John Banville - Nightspawn

The house was built into a recess of the hill, so that the rear side of the roof was always shaded, while the front wall blazed in the sunlight with a bluish blinding ferocity. The original had been a two-roomed structure of severe simplicity, but Julian had added to it year by year, and now it clambered up and down the hillface in a confusing jumble of planes and ledges. I stopped by the gate, my hand on the crumbling stone pillar, and took a deep breath to clear the wool from my eyes. Around the corner of one wall, an ear, a ragged curl of hair, and a fat hand holding a cane were visible. I walked toward that corner over the quiet dust. Julian stood there, very still, peering down into the ground at his feet, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke, for the arse of the fat man’s trousers to burst. I think he knew that I was there, watching him. I think he was waiting for me.

‘Good morning,’ I said, but the words did not come out of my mouth. I coughed and tried again, and produced a slightly more successful croak. Julian started melodramatically and turned, a smile already forming on his goatish jowls.

‘Ah, Mr White, you came. How are you? Recovered from last night, eh?’

‘Somewhat.’

‘You shouldn’t drink so much, you know,’ he said roguishly.

We looked at each other for a moment of awkward silence (at least my side of the silence was awkward) and then our gazes slipped elsewhere. Julian cut with his cane three neatly considered lines in the dust beside his malformed foot. He said something, but the wind whirled his words away.

‘What?’ I cried.

‘I said, have you seen my well? I had it dug —’

Another blast of wind severed the sentence. A hole, not more than eighteen inches in diameter, was open in the ground behind him, ringed with a ledge of flat stones. It was down into its depths that he had been peering when I found him. I watched him, wondering if this were another trick to set me up for his mockery, but his eyes were innocent.

‘That’s nice,’ I said.

He nodded complacently.

‘Yes, I’m fascinated by these things.’

There was a sound behind us, and we turned. A slight, pale man in horn-rimmed spectacles stood in the doorway of the villa. He seemed ill at ease, and looked at us with an aggrieved moroseness, as though we had no right to whirl about so suddenly and catch him like that. His neat dark suit (jagged teeth of a frayed trouser cuff clenched on the back of his shoe) Struck an incongruous note against the fierce wind-blasted landscape about him.

‘Ah, Charles,’ said Julian. ‘This is Mr White, the writer I spoke of.’

He turned to me.

‘This is Charles Knight, a fellow-countryman of mine.’

I shook a moist warm hand, while Julian looked from one of us to the other, beaming. He said,

‘Charlie wanted to meet you, didn’t you, Charlie? Charlie is very interested in literature.’

There was the faintest hint of a pause before that last word … at least, there should have been some hesitation. Charlie Knight’s blue jowls registered a further depth of gloom.

‘Yes,’ he moaned. ‘I’m very interested in literature.’

He blinked slowly, sadly, behind the powerful lenses of his spectacles, and heaved a tiny sigh. His voice, vivid and thrilling as a Lancashire smog, was utterly without cadence; the voice of a weary executive contemplating the arrival of his second ulcer. I began to laugh. I could not help it. The scene was ridiculous.

‘Oh,’ I cried, somewhat unsteadily, to stifle the boiling glee, ‘you’re interested in literature?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded slowly. A thought seemed to stir in his brain, for his left eye began to flicker, and a vein ticked in his forehead. I had a vision of him slowly falling to pieces before me, like a clockwork man gone wrong. My hilarity could not be checked. I gave a muffled sneeze of joy.

‘Bless you,’ Charlie murmured absently, and began to turn away. ‘You’ll be on the island for a while, I suppose, Mr White?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘Ah.’

I glanced at Julian. He stood a step away from us with his hands clasped on his stomach, grinning, in a rapture of delight. I thought he might wink, but instead he swung away across the garden in the wake of his friend. At the gate he halted.

‘Do say hello to Helena,’ he called, waving a hand toward the house.

Then they were gone around a spur of the hill. I stood pulling at my lip, and looked into the well. The water lay ten feet down, like black shining steel. From its surface, my own eyes stared back at me, cold and unwavering, changed by depth into the eyes of some animal. What vengeful urges were stirring in that bile in the bowels of the earth? I shivered. Julian was on my mind. I had never met anyone like him before, and never will again. To be in his presence was to glimpse the infinite possibilities of laughter which the world could offer. He carried always a great cauldron of laughter trapped within him, which at intervals released little jets of merriment. Absurdity was his drug. Whether such a sense of humour was of value, or was anarchic and vicious, that I could not decide. But it occurred to me, standing by the well, that death, death indeed was the great joke which Julian sought. A massive heart attack, I decided, would be the most hilarious thing of all, and Julian would die with laughter bubbling in the blood on his lips. A very pretty notion, but unfortunately mistaken. Julian’s joke of a lifetime was something quite different from death, and I, surprise surprise, was the one who set it up for him.

But that is enough of Julian for the moment. On, on to his charming wife, if that is not too precise an imperative.

‘You too, Mr White?’

She stood behind me with one hand, palm inward, fingers splayed, resting on her hip. The blonde hair was gathered into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, held by a large gold pin. She wore a tight blue pullover without sleeves, and a worn pair of white cord trousers. Her toes were out through battered tennis shoes. Standing there before me, with the wind shaking the hills around her, she seemed a Cycladean queen, the patrician line of each small bone formed by a millennium of aristocrats. Aye, and a lady into whom this poor peasant could never hope to plunge his hairy claws. She advanced, smiling, her eyes on mine, fully aware of the effect she had on me, and pleased with it.

‘Me too?’ I asked.

She glanced at the well.

‘Do you also have a fascination with holes in the ground?’

‘Not in the ground, no.’

I tried to bite off my tongue. She was good enough to ignore that remark. I studied the hand which she lifted to her forehead to brush away a strand of hair, and a whole night of forgotten drunkenness came flooding back to me. Her nails were badly bitten.

‘Julian says that his greatest ambition is to buy Syntagma Square, dig an enormous crater in the middle of it, and then spy from the palace windows on the people who come to gape into it …’

She wheeled around to face me, and considered me curiously.

‘I wondered if you have the same kind of mind.’

I did not know what to make of that question. I giggled, and then looked gravely down into the well, giving her the benefit of my dignified profile. The wind roared around us.

‘There was a man driving alone one night on a country road in Ireland,’ I said. ‘He was going home. He crashed, and was thrown through the windscreen into a field. Various important bones were broken. At the other side of the field there were lights. He crawled toward them. It was a farmhouse. He got so near to it that he could see the farmer sitting by the fire with a newspaper, and the farmer’s wife bathing a child in a tin bath. With a great effort he started forward for the last few yards. Nearer and nearer, almost there, he began to laugh with relief, and laughing fell into a pond, and was drowned.’