John Banville - Eclipse

Someone was in the house, I knew it as soon as I crossed the threshold. With the milk and the bag of eggs in my hands I stood motionless, not breathing, nostrils flared and one ear lifted, an animal invaded in its lair. Calm summer light stood in the hall and three flies were circling in tight formation under a peculiarly repulsive, bare grey light-bulb. Not a sound. What was it that was amiss, what scent or signal had I caught? There was a flaw in the atmosphere, a lingering ripple where someone had passed through. Cautiously I moved from room to room, mounted the stairs, the tendons in my knees creaking, even peered into the damp-smelling broom cupboard behind the scullery door, but found no one lurking there. Outside, then? I went to the windows, checking the co-ordinates of my world: the square in front, innocent of any sign that I could see, and at the back the garden, tree, fields, far hills, all Sunday-still in the cottony light of afternoon. I was in the kitchen when I heard a sound behind me. My scalp tingled and a bead of sweat came out at the hairline and ran a little way swiftly down my forehead and stopped. I turned. A girl was standing in the doorway with the light of the hall behind her. The first impression I had was of a general slight lopsidedness. Her eyes were not quite level, and her mouth drooped at one side in the slack lewd way of the bored young. Even the hem of her dress was crooked. She said nothing, only stood there eyeing me with dull candour. Some moments of uncertain silence passed. I might have taken her for another hallucination, but she was far too solidly herself for that. Still neither of us spoke, then there was a shuffle and a cough, and behind her Quirke appeared, stooping apologetically, the nervous fingers of one hand jiggling at his side. Today he was wearing a blue blazer with brass buttons and a high shine on the elbows, a shirt that had once been white, narrow tie, grey slacks sagging in the rear, grey leather slip-ons with buckles on the insteps, white socks. He had cut himself shaving again, a bit of bloodstained toilet paper was stuck to his chin, a white floweret with a tiny rust-red heart. Under his arm he carried a large scuffed black cardboard box tied with a black silk ribbon.

“You asked about the house,” he said—had I? “I have it all”—bending a glance in the direction of the box—“here.”

He stepped past the girl and came forward eagerly and put the box on the kitchen table and undid the ribbon and with loving deftness set out his documents, fanning them like a hand of outsize cards, talking the while. “I’m what you might call a spoilt solicitor,” he said with a melancholy leer, showing big, wax-coloured teeth. He was leaning across the table, holding out to me a sheaf of yellow-edged pages crawled all over by elaborate sepia script. I took them and held them in my hands and looked at them; they had the flat, mildewed fragrance of dried chrysanthemums. I scanned the words. Whereas… hereinunder… given this day of… A gathering yawn made my nostrils tighten. The girl came and stood at Quirke’s shoulder and looked on in listless curiosity. He had launched into an elaborate account of a historic, long-running and intricate dispute over land rent and boundaries and rights of way, illustrating each stage of the wrangle with its piece of parchment, its deeds, its map. As he spoke I saw the players in the little drama, the shovel-hatted fathers and long-suffering mothers, the hothead sons, the languishing consumptive daughters with their needlepoint and novels. And I pictured Quirke, too, got up in fustian, like them, high-collared in a dank attic room, crouched over his papers by the glimmer of a guttering candle stub, while the night wind sighed through the slates and cats prowled the cramped back gardens under a moon like a paring of polished tin… “The son got hold of the old one’s will and burned it,” he was saying in a husky, confiding whisper, shutting one eye and portentously nodding. “And that of course would have left him… ” He reached out a tapered and faintly trembling forefinger and tapped the top page of the papers where I held them. “Do you see?”

“I do,” I said, earnestly, though I lied.

He waited, scanning my face, then sighed; there is no satisfying the hobbyist’s hunger. Dispirited, he turned aside and gazed morosely through the window out to the garden with unseeing eyes. The sunlight was turning brazen as the afternoon lost strength. The girl nudged him with a lazy sideways movement of her hip and he blinked. “Oh, yes,” he said, “this is Lily.” She gave me a cheerless down-turned smile and made a mock curtsey. “You’ll be in need of help around the house,” he said. “Lily will see to it.”

Peeved and doleful, he gathered up his papers and put them into the box and shut the lid and knotted the black silk ribbon; I noticed again the deftness of those maidenly fingers. He fished his bicycle clips from his blazer pocket and bent and put them on, grunting. The girl and I together looked down at the top of his head and the slick of sandy hair and the bowed shoulders with their light snowfall of dandruff. We might have been the parents and he the overgrown, unlovely son of whom we were less than proud. He straightened, now suggesting for a second a pan-talooned palace eunuch, with his yeasty pallor and his white socks and slips-ons upturned at the toes.

“I’ll be off,” he said.

I walked with him down the hall to the front door. Outside, his bicycle was lying against its lamppost in a state of exaggerated collapse, front wheel upturned and handlebars askew, like a comic impersonating a drunk. He righted it and clipped the document box to the carrier and in moody silence mounted up and rode away. He has a manner of cycling that is all his own, sitting far back on the saddle with shoulders drooping forward and paunch upturned, steering with one hand while the other rests limply in his lap, his knees going up and down like pistons that are not working but merely idling. Halfway across the square he braked and stopped and put a balletic toe to the ground and turned and looked back; I waved; he went on.

In the kitchen the girl was standing at the sink lethargically going through the motions of washing up. She is not a pretty child, and not, by the look of her, particularly clean, either. She kept her head down when I came in. I crossed the room and sat at the table. Butter in its dish had separated in the sun, a greasy puddle of curds; a slice of staling bread was scalloped decoratively along its edges by the heat. The milk and the bag of eggs were there where I had left them. I looked at the girl’s pale long neck and rat’s tails of colourless hair. I cleared my throat, and drummed my fingers on the table.

“And tell me, Lily,” I said, “what age are you?”

I detected a sinister, oily smoothness in my voice, the voice of a sly old roué trying to sound harmless.

“Seventeen,” she answered without hesitation; I am sure she is far younger than that.

“And do you go to school?”

A crooked shrug, the right shoulder rising, the left let fall.

“Used to.”

I rose from the table and went and stood beside her, leaning back against the draining board with my arms and ankles crossed.

Stance, and tone, these are the important things; once you have the tone and the stance the part plays itself. Lily’s hands in the hot water were raw to the wrists, as if she were wearing a pair of pink surgical gloves. They are Quirke’s hands, shapely and delicate. She set a mug upside down on the board in a froth of opalescent bubbles. I enquired mildly if she did not think she should rinse off the suds. She went still and stood a moment, looking into the sink, then turned her head slowly and gave me a dead-eyed stare that made me blench. Deliberately she picked up the mug and held it under the running tap and thumped it down again. I tottered hurriedly back to my place at the table, feathers all awry. How do they manage to be so discomfiting, the young, with no more than a glance, a grimace? Presently she finished the dishes, and dried her hands on a rag; her fingers, I noticed, were nicotine-stained. “ 1 have a daughter, you know,” I said, sounding the fond old fumbling booby now. “Older than you. Catherine is her name. We call her Cass.” She might not have heard me. I watched her as she stored away the still-damp cups and saucers; how well she knows their places, it must be a female instinct. When she was done she stood a moment looking about her dimly, then turned to go, but paused, as if she had just remembered my existence, and looked at me, wrinkling her nose.