Authors: John Banville
Anaglypta! That was the name of that old-fashioned wallpaper stuff, stiff with layers of yellowed white paint, with which every other wall in the house is covered to the height of the dado. I wonder if it is manufactured any more. Anaglypta. All afternoon I had been searching for the word and now I had found it. Why glyp not glyph? This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.
Eight o’clock. The curtain would be going up and I not there. Another absence. I would be missed. When an actor walks out of a performance no understudy can entirely fill his place. He leaves the shadow of something behind him, an aspect of the character that only he could have conjured, his singular creation, independent of mere lines. The rest of the cast feel it, the audience feels it too. The stand-in is always a stand-in: for him there is always another, prior presence, standing in him.
Who if not I, then, is
Amphitryon?
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 plop-ping 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 motionlessly 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.”
I would speak no more, but stood with steepled fingers pressed on the table, softly snorting, head ahang. Quirke heaved a sigh that turned into an involuntary sorrowful little chirrup at the end and hauled himself to his feet at last and yanked open the door to the hall, making the tongued lever of the latch joggle in its worn hole,
quirquirquirke.
He staggered going out into the passageway, lurched hugely sideways and struck his shoulder on the door jamb, swore, chuckled, liquidly coughed. “Good luck, then,” he said, bowing under the low lintel and giving a stiff-armed salute behind him. Wordlessly we walked in single file through the dark house. When I opened the front door the smells of the summer night came into the hall, of tar and lupins, and something mushroomy, of sun-warmed pavements gone cold now, of salt sea-mist, and a myriad of other, nameless things. Quirke’s bicycle, a high, black, old-fashioned affair, was tethered to a lamppost. He tarried a moment, looking blearily about him. The deserted square at dusk, with its low, humped roofs and windows sullenly aglow, has a slightly sinister, alien air, a touch almost of Transylvania. “Good luck,” Quirke said again, loudly, and uttered a phrase of mournful laughter, as at some painful joke. The saddle of his bicycle was furred with dew. Indifferent to damp discomfort he mounted up and pedalled away unsteadily, as I turned back and shut the door, maundering chaotically in my disordered heart.
As I drifted toward sleep, my whiskeyed breath staling the air, I seemed to feel another rise up out of me into the room and hang there on the dark like smoke, like thought, like memory. A night breeze stirred the hem of the dusty lace curtain at the window. There was a glimmer even yet in the far sky. I fell into a dream. There was a room, cool, marble tiled, as in a Roman villa, with a view through unglazed windows of a stepped ochre hill and a line of sentinel trees. Scant furnishings: a couch with ornately scrolled ends and a low table nearby bearing unguents in porphyry pots and coloured glass phials, and in a far corner a tall urn in which a single lily leaned. On the couch, of which I was permitted only a three-quarters view, a woman was lying back, young, ample, impossibly pale skinned, her naked arms lifted and hiding her face in abandonment and shame. Beside her sat a turbaned negress, naked also, a mountainous figure with polished melony thighs and big hard gleaming breasts and broad pink palms. The middle finger and thumb of her right hand were plunged to the knuckle and ball in the two holes of the woman’s wantonly offered lap. I noted the angry-pink frilling of the vagina, dainty as the volutes of a cat’s ear, and the taut oiled tea-coloured cincture of the anus. The slave turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder with a broad, jaunty grin and for my benefit joggled her mistress’s gaping flesh, and the woman shuddered and made a mewling sound. In succubus sleep my face formed a rictus, and as the little seizure took me I arched my back and pressed the back of my head into the pillow and then went still and lay like that for a long moment, like a dead dictator lying in state sunk to his ears in the plush.
I opened my eyes and did not know where I was. The window was in the wrong place, the wardrobe too. Then I remembered, and the old, mysterious foreboding seized on me again. There was neither darkness nor light, but a dim grainy glow that seemed to have no source, unless the source were the room itself, the very walls. I felt the patter and skip of my labouring heart. The sticky wetness on my thigh was growing cold already. I thought I should get up and go to the lavatory and wipe myself, I even saw myself rise and fumble for the light switch—was I still dreaming, half asleep?—yet I lay on, swaddled in flocculent warmth. Languorously my fancy found its way back to the woman in the dream and traced again the outline of her white limbs and touched her secret places, but without agitation now, curious only, mildly wondering at the unreally white flesh, the fantastical lewdness. Musing thus in drowsy torpor I turned my head on the pillow and it was then I saw the figure in the room, standing motionless a little way from the side of the bed. I took it for a woman, or womanish old man, or even a child, of indeterminate gender. Shrouded and still it stood facing in my direction, like one of those guardians of the sickroom long ago, the dim attendants of childhood fevers. The head was covered and I could make out no features. The hands were clasped at the breastbone in what seemed an attitude of beseeching, or of anguished prayer, or some other extreme of passionate striving. I was frightened, of course—cold sweat stood on my forehead, hairs prickled at the nape of my neck—but what I registered most strongly was a sense of being the object of intense concentration, a kind of needful scrutiny. I tried to speak but could not, not because I was struck dumb with fear but because the mechanism of my voice could not be made to work in the other-world between dream and waking in which I was suspended. Still the figure did not stir, nor give any sign, only stood in that pose of ambiguous extremity, waiting, it might be, for some desired response from me. I thought:
The Necessary . . .
and as I did, in that momentary blink of the mind, the figure faded. I was not aware of its going. There seemed no transition between its state of being seen and its invisibility, as if it had not departed but only changed its form, or refined itself into a frequency beyond the reach of my coarse senses. At once relieved and regretful at its going I closed my eyes, and when I unwillingly opened them again, no more than a moment later, so it seemed, a streaming blade of sunlight had already made a deep slash through the parting in the curtains.