John Banville - Eclipse

“Where were you living, when she died,” I said, “your mother?” She did not answer, pretending not to have heard.

I have discovered Quirke’s lair, did I say that? I stumbled on it in one of my prowls about the house the other day. He picked a modest room, I will say that for him. It is hardly a room at all, up near the attics; my mother would not have offered it to even the most indigent of our lodgers, and used it for storing lumber, and, after his death, my father’s old suits and shoes that her sense of thrift would not let her throw away. It is low-ceilinged, and slightly wedge-shaped, with a single, crooked window at the narrower end, long ago painted shut, as the cheesy air attested. There is a camp bed with a thin horsehair mattress, and a blanket but no sheets. He uses a chamber pot, I noticed, the handle of it protruded from under the bed like an ear eagerly cocked. He is not the most fastidious of persons. There was dust on everything, and some worrying smears on the walls, and used plates, and a tea mug that does not seem to have been washed for a very long time, and three far from clean shirts hanging in an overlapping row on the wardrobe door, like a trio of close-harmony singers. I trust he will not invite Lydia up here, no matter how chummy they may become, for she would surely smack him smartly on the wrist and have him down on his knees again with the scrubbing brush and pail. Despite the squalor and the sadness of the place—those shirts, that mug, a pair of cracked shoes, one lying on its side, both with their tongues hanging out, that looked as if they had dropped off a corpse as it was being dragged out—I experienced a childish tingle of excitement. I have always been an enthusiastic snooper; diaries, letters, handbags, nothing is safe from me—why, sometimes, though I should not admit it, sometimes I will even take a peek into other people’s laundry baskets, or used to, in the days when Lydia and I had friends, and would go out to their houses, for parties, and dinner, and summer lunches… Unimaginable, now. In Quirke’s room, though, the tingly sensation I had was more than merely the pleasure of delving into someone else’s belongings. I am thinking of the hare’s nest I found one day at the seaside when I was a child, a neat deep whorl hollowed out of the coarse grass on the back of a dune, containing three tiny, throbbing leverets huddled so close together they looked like a single animal with three heads. I picked them up and put them inside my jersey and carried them back to the two-roomed wooden chalet where my mother and I were enduring a holiday together. When I showed them to her she gave a small cry of dismay and took a hasty step backward; she was not long a widow, and her nerves were bad. She said the creatures were probably diseased, or had lice, and would I please take the dirty things away this instant. I plodded out to the dunes again, where now a fine rain was slanting in from the sea, but of course I could not find the nest, and in the end I lodged the poor things, unpleasantly slippery now in their wet fur and seeming even tinier than before, in a sandy hollow under a stone, and when I returned the next day they were gone. But I have not forgotten them, their helplessness, the hot soft feel of them against my heart, the faltering way they kept moving their blind heads from side to side and up and down, like those toy dogs that people put in the back windows of motor cars. Quirke, for all his bulk and his sardonic humour, has something of the same motherless lost incompetency about him. I searched his things, of course, but the dearth of secrets, indeed, the absence of anything much of interest, was more dispiriting than would have been the most shaming discovery. As I turned over the bits and pieces of his gimcrack life a bleak awfulness came down on me, and despite myself I felt ashamed, though whether for my prurience or the paltriness of his life I could not rightly tell. In a leather wallet polished with age and shaped to the curve of a buttock I found a photograph, similarly curved, and finely craquelured, in faded shades of pearl and grey. The picture was of a thin, youngish woman with an unfortunate perm, standing in a summer garden smiling bravely into the lens. I took it to the window and scanned it hungrily, cursing the lack of a magnifying glass. The woman was holding herself in an awkward pose before the camera’s bulging eye. She had a hand lifted to her forehead against the glare of the sun, so that most of the upper part of her face was in shadow. Minutely I examined what features I could make out—delicate pointed chin, somewhat vapid mouth, her smile disclosing the hint of a discoloured front tooth, that lifted arm, nicely curved but pathetically skinny, the little, weak, defensive hand—searching for the slightest suggestion of familiarity, the faintest echo. In the bottom left corner a part of the photographer’s shadow was to be seen, a sloping shoulder and one side of a big round head, Quirke’s, most likely. And the garden? At the woman’s back there was a tree of some sort, birch, perhaps, in full leaf, and under her a bit of lumpy lawn. Could be anywhere. Discouraged, I pocketed the photo, and with a last gloomy look around I went out softly and shut the door behind me. On the stairs I stopped, struck by a flaw in the stillness, as if someone, fled now, had been listening at the door, or spying on me through the keyhole. Lily, probably; it did not matter.

What I want to know now is, how long exactly have the Quirkes been living here, and, more important, how many of them were there here to start with? Lily clings to a stubborn vagueness on the matter. Yet she claims to remember clearly the circumstances, even if she will not disclose the precise location, of her mother’s death—too clearly, I surmise, for it happened many years ago, and I do not see Lily as an infant prodigy, beadily recording the events of family history over the rim of her cradle. Her mother woke one night with a pain, she says. The doctor was sent for, but there was a mix-up and he went to the wrong house, and did not realise the mistake because by chance in the other house there was also a mother in distress, though she was giving birth, and did so, successfully, while Lily’s poor Mam was engaged in an opposite exercise, which in time she accomplished, with much anguish. Her Auntie Dora came, Lily says, from the far end of town, wearing a raincoat over her nightdress, but even Auntie Dora, evidently a stalwart among incompetent Quirkes, even she could do nothing to save her sister. She had shouted at Quirke, and said it was all his fault, and said if he was any example of a husband she was glad she had never married, and Quirke had made to hit her and she put up her fists to him, and there might have been a real fight, for Quirke was beside himself and Auntie Dora was ready for him, except that someone else who was there, a neighbour or a family friend, Lily could not recall who it was, had stepped between the opponents and said they should be ashamed of themselves, with Kitty not yet cold. All this I heard, sitting on that bench, in the sun, while Lily picked at that thread in her dress and squinted off. It must have been quite a night, the night that Kitty died. I had the purloined photograph in my pocket. I showed it to Lily, and she looked at it blankly. I asked if it was not her mother. She peered harder and was silent for a long moment. “I don’t think so,” she said, tentatively. “I don’t think it’s her.” “Then who is it?” I asked, in some chagrin. I told her where I had got the picture, thinking she might protest my invasion of her father’s privacy, but she only snickered.

“Oh, it’s some girl, then,” she said. “Da always had girls.” Quirke as Casanova; it does not seem likely, somehow. “And did you have a brother,” I said, “or a sister, that died?” At that she took on a furtive, rabbity look, and after hesitating for a moment gave a quick little nod, darting her head forward as if to pluck a morsel of something from my hand.