John Banville: Eclipse

I heard a noise from downstairs and a shock of fright passed through me, making my shoulder blades quiver and my head feel momentarily hot. I have always been a timid soul, for all the blackness of my heart. I went out creakingly on to the landing and stood amid the standing shadows and listened, clutching the banister rail, registering the clammy texture of old varnish and the oddly unresistant hardness of the wood. The noise came faintly again up through the stairwell, an intermittent, brittle scratching. I recalled the strange animal on the road that night. Then a surge of indignation and impatience made me frown and shake my head. “Oh, this is all completely… !” I began to say, and stopped; the silence took my words and tittered over them. Down there, someone uttered a low, guttural oath, and I went still again. I waited— scratch scratch —then stepped backwards cautiously into the bedroom doorway, squared my shoulders, took a breath, and marched out on to the landing once more, but differently this time—for whose benefit did I think I was putting on this dumb show?—slamming the door behind me, all bluff business now, a man at home in his world. “Hello?” I called out grandly, actorily, though my voice had a crack in it. “Hello, who is there?” This brought a startled silence, with a suggestion of laughter. Then the voice again, calling upwards:

“Ah, it’s only me.”

Quirke.

He was in the parlour, on his hunkers in front of the grate, with a blackened bit of stick in his hand. He had been poking among the remains of the charred books. He turned up his head, an amiable eyebrow cocked, and watched me as I entered.

“Some tinker must have got in here,” he said without rancour. “Or was it you was burning the books?” This amused him. He shook his head and made a clicking noise in his cheek. “You can’t leave a thing untended.”

Stalled at the foot of the stairs I nodded, for want of better. Quirke’s sardonical composure is both annoying and unchallengeable. He is the superannuated office boy a solicitor in the town appointed years ago at my request to look after the house. That is, I requested a caretaker: I did not bargain on it being Quirke. He tossed the stick into the fireplace and rose to his feet with surprising agility, brushing his hands. I had already noticed those unlikely hands: pale, hairless, plump in the palm, with long, tapering fingers, the hands of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden. The rest of him is shaped like a sea elephant. He is large, soft-skinned, sandy-haired, in his middle forties, with the ageless aspect of a wastrel son.

“There was someone living here, some intruder,” I said, with a heavy emphasis of reproof, wasted on him, as I could see by his unruffled look. “He left more than burned books.” I mentioned, with a qualm of disgust, the thing Lydia had found in the lavatory. Quirke was only the more amused.

“A squatter is right,” he said, and grinned.

He was quite at his ease, standing on the hearth rug—another furrow there, kin to the one beside the bed upstairs—and looking about him with an expression of arch scepticism, as if the things in the room had been arranged to deceive him and he was not deceived. His protuberant pale eyes reminded me of a virulent kind of boiled sweet much fancied when I was a boy. There was a raw patch on his chin where the morning razor had scraped too closely. From the pocket of his balding corduroy jacket he brought out a bottle in a brown-paper bag. “Warm the house,” he said, with a lopsided leer, showing the whiskey.

We sat at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen and drank while the day died. Quirke was not to be got rid of. He squirmed his big backside down on a kitchen chair and lit up a cigarette and planted his elbows on the table, regarding me the while with an air of high expectancy, his boiled eyes roaming speculatively over my face and frame like those of a rock climber searching for a handhold on a not very serious but tricky piece of cliff. He told of the history of the house before my family’s time—he had gone into it, he said, it was a hobby of his, he had the documents, the searches and affidavits and deeds, all done out in sepia copperplate, beribboned, stamped, impressed with seals. I meanwhile was recalling the first time I had found myself weeping in the cinema, soundlessly, unstoppably. It was the ache in my constricted throat that I registered first, then the salt tears that were seeping in at the corners of my mouth. It was deep winter, the middle of a sleety afternoon. I had ducked out of a matinée performance—young Sniveling my understudy’s impossible dream come true—and sloped off on my own to the pictures, feeling foolish and elated. Then when the film started there were these inexplicable tears, hiccups, stifled wails, as I sat shuddering with fists clenched in my lap, the hot drops plopping off my chin and wetting my shirt-front. I was baffled, and mortified, too, of course, afraid the afternoon’s other shadowy voyeurs around me would notice my shameful collapse, yet there was something glorious too in such abandon, such childish transgression. When the picture ended and I skulked out red-eyed into the cold and the early dark I felt emptied, invigorated, rinsed. It became a shameful habit then, twice, three times a week I would do it, in different picture-houses, the dingier the better, with still no notion of what I was weeping for, what loss I might be mourning. Somewhere inside me there must be a secret well of grief from which these springs were pouring. Sprawled there in the phantasmally peopled darkness I would sob myself dry, while some extravaganza of violence and impossible passions played itself out on the vast screen tilted above me. Then came the night when I dried onstage—cold sweat, mute helpless fish-mouths, the works—and I knew I must get away.

“So what are you up to?” Quirke said. “Down here, I mean.” Last of evening in the window, dishwater light and the overgrown grass in the garden all grey. I wanted to say, I have lived amid surfaces too long, skated too well upon them; I require the shock of the icy water now, the icy deeps. Yet wasn’t ice my trouble, that it had penetrated me, to the very marrow? A man thronged up with cold … Fire, rather; fire was what was needed…

With a start I came back to myself, from myself. Quirke was nodding: someone must have said something of moment—Lord, I wondered, was it me? Often lately I would be startled to hear people replying to things I had thought I had only spoken in my head. I wanted to jump up now and tell Quirke to leave, to leave and leave me alone, to my own devices, my own voices.

“That’s the trouble, all right,” he was saying, nodding slowly, solemnly, like that black saint on the collection box who nodded when as a little boy you put a penny in. Mnemosyne, mother of sorrows!

“What is?” I said.

“What?”

” The trouble—what is the trouble? “

“What?”

A kind of quacking. We gaped at each other helplessly.

“I’m sorry,” I said then, lifting a hand wearily to shade my eyes. “I have forgotten what we were talking about.”

But Quirke’s attention too had wandered, and he sat motion-lessly at gaze with one shoulder hunched and his virginal hands with fingers palely linked resting on the table before him. I stood up at an angle and everything in the world slid abruptly to one side and I realised I was drunk. I said that I must go to bed. Quirke looked up at me in hurt amazement. He too must be drunk, but evidently he was not ready to go home. He made no stir, and let his wounded gaze drift to the window.

“Not dark yet,” he said, “look. And still when it does get dark the nights seem like they’ll never end. This is a terrible time of the year, if you’re not a sleeper.”