John Banville: Shroud

I passed a restless night; the bed, as so often with hotel beds, was far too small to accommodate me and my stiff leg, and I was woken repeatedly by noises from outside, car horns and revving motorcycles and young men shouting to each other from street to street. Toward dawn the clamour abated and I fell into a doze, beset by violent dreams. I woke early, sweating alcohol, my brain beating, and rose and stumbled to the window and opened wide the curtains and squinted up between the beetling buildings at the dense cerulean sky of Europe.

After breakfast, with renewed fuss and apologies, I was moved into a large suite on the more salubrious third floor. The rooms were spacious and cool, with floors of black marble, silken smooth. My returned suitcase stood at the foot of the bed, wearing a shame-faced look. I have a fondness for hotel rooms, the air they have of tight-lipped anonymity, the sense of being sealed off from the world, the almost audible echo of whisperings and indrawn breaths and women crying out in helpless rapture. Reclining in a mid-morning bath I concocted a picture of Miss Nemesis: a dried-up old virgin with blue-veined talons and spectacles on a string, and a mouth, with a fan of fine wrinkles etched into the whiskered upper lip, set in bitter dissatisfaction at the lost promise of her youth, when she had worn slacks and smoked cigarettes and written that thesis on Wordsworth's politics or Shelley's atheism that had so shocked and impressed her tutor at Girton or the bluestockings at Bryn Mawr. Surely she would be easy to deal with. First I would try charm, then threats; if all else failed I would take her to the top of the Antonelli Mole and push her off. Laughing, I began to cough, and felt my tobacco-beaten lungs wobbling in their cage like heavy, half-inflated, wet balloons, and the bath water around me swayed and almost slopped over. My cigarette case, another purloined trinket from the past, was beside me in the soap dish. I lit up, small flakes of hot ash hissing around me in the water. Nothing like a good deep chestful of cigarette smoke to quell a morning cough.

I hauled myself up in a cascade of suds and immediately jarred my elbow on the edge of a glass shelf. This new pain struck up an echo in the knee I had bruised yesterday in the taxi on the bridge. I stood a moment clutching my arm and swearing. I am a bad fit with the world, an awkward fit; I am too high, too wide, too heavy for the common scale of things. I am not being boastful, quite the contrary; I have always found my oversized self burdensome and embarrassing. Before me in the misted glass of the bathroom's floor-length mirror my reflection loomed, pallid and peering I went out to the bedroom and stood by the window looking down into the shaded defile of the street, still massaging my bruised elbow. A bus went past, cars, foreshortened people. At the corner, where an angled block of buttery sunlight leaned, a woman selling flowers looked up and seemed to see me – was it possible, at such a distance? What a sight I would have been, suspended up there behind glass, a grotesque seraph, vast, naked, ancient. I lifted a hand, the palm held flatly forward, in solemn greeting, but the flower seller made no response.

Almost before I knew what I was doing I had snatched up the telephone and asked for the Antwerp number. Waiting, I could hear myself breathing in the mouthpiece, as if I were standing behind my own shoulder. Wet still from the bath, I dripped on the marble floor, in the darkly gleaming surface of which I could see yet another, dim reflection of myself, in end-on perspective this time, like that bronzen portrait of the dead Christ by what's-his-name, first the feet and then the shins, the knees, and dangling genitals, and belly and big chest, and topping it all the aura of wild hair and the featureless face looking down.

She answered on the first ring. I hardly knew what to say; I had not thought I would reach her at once like this, I had expected delays, obstacles, evasions. Yes, she said, yes, this is she. I could not place her accent; she was not English, and yet an English-speaker. I knew from something in her voice that she had been doing nothing, nothing at all, only waiting for me to call. I pictured the scene, the meagre room in the cheap hotel, the light of a northern spring morning the colour of shined-on lead falling from a mansard window, and her, sitting on the side of the bed, head bowed and arthritic old hands folded in her lap, biding through the long hours, listening to the silence, willing it to be broken by the telephone's jangling summons. She spoke with judicious care, costively, rationing the words; was there someone with her, overhearing what she said? No, she would be alone, I was certain of that. I said that she must come to me, for I would not go to her, and there was a lengthy pause. Then she said it was a question of the fare; train travel was expensive, and it was a long way. Now it was I who allowed the silence to expand. Did she think I should pay for her to come and ruin me? Still I would not speak. Very well, she said at last, she would take the overnight express and be here in the morning, and without another word, yet not hurriedly, she hung up. I shivered; the bath water drying off had left my old skin stretched and chill. My hands were shaking too, a little, but not from the damp or the cold.

I dressed, impatiently, as always now. With the years I find these necessary morning rituals increasingly irksome. For whose benefit was I putting on this shirt, this linen suit, this tie that was too short and too broad at the end and made me look, as I could see from the mirror, as if my tongue were hanging out? The old should have a special garment, something like a monk's habit, simple and functional, and suitably presageful of the winding-sheet. I ran my fingers through the crackling strands of my unruly hair, without visible effect; I never wanted to let my hair grow wild like this, especially when it began to turn white, but I felt it would be expected of me, the famous Mijnheer de Professor from the doddery, woolly Old World. Suddenly, like a soft blow, the memory from childhood came to me of my mother wetting a fingertip and smoothing down the comma of wiry hair on the crown of my head that always a moment afterwards would spring up again. I recalled too the curiously voluptuous shiver of disgust I would experience when she was helping me into some new item of clothing, a blouse, or knee-breeches, or a crisp navy-and-white sailor suit with the pasteboard price-tag still dangling from a buttonhole. What was the cause of that inner recoil? An excess of intimacy with my mother, under the chrysanthemum-smell of whose face powder I could detect a medley of more intimate and more exciting odours? No, that is not it, I think; what made me flinch, surely, was an over-consciousness of self, the sudden, ghastly awareness of being trapped inside this armature of flesh and bone like a pupa wedged in the hardened-over mastic of its cocoon. Immediately, again, came the demand: What self? What sticky imago did I imagine was within me, do I imagine is within me, even still, aching to burst forth and spread its gorgeous, eyed wings?

The lift was an old-fashioned, rackety affair, the sight of which twanged another vaguely nostalgic string at the far back of my memory. I could hear it coming down from above, stopping at every floor and flinging open its gate with a noise of mashing metals, as if successive armfuls of wire clothes-hangers were being crushed between giant steel claws. When it reached me, though, there was no one in it. The lobby too was empty, the reception desk unattended. Through a partly open door behind the desk I spied the manager from last night, eating a sandwich, sitting hunched at the corner of a table on which there was a typewriter and untidy mounds of papers. He was tieless today, with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled and the collar open on a tufted triangle of bulging chest. Was he, out of costume like this and in slight dishevelment, was he, I wondered, more himself, or less? He was going at the sandwich with the concentrated ferocity of a dog that has not been fed for days. When he saw me looking he did not acknowledge me, only scowled, his jaw munching away, and leaned out sideways and pushed the door shut with his foot. I was about to walk on when there rose unbidden before my mind's eye the image of the coffee mug, the one I had left on the table in the lounge when the taxi arrived to take me to the airport. I saw it all that way away, on what was now the dark side of the world, the rim marked with a dried half moon of gum from my morning mouth, the coffee dregs turning to a ring of furry brown powder in the bottom, just standing there in the darkness and the silence, one among all the other mute, unmoving objects I had left behind me in the locked house, and it came to me, with inexplicable but absolute certainty, that I would never return there. Shaken, I faltered, and put a hand to the desk to steady myself. A clerk came out of the office and looked at me. To cover the moment's infirmity I asked for a map of the city, and the clerk opened one between us on the counter and with a show of laboured dutifulness – why do his kind always glance aside in that blank, bored way just before they speak? – began to show me on it the location of the hotel. Yes yes, I said, I knew where I was! I snatched up the map and without folding it I stuffed it into my pocket and went through the glass door and corkscrewed myself on my stick down the steps into the high, narrow street.