John Banville: Eclipse

We cleaned up as best we could, gathered the rubbish, opened windows, flung bucketfuls of water down the lavatory pan. I had not dared to venture upstairs yet.

“I heard from Cass,” Lydia said without looking at me, wringing the neck of a bulging plastic bag.

I felt the usual constriction in my chest. Cass is my daughter. She has been living abroad.

“Oh, yes?” I said, cautiously.

“She says she will be coming home.”

“The harpies gather, eh?” I had intended it lightly, but Lydia’s brow grew red. “ Harpazein,” I said hastily, “to seize. Greek, that is.” Playing the fussy old professor, remote but kindly; when in difficulty, act.

“Of course, she’ll take your side,” she said.

I followed her into the parlour. Large dark masses of furniture stood sullenly at attention in the dimness of the gaunt room like almost living things. Lydia walked to the window, lighting a cigarette. On her delicate pale long feet she wore a pair of crimson velvet slippers suggestive of Araby. I marvel to think there was a time when I would have fallen on my face before her in the sand and covered those Arabian feet with kisses, caresses, adoring helpless tears.

“I didn’t know that there were sides,” I said, too innocently.

She gave a full cold laugh.

“Oh, no,” she said, “you know nothing.” She turned, her head swathed in a swirl of ash-blue cigarette smoke, the garden’s menacing greenery crowding in the window behind her, and, between the green, a patch of the sky’s delicate summer azure. In this light the shock of silver in her hair was stark, undulate, ashine. Once in one of our fights she called me a black-hearted bastard and I experienced a warm little thrill, as at a pretty piece of flattery—that is the kind of black-hearted bastard that I am. Now she gazed at me for a moment in silence, slowly shaking her head. “No,” she said again, with a bitter, weary sigh, “you know nothing.”

The moment came, which I had been both impatient for and dreading, when there was nothing left for her to do but leave. We loitered on the pavement outside the front door in the milky light of late afternoon, together yet already apart. The day was without human sound, as if everyone else in the world had gone away (how can I stay here?). Then a motor car came fizzing across the square and passed us by, the driver glaring at us briefly, in angry surprise, so it seemed. The silence returned. I lifted a hand and touched the air by Lydia’s shoulder.

“Yes, all right,” she said, “I’ll go.”

Her eyes turned glossy and she ducked into the car and slammed the door. The tyres skidded as she drove away. The last I saw of her she was leaning forward over the wheel with a knuckle stuck into an eye. I turned back to the house. Cass, I was thinking. Cass, now.

Things to do, things to do. Store the kitchen supplies, set out my books, my framed photographs, my lucky rabbit’s paw. Too soon it was all done. There was no avoiding upstairs any longer. Grimly I mounted the steps as if I were climbing into the past itself, the years pressing down on me, like a heavier atmosphere. Here is the room looking out on the square that used to be mine. Alex’s room. Dust, and a mildew smell, and droppings on an inside sill where birds had got in through a broken windowpane. Strange, how places, once so intimate, can go neutral under the dust-fall of time. First there is the soft detonation of recognition, and for a moment the object throbs in the sudden awareness of being unique—that chair, that awful picture—then all composes itself into the drear familiar, the parts of a world. Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averting itself from my unwelcome return. I lingered a moment, feeling nothing except a heavy hollowness, as if I had been holding my breath—as perhaps I had—then I turned and went down a flight, to the first floor, and entered the big back bedroom there. It was light still. I stood at the tall window, where that other day I had seen my not-wife not-standing, and looked out at what she had not-seen: the garden straggling off into nondescript fields, then a huddle of trees, and beyond that, where the world tilted, an upland meadow with motionless miniature cattle, and in the farthest distance a fringe of mountains, matt blue and flat against the sky where the sun was causing a livid commotion behind a heaping of clouds. Having used up the outside, I turned to the in: high ceiling, the sagging bed with brass knobs, a night table with wormholes, a solitary, resentful-looking bentwood chair. The floral-patterned linoleum—three shades of dried blood—had a worn patch alongside the bed, where my mother used to pace, unsubduably, night after long night, trying to die. I felt nothing. Was I here at all? I seemed to be fading in face of these signs, the hollow in the mattress, the wear in the lino; a watcher outside the window would hardly see me now, a shadow only.

There were traces here too of an intruder; someone had been sleeping in my mother’s bed. Outrage flared briefly, then faded; why should not some Goldilocks lay down her weary head where my poor mother would never again lay hers?

I loved to prowl the house like this when I was young. Afternoons were my favourite time, there was a special quality to afternoons indoors, a wistfulness, a sense of dreamy distance, of boundless air all around, that was at once tranquil and unsettling. There were hidden portents everywhere. Something would catch my attention, anything, a cobweb, a damp patch on a wall, a scrap of old newspaper lining a drawer, a discarded paperback, and I would stop and stand gazing at it for a long time, motionless, lost, unthinking. My mother kept lodgers, clerks and secretaries, schoolteachers, travelling salesmen. They fascinated me, their furtive and somehow anguished, rented lives. Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves. When one of them moved out I would slip into the vacated room and breathe its hushed, attentive air, turning things over, poking into corners, searching through drawers and mysteriously airless cupboards, diligent as a sleuth hunting for clues. And what incriminating leavings I came up with—a set of horribly grinning false teeth, a pair of underpants caked and brittle with blood, a baffling contraption like the bellows of a bagpipes made of red rubber and bristling with tubes and nozzles, and, best of all, pushed to the back of a wardrobe’s highest shelf, a sealed jar of yellowish liquid in which a preserved frog was suspended, its slash of mouth blackly open, its translucent toes splayed and touching delicately the clouded glass walls of its tomb…

Anaglypta! That was the name of that old-fashioned wallpaper stuff, stiff with layers of yellowed white paint, with which every other wall in the house is covered to the height of the dado. I wonder if it is manufactured any more. Anaglypta. All afternoon I had been searching for the word and now I had found it. Why glyp not glyph? This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.

Eight o’clock. The curtain would be going up and I not there. Another absence. I would be missed. When an actor walks out of a performance no understudy can entirely fill his place. He leaves the shadow of something behind him, an aspect of the character that only he could have conjured, his singular creation, independent of mere lines. The rest of the cast feel it, the audience feels it too. The stand-in is always a stand-in: for him there is always another, prior presence, standing in him. Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?