John Banville - Nightspawn

‘Yacinth, O Yacinth, Hyacinth, where are you?’

The slow clear calls fell about me like petals, settled softly on the leaves, the branches, on the flowers, and I was assailed by something which I cannot define, a feeling of the nerve of that day perhaps, redolent of sunlight and happiness, of tiny creatures stirring, and the air singing, like the hollow call of muted horns heard distantly across the sweltering fields of summer. No, I shall never forget.

When, in late evening, as dusk was gathering, we got back to the house, we found a note from Julian to say that he would be away overnight. There were mornings I shared with her, evenings, afternoons, long hours stolen from the nights, but one dawn, and one dawn only, which we saw together. This was to be it, I knew. The scrap of paper on which he had written, like so many other scraps I was to see, for Julian was a compulsive note-leaver, shook in my fingers. I looked at Helena, but she refused to meet my eyes, and turned away with Yacinth toward the stairs. When she came down again, trailing a pale hand on the polished banister and picking a fragment of leaf from her pullover, I was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the hall, pouring a generous dose of brandy into my face.

‘Well?’ I asked, my voice thick. The heat and rarefied air of the mountains had left me slightly drugged, and now the brandy was punching my lungs as it passed them by on its downward journey. She paused on the last step, her head bowed.

‘Do you want to stay?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She took my hand and led me up to the master bedroom, an enormous, vulgar, and vaguely frightening room. She sat before the mirror of the dressing table, combing out her long hair. The long gold strands were dark at the roots, dark on dark, gold light, mirror, crystal; I was lacerated by her beauty. She stood up, and took off her clothes.

I had such acrobatics planned for the occasion, a whole gymnasium of crippling and outrageous postures, but when finally we made it into that acre of bed, I was exhausted just on the thought of all we were going to do to each other. We lay in each other’s arms in the darkness. She was such a tiny creature, as delicate as a bird. Her breasts were hardly noticeable when she pressed against me. I kissed her shoulders, her ankles, her tiny gleaming cunt. Ah, she said, ahh.

‘I love you,’ I murmured, wishing there were better ways of expressing that ancient lie.

Something touched my arm. It was a tear, with a perfect, tiny miniature of the lamp on the dressing table trapped inside it. She was weeping silently, terribly, without a sound. I moved my arm so that those stars could freely fall, but they were extinguished so brutally by the sheets, and turned into grey smudges, that I put back my hand and caught a whole sky falling. I had no wish to probe the well from which the tears sprang, but understood in silence that they were a tribute to this little precious thing which we had found. We knew that it would not live long. It was sickly. I would leave her, or she would leave me, or we would leave us, or they would leave them, or it would leave you … bah, we knew nothing of the kind. She probably had a pain, and I was too tired to bother asking her where it was. We fell asleep, as chaste as children.

It was a long, restless and exquisite night, filled with the intimation of future pain. I had a foul and garrulous dream in which hulking giants did disgusting things to little boys. I woke to find Helena clinging fiercely to me.

‘I thought you were gone,’ she cried. ‘I thought you were gone away already.’

What wounds these moments inflict. They do not heal, they never heal. Get your fucking claws out of my throat and let me be tender for a while, there is enough cruelty, is your thirst for blood never sated?

‘No no,’ I murmured. ‘I’m here, Helena, I’m here.’

And we fell asleep again, weeping in each other’s arms. Later she sat up suddenly and gaped at me, her teeth flashing.

‘Julian?’ she whispered.

I said nothing, pretended to sleep. In a moment she lay down again, and with a great sigh turned her back to me. I smiled. She had turned her back on him, yes, on him.

I wakened for the last time just as the first crippled fingers of light were crawling into the room. Helena lay beside me with her eyes wide.

‘There is someone outside,’ she said, terror-stricken.

‘Don’t be silly, there’s no one.’

There was. I left the bed and went silently to the door. Came a rustle of cloth from the corridor. I looked out. Yacinth stood on the landing holding up the trousers of his pyjamas with one hand, and the other thrusting one of its knuckles into the corner of his eye. We stared. His lips curled slowly away from his teeth, and he made a hoarse hissing sound deep in his throat, which chilled my blood. He turned abruptly and scurried away. I closed the door, went back and covered myself to the nose under the sheets.

‘Who was it?’

‘Only the dog,’ I said.

She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. She nibbled the nail of her little finger thoughtfully. I put my head against her shoulder and closed my eyes.

‘Ben. Ben. Be-en, wake up.’

‘What?’

‘This must stop.’

‘Helena.’

‘Well it must.’

‘For Christ’s sake.’

‘I’m afraid of you — I mean for you. If Julian discovers —’

‘He won’t.’

‘But he might.’

‘What would he do?’ I asked. ‘Have me assassinated?’

She pushed my head away and stared into my eyes, biting a lip which would not be kept from trembling. I laughed at her.

‘I’m not afraid of Julian.’

‘You don’t know,’ she muttered. ‘There are things that you do not know.’

‘Aye, and things you don’t know either.’

Oh yes, I knew my part well, the gay pirate with a cutlass in his teeth, laughing heartily in the face of the king and his justice. What a fool, what an incredible fool. I kissed her mouth to silence her, and soon we were making violent and lunging love, causing the bed, the window panes, the very walls to rattle. But afterwards, that sadness returned, and we lay captive in a fearful silence, our wide eyes watching the light grow in the window. Helena touched a bruise on my throat, and said,

‘I want so much to be happy, and I never will.’

For once I believed one of her stricken sayings, and gazed at her for a long time. She curled herself up and lay against me like some small pale injured animal. A petal broke from a blossom, but did not fall.

I picked my way down the stairs, knees unsteady, nerves jangling, to Yacinth’s study where the boy sat calmly waiting for his lesson. He had a desk by the window which looked into the courtyard, and caught any sun which made its way there. He opened a book, before I had time to sit down, and pointed to a word.

‘What does that mean?’

I scratched my ear and frowned.

‘Well, it means that people, close relations, you know, it’s when they, ah, like a sister and brother … sister and brother …’

He looked at me with that intelligent gaze of his, and I looked down at the fountain.

‘When they what?’ he inquired.

‘I’ll tell you when you’re older. Here, study this poem.’

He bent his head over the page I had selected at random, a bright tip of tongue between his teeth. A ray of dusty sunlight took his cheek bone and moulded it into an exact replica of hers, and there I was, suffused with her again, sodden with her. One night, with the black rain hammering on the roof of her car, Helena came rearing up at me to ask what the hell did I mean by muttering at her about tigers burning in forests. She had, by some osmosis through the porous walls of my brain, received half of a lesson, meant for the boy, panted into her ear. Yacinth began to read aloud, startling me in the midst of my reverie.