Authors: John Banville
Lily was the one who puzzled me. After her earlier outburst in the hall, she was all surliness and feline shrinking now. She sat beside me slumped over her plate, her face hidden by hanging locks of hair. I know very well how death bores the young, like a glum intruder come to spoil finally an already dull party, but the silence that radiated off her like heat had a furious force to it that was, as I could see even in my distress of mind, directed entirely at me. But what injury had I done to her? As a rule I do not understand human beings, as I am sure I have remarked more than once, but the young I find especially baffling, and always have found them so. Later, in the hall, when Lydia and I were leaving, shuffling off in our sodden sorrow, the child appeared out of nowhere and fairly flung herself at me and clung to me for a second in a violent, awkward, damp embrace, before speeding off again, on those swift, bare, filthy feet of hers. Perhaps she really did want me for a Dad.
By now it was almost night, yet it was hard to get away, hard to find a formulation that would bring the occasion to a close. Miss Kettle was smiling and nodding again, and Quirke stood by saying nothing, but looking serious and thoughtfully benign. We might have been children, Lydia and I, tired and sleepy after a day in the country visiting a kindly aunt and uncle. The evening had passed for me in a peculiar, crepuscular gloom, illumined fitfully as by wan and slowed-down flashes of a camera bulb. Certain snapshots remained: Quirke and Lydia away from the table, sitting opposite each other on straight-backed chairs, Lydia weeping without restraint, and Quirke, leaning forward earnestly with his knees open, holding her hands in his and gently flapping them up and down, as if he were out for a drive in a gig and they were the two ends of the reins he was wielding; Miss Kettle laughing at something, and then remembering, and snapping shut her mouth, and apologetically straightening her glasses, which at once went crooked again; Lily’s bare arm beside mine, each tiny strand of down on it agleam; the evening sunlight in the window, goldening the draining board and glinting on the rim of a tumbler; my plate, with one limp round of tomato, a bruised lettuce leaf, a smear of crumbled egg yolk. These are the things one remembers.
Our leaving, when we managed it at last, was the beginning of that grotesque parody of a family holiday that Lydia and I were condemned to play out over the coming days. We were all gathered at the front door, us with our bags, and Quirke and Miss Kettle, and even Lily, who had reappeared from wherever she had fled to, and hung back in the shadows of the hall, surly and accusing, like a spoiled young actress who has been upstaged, which I suppose she had been. The last light of evening from the west paled the glow of the street lamps behind us. The lenses of Miss Kettle’s spectacles caught a flash of something and for an instant seemed two blank-faced, shining coins laid on her eyes. Quirke in shirt-sleeves stood in the doorway in the pose of Vaublin’s Pier-rot, trying to find something to do with his hanging hands.
“There was only the one?” he said to me.
“The one?”
“Daughter.”
In my mind I clearly saw Goodfellow, who smiled his thin-lipped smile, and winked at me, and faded.
“Only the one,” I said, “yes.”
There were bizarre gestures of aid and comfort. It will seem strange, perhaps, but these, the most bizarre of them, were the ones that touched me most sharply, striking through the otherwise impenetrable shrouds of grief like little shocks of static electricity. One of Lydia’s aunts, a moustached old brute with skin like elephant hide, who I thought had always despised me, clasped me in a mothball-smelling embrace and thrust a wad of banknotes into my hand, croaking hoarsely in my ear that
there would be things that
would be needed.
The man who did Lydia’s garden—I think of the house by the sea and everything in it as hers, now—volunteered to do the flowers for the funeral. The local tradesmen rallied, too; Lydia had to spend days writing notes of thanks. Her chemist passed us under the counter an insomniac’s treasure trove of sleeping draughts that would normally have required a prescription signed by a whole board of doctors, so potent were they. The grocer sent round a box of assorted tinned goods. And there were the letters of condolence, they had to be answered too. Some of these were from people whose names we did not recognise, in places abroad that we had never heard of, academic institutions, research foundations, libraries. They made another version of our daughter, one I did not recognise: the international scholar; I should have paid more attention to what I always winced at when I heard her refer to it as her
work.
I could never believe it was anything more than an elaborate pastime, like thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, or Chinese patience, something dull but demanding that would soothe her frantic mind. Late one night, when we had finally got to sleep, felled at last by Mr. Finn’s knock-out drops, someone telephoned, but he was drunk, and rapturously weeping, and I could make out nothing of what he was saying, except that it was something about Cass, and I was still trying to shake my brain awake when he hung up. I have begun to realise fully at last how little I know about my daughter—how little I had known; I must accustom myself now to the past tenses.
On the endless journey out—in real time it took only from early morning until the middle of an afternoon—woe sat like lumpy satchels on our backs, weighing us down. I thought of a pair of mendicant pilgrims out of a Bible scene, bent under our burdens, making our toilsome way along a hot and dusty road leading off into an infinite perspective. We were so weary; I have never known such weariness, it burned in us like the dregs of a long night’s drinking. I felt grimy and sweat-stained and used up. My skin was puffy and hot to the touch, as if it were not blood but acid that was boiling in my veins. I sat slumped in the narrow aeroplane seat, numb of mind and heart, stewing in my crumpled clothes, my bilious frog’s stare fixed on the stylised patchwork world slowly passing far below us. I could find no ease for my physical discomforts, and kept involuntarily heaving little fluttery, whimpering sighs. Beside me Lydia wept to herself quietly, almost reflectively, it seemed, and sighing too the while. Yet I wonder if, like me, she felt behind it all, behind the sorrow and the ceaseless tears, hardly palpable yet never fading, the background hum of relief. Yes, there was a kind of relief. For now that the worst had happened, I would no longer have to live in fear of it. Thus reason, stricken, formulates its wounded logic.
A charming spot it was Cass chose to die in, we saw it first from a turn of the coast road, an untidy amphitheatre of white and ochre and terracotta little houses on a stepped hill at the end of a promontory thrusting out into a white-capped sea of a deep, malignant blueness. It was like something in a travel brochure, only a little more wild of aspect. Byron supposedly did one of his marathon swims from here, thrashing away, club foot and all, to another headland a good five miles off across the strait. There were real fishermen on the harbour mending real nets, and real bars with bead curtains and men in white shirts playing clackety board games, and real
ragazzi
kicking a soccer ball under the dusty lime trees in the Piazza Cavour. Lydia parked our hired car outside the police station—at the airport I had realised that I had lost the ability to drive, simply could not work the pedals, change the gears—and we sat for a moment motionless side by side gazing blankly through the windscreen at a torn advertising poster from which an unreally perfect young woman poutingly proffered her half-naked breasts. “I can’t,” Lydia said, without emphasis. I laid a hand on her wrist but she shrugged it off, jadedly. We got out of the car, unfolding ourselves from our seats with the caution and infirm laboriousness of the sole survivors of a fatal accident. The square was strikingly familiar—that tree, that stark white wall— and I felt all this had happened before. There was the usual smell of fish and oil and dust and bad drains. A neat little man in a neat, expensive suit came out on the steps of the police station to meet us. Everything about him was made in miniature. He had a small moustache, and wonderfully small feet shod in spotless patent-leather pumps, and very black hair oiled and combed smooth and severely parted at the side. He shook hands gravely with both of us, his mouth pursed in a sympathetic moue, and ushered us inside the station. The building was incongruously grand, an echoing high square temple with pillars of pitted stone and a chequered black-and-white marble floor. Heads were briefly lifted from desks, dark eyes looked on us with remote inquisitiveness. The little man was skipping ahead, urging us on with soft clickings of tongue and lips, as if we were a pair of prize horses. I was never to make out exactly who or what he was; he may have been the chief of police, or the coroner, or Death himself, even. He could not be still, even when we had come to the mortuary and were standing helpless by the bier, but kept bowing from the shoulders, and reaching out but not quite touching Lydia’s hand, or my elbow, and stepping back quickly and delicately clearing his throat behind the raised first knuckle of a tiny brown fist. It was he who took me aside, out of Lydia’s hearing, and told me in a hurried whisper, husky with embarrassment, that my daughter had been pregnant when she died. Three months gone, as they say. He clapped a hand histrionically to his breast.
“Ah, signore, mi dispiace . . .”
The sheet was drawn back.
Stella maris.
Her face was not there, the rocks and the sea had taken it. We identified her by a ring, and a little scar on her left ankle that Lydia remembered. But I would have known her, my Marina, even if all that was left of her was the bare, wave-washed bones.
What was she doing in this place, what had brought her here? As if the mystery of her life were not enough, now I must deal with the mystery of her death. We climbed the narrow streets to the little hotel where she had stayed. It was the siesta hour, and all was eerily still in the flat, airless heat, and as we laboured up those cobbled steeps we gaped about in a blear of disbelief, unable to credit the cruelty of the picturesqueness all around us. There were sleepy cats in doorways, and geraniums on window sills, and a yellow canary was singing in its cage, and we could hear the voices of children at play somewhere, in some sequestered courtyard, and our daughter was dead.
The hotel proprietor was a swarthy, big-chested old fellow with greased grey hair and a manicured moustache, a dead ringer for the film star Vittorio De Sica, if anyone now remembers him. He greeted us circumspectly, staying resolutely behind the protective barrier of the reception desk, looking at everything except us and humming to himself. He kept on nodding at everything we asked him, but the nods seemed more like shrugs, and he would tell us nothing. His fat wife, round and thick as a totem pole, had planted herself behind him with her hands implacably folded on her stomach, her Mussolini scowl fixed on the back of his head, willing him to caution. He was sorry, he could tell us nothing, he said, nothing. Cass had arrived two days ago, he said, and paid in advance. They had hardly seen her since she came, she had spent her days in the hills above the town, or walking on the beach. As he spoke he was fiddling with things on the desk, pens, cards, a sheaf of folded maps. I asked if anyone had been with her, and he shook his head—too quickly, I thought. I noticed his shoes— tassels, little gold buckles, Quirke would have been envious—and the fine silk of his too-white shirt. Quite the dandy. He led us up the narrow stairs, past a set of mildly indecent eighteenth-century prints in plastic frames, and applied a large, mock-antique key to the door of Cass’s room and opened it for us. We hung back, Lydia and I, looking incompetently in. Big bed, washstand and pitcher, straight chair with a straw seat, a narrow window squinting down on the sunstruck harbour. There was, incongruously, a smell of suntan lotion. Cass’s suitcase was open on the floor, still half unpacked. A dress, a pair of shorts, her remembered shoes, mute things clamouring to speak. “I can’t,” Lydia said, as listlessly as before, and turned aside. I looked at De Sica and he looked at his nails. His lumpy wife was still there at his shoulder. She would once have been as young as Cass, and as lissom too, most likely. I gazed full into her face, beseeching her silently to tell us what had happened here to our poor damaged daughter, our eclipsed light, that had driven her to death, but she just stood and stared back at me stonily and offered not a word.
We lodged there at the hotel that night, it seemed the simplest thing to do. Our room was eerily similar to the one Cass had been in, with the same washstand and chair, and the same window framing what seemed an identical view of the harbour. We ate dinner in the silent dining room, and then went down to the harbour and walked up and down the quayside for what seemed hours. It was quiet, there at the season’s end. We held hands, for the first time since the days of the Hotel Halcyon. A gold and smoke-grey sunset sank out at sea like a slow catastrophe, and the warm night came on, and the lamps on the harbour glowed, and the bristling masts tilted, and a bat swooped and swerved soundlessly about us. In the room we lay sleepless side by side on the big high bed, like a pair of long-term hospital patients, listening to the faint far whisperings of the sea. Softly I sang the little song I used to sing for Cass, to make her laugh:
I’ve got tears in my ears
From lying on my back,
In my bed,
While I cry,
Over you.
“What did that man say to you?” Lydia asked out of the darkness. “The one at the police station.” She rose up on an elbow, making the mattress wobble, and peered at me. In the faint glow from the window the whites of her eyes glittered. “What was it, that he didn’t want me to hear?”
“He told me her surprise,” I said, “the one she told you not to tell me. You were right: I am amazed.” She said nothing to that, only gave what might have been an angry sigh, and laid her head down again. “I suppose,” I said, “we don’t know who the father is?” I could see him, a lost one like herself, most probably, some pimply young savant haggard with ambition and the weight of useless knowledge agonisingly acquired; I wonder if he knew how close he had come to replicating himself. “Not that it matters, now.”