John Banville - Eclipse

“You brought them into the house,” she said, nodding toward the kitchen and the Quirkes.

“No, I didn’t. They were here when I came.”

“But you let them stay.” So Quirke had confessed all. She put on a big triumphant smile, into the soft centre of which I pictured myself sinking a fist. “You are the one who seems in need of a family.”

Of course, I could think of no reply to that, and came up here to my cubbyhole in a sulk, nursing an irrational and infantile satisfaction at having refused to eat a crumb of breakfast, the foul aromas of which followed me like a taunt up the three steps and through the green door, and which linger faintly even yet. I flung myself down at my bamboo table, ignoring its squeal and crackle of apprehensive protest, and snatched up my pen and scrawled an extended passage of invective against my wife, which when I had finished it I immediately struck out. Terrible things I wrote, unrepeatable, they made me blush even as I set them down. I do not know what it is that comes over me at such moments, this frightening red rage that might make me do anything. What is there for me to be so angry about? I know what Lydia is up to, it is not so reprehensible. She has a great capacity to make the best of the worst predicaments. Finding how things are here, or how she takes them to be, me a landlocked Crusoe, bearded and wild of eye, with not only Quirke as Friday but a surrogate daughter as well—is that what Lily is? the words were written before I had time to think them—she at once set about creating an environment that would simulate, however grisly the likeness, our own dear hearth, which she supposes I am pining for. Ever the home-maker, my Lydia. Well, it will take more than crisped bacon and black pudding to turn this house into a home.

Although I know that nothing can ever be pinpointed so definitively, I date the inauguration of a significant shift in my attitude toward Lydia from the moment, some years back, when I realised that she is mortal. Let me explain, if I can, or let me describe, at least, how the realisation came to me. It was a very odd experience, or perhaps sensation would be a better word. One day, set as usual on the dogged but indisciplined task of self-improvement, I was reading an intricate passage in the work of some philosopher, I forget which one, dealing with the theoretical possibility of the existence of unicorns, when for no reason that I can think of I saw in my mind suddenly the figure of my wife, a very clear and detailed though miniaturised image of her, dressed, most implausibly, in an unbecoming frock of some stiff, brocade-like fabric, which she certainly never possessed in the—what shall I call it?—the empirical world, and with her hair done in that style of frozen rolls of sea-foam so favoured by the second Queen Elizabeth in her latter years, but which Lydia, the living Lydia, would never dream of adopting; I mention these details only in a spirit of scientific rigorousness, for I can think of no explanation for them; in this peculiar image of her—my wife, that is, not the English monarch—she was suspended in a fathomless dark space, a region of infinite emptiness wherein she was the only and only possible specific point, and in which she was receding backwards, at a steady but not rapid rate, with her hands vainly lifted before her as if holding an invisible orb and sceptre—there is the royal note again—wearing an expression of puzzlement and as yet mild though deepening consternation, and it came to me, with ghastly, breathtaking certitude, that one day she would die. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that before then I had imagined her to be somehow immortal. Despite the absurdity of it, what I had understood in that vision of her, simply, astonishingly, was her absolute otherness, not only from me, but from everything else that was in the world, that was the world. Up to then, and, indeed, as I have done most of the time since, the mind being a lazy organ, I had conceived her, as I did so much else, to be a part of me, or at least of my immediate vicinity, a satellite fixed and defined within the gravitational field of the body, of the planet, of the red giant that is my being. But if she could die, as I saw now she most certainly could, and would; if some day I was destined to lose her, even in that awful dress and gruesome perm, into the unknowable depths of eternity; if she was to be taken back, bouncing away from me like a ball that has snapped free at the end of its elastic, then how could she be said to be here, fully, palpably, knowably, now? I even saw the circumstances of her death, if I may use that verb of so nebulous a vision. In it, there was a room, in what seemed to be a large apartment, not a remarkable room, rather low-ceilinged, but wide and deep and well appointed. It was night, or late evening, and although there were many lamps about, on tables and bookshelves and even standing, set in heavy broad bases, on the floor, none of them was lit; what light there was came down from the ceiling, a thickish, worn yet unforgiving light that threw no shadows. The atmosphere was heavy, airless, lifeless, though not in any way threatening or distressed. Someone was reclining in a deep armchair, a person whom I could not see, but who I am certain was not Lydia, and someone else was walking past, a woman, a woman I did not know, nondescript and plainly dressed; she had stopped, and turned to ask a question, and waited now, but no answer came, and it was understood that none would come, that there was no answer, and somehow that was death, Lydia’s death, even though Lydia was not there, not there at all. Understand, this was not a dream, or at least I was not asleep. I sat with the book still open in my hands, my eyes still fixed on the page, and went back over it all, carefully, the room, and the tired light, and the woman, and the unseen figure in the chair, and, before that, Lydia herself, still suspended in space, ridiculously coiffed, with her hands held up, but it had all gone inert now, inert and flat, without movement, like a series of badly proportioned photographs, taken by someone else, in places where I had never been. Do not ask me where it came from, this image, illusion, hallucination, call it what you will; I only know what I experienced, and what, for no good reason, it signified.

I have just heard, from down in the house, a sound that for a second I did not recognise. Laughter. They are laughing together, my wife and Quirke. When is it exactly that I last saw my phantoms? Not today, as I have noted, but did I see them yesterday, or even the day before? Perhaps they really have gone for good. Yet somehow I do not think so. The traces of them that persist are all impatience, resentment, envy, even. What there is of them is so little, so faint and insubstantial, that what they leave behind them, their affects, seems more than they are, were, themselves.

An accusation Lydia flung at me last night is that I have always had a deplorable weakness for strays. This was in connection with the Quirkes, obviously, yet I am not clear why she thinks it such a deplorable flaw. After all, I enquired of her, in my most reasoning tone, is not hospitableness a virtue urged on us even by the unaccommodating God of the desert tribes? She laughed at this, one of her large, would-be pitying laughs. “Hospitable?” she cried, throwing back her head. “Hos pit able?—You?” What she believes is that I take to strays not out of any charitable urge, but in the spirit of the anthropologist, or, worse, the vivisectionist. “You want to study them,” she said, “take them apart, like a watch, to see how they work.” Her eyes had a malignant gleam, and there was a speck of white spit at one corner of her mouth, and a flake of ash on her sleeve. We were in my bedroom by now, with no lamp lit and the last grainy glow of twilight from the window making the air seem a box full of agitated, wanly illumined dust. The boy and the watch: how often have I heard that tired formulation flung at me, by a succession of disenchanted lovers, each one imagining she has new-minted it. Yet I did once do it, in fact, took a watch apart, when I was a boy. After my father’s death, it was. He had given it to me, brought it home one birthday in a box, with a bow that the girl in the shop had tied for him. A cheap model, Omega, I think the brand was. It boasted seven rubies in the mechanism; I could not find them, search as I would, with my little screwdriver.