John Banville: Eclipse

“My missus didn’t die,” he said, “who told you that? She ran off with a traveller.”

“A…?”

“Travelling salesman. Shoes.” He gave a mournful, angry laugh. “The bitch.”

He helped me to carry my bags and boxes of books downstairs. I told him I intended to give the house to the girl. “Not to you, mind,” I said. “To Lily.” He had stopped on the last step of the stair, and stood now, leaning forward with a heavy suitcase in each hand, his head on one side, looking at the floor. “There is only one condition,” I said, “that she doesn’t sell it. I want her to live here.” I could see him deciding, with a sort of click, to believe I was in earnest. Already the light of anticipation was dawning in his eye; I suspect he was as much looking forward to drawing up the papers as he was to getting his hands, even if at one remove, on my property. He put down the bags as if all his troubles were in them, and straightened, unable to keep himself from grinning.

Yes, I shall give her the house. I hope that she will live here. I hope she will let me visit her, la jeune châtelaine. I have all kinds of wild ideas, mad projects. We might fix up the place between us, she and I. What is it the estate agents say?—major refurbishments. Why, we might even take in lodgers again! I shall ask her if I may keep my little room. I might write something about the town, a history, a topography, learn the place names at last. Yes, yes, all kinds of plans, there is time enough, and my! how slowly it goes. When I have got back the knack of driving we shall go for a jaunt around the country in search of that circus, have Goodfellow do his dance for us again, and this time hypnotise me, perhaps, and lay all my ghosts. Or I could take her with me back to that village clinging to its rocky hillside on that cerulean sea, and climb those cobbled streets again and grab De Sica by the throat and say that I will throttle him unless he tells me all he knows. Vain thoughts, vain fancies.

I walked into the kitchen. When I looked through the window, Cass was outside. She was standing on the rise beyond what once had been the vegetable garden, by the half-grown birch tree there. She was wearing an unbelted green dress that left her arms and her long calves bare. I noticed the echo between her glimmering skin and the silver-white bark of the tree. She had the child with her, though when I say it was the child I mean it was as always only the notion of a child, hardly even an image, a wavering transparency. Seeming to see me at the window she turned and started toward the house. In her green tunic and thonged sandals she might have been striding out of Arcady to meet me. As she advanced along the overgrown garden path the air pressed the stuff of her smock-dress against her, and I thought, not for the first time, how like one of Botticelli’s girls she looked—even, like them, a little mannish. She came into the room and frowned and glanced about sharply, as if she had expected someone else to be here. One arm was lifted higher than her head, the hand open as if to catch some flung or flying thing out of the air. There was a brimming in her, an exaltation. Her eyes had a dazzlingly virescent shine. Her warm breath brushed my cheek, I swear it did. Remembered zephyr! How real she seemed, an incarnation sent ahead to greet me while the other she, the goddess of the birches, tarried outside, sheathing her arrows and unstringing her gilded bow. Cass! The glimmering brow, the aureole of russet hair, the fine-drawn nose with its saddle of apple-flecks, those grey-green eyes that are mine, the long pale pillar of neck. A pang went through me and I reached out a faltering hand to touch her, and I spoke her name, and she seemed to pause, and shiver, as if she had indeed heard me, and then at once she was gone, leaving only the glistening chord of her passing, that faded, and fell. Outside, in the garden, the bright day stood, a gold man, stilled in startlement. Die Sonne, sie scheinet all-gemein… I turned to the room again and there Lily was, leaning sideways on one leg and looking past me eagerly to the window, trying to see what I had seen, or perhaps not interested in me or my ghosts at all, perhaps just looking out into the world, the great world, waiting for her. Of Cass there was no sign, no sign at all. The living are too much for the dead. Lily was saying something. I could not hear her.

Blossom, speed thee well. The bud is in flower. Things can go wrong. My Marina, my Miranda, oh, my Perdita.