John Banville - Nightspawn

I shrugged.

‘I’m not a political animal.’

Aristotle suddenly turned on me and said venomously,

‘Like all the English.’

I reared away from him in fright, stammering,

‘I’m, I’m Irish.’

He looked past my shoulder and sank once again into his pit of gloom.

‘So they tell me,’ he muttered.

The sun drew a length of shadow painfully across the table. It lay quietly between us, faintly shaking, drinking from our glasses. My eyes followed it to the ground, and to the dancing water of the fountain, from whence it came. My eyelids were wet. In the house, a clock chimed thrice, deep black notes that reached far down into the silence and left it quivering. Julian was drawing patterns in the gravel with the blunt toe of his shoe. He wore a nice light linen suit and a cream shirt. There was a tiny purple scratch on his jaw, where he had cut himself with his razor. The dog lifted its head, looked at something in the blank air which only it could see, then set its chin down on its paw again. We had none of us anything left to say. I felt as though the heat were trying to suck me into the sky. My brain was banging, and my head was like a lump of scorched wool. Something stirred behind the dark glass of the french windows. All this had happened before, somewhere, on another plane. I thought of that four-letter word of which Heraclitus was so fond. Things fluctuate, merge, nothing remains still. A late September day, say, and you pause in a deserted corner of a strange town. There is a white sunlit wall, and a patch of dark shadow. Dandelions nod among sparse grass. All is silent, but for an intimation of music somewhere, just beyond hearing. The leaning lid of a dustbin beckons you around the corner. You step forward, and come suddenly, breathtakingly, upon the river, far below, calm and blue, with a small white cloud swimming in it. You think that this has all been arranged, that some hand has set up the props, that wall, those flowers, all of them exact and perfect and inimitable, so that you may catch a strange memory of something extraordinary and beautiful. It never reaches you, but you walk on, down to the river, smiling, enriched by the mere knowledge that such a memory exists and may some day be caught. You have touched the mystery of things. In time that moment in that strange town becomes itself a memory, and merges with the one which eluded you. Life goes on. Spring sunshine wrings your heart, spring rain. Love and hate eventually become one. I am talking about the past, about remembrance. You find no answers, only questions. It is enough, almost enough. That day I thought about the island, and now I think about thinking about the island, and tomorrow, tomorrow I shall think about thinking about thinking about the island, and all will be one, however I try, and there will be no separate thoughts, but only one thought, one memory, and I shall still know nothing. What am I talking about, what are these ravings? About the past, of course, and about Mnemosyne, that lying whore. And I am talking about torment.

‘Yes,’ said Julian. ‘Almost perfect, do you think?’

I brought my wandering eyes back into a semblance of straightness.

‘Is Helena here?’ I asked.

He was startled by my question, but nodded, and waved his hand at the house.

‘Yes, I think she’s about somewhere.’

He watched me curiously, but I had not the energy to be prudent. Aristotle’s eyes were closed, and his chin was sinking slowly down to rest on his breast. I left them, and went through the french windows, and found myself in a large, totally empty room. The walls and ceiling were painted a frozen blue, and the floor was of bare polished wood. Someone had to be insane to keep a room so indecently bare. I crept across the echoing floor and through a door into a dining-room, where five or six stark pieces of modern furniture stood in mutinous silence, as though, when I entered, they had halted in the midst of an electric dance, and were impatient for me to be gone, so that they might continue. There were other rooms, all of them extraordinary in some way. In that house, I was ridden by a nameless unease. The upper storey had a maze of white corridors flanked with closed and ominously silent doors. Each corridor found its way to a conclusion on the balcony, which ran, without the protection of a hand-rail, around the perimeter of the open courtyard. I peered up into the blue square of sky, and my horror of spaces, enclosed and open, worked on me a rare treat of terror.

‘Highly dangerous, don’t you think?’ Julian said.

He stood behind me at an entrance to a corridor, one hand against the wall, the other in the pocket of his jacket. He came to my side and we looked down into the courtyard. Down there Aristotle sat, morosely eyeing the fountain, while he in turn was morosely eyed by the sleepy dog.

‘Yes,’ said Julian, with a little sigh. ‘Highly dangerous. For some reason, the architects refused to put up a barrier. Or perhaps it was the builders, a dispute of some kind. A senior official of the French embassy once fell from here into the fountain, during a party. He was very drunk.’

With a slow sweep of his hand he traced the line of the Frenchman’s descent. He pursed his lips, and sadly shook his head, but then I caught him glancing at me, and he could contain himself no longer. He began to laugh.

‘I must admit it was all great fun. You know, I think I shall have another party soon. What do you think? Will you come?’

He looked at me with his head on one side, and his eyes, well yes, what the hell, they did, they twinkled.

‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said.

‘Good, good. Seen Helena? No? She must be around somewhere.’

We stood together quietly. Julian frowned, and looked at his toe, which drew an invisible parallelogram on the smooth stone of the balcony. He was going to ask a question, I knew, and I had a message from somewhere which told me: fend it off, quick. I lifted a finger and opened my mouth, but I was not quick enough.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I have a proposition. How would you like to become the boy’s tutor, Yacinth, you know, hmm?’

I called down that uplifted finger, but my mouth stayed open.

‘Eh?’

‘A tutor. You. For Yacinth.’

He watched me now with an unsettling scrutiny, his head thrown slightly back, lips parted, eyebrows raised, like a conductor waiting for the piercing sweetness of that first note of the flute which tells him yes, this performance will be perfect.

‘Brush up his English and so on.’ A twitch of the baton. ‘He’s extraordinarily precocious for his age, and we just cannot find a suitable school.’ A lifting of a rosebud of fingers.

‘What age is he?’ I asked.

The question seemed profound at the time. Julian chose to ignore it.

‘You could still keep your job at Rabin’s, and just spend a few hours up here each evening. What do you say? — Oops, there goes Aristotle, insulted again, must go —’

He scampered off into the corridor, and I heard him clattering away down the stairs, calling the Colonel’s name. If Sesosteris heard him, then he gave no sign of it, but went on plodding across the gravel, through the tunnel and away. Julian appeared below me, a hilariously foreshortened figure capering past the fountain with the dog snapping joyously at his heels. There was the sound of a car starting up, and of wheels squealing on the gravel. The notion came to me that, had Aristotle not given him an excuse to leave me, Julian would have had to find some other means of escape, for I was convinced that he had been perilously close to laughter when making me that proposition.

I wandered down through the house again, and in a room somewhere at the back I found Helena, standing by a window looking down on the city. The sun laid a tender light on her face. She wore a short skirt of some bright design, and a white silk shirt with ruffles at the throat. Her hair was loose, burning on her shoulders. How can I say what I felt, how could I say it then? I did not try. I shall not try now. Only I think of certain summer days when the air itself seems to sing, and I think of the perfection of silence caught by the best music; I think of Botticelli’s maiden of abundant spring. The essence of such things is the love that I have lost, the one I never had. I am still talking about torment. She looked at me. Expecting someone else, it took a moment for my presence to register on her face. I rushed across the room, swept her up in my arms, covered her mouth with kisses, and then found myself still standing like an idiot in the doorway, my gob gaping. I had had one of those moments when the desire suffices for the action. She said,