John Banville - Nightspawn

‘Ben. I did not think you would come. Julian said that he had met you. I did not think … shut the door.’

Almost a year. Deserted autumn, the wind rattling the olive trees in the square, and a yellowed sheet of newspaper (Get Fix Best Beer) rearing up with singular viciousness and wrapping itself around my legs. The air is filled with strange mournful voices and snatches of awful songs. Then the days dwindle down, September, December, and a glass-hard Christmas eve with sunlight as brittle as a communion wafer, and a wind with teeth in its jaws coming down from the northern mountains; a new year, no different from the old except in number, and that intolerable ache, which might be love or cancer, grinding the breast bone, and now here, here, here at last. While I closed that door, she moved away from the window and sat down demurely on the couch, her knees together leaning sideward, as, with a rush of tenderness, I remembered they were wont to do. Her quiet pale hands were in her lap. She bit her lip and would not look at me. I stood before her. If we spoke, then I can recall no words. That scene reproduces only a deafening hum. She reached forward and touched me with a fingertip. Yes, I was real. She had not thought that I would come, but there I was, as small as life. I knelt before her and put my head into her lap. It seemed to descend with the gigantic slowness of a planet falling. Her cool fingers played about my face, tentatively touching it here and there, expressing a lost, sad helplessness before such a weight of love.

‘Ben, Ben, Julian will see us.’

I caught the wisp of an odour of hot musk from her, which spoke of dealings with the moon. I put my arms around her round little knees. A rose stood on the table near me, and I watched it let fall a petal, like a single drop of blood. I tried to recall when it was that another such flower had been part of the stage-settings for another such momentous instant of the farce which I call my life.

O Helena, poor imitation of a flower, you were better than nothing.

There is, or was, a small restaurant which lies below the sheer cliffs of the Acropolis on Dionysus Avenue. It is a pleasant place, with a dusty courtyard shaded by a trellis of creeping vines. The charcoal spit stands almost on the pavement, and most nights of the week they roast a small piglet whole. The odour of crackling pork lends an air of light-headed hungry gaiety to the evenings there. Two waiters haunt the place, a fat one and an emaciated one, both equally solemn, speaking an odd malapropian brand of English which adds immensely to the general hilarity. They knew me as Mr What, and the querulous quality of that appellation appealed to my self-congratulatory sense of alienation. It was there that Helena and I had our first date of the new age, on a soft spring evening in March. She arrived an hour late, during which period I was reduced to a state comparable to what I imagine must be the fury of a nerve wriggling in the black hollow of a rotten tooth. But of course, as these things will go, when she stepped with that perfect aplomb under the arch of vine leaves, and illuminated the darkness, I was all smiles and tiny attentions, the picture of gibbering idolatry. God, how it burns me now. She had dressed with care for the occasion, in a black dress of severe simplicity, head bare, no jewellery, look on this poor helpless sinner. I held her chair, but she sat down before I could push it forward for her. I never could master the fine timing required by the task. I returned to my place opposite her. I offered her a cigarette, fumbled with matches, flame, smoke, ashes, it was pandemonium. She had still not spoken, but watched me with a thoughtful calm. I said,

‘Will you have a drink?’

‘No thank you.’

‘Coffee?’

‘No thank you.’

‘How about a screw? Ho ho.’

She laid her elbows on the table and put her hands, with fingers clasped, under her chin.

‘I want to warn you,’ she said evenly. ‘If you insist on speaking to me like this I shall see no reason to remain here. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

How, how could I take such solemn crap from her, meekly, with a little simpering smile, how could I do it, how? With the greatest of ease.

Spiro, the fat waiter, came and moaned at us. I ordered some food or other, god knows what, hot twat maybe, I cannot remember. It never did get eaten. Helena puffed delicately at her cigarette. She looked really splendid, her hair newly washed and glowing at the tips in the swaying light from the bulbs above us among the leaves. A cat leapt suddenly in silence on to the table between us. Helena did not stir. Any other woman would have squealed at that sudden blur of fur, but not my Helena. I gave the animal a punch in its surprisingly delicate rib-cage, and it went away (not without a last spiteful glance) as it had come, without a sound. Helena said,

‘I came to speak to you about Yacinth.’

‘You too?’

‘Yes. Julian asked you today if you would tutor him.’

‘What could I teach Julian?’

‘I meant Yacinth, as you well know.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Your sense of humour is very childish. Well, will you do it?’

‘What?’

She looked heavenwards, leafwards, groaning.

‘My god,’ she muttered between clenched teeth. ‘You are impossible.’

‘Helena.’

‘Well?’

‘Don’t you ever laugh? No wait, I mean really laugh, just for the sake of it, not at something clever or witty, but just at the foolishness of things, you know? I’m serious. I want to know. You must have a sense of humour, everyone has.’

‘What you mean is, I must have a sense of humour like yours because you … you like me, isn’t that so?’

I put a hand to my forehead and stared hard at a spent match on the table.

‘No, that isn’t it. It’s just that, I can’t take all this solemnity.’

‘You do not have to take it, as you put it.’

‘Don’t say things like that, Helena. I’m trying to talk to you. We’ve never really talked. I want to understand you.’

‘Why?’ she asked, with an odd venom.

‘Because I love you.’

She lowered her eyes and gazed at the cigarette burning in her fingers. She had that habit, which I find dementing, of never breaking the ash before the last possible moment. A good inch and a half of dead tobacco now drooped obscenely from the tip of her cigarette. In the quietest of voices, she said,

‘He has laughed at me so often that now I have forgotten how to laugh myself.’

There was no need to ask her who he was. She dropped her ash into the waiting tray. People with that habit always do make it at the last moment, and that, for some perverse reason, drives me into an even more extravagant rage.

‘Is it that bad?’ I asked.

She made no reply, and did not look at me. Her attitude, perfectly still, with head bowed, was heartrending. I felt a terrible pity for her, a pity which was based on deeper things than the difficulty of her life with Julian. I reached forward and touched her hand.

‘I’ll teach you to laugh again.’

I said that, I did, I really did. Let us have it once more, for the joy of it.

‘I shall teach you to laugh again, Helena.’

O boy, O boy. I am slapping my thigh. Spiro laid our meal before us with such a depth of melancholy concern that it seemed that he was convinced that it would be our last taste of food. We both pawed at the stuff for a while, and then pushed it aside. The cat returned and stuck a claw into my trouser-leg. I gave it a look and it slunk away. Then I lit another cigarette, without fumbling this time. I was in command now. Nothing like a bit of pity to send one soaring above the poor lump who had merited it. I said,