John Banville - Eclipse

But am I righdy remembering that night? Am I remembering anything rightly? I may be embellishing, inventing, I may be mixing everything up. Perhaps it was another night entirely that he brought me home on the bar of his bicycle, under his coat. And how did his bicycle come to be there, at the station, anyway, if he was arriving by train? These are the telltale threads on which memory snags her nails.

Here I am, a grown man in a haunted house, obsessing on the past.

It was summer when my father died. My mother had moved him to the top of the house, to a room across the landing from mine, where he would be out of sight of the lodgers. I would meet him, leaving his tea tray outside his door, or shuffling in his slippers down the hall to the lavatory, and I would avoid his eye, the anguished stoicism of it, like the eye of the Saviour mournfully displaying his pierced heart in the silver and neon-pink picture that hung beside the hatstand in the hall. I see him, ashen, lost inside his clothes, and always, like me now, with a three-day stubble, moving wraithlike without sound through rooms gaunt with summer’s stillness, a stooped figure flickering from sunlight into shadow, fading with no footfall, leaving no trace of his passing save a sort of shimmer, a fold in the air, and a coiling question mark of cigarette smoke.

The day of his death is memorable too as the day my mother slapped my face. When she turned from the range I thought she was reaching out quickly to give me something. I can feel still the hard hot quick smack of her hand on my jaw, the jolt of it. She had never hit me before. She did it too not as a parent slapping a child, but as one angry adult turning suddenly on another. I do not remember what I had said or done to provoke her. Her look immediately afterwards was one almost of triumph. She lifted her head back and widened her nostrils, like Snow White’s wicked stepmother, and something came at me out of her eyes, sharp and glittering and swift, like a blade shown and promptly pocketed. Then without a word she turned back to whatever it was she had been doing at the range. I did not cry, I was too surprised to cry, but only sat with one hand laid flat before me on the table, feeling the tingle along my jaw where she had slapped me, as if tiny droplets of something scalding were falling on my skin. The oilcloth cover on the table was wonderfully cool and smooth and moist under my hand, almost like something living, almost like skin. Then my father came down, clutching a blanket tight around his drawn, ill-shaven neck. There were shadows in the hollows of his face and feverish red spots on his cheekbones that looked as if they had been painted there. My mother’s expression was blank, as though nothing had happened, but my father wrinkled his nose, testing the pressure of her anger on the air, and gave me an odd, sidewise glance, half-smiling, almost sly. Late that night I was wakened by muffled noises outside my room. When I went to the door and looked out I saw my mother in her nightdress crossing the landing hastily with a blue bowl in her hands, and heard through the open door of my father’s room a high whistling noise that was the noise of him struggling for breath, and I shut my door hurriedly and got back into bed, and when I woke again it was morning, and I knew that my father was gone.

At the funeral it rained briefly, as if just for us. A small round cloud appeared in an otherwise empty sky above the cemetery and let fall upon the circle of mourners a gentle drizzle, warm and fine. I watched every step of the ceremony with frowning attention, determined not to miss a thing. My mother kept glancing off with a vague, anxious look in the direction of the cemetery gate, as if there were something far more urgent elsewhere calling out plaintively for her attention. Later in the day, when the mourners had all dispersed, I came upon her sitting on the sofa in the parlour, weeping, with her face in her hands, and feeling grown-up and solemnly responsible I walked up quietly and stopped just behind her and laid a hand gently on her shoulder. I can still feel the cool smooth brittle texture of her newly bought black dress. She wrenched herself away from me, making cat noises and scrubbing at her cheeks, and I had the sense of a small, slightly shameful and gratifying victory.

Why is it not she who appears to me? Her own last years were haunted. I would hear her in the night, pacing the floor by her bed, endlessly pacing. She grew confused, and mistook me for my father, and would fly into fits of unprovoked rage. Then one morning I found her lying on her side on the floor in the downstairs lavatory with her bloomers around her knees. Her face had a bluish cast and there was froth on her lips. I thought she was dead; I felt strange, very cold and calm and distant from myself. I flushed the lavatory, careful not to look into the bowl, and knelt and hauled her up and held her to me. She was warm and flaccid and faintly atremble, and I was shocked to find myself thinking of Lydia as she would be at the climax of love-making. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open, and she sighed as if from a great weariness, and a glistening bubble came out of her mouth and swelled, and swelled, and burst.

For weeks she lay unmoving in a metal-framed bed in a bright room at the corner of the hospital wing that looked out on a cindered pathway and a row of cherry trees. I sat with her through long hours of wakeful dreaming; it was almost restful there. The sunlight threw complicated shapes across the bed that would spend the afternoon inching their way slowly along the blanket and on to the floor like things making an elaborately stealthy getaway. Hospital sounds came to me, soothingly muffled. My mother’s hands rested on the sheet, unmoving, pale as paper, impossibly large. She looked like a more than life-sized statue of herself. Some error had been made, some bit of celestial business had gone awry and she had been left like this, felled by death yet still alive, stranded between two imperceptibly darkening shores. When I was leaving at the end of the day’s vigil I would lean over her, teetering a little, and kiss her self-consciously on the forehead, smelling her mingled smell of soap and washed-out cotton and dried skin and musty hair.

The cherry trees blossomed, and the blossoms fell, and then the leaves fell. Eventually she regained a sort of consciousness. I arrived one late autumn afternoon and she was sitting up at an angle wearing a pink cardigan that was not hers, with a look of wild enquiry in her eye. When I spoke to her she jerked her head back on its wattled neck like a startled hen. She came home that evening. They brought her in an ambulance, which impressed her, I could see, for all her distractedness; she descended from the wide-flung back doors with an almost queenly step, laying a hand imperiously on my offered arm.

It was strange, the silent clamour of her presence in the house. I felt like an attendant set to watch over a large, dangerous machine that had seized up and that no one knew how to set going again. It was always there, under everything, the sense of her, all that stalled potential, the house hummed with it. Inside her somewhere the dynamo was still spinning; where did the energy go to, what invisible elaborations was it generating? She unnerved me. She seemed no longer human, she seemed something more than that, ancient and elemental. I tended her like a priest at a shrine, with weary reverence, resignedly, stooping under that silent stare, that mute mixture of pleading and disdain. She took to pushing things off the bedside table, pill boxes, the night-light holder, the glass for her false teeth; she even developed a knack of overturning her chamber pot. Word of her condition got round among the lodgers, and soon the commercial travellers stopped coming and the clerks and secretaries found digs elsewhere. Now the deserted house became her shell, her sounding-box. Despite the ruin of her mind I credited her with uncanny powers of perception. I fancied I could hear her breathing wherever I was in the house, even down in the back scullery, where I brewed her tea and mashed the slops for her that were all she could manage now. She seemed never to sleep. I would look into her room and there she would be, no matter how late the hour, sprawled in the foul roost of her bed, propped up crookedly in the corner against a bank of pillows, in the tallowy glow of the night light, an elbow wedged against the wall, grey hair a fright and her jaw set and the little hard blue teary eyes fixed on me furiously, brimming with all that was pent in her, the years. Despite myself, I would step inside, and shut the door, and the flame of the night light would waver and the room would lurch and immediately right itself again. Sometimes I would talk to her, not knowing if she could hear me, or if she did, that she could understand what I was saying. I was prey to an oppressive self-awareness. Listening shadows hung in the high room. The tall black wardrobe had a curved front, more like a lid than a door, and always reminded me of a sarcophagus. She would stir, or rather, something would stir in her, one of those interior tremors, barely detectable, that I had learned to interpret, I do not know how, and I would sigh, and lift the teacup and cracked jug that stood with her rosary beads and prayer book on the bedside table, and pour out a draught of water, marvelling vaguely at the undulant rope of liquid coiling into the cup, gold-coloured in the candlelight. I would sit down beside her on one haunch on the side of the bed, the bed in which I had been born—had been got, too, most likely—and put an arm around her shoulders and draw her forward and look on as she drank, her puckered, whiskery lips mumbling the rim of the cup, and feel the water going down her gullet in hiccupy swallows. Then I would see myself here as a child, kneeling on the floor in the rain-light of a winter afternoon, lost in my solitary games, my mother lolling in bed with her magazines and her chocs, and the wireless whispering and the rain tapping on the windowpanes, and now I would shake her a little, not roughly, feeling the bones of her shoulders shift inside their parcel of loose flesh, and at last, surrendering, she would lay her raddled old head against my shoulder and exhale a long, slow, whistling sigh. Look at us there, a deposition scene in reverse, the dying hunched old woman cradled in the arm of her living son, in our dome of candlelight, lapped in our noisome, ancient warmth.