John Banville - Shroud

Cass Cleave stepped out from the dimness of the restaurant, her head down, falteringly. She stopped a moment and looked about, holding up a shielding hand and squinnying her eyes against the glare, as if this – the empty tables, the trellis of vine, the three of us looking at her – as if this were not at all where she had expected to find herself. She came forward, negotiating her way between the chairs – they might have been so many crouching animals – and stopped beside me, bracing the steepled fingers of one hand on the table and leaning forward at a teetering angle. She began to speak but her voice would not work and she laughed instead, inanely, snuffling. There was a bad scrape on her elbow beaded with blood and her dress was stained. I reached out and seized the hand she was not leaning on and tried to use it as a lever to lift myself up but could not, and fell back on the chair, and closed my eyes.

The last gift I ever gave to Magda, one of the very few things I bought for her – like most displaced persons I have a distrust of material possessions – was an ornate and absurdly expensive glass vase. I had, uncharacteristically, I suppose, remembered that this year marked the fortieth anniversary of our life together, and although her mind by now was almost gone I thought that I should mark the occasion. In the shop, a narrow box of plate-glass and angled steel on Euclid – am I alone in experiencing the peculiar and inexplicable soreness of heart that attends the purchase of a gift? – the vase had looked a fine and fetching thing, tall and slender, the pale-green glass shot through with fat coils of a clouded, sugar-coloured whiteness. However, when it had been installed in the living room for a week or two the green of the glass took on a snotlike hue, while the swirls of frozen white syrup made me feel slightly nauseous if I kept them in sight for long enough, and I came to regard it as somehow malignant, even menacing. I wanted to get rid of it, but I could see that Magda had become attached to it in all its horrid viridescence, which must, for her, have been a radiance piercing enough to strike even through the mists of her hopelessly distracted comprehension. She would sit and gaze at it for long hours, in placid quietude, and I did not have the heart to take it outside the back door and dash it to smithereens on the ground, as I was convinced I ought to do. The vase in its turn must have found me equally repulsive, or else must have felt my animosity to be unbearable, and decided to put us both out of our distress. Here is what happened; really, the oddest thing. On the day after Magda's death I was reclining on the sofa in the dimness of the lounge, awash in my new state of widowhood – the word still sounds wrong, applied to a man – with a bag of ice on my brow and a steadily diminishing bottle on the floor beside me, when a loud report, sharp and incontrovertible as a gunshot, brought me rearing up in fright, like the man-monster arching on his table when the big blue spark leaps between the conducting rods. I scrambled upright and swayed at a drunken list into the living room to investigate, thinking, in my befuddled state, of Officer Blank – remember him? – and that blunt blue pistol of his, stuffed full with live rounds. It took much fruitless peering and searching before at last I discovered what had occurred. The vase had shattered, not into fragments in the way that glass should, but into two almost equal halves, vertically, and remarkably cleanly, as if it had been sliced down the middle by an immensely swift diamond blade or a powerful, unearthly ultra-ray. As I may already have remarked, I am not of a superstitious nature – or was not, since this was before Magda's ghost had begun haunting me – and I knew that it was simply that there must have been a fault in the glass, a crack so fine as to be invisible, that had succumbed at last to an infinitesimal shift in air temperature or change of atmospheric pressure. I thought, with a pang almost of remorse, of the once-hated thing standing there, day after day, suffering my baleful glances and the hours of Magda's fond but perhaps no less assailing gaze, locked motionless in agonised struggle with the irresistible forces of the world working on it, straining to hold itself together for another hour, another minute, another few seconds, the last few, of wholeness and poise. I am thinking, of course, of Cass Cleave. For that is how it was with her, too, she was another tall, tense, fissile vessel waiting to be cloven in two.

In the lavatory she had suffered one of her seizures. She did not remember falling, only the familiar, faint smell, dry and sweet, and the voices in her head suddenly starting all together to say something. The stall was cramped and dirty and when she collapsed she grazed her arm on something, aldiough she did not feel the pain of it. Then the Ko vacs woman was tapping at the door and saying her name, and she got herself up somehow and wadded a handful of tissue and scrubbed at the hem of her dress where it was stained from the filth on the floor. It was one of her worst fears that one day she would pass out in some foul place like this and not come round until someone had found her, wedged between the stool and the door with her pants around her knees. When she came out into the sun she felt fluttery and light, and the air seemed to have turned into another medium, a kind of bright, viscous fluid that both sustained and hindered her. It was always like this after an attack, the sense of everything around her being different, as though she had stepped through a looking-glass into the other, gleaming world that it contained. When Vander wrenched himself around in his chair and grabbed her hand she felt an infirm tremor run down his arm, it might have been the last of his life draining out of him, and when his head fell forward on to the table with a frightening bang she thought that he was surely dead. Her father's mother had died in his arms after he had fallen asleep holding her and even that, his mother dying, had not woken him. To be gone like that, without a sound, like slipping out of a room and turning and quietly closing the door; in her mind she saw a hand, it was hers, slowly relinquish the polished knob and her miniature, curved reflection on it shrink to a dot of darkness and disappear. To be gone.

At Vander's collapse Kristina Kovacs and Franco Bartoli sprang up at once and began to bustle about like mechanical figures, as if his fall had somehow switched on a motor and set their parts moving. Kristina Kovacs touched Bartoli on the wrist and he turned aside quickly to go, buttoning his jacket. She said nothing to him, and he nodded rapid acknowledgement of what she had not said. He muttered something in Italian: was it a prayer, perhaps, or was he cursing his bad luck in being here? He glanced at Vander where he lay slumped forward with his head on the table and his arms hanging down past his knees, and nodded again and said that, si, certo, he would go and fetch the car. And he went away, hurrying, with short, purposeful steps, a hand pressed flat against the side pocket of his jacket. Vander produced, as if in scornful comment, a loud, rolling belch that ended in a groan. Kristina Kovacs moved to his side, and, as Cass Cleave looked on, put her hands on his shoulders and with an effort drew him upright on his chair. He groaned again, more loudly, lolling. Kristina Kovacs spoke softly, as to a child, in a language Cass Cleave did not recognise, and then with a strange, sorrowing gesture she extended her arm all the way around his head in a sort of wrestler's hold, but tenderly, and drew him to her, until his forehead was resting against her midriff. His eyes were shut and his mouth was open, and there was a trickle of drool on his chin. Cass Cleave was sharply aware that there was something she wanted to say, or ask, but she could not think what it was, or whom she might address, and anyway here came Franco Bartoli in his little bright-red car, pulling up at the kerb.