John Banville - Eclipse

The next act was a juggler; it took me a moment to recognise Lothario, got up in a loose red silk shirt open on a perfectly hairless chest. He kept dropping an Indian club and picking it up with forced and scowling insouciance. After him came a magician, even clumsier than he, wearing a crumpled evening suit too long in the leg, and a celluloid dicky that had a habit of snapping up like a roller-blind when he was about to complete a trick. He too was familiar, and sure enough, when I looked to the keyboard it was unattended. The magic feats he performed were old and obvious. When they went wrong and the audience guffawed he would smile shyly, showing the tip of his tongue, and smooth a small plump hand across the oiled hair plastered to his pate. Presently he summoned his assistant—the trumpeter, of course, quick-changed now into a crimson corset affair and fishnet tights and wearing a lustrous black wig that seemed made of plastic—and proceeded laboriously to saw her in half. After that he shuffled off, to derisory applause, while the trumpeter remained behind and did a perfunctory sword-swallowing act. Striking a heroic stance, stout legs braced and back arched, she lowered the blade deftly and daintily down her throat as if it were a long, gleaming silver fish, winning a storm of wolf-whistles from the rear of the tent.

Now Goodfellow came on to the stage yet again, hatless this time, and wearing a spangled waistcoat. I studied him with anxious scrutiny, wondering what it was about him that alarmed me so strangely. His face was stark and waxy white, as if there were no skin at all, just the skull set with a moving mouth and those two darting eyes. He swaggered back and forth before us, chanting in a high, singsong voice a patter he had obviously delivered so often that the words had taken on a rhythm of their own, independent of any sense. He was calling for a volunteer, some stout soul from amongst us brave enough, he said, smirking, to enter into a contest of wills with him. The crowd was quieter now. He cast his dark glance over us with contemptuous enjoyment. Lily sat with a fist clenched in her lap and her legs coiled, one ankle hooked behind the other, her face lifted to the stage in an attitude of awed solemnity, like that of one of the women at the foot of the cross. I could feel the tiny tremors of excitement running through her. Then all at once she was out of her seat and racing forward, fleet as a maenad, and with one skip leapt on to the stage and stopped, and stood, teetering a little, her mouth open in a silent exclamation of surprise and sudden misgiving.

At first, Goodfellow did not look at her at all, but pretended to be unaware of her presence; then, slowly, still keeping his eye on us, he began to circle around her, in a strange, high-stepping, stealthy prowl, approaching a little nearer to her at each pass, until he was close enough to lay a hand lightly on her shoulder. Still he continued to circle about her, gently turning her with him, so that she became the revolving axis around which he moved. Her expression was growing ever more uncertain, and a worried smile kept flickering on and off her face like the light of a faltering bulb.

Her gaze was fixed on Goodfellow’s face, though still he had not looked directly at her. Now he began to speak, in the same singsong manner as when a moment ago he had issued his challenge to us, but gently, tenderly, almost, in caressing soft insinuating tones. His was a strange voice, mellifluous yet not pleasant at all, wheedling, suggestive, the voice of a pander. More and more slowly he paced, speaking all the while, and slowly she turned with him, and at last they came to a stop, and something moved over the audience, a wave of something, moved, and was still. In the silence Goodfellow surveyed us with that tight-lipped, foxy smile of his that never reached his eyes. Lily’s look had gone entirely blank, and her arms hung at her sides as if there were no bones at all inside them. At long last Goodfellow looked at her. Carefully, as if she were some delicate figure he had just finished fashioning, he lifted his hand from her shoulder and passed it smoothly back and forth in front of her eyes. She did not blink, or stir in any way. Again the audience made that sighing, wave-like movement. Goodfellow turned his head and looked at us with a piercing, narrowed stare. How thin that smiling mouth, how red, a livid cicatrice. He took Lily’s hand in his and led her unresisting to the edge of the stage.

“Well?” he said, turning to us in the audience, his voice so soft as to be hardly heard. “What shall we have her do?”

One afternoon, long ago, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in my mother’s room. I was on one of my solitary and aimless explorations about the house. The door to the bedroom stood ajar, and as I passed by a movement flashed in the corner of my eye, a glossy start and flinch, so it seemed, knife-coloured, as of an assassin in there surprised at his surreptitious work. I stopped, my heart thudding, and took a wary step backward, and my reflection stepped with me again into the tilted mirror on the dressing table, and I saw myself as someone else, a stranger lurking there, a figure of momentous and inscrutable intent, and an almost pleasurable shiver of horror swarmed briefly across my shoulder blades. I had that same feeling as I rose from my seat now and went forward, light on my feet as Mercury himself, and stepped nimbly on to the stage and stopped, head lifted and my arms swinging a little, in the stance of an athlete at the end of some graceful and strenuous display of skill. Odd, to be treading the boards again. There is only one stage; wherever the venue, it is always the same. I think of it as a trampoline, it has that spring, that queasy-making bounce; at times it sways and sags, at others it is tight as a drum-skin, and as thin, with only an endless emptiness underneath. There is no fear like the fear one knows up there. I do not mean the anxiety of fluffed lines or a wig coming unstuck; such mishaps mean less to us than an audience imagines. No, what I speak of is a terror of the self, of letting the self go so far free that one night it might break away, detach entirely and become another, leaving behind it only a talking shell, an empty costume standing there aghast, topped by an eyeless mask.

I took Lily’s hand, the one that Goodfellow was not holding, and pressed it in my own.

“My name is Alexander Cleave,” I said, in a loud, firm voice, “and this is my daughter.”

Before I rose I had not known what I would do or say, and indeed, I still did not rightly know what I was saying, what doing, but at the touch of Lily’s chill, soft, damp hand on mine I experienced a moment of inexplicable and ecstatic sorrow such that I faltered and almost fell out of my standing; it was as if a drop of the most refined, the purest acid had been let fall into an open chamber of my heart. Goodfellow seemed not at all surprised by my sudden appearance there before him. He did not start, or stir at all, but stood in an almost pensive pose, head held a little to one side and eyes downcast, his red mouth pursed in that smile of covert knowing, like the footman who has recognised the king in disguise and keeps the secret to himself, not out of loyalty, but other things.

Did he know me? I do not like to think he did. Lily sighed; she had the intent, turned-in expression of a sleepwalker. I spoke her name and a little languid tremor went through her, and she gave a shivery sigh, and was still again. Goodfellow shook his head once, and clicked his tongue, as if in mild admonition. He had yet to meet my eye. I caught his smell, a thin, rancid, secretive stink. Behind him, off at the entrance to the tent, the canvas flap hung open a little way, framing a tall, thorn-shaped glimpse of the sunlit square outside. In here, the khaki-coloured air was dense, and had a bruised tinge to it. The audience sat in puzzlement, waiting. Throats were cleared, and there was an uneasy laugh or two, and someone said something, asking a question, it seemed, and someone gave what seemed a muffled answer. Lily had begun to sway a little, back and forth, her arms outstretched to Goodfellow and me as we held her between us. Now he looked at me. Yes, yes, I think he knew me, I think he knew who I was, am. I saw myself reflected in his eyes. Then with the faintest of shrugs he let go his hold on Lily’s hand. She swayed again, sideways this time, and I put my arm around her shoulders, fearing she might drop. As I led her down from the stage someone booed at the back, and laughed, and the trumpeter leaned out and blew a brassy note at us, but halfheartedly. Heads turned to watch us as we went past. Outside the tent, Lily drew back, blinking in the harsh sunlight. I smelled the tethered horses, and remembered the boy in the square that day, on his pony, in the rain. Lily, with a hand to her face, was quietly weeping. There there, I said; there there.