John Banville - Eclipse

“What is it?” Lydia said without looking up, and for a second I thought she had somehow been reading my mind. “What’s wrong with you, what is the matter? What”—wearily—“what has happened to you?”

The apples were a pale whitish green and each bite came away with a satisfying, woody snap. I remember them; to this day I remember them.

“I have the feeling,” I said, “the conviction, I can’t rid myself of it, that something has happened, something dreadful, and I haven’t taken sufficient notice, haven’t paid due regard, because I don’t know what it is.”

She was silent, then gave a sort of laugh, and sat up and rubbed her hands vigorously on her upper arms, as if she had become chilled, keeping her face turned away from me.

“Maybe it’s your life,” she said. “That’s disaster enough, isn’t it?”

Evening, and she is still here. At least, I have not heard her departing. I do not know what she is up to, there has not been a sound from her, from anyone, for hours. It is worrying. Perhaps she has encountered Quirke, and is with him now, pouring out her troubles. Serve him right. Or she might have cornered the girl, might be quizzing her, wanting to know if I have interfered with her. I am skulking in my hideout, hunched over my bamboo table, feeling cross and ill at ease. Why must I always be the guilty one? I did not ask her to come here, I did not invite her. All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up. I am sick of them all. I shall not come out until she is gone.

It is the following morning, and there is much excitement. The circus, of all things, has come to town. After a night of disturbed sleep I was woken early by a confusion of noises outside my window, and looked through a crack in the curtains to find a dozen or more trailers drawn up at haphazard angles in the square. The horses were being unhitched, and big-muscled bandy men in striped vests were hurrying to and fro, plying ropes, and hefting things, and calling to each other in sharp, brief barks; it was as if the performance had already started and they were the opening act. As I watched, tent-poles were being assembled, and a big tarpaulin was thrown down and rapidly unrolled. All around the square, at other bedroom windows, other curtains were twitching, and even the odd front door was opened cautiously and a lathered face or curlered head appeared, poking out in groggy wonderment.

“What’s going on?” Lydia asked sleepily from the bed behind me, where she had raised herself on an elbow, a hand lifted to shade her eyes.

“It’s the circus,” I said, and had to laugh, though it came out more like a cough.

In fact, as I later found, it is more than a circus, it is a kind of roadshow, with a shooting gallery, and stalls for shying coconuts and throwing rings, and a cage on wheels containing a family of mangy, purple-bottomed monkeys who gibber and hoot and stare at passers-by with comical malignity. There is even a hall of mirrors: Lily and I were present when it was being put up. The big rippled sheets of glass were taken out of their sacking and lowered from the back of the wagon, and for a few giddy moments a troupe of rubbery dwarves and etiolated giants shimmied and shivered in those depthless caskets of light. Lily pretends to be bored by all this, but behind her arch look there is a glitter of childish excitement she cannot suppress. We had come out to do a tour of inspection while Lydia prepared breakfast. I had that sense of false alertness that comes from the lack of both sleep and sustenance, and in the early sunlight everything around me was unreally clear and sharply defined, like the pieces of a shattered kaleidoscope. On the back steps of a trailer painted in scarlet and midnight blue a man sat, watching us. He was a shabby, skinny fellow with red hair and a thin, foxy face. He wore a loose red shirt and shapeless trousers that were much too big for him, a clownish get-up, and he had a gold ring in one ear. He looked familiar, although I was sure I had never seen him before. He reminded me of a person I used to meet about the streets last winter, at the start of my bad time, whom also I seemed vaguely to know, and who certainly knew me, or of me, at least, for every time we encountered each other, which happened with alarming frequency, he would smile to himself, an awful, smug, lip-biting smile, which he would make a show of trying to hide behind a hand, while sidling quickly past me, with eyes resolutely downcast, as if he thought I might tackle him, might plant myself in his path and make him stop, or try to cuff him on the ear as he went by. He too had red hair, and wore spectacles that flashed at me mockingly, and a duffel coat, and down-at-heel shoes and concertina trousers. I thought perhaps he might be a member of the guild, a spear-carrier who thinks himself a Kean and hates me for my reputation and my successes. After an encounter with him I would have a sense of disquiet that lingered for days. I did think of confronting him, and demanding to know what it was about me that amused him, what secret of mine he thought he had uncovered, but before I could decide to act he would be gone, hurrying off into the crowd, head down and shoulders shaking, so it seemed to me, with secret mirth. This circus fellow had the same look of amused knowingness, though he was even more sure of himself, and was evidently not in the least concerned as to what I might say or do. Nevertheless, as we drew near he stood up, showing a hand-rolled cigarette and patting his scrawny thighs as if in search of matches, and went inside the trailer. Lily, I saw, had spotted him too.

We inspected the monkeys, one of whom rolled back his mouth so far it seemed he would turn himself inside-out, a moth-eaten lion reclining motionless as a sphinx and gazing out upon the world with an expression of unfathomable boredom, and a supercilious and very smelly dromedary tethered to a cherry tree, the lower leaves of which it was tearing with rubbery lips and spitting disdainfully on the ground. Lily stopped to watch in awe a dun mare copiously pissing. Despite my hunger I was not eager to return to the house. I am not sure which I find harder to cope with, Lydia’s anger, or that brittle cheerfulness which is its inevitable consequence. After our fight yesterday she sulked throughout the evening, but relented later, as I knew she would. I had made her come with me to the pub, in order, I confess, to allow Quirke and the girl to get themselves settled for the night without her knowing, for I had not yet gathered my courage sufficiently to break to her the news of their permanent residency. We drank too many gins, and fell into amorousness—yes, yes, I have languished off the sexual wagon, I’m afraid, just when I thought I was cured of all that delirium. But we were very tender and forgiving toward each other, and in the glimmering small hours, clasped in her familiar warmth like a marsupial in its mother’s pouch, I seemed more nearly sane than I have felt since I cannot remember when. By morning, however, doubts had set in. There is something not quite right, something even mildly disgraceful, in the way she lets her fury be transformed with such apparent ease into a wholly other sort of passion. Intransigent and cold of heart I may be, but when terrible things are said I take them to be at least an approximately accurate expression of true feelings, firm convictions. For instance, when Lydia hurls at me those accusations—that I am a bad husband and neglectful father, that I am a monster of self-regard, that onstage I cannot act and in life never cease from acting—I am impressed, I am cowed, even, despite the flinty exterior I take care to maintain. Not only that, but I bethink myself, even in the heat of battle, and wonder if perhaps these things are true of me, and if so how I should go about trying at least to ameliorate my faults and failings. My wife, on the other hand, judging by the rapidity and thoroughness with which she switches mood, seems to regard these exchanges of heavy fire, which leave me drilled with holes through which the wind of self-recognition whistles unimpeded, as no more than light badinage, lovers’ raillery, or even, as last night, a form of sexual foreplay. Where is her sense of duty, I mean the duty to mean what one says, and, having said it, to stand by it?