John Banville: Eclipse

“I’ve seen you,” she said, “hanging about on the quays.” She was always disconcertingly direct.

But that Levantine tinge to her looks, the hothouse pallor and stark black brows and faintly shadowed upper lip, remained a powerful attraction. The Hotel Halcyon took on for me the air of an oasis; before I entered there I imagined behind that revolving door a secret world of greenery and plashing water and sultry murmurings; I could almost taste the sherbet, smell the sandalwood. Lydia had a magnificence about her that was all the more enticing for her seeming unawareness of it. I admired her fullness, the sense she gave of filling whatever she wore, no matter how ample or flowing. Even her name bespoke for me a physical opulence. She was my big sleek slightly helpless princess. I loved to watch her as she walked to meet me, with that heavy-hipped slouch and that distracted, always vaguely dissatisfied smile. I basked in her; she seemed the very source and origin of the word uxorious; I decided at once, without having to think about it, that I would marry her.

I should say in fact that my tender-eyed wife’s real, or given, name is Leah; in the hubbub of the crush bar that night when I was introduced to her I misheard it as Lydia, and when I repeated it later she liked it, and we kept it between us as a love-name, and eventually it became established, even among the more easygoing members of her family. It occurs to me to wonder now if this surrender and substitution of names worked a deeper change in her than one of mere nomenclature. She had relinquished a part of herself, so surely she took something on, as well. From Leah to Lydia is no small journey. When I was starting out in the theatre I toyed with the possibility of taking a stage name, but there was already so little of me that was real, I felt I could not afford to sacrifice the imperial label my mother—I am sure my father had no say in the matter—pinned on me so that I might be at least a noise in the world, though at once everyone, including my mother, went to work shortening my name to Alex. In my first parts I billed myself as Alexander, but it did not stick. I wonder what it takes to be proof against abbreviation.

I looked up the name Leah in a dictionary, which told me that in Hebrew it means cow. Dear me. No wonder she was willing to relinquish it.

Over all my recollections of that period of my life there lingers a faint warm bloom of embarrassment. I was not entirely what I pretended to be. It is an actor’s failing. I did not tell lies about myself, exactly, but I did permit certain prominences to show through the deliberate fuzziness of my origins that were, frankly, larger than life. The fact is, I would happily have exchanged everything I had made myself into for a modicum of inherited grace, something not of my own invention, and which I had done nothing to deserve—class, breeding, money, even a run-down riverside hotel and a drop of the blood of Abraham in my veins. I was an unknown, as we say of fledgelings in our trade: in my case, truly an unknown, even to myself.

I think I took to the stage to give myself a cast of characters to inhabit who would be bigger, grander, of more weight and moment than I could ever hope to be. I studied—oh, how I studied for the part, I mean the role of being others, while at the same time striving to achieve my authentic self. I devoted hours to my exercises, far beyond the demands of even the most demanding among my coaches. The stage is a great academy; I mastered all manner of useless accomplishments: I can dance, I can fence, I can, should circumstance demand it, swing down from the rafters on a rope with a cutlass in my teeth. When I was younger I used to do a frightening fall, straight over, crash! like a pole-axed ox. For a year I took elocution lessons, at five bob a time, from a genteel old thing in black velvet and musty lace—“By a negg, Mr. Cleave, do you perhaps mean an egg? ”—who at intervals in our weekly half-hours together would excuse herself and turn aside demurely to steal a swig from a naggin-bottle she kept hidden in her reticule. I did a course in ballet, stuck at it throughout a whole winter, sweating away doggedly at the barre, stared at by lumpen schoolgirls and doe-eyed ephebes of doubtful intent. I devoured improving texts. I read Stanislavski, and Bradley on tragedy and Kleist on the puppet theatre, and even double-barrelled old buffers like Granville-Barker and Beerbohm Tree on the art of acting. I sought out the most obscure treatises. I still have somewhere on my shelves Perrucci’s Dell’arte rappresentativa, premeditata ed all’improvviso —I used to roll that title around my tongue like a line from Petrarch—on seventeenth-century Venetian comedy, which I would carry about with studied aplomb, and some pages of which I even read, laboriously, with the aid of a primer. I was after nothing less than a total transformation, a making-over of all I was into a miraculous, bright new being. But it was impossible. What I desired only a god could manage—a god, or a marionette. I learned to act, that was all, which really means I learned to act convincingly the part of an actor seeming not to act. It brought me no nearer to that exalted metamorphosis I had so hoped to achieve. The self-made man has no solid ground to stand on. He who pulls himself up by his bootstraps is in a permanent state of somersault, and in his ear always is the world’s laughter as, look! there he goes again, arse over tip. I had come from nowhere, and now at last, through Lydia, I had arrived at the centre of what seemed to be somewhere. I was compelled to invent, of course, to elaborate on myself, for how could I expect to be accepted for what I merely was in the exotic new accommodation she was offering me?

We were married in a register office, a scandalous thing, in those days; it made me feel quite the iconoclast. My mother stayed away, not so much out of disapproval of the miscegenous match I was making—though disapprove she assuredly did—as from a fear of what to her was the dauntingly exotic world I was entering. The wedding breakfast was held at the Halcyon. It was a hot day and the stink from the river gave to the celebrations a bilious cast of the bazaar. Lydia’s many black-haired, big-bottomed brothers, hearty and curiously childlike young men, clapped me on the back and made harmlessly lewd jokes. They kept walking away from me; that is how I remember them that day, walking away from me, all with the family’s heavy-hipped gait that in them was a waddle, laughing back over their shoulders with a sort of amiable scepticism. My brand-new father-in-law, a watchful widower with the incongruously noble brow of a philosopher king, patrolled the occasion, wearing more the aspect of the hotel’s detective than its proprietor. He had not liked the look of me from the start.

Have I described the Halcyon? I was fond of that old place. It is gone now, of course. The sons got rid of it when their father died, and then there was a fire, and the building was razed and the site sold on. It seems extraordinary, that something so solid could be so thoroughly erased. The interior as I remember it was generally brown, not the brown of mellowed wood but of old varnish, many-layered and slightly gummy to the touch, like toffee. A flabby smell of overcooked food stood in the corridors night and day. The bathrooms had enormous throne-like lavatories with wooden seats, and baths that seemed made for rendering murdered brides in; when the taps were turned on a tremendous knocking would run back along the pipes and make the very walls tremble all the way up to the attics. It was in a vacant room up there under the roof, one stifling Sabbath afternoon in summer, on a high broad bed troublingly reminiscent of an altar, that Lydia and I first made illicit love. It was like clasping in my arms a big marvellous flustered bird that cooed and cawed and thrashed wild wings and shuddered at the end and sank down beneath me helplessly with faint woeful-sounding cries.