John Banville: Eclipse

The house. It is tall and narrow, and stands on a corner of the little square across from the high white wall of the convent of the Sisters of Mercy. In fact, our square is not a square at all, but converges and funnels off at the far end into a road that climbs a hill leading out into the country. I date a fascination with speculative thought, uncommon in my profession—the thinking man’s thespian, that is another thing the critics used to call me, with a detectable smirk—from the moment in childhood when it occurred to me to wonder how a triangular space could have come to be called a square. Next door had a madwoman in the attic. Really, this is true. Often of a morning when I was setting off for school she would pop her golliwog’s head out at the mansard window and call down to me, shrieking gibberish. Her hair was very black and her face was very white. She was twenty, or thirty, some age like that, and played with dolls. What ailed her no one seemed to know for sure, or would not say; there was talk of incest. Her father was a coarse, puce-faced person with a big round head set necklessly on his shoulders like a stone ball. I see him in gaiters but surely that is just fancy. Mind you, pelt shoon and hempen trews would not be out of place, for those days are so far off from me now they have become a kind of antiquity.

See how I parry and duck, like an outclassed boxer? I begin to speak of the ancestral home and within a sentence or two I have moved next door. That is me all over.

The incident with the animal on the road in the wintry gloaming was definitive, though what it was that was being defined I could not tell. I saw where I was, and I thought of the house, and knew that I must live there again, if only for a little while. So came the April day when I drove with Lydia down those familiar roads and found the keys, left under a stone beside the doorstep by an unknown hand. Such seeming absence of human agency was proper also; it was as if…

“As if what?” my wife said.

I turned from her with a shrug.

“I don’t know.”

Once I had made my arrangements—a contract brusquely broken, a summer tour abandoned—it took no time at all, one Sunday afternoon, to move my things down here, the few necessities of what I insist on thinking will be no more than a brief respite from life, an interval between acts. I loaded my bags and books into the boot and the back seat of the car, not speaking, while Lydia looked on with folded arms, smiling angrily. I shuffled from house to car and back again without pausing, afraid that if I stopped once I would not start up again, would dissolve into a puddle of irresolution on the pavement. It was summer by now, one of those vague hazy days of early June that seem made half of weather and half of memory. A soft breeze stirred the lilac bush by the front door. Across the road a pair of poplars were excitedly discussing something dreadful, their foliage tinkling. Lydia had accused me of being a sentimentalist. “All this is just some kind of ridiculous nostalgia,” she said, and laughed unsteadily. She stopped me in the hallway, planted herself and the barrier of her folded arms in front of me and would not let me pass. I stood breathing, burdened with baggage, staring morosely at the floor by her feet, saying nothing. I pictured myself hauling off and hitting her. This is the kind of thing that comes into my head nowadays. It is strange, for I was never a brawler: the word was always weapon enough. It is true that when we were younger and our relations more tempestuous Lydia and I would sometimes resort to fisticuffs to settle a difference, but that was less from anger than other things—how erotic is the sight of a woman winding up her fist to deliver a punch!—for all that one or other of us might come out of the fray with a ringing ear or a chipped tooth. These new thoughts of violence are alarming. Is it not right that I should have put myself out of harm’s way? The harm of others, that is; the harm to others.

“Be honest,” Lydia said. “Are you leaving us?”

Us.

“Listen, my dear—”

“Don’t call me my dear,” she cried. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that.” I was, I realised, bored. Boredom is the brother of misery, that is something I have been discovering. I gazed away from her, into the soft, unresting air. There were moments even then when the very light seemed thronged with figures. She waited; still I would not speak. “Oh, go, then,” she said, and turned away in disgust.

But when I was in the car and about to drive off she came out of the house with her coat and her keys and got in wordlessly beside me. Soon we were bowling along through the countryside’s slovenly and uncaring loveliness. We passed by a circus, going in our direction, one of the old-fashioned kind, rarely to be seen any more, with garishly painted horse-drawn caravans, driven by gypsy types with neckerchiefs and earrings. A circus, now, this was surely a good sign, I thought, and began to feel quite gay. The trees were puffs of green, the sky was blue. I recalled a page from my daughter’s homework book I had kept since she was a child, hidden at the back of a drawer in my desk, along with a clutch of yellowed first-night programmes and one or two clandestine love letters. The Bud is in flower, she had written, in the big, wide-eyed hand of a five-year-old. Mud is brown. I feel as fit as a Flea. things can go wrong. A spasm of sweetish sadness made my mind droop; I thought perhaps Lydia was right, perhaps I am a sentimentalist. I brooded on words. Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was. I remarked aloud the smoothness of the road. “When I was young this journey took three hours, nearly.” Lydia threw up her eyes and sighed. Yes, the past, again. I was thinking of my Easter-morning dream. I still felt invaded, as I had that day out in the fields: invaded, occupied, big with whatever it was that has entered me. It is still here; I feel I am pregnant; it is a very peculiar sensation. Before, what I contained was the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be. Now, that essential self has been pushed to the side with savage insouciance, and I am as a house walked up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger. I am all inwardness, gazing out in ever intensifying perplexity upon a world in which nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly what it is. And the thing itself, my little stranger, what of it? To have no past, no foreseeable future, only the steady pulse of a changeless present—how would that feel? There’s being for you. I imagine it in there, filling me to the skin, anticipating and matching my every movement, diligently mimicking the tiniest details of what I am and do. Why am I not writhing in disgust, to feel thus horribly inhabited? Why not revulsion, instead of this sweet, melancholy sense of longing and lost promise?

The house too had been invaded, someone had got in and had been living here, some tramp or fugitive. There were crusts of bread on the kitchen table and used tea bags in the sink, obscene, squashed brown things. A fire had been lit in the parlour, in the grate were the charred remains of books the intruder had pulled from the shelves and used for fuel. Some titles and parts of titles were still legible. I leaned down and tried to make them out, intent as a scryer: The Revenant, My Mother’s House —apt, that one—something called Heart’s Needle, and, most badly burned, The Necessary… with a final word obscured by a scorch mark that I thought might have been Angel. Not your run-of-the-mill book-burner, evidently. I sat back on my heels and sighed, then rose and picked my way from room to room, frowning at the grime, the faded furnishings, the sun-bleached curtains; how could I stay here? Lydia called to me. I went and found her standing in the lime-smelling lavatory under the stairs, a wrist on her hip, in the pose of Donatello’s David, pointing disgustedly into the bowl, where a gigantic turd was wedged. “Aren’t people lovely,” she said.