wriggled out of her grasp. The old man disappeared from the doorway. George raced after him. When he reached the garden it was empty. The air throbbed with a deep, malevolent hum. He stumbled through the briars and the tangled grass, into the orchard, ducking under the branches. The old man lay on his back among the hives, eyes wide, the hose clutched in his hands, the water rising straight up and splashing back on his face. George knelt by his side, under the spray. The orchard quivered around him. Under the sun all was gloom and growth, green things, stalks, lichen, rot and wrack. He stared into thorns and sodden mould, drenched leaves, the purple hearts of roses. His flesh crawled. Then he saw the snails. They were everywhere in the wet, on the leaves, the trees, glued along slender stalks of grass, gleaming silver and black brutes straining out of their shells as though in ecstasy, their moist horns erect and weaving. It was a dance. The snails were dancing. A black cloud of bees rose from the hives and spun away into the sky, thrumming. The old man was dead.

George stood in the bedroom.

— I had better stay here for a day or two, he said. Clear things up. You know.

She nodded absently, wandering about the room, picking up things, a newspaper, clothes, a tube of lipstick. She seemed hardly to notice him, and avoided meeting his eyes. He stood in the drawing-room and watched her clatter away down the drive, stumbling in her high heels, and then he went down and pushed the piano against the door.

Glorious weather, days drenched with sun and the singing of larks, a lavender haze over the sweltering meadows, the silence trembling on the upper airs of evening, and then the nights, the glossy black and the pale radiance, Sirius ascending, a smokewhite breeze at dawn. He spent his time in the garden, tending the roses, the vegetables, the hives. Sometimes he took the hose and sprayed the parched plants, the trees, the earth, and then sat for hours studying the surging life around him, the spiders, the birds and flies, his beloved bees. A swarm of them settled in a corner of the drawing room, under the ceiling. That was fine with him. Life everywhere.

Eight of these nine stories were published, under the title Long Lankin , by Secker & Warburg, London, in 1970. Another story, ‘Persona’, and a longer tale, or novella, called ‘The Possessed’, I have decided not to republish. For the present edition, slight revisions to the 1970 text have been made, mainly in punctuation. The final story here, ‘De Rerum Natura’, was first published in the Transatlantic Review .

November 1984