Eclipse

2

There is pandemonium among the seagulls, great events seem to be taking place. Before my arrival a flock of them had come in from the sea and settled on the house, building their nests in the chimneys and the valley of the roof. Why they chose this spot I do not know; perhaps they liked the calm and quiet of our little square. They are anything but calm themselves. From earliest morning the sky is filled with their tumult. They clamour and shriek and make an angry rattling with beaks agape. Their favourite noise, however, is a staccato yacking, like a hyena’s laugh or baboon’s hoot, that decelerates gradually while simultaneously rising in pitch. Even at night they are restless, I hear them flopping about on the roof, grumbling and threatening each other. At dawn every day they set up a deafening racket. Why such uproar? Surely the mating season is well over—certainly there are young already being taught to fly, ugly, awkward, dun-coloured things that waddle to the edge of the roof and perch there, peering down at the drop and swallowing hard, or looking all about with a show of unconcern, before launching themselves out shakily on to the air currents. At certain times their elders all together will take to the sky and wheel and wheel in majestic slow circles above the house, screaming, whether in panic or wild exultation it is impossible to know.

Yesterday I looked up from where I was sitting and saw one of the adults standing outside on the window sill. I am always startled by the great size of these birds when seen up close. They are so menacingly graceful in flight, yet when they land they become sadly comical, perched on their spindly legs and ridiculous flat feet, like the botched prototype of some far more handsome, far more well-fashioned species. This one just stood there beyond the glass, doing nothing except opening wide its beak in what seemed a yawn or a soundless cry. Curious, I put down my book and went outside. The bird did not fly away at my approach, but held its place, shifting ponderously from foot to foot and regarding me with wary deprecation out of one large, pale, lustrous eye. I saw at once what the matter was: on the ground below the window sill a dead fledgeling lay. It must have fallen from the roof, or failed in flight and plummeted to earth and broken its neck. Its look was glazed already, its plumage dulled. The parent, for I have no doubt that is what it was, made its beak gape again in that odd way, with no sound. It might have been a threat, to warn me off, but I am inclined to believe it was a sign of distress. Even seagulls must have expressions of sorrow or of joy recognisable at least to their fellows. Probably they see our visages as just as blank and inexpressive as theirs seem to us. A man numb with inexplicable misery, for instance, I am sure to them would be merely another dead-eyed dullard gazing pitilessly upon a scene of incommensurable loss. The bird was male, I think; I think, yes, a father.

I left it to its silent vigil and, prompted somehow by the encounter, made my way down to the sea. I have hardly left the house since coming here, and I went forth almost fearfully, casting an anxious backward look about my little world, like a medieval explorer about to take ship for Cathay. The trek took a good half-hour. I went by what I thought would be a short cut across the fields, and got lost. At last, sweating and shaken, I came out through a hazel wood on to a shingly strip of beach. The usual mingled iodine and cat-piss smell was very strong. Is there anywhere more evocative than these tawny fringes of our dry-land world? At the first crunching footstep I might have been walking these sands all my life, despite the surly and unwelcoming aspect of the spot, that would have been fitted more to brigandage than bathing. The dunes were low, and there was no grass, only a tough, thorny stuff that crackled underfoot. The beach was steeply shelved, and in places the top layer of sand had blown away, exposing striated ridges of a scaly, shale-like stuff that would cut the soles of any swimmer foolhardy enough to venture barefoot over it.

I wonder if my ghosts would have known I was not in the house. Do they appear when I am not present? Is a rose red in the dark—who said that?

Not a soul was to be seen on the shore, except, a little way out, a very large black seabird standing motionless on a black rock. It had a long slender neck and a slender body, and seemed unreal in its stillness, more an artist’s stylisation than a living bird. I sat down on one of the exposed ridges of shale. Curious stuff it was, like crumbly stone, and greasy to the touch. The morning was still, under a seamless white sky. There was a full tide, and the surface of the water, taut and burnished like billowing silk, seemed higher than the land, and on the point of spilling over. The waves were hardly waves at all, more a wrinkle running along the edges of a sluggishly swaying vast bowl of water. Why do I find the thought of the sea so alarming? We speak of its power and violence as if it were a species of wild animal, ravening and unappeasable, but the sea does nothing, it is simply there, its own reality, like night, or the sky. Is it the heave and lurch and sudden suck of it that frightens? Or is it that it is so emphatically not our medium? I think of the world beneath the ocean, the obverse of ours, the negative of ours, with its sandy plains and silent valleys and great sunken mountain ranges, and something fails me in myself, something that is mine draws away from me in horror. Water is uncanny in the way, single-minded and uncontrollable, it keeps seeking its own level, like nothing else in the world that we inhabit. There are storms, yes, and tidal waves, and even in these temperate zones the estuarial bore, or eagre, but such phenomena are not due to any inherent qualities of water itself, for water, though fluid and eerily always beyond our grasp, surely is essentially inert. Yet it puts us off balance; one is always at an angle to the ocean—keeping one’s head above water ensures that. To wade into the waves is to seem to fall without falling, feeling the steep squirming sandy incline under one’s slowed-down, leaden tread. Yes, the inhuman constant levelling, and the two-dimensional, angled aspect which we see of it, these are the characteristics of water that unnerve us. And drowning, of course, drowning is strange, I mean strange for those on shore. It all seems done so discreetly. The onlooker, attention caught by a distant feathery cry, peers out intently but sees nothing of the struggle, the helpless silencing, the awful slow-motion thrashing, the last, long fall into the bottomless and ever-blackening blue. No. All that is to be seen is a moment of white water, and a hand, languidly sinking.

The sea was not blue now, though; it hardly ever is. In our latitudes it is more often a gleaming grey, or purplish, like a bruise, or, after the churnings of a gale, marl-coloured. But rarely, rarely blue.

The black bird on the rock opened wide its wings and shook them vigorously and after a long moment of absolute, cruciform stillness carefully refolded them.

When I was young I had no fear of the sea, and loved the beach. Disporting myself on that narrow strip of not-quite-land wedged between sky and water, I would feel all down the imperceptibly declining curve of the afternoon a sense of the great world’s glamour. Some girl in cheap sunglasses and crimpled swimsuit would catch my attention and seem a glimmering naiad. The yard of undersprung soft sand at the edge of the waves was a trampoline on which I trod with a gracefulness not to be achieved elsewhere in the gawky world of boyhood. And then the sea itself, running off flat to the low horizon, like a limitless promise—no, I had no dread of it, then. As a boy I was a fair swimmer, in my unruly way, all splash and thrash. Especially I loved to dive, loved that moment of breathless almost-panic under water, the eerie greenish glow, the bulging silence, the sense of slide and shift and sway. My father too was fascinated by things maritime. He did not swim, had never been out on the ocean, but he was irresistibly drawn to its margins. He would roll up the bottoms of his trousers and paddle in the shallows, like all the other fathers, but away from them, keeping himself to himself. In my memory it is like a scene in one of those gaudy seaside postcards of the time, him there in his sleeveless pullover and sun hat made from a white handkerchief knotted at the corners, paddling in the running surf, while up the beach my mother sits on a towel with her embarrassingly bare legs stuck straight out before her, deep in a novelette. Later, when the sun lost strength and the light grew heavy, and we collected our things and mashed our way back through the dunes in the direction of the train station, my father would maintain a remote, frowning silence, which even my mother would not try to break, as if he had been away somewhere distant, and had seen incommunicable things.

A shimmer, a shiver in the air. Uncanny sensation, as of a chill presentiment. I peered about the beach. Still there was no one, yet I seemed not alone. I felt a sudden, familiar cold, and scrambled to my feet and at a half-crouch scuttled up the beach in fright. Had my phantoms followed me? At the edge of the hazel wood there was a sort of hut part sunk in the sand, a hide for hunters, I suppose, made of tarred planks warped by sunlight and the salt winds, just three walls and a leaning roof and a board wedged lengthwise to make a bench for sitting. The thing was so old and weathered it had lost almost all trace of human industry, and seemed one with the gnarled trees massed behind it, with the scaly sand and clumps of podded seaweed and strewn driftwood. I went inside and sat down, out of sight of that inhospitable shoreline and the sighing waves. There was the usual litter of cigarette ends and rusty cans and yellowed scraps of newsprint. I imagined myself a fugitive landing up here out of the way of the world’s harm. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps this is what I need to do, finally to give it all up, home, wife, possessions, renounce it all for good, rid myself of every last thing and come and live in some such unconsidered spot as this. What would I require for survival, except a cup, a dish, a blanket? Free then of all encumbrance, all distraction, I might be able at last to confront myself without shock or shrinking. For is this not what I am after, the pure conjunction, the union of self with sundered self? I am weary of division, of being always torn. I shut my eyes and in a sort of rapture see myself stepping backward slowly into the cloven shell, and the two halves of it, still moist with glair, closing around me…

When I came out of the hut and looked about again the day seemed different, as if the light had shifted, as if a shadow had swept across the sand and left something behind it, a darkening, a chill. Beyond the little waves a patch of water grew a hump, and then there was a heave, and a brief churning, and a figure reared up, clad all in black, with a flashing mask for a face and carrying in one hand what seemed a slender trident. My heart reared on its tethers, bumping like a wind-tossed balloon. The seabird rose from its rock and flew away with a lazily majestic motion. Then Poseidon pulled off his mask and spat, and, seeing me, waved his harpoon gun and flip-flopped away over the shingle. His rubber suit had the same thick dull sheen as the seabird’s plumage. I turned and plunged into the wood, blunderingly. Coming, I had got lost, and now I thought I knew the straight way back, but I was wrong.

I am thinking of my daughter. At once an angry buzzing of emotions starts up in my breast. She exasperates me, I confess it. I do not trust her. I know, I know, there is even a name for the syndrome from which she suffers, yet half the time I think there is nothing at all the matter with her, that her fits and fallings, her obsessions, her black days and violent sleepless nights, are all no more than a strategy to make me pay for some enormity she imagines I visited on her in the far past. At times she has a look, a fleeting, sidelong, faintly smiling look, in which I seem to glimpse a wholly other she, cold and sly and secretly laughing. With such ingenuity does she connect the workings of the world to her own fate. Everything that happens, she is convinced, carries a specific and personal reference to her. There is nothing, not a turn in the weather, or a chance word spoken in the street, that does not covertly pass on to her some profound message of warning or encouragement. I used to try to reason with her, talking myself into spluttering, head-shaking, wildly laughing transports of frustration and rage, while she stood silently before me, as if in the stocks, shoulders up and arms hanging and her chin drawn down to her collarbone, frowning in sullen refusal and defiance. There was no keeping track of her moods, I never knew when she might veer aside and turn and confront me with a new version of herself, a whole new map of that strange, intense and volatile world that she alone inhabits. For that is how she makes it seem, that she lives in a place where there is no one else. What an actor she is! She puts on a character with an ease and persuasiveness that I could never match. Yet perhaps she is not feigning, perhaps that is her secret, that she does not act, but variously is. Like the sorcerer’s assistant, she steps smiling into the spangled casket and comes out the other side transfigured.

Lydia never shared my doubts. This is, of course, another source of annoyance to me. How she would run to Cass, breathless with forced enthusiasm, and try to press her into the latest game she had devised to divert the child’s attention from herself and her manias. And Cass would play along for a while, all smiles and trembling enthusiasm, only to turn away in the end and retreat again listlessly into herself. Then Lydia would seem the crestfallen child and Cass the withholding adult.

She was five or six when she displayed the first symptoms of her condition. I came home late one night after a performance and she was standing in her nightdress in the darkness at the top of the stairs, talking. Even yet, as I remember her there, a slow shiver crawls across the back of my scalp. Her eyes were open and her face was empty of expression; she looked like a waxwork model of herself. She was speaking in a low, uninflected voice, the voice of an oracle. I could not make out what she was saying except that it was something about an owl, and the moon. I thought she must be rehearsing in her sleep a nursery rhyme or jingle out of infancy. I took her by the shoulders and turned her about and walked her back to her room. She is the one who at such times is supposed to experience strange auras, but that night it was I who noticed the smell. It was the smell, I am convinced, of what was, is, wrong with her. It is not at all extraordinary, just a dull flat grey faint stink, like that of unwashed hair, or a garment left in a drawer and gone stale. I recognised it. I had an uncle, he died when I was young, I barely remember him, who played the accordion, and wore his hat in the house, and walked with a crutch. He had that smell, too. The crutch was an old-fashioned one, a single thick rough stave and a curved crosspiece padded with sweat-stained cloth; the part of the upright where his hand grasped it was polished to the texture of grey silk. I thought it was this crutch that smelled, but now I think it was the very odour of affliction itself. Cass’s room in the lamplight was obsessively neat, as always—there is a touch of the nun to our Cass—yet to my alarmed heart it seemed a site of wild disorder. I made her lie down on the bed, still murmuring, her eyes fixed on my face, her hands clutching mine, and it was as if I were letting her sink into some dark deep pool, under a willow, at dead of night. Sleepily Lydia appeared in the doorway behind us, a hand in her hair, wanting to know what was the matter. I sat down on the side of the narrow bed, still holding Cass’s cold pale hands. I looked at the toys on the shelves, at the lampshade stuck with faded transfers; on the wallpaper, cartoon characters pranced and grinned. I felt the darkness pressing around our cave of lamplight like the ogre in a fairy tale. A gloating moon hung crookedly in the window above the bed and when I looked up it seemed to tip me a fat wink, knowing and horrible. Cass’s voice when she spoke was scratchy and dry, a fall of dust in a parched place.

“They’re telling me things, Daddy,” she said, and her fingers holding mine tightened like wires. “They’re telling me things.”

What things the voices told her, what actions they urged, she would never say. They were her secret. She had periods of respite, weeks, months, even, when of their own accord they would go silent. How still the house seemed then, as if a clamour audible to all had lapsed. But presently, when my ears had adjusted, I would become aware again of that sustained note of anxiety that was always there, in every room, thin and piercing enough to shatter the frail glass of any hope. Of the three of us, Cass was the calmest in face of these disorders. Indeed, such was her calm at times that she would seem to be not there at all, to have drifted off, lighter than air. It is a different air in which she moves, a separate medium. For her I think the world is always somewhere other, an unfamiliar place where yet she has always been. This is for me the hardest thing, to think of her out there, standing on some far bleak deserted shore, beyond help, in unmoving light, with an ocean of lostness all before her and the siren voices singing in her head. She was always alone, always outside. One day when I was collecting her from school I came upon her looking down the length of a long, green-painted corridor to where at the far end a raucous group of girls was gathered. They were preparing for some game or outing, and their laughter and sharp cries made the deadened air ring. Cass stood with her schoolbag clasped to her breast, leaning forward a little, with her head on one side, frowning, helplessly eager, like a naturalist glimpsing some impossible, brilliant-hued new species that had alighted on the far bank of an unfordable river and in a moment would rise and fly away again, into the deeps of the forest, where she could not hope to follow. When she heard my step she looked up at me and smiled, my Miranda, and her eyes did that trick they had of seeming to turn over in their sockets like two flat metal discs to show their blank, defensive backs. We walked together in silence out to the street, where she stopped and stood for a moment motionless, looking at the ground. A March wind grey as her school overcoat whipped up an eddy of dust on the pavement at our feet. The cathedral bell had been ringing, the last reverberations fell about us, wrinkling the air. She told me how in history class they had learned about Joan of Arc and her voices. She raised her eyes and narrowed them and smiled again, looking off toward the river.

“Do you think they’ll burn me at the stake, too?” she said. It was to become one of her jokes.

Memory is peculiar in the fierce hold with which it will fix the most insignificant-seeming scenes. Whole tracts of my life have fallen away like a cliff into the sea, yet I cling to seeming trivia with a pop-eyed tenacity. Often in these idle days, and in the wakeful nights especially, I pass the time picking over the parts of this or that remembered moment, like a blackbird grubbing among dead leaves, searching for the one telling thing lurking in the clay, among the wood-scurf and dried husks and discarded wing casings, the morsel that will give meaning to a meaningless remembrance, the fat grub concealed in open sight under the camouflage of the accidental. There are times with Cass that should be burned into the inner lining of my skull, times that I thought as I endured them I would never be so fortunate as to forget—the nights by the telephone, the hours spent watching over the crouched unmoving form under the tangled sheets, the ashen waits in anonymous consuiting rooms—that yet seem to me now no more than the vague remnants of bad dreams, while an idle word of hers, a look thrown back from a doorway, an aimless car journey with her slumped silent beside me, resonate in my mind, rife with significance.

There is the icy Christmas afternoon when I took her to the park to try out her first pair of roller skates. The trees were white with hoar-frost and a crepuscular pinkish mist hung in the motionless air. I was not in a pretty mood; the place was full of screaming children and their irritatingly forbearing fathers. Cass on her skates clung to me with trembling fierceness and would not let go. It was like teaching a tiny invalid the rudiments of mobility. In the end she lost her balance and the edge of her skate struck me on the ankle and I swore at her and furiously shook off her clutching hand and she teetered this way and that for a moment and then her legs shot out from under her and she sat down suddenly on the cindered path. What a look she gave me.

There was another day when she fell again, a day in April, it was, and we were walking together in the hills. The weather was wintry still. There had been a brief fall of soft wet snow, and now the sun had come infirmly out, and the sky was made of pale glass, and the gorse was a yellow flame against the whiteness, and all about us water was dripping and trickling and covertly running under the lush, flattened grass. I remarked that the snow was icy, and she pretended to think I had said icing, and wanted to know where the cake was, and held her sides in exaggerated hilarity, doing her snuffly laugh. She was never a gainly girl, and that day she was wearing rubber boots and a heavy padded coat that made the going all the harder, and when we were coming down a stony track between two walls of blue-black pines she tripped and fell over and cut her lip. The drops of her blood against the patchwork snow were a definition of redness. I snatched her up and held her to me, a bulky warm ball of woe, and one of her quicksilver tears ran into my mouth. I think of the two of us there, among the shivering trees, the birdsong, the gossipy swift whisperings of trickling water, and something sags in me, sags, and rebounds with a weary effort. What is happiness but a refined form of pain?

The route I took coming back from that unsettling visit to the beach brought me upland somehow. I was not aware of climbing until at last I came out on the hill road, at the spot where I had stopped in the car that winter night, the night of the animal. The day was hot; light hummed above the fields. I stood on the brow of the hill and the spired town was there below me, huddled in its pale-blue haze. I could see the square, and the house, and the shining white wall of the Stella Maris convent. A little brown bird flitted silently upward from branch to branch of a thorn tree at the side of the road. Beyond the town the sea now was a mirage-like expanse that merged into the sky without horizon. It was that torpid hour of afternoon in summer when all falls silent and even the birds cease their twitterings. At such a time, in such a place, a man might lose his grip on all that he is. As I stood there in the stillness I became aware of an almost imperceptible sound, a sort of attenuated, smoothed-out warbling. It puzzled me, until I realised that what I was hearing was simply the noise of the world, the medleyed voice of everything in the world, just going on, and my heart was almost soothed.

I walked down through the town. It was Sunday and the streets were empty, and the glossy black windows of shut shops stared at me disapprovingly as I went past. A wedge of inky shadow sliced the main street neatly into halves. On one side parked cars squatted hotly in the sun. A small boy threw a stone at me and ran off laughing. I suppose I was a motley sight, with my nascent beard and unkempt hair and no doubt staring eyes. A dog came and sniffed at the cuffs of my trousers with fastidious twitchings of its snout. Where am I here, boy, youth, young man, broken-down actor? This is the place that I should know, the place where I grew up, but I am a stranger, no one can put a name to my face, I cannot even do it myself, with any surety. There is no present, the past is random, and only the future is fixed. To cease becoming and merely be, to stand as a statue in some forgotten dead-leafed square, released from destruction, enduring the seasons equably, the rain and snow and sun, taken for granted even by the birds, how would that be? I turned for home, with a bottle of milk and a brown-paper bag of eggs bought from a crone in a hole-in-the-wall down a lane.

Someone was in the house, I knew it as soon as I crossed the threshold. With the milk and the bag of eggs in my hands I stood motionless, not breathing, nostrils flared and one ear lifted, an animal invaded in its lair. Calm summer light stood in the hall and three flies were circling in tight formation under a peculiarly repulsive, bare grey light-bulb. Not a sound. What was it that was amiss, what scent or signal had I caught? There was a flaw in the atmosphere, a lingering ripple where someone had passed through. Cautiously I moved from room to room, mounted the stairs, the tendons in my knees creaking, even peered into the damp-smelling broom cupboard behind the scullery door, but found no one lurking there. Outside, then? I went to the windows, checking the co-ordinates of my world: the square in front, innocent of any sign that I could see, and at the back the garden, tree, fields, far hills, all Sunday-still in the cottony light of afternoon. I was in the kitchen when I heard a sound behind me. My scalp tingled and a bead of sweat came out at the hairline and ran a little way swiftly down my forehead and stopped. I turned. A girl was standing in the doorway with the light of the hall behind her. The first impression I had was of a general slight lopsidedness. Her eyes were not quite level, and her mouth drooped at one side in the slack lewd way of the bored young. Even the hem of her dress was crooked. She said nothing, only stood there eyeing me with dull candour. Some moments of uncertain silence passed. I might have taken her for another hallucination, but she was far too solidly herself for that. Still neither of us spoke, then there was a shuffle and a cough, and behind her Quirke appeared, stooping apologetically, the nervous fingers of one hand jiggling at his side. Today he was wearing a blue blazer with brass buttons and a high shine on the elbows, a shirt that had once been white, narrow tie, grey slacks sagging in the rear, grey leather slip-ons with buckles on the insteps, white socks. He had cut himself shaving again, a bit of bloodstained toilet paper was stuck to his chin, a white floweret with a tiny rust-red heart. Under his arm he carried a large scuffed black cardboard box tied with a black silk ribbon.

“You asked about the house,” he said—had I? “I have it all”—bending a glance in the direction of the box—“here.”

He stepped past the girl and came forward eagerly and put the box on the kitchen table and undid the ribbon and with loving deftness set out his documents, fanning them like a hand of outsize cards, talking the while. “I’m what you might call a spoilt solicitor,” he said with a melancholy leer, showing big, wax-coloured teeth. He was leaning across the table, holding out to me a sheaf of yellow-edged pages crawled all over by elaborate sepia script. I took them and held them in my hands and looked at them; they had the flat, mildewed fragrance of dried chrysanthemums. I scanned the words. Whereas… hereinunder… given this day of… A gathering yawn made my nostrils tighten. The girl came and stood at Quirke’s shoulder and looked on in listless curiosity. He had launched into an elaborate account of a historic, long-running and intricate dispute over land rent and boundaries and rights of way, illustrating each stage of the wrangle with its piece of parchment, its deeds, its map. As he spoke I saw the players in the little drama, the shovel-hatted fathers and long-suffering mothers, the hothead sons, the languishing consumptive daughters with their needlepoint and novels. And I pictured Quirke, too, got up in fustian, like them, high-collared in a dank attic room, crouched over his papers by the glimmer of a guttering candle stub, while the night wind sighed through the slates and cats prowled the cramped back gardens under a moon like a paring of polished tin… “The son got hold of the old one’s will and burned it,” he was saying in a husky, confiding whisper, shutting one eye and portentously nodding. “And that of course would have left him…” He reached out a tapered and faintly trembling forefinger and tapped the top page of the papers where I held them. “Do you see?”

“I do,” I said, earnestly, though I lied.

He waited, scanning my face, then sighed; there is no satisfying the hobbyist’s hunger. Dispirited, he turned aside and gazed morosely through the window out to the garden with unseeing eyes. The sunlight was turning brazen as the afternoon lost strength. The girl nudged him with a lazy sideways movement of her hip and he blinked. “Oh, yes,” he said, “this is Lily.” She gave me a cheerless down-turned smile and made a mock curtsey. “You’ll be in need of help around the house,” he said. “Lily will see to it.”

Peeved and doleful, he gathered up his papers and put them into the box and shut the lid and knotted the black silk ribbon; I noticed again the deftness of those maidenly fingers. He fished his bicycle clips from his blazer pocket and bent and put them on, grunting. The girl and I together looked down at the top of his head and the slick of sandy hair and the bowed shoulders with their light snowfall of dandruff. We might have been the parents and he the overgrown, unlovely son of whom we were less than proud. He straightened, now suggesting for a second a pan-talooned palace eunuch, with his yeasty pallor and his white socks and slips-ons upturned at the toes.

“I’ll be off,” he said.

I walked with him down the hall to the front door. Outside, his bicycle was lying against its lamppost in a state of exaggerated collapse, front wheel upturned and handlebars askew, like a comic impersonating a drunk. He righted it and clipped the document box to the carrier and in moody silence mounted up and rode away. He has a manner of cycling that is all his own, sitting far back on the saddle with shoulders drooping forward and paunch upturned, steering with one hand while the other rests limply in his lap, his knees going up and down like pistons that are not working but merely idling. Halfway across the square he braked and stopped and put a balletic toe to the ground and turned and looked back; I waved; he went on.

In the kitchen the girl was standing at the sink lethargically going through the motions of washing up. She is not a pretty child, and not, by the look of her, particularly clean, either. She kept her head down when I came in. I crossed the room and sat at the table. Butter in its dish had separated in the sun, a greasy puddle of curds; a slice of staling bread was scalloped decoratively along its edges by the heat. The milk and the bag of eggs were there where I had left them. I looked at the girl’s pale long neck and rat’s tails of colourless hair. I cleared my throat, and drummed my fingers on the table.

“And tell me, Lily,” I said, “what age are you?”

I detected a sinister, oily smoothness in my voice, the voice of a sly old roué trying to sound harmless.

“Seventeen,” she answered without hesitation; I am sure she is far younger than that.

“And do you go to school?”

A crooked shrug, the right shoulder rising, the left let fall.

“Used to.”

I rose from the table and went and stood beside her, leaning back against the draining board with my arms and ankles crossed.

Stance, and tone, these are the important things; once you have the tone and the stance the part plays itself. Lily’s hands in the hot water were raw to the wrists, as if she were wearing a pair of pink surgical gloves. They are Quirke’s hands, shapely and delicate. She set a mug upside down on the board in a froth of opalescent bubbles. I enquired mildly if she did not think she should rinse off the suds. She went still and stood a moment, looking into the sink, then turned her head slowly and gave me a dead-eyed stare that made me blench. Deliberately she picked up the mug and held it under the running tap and thumped it down again. I tottered hurriedly back to my place at the table, feathers all awry. How do they manage to be so discomfiting, the young, with no more than a glance, a grimace? Presently she finished the dishes, and dried her hands on a rag; her fingers, I noticed, were nicotine-stained. “1 have a daughter, you know,” I said, sounding the fond old fumbling booby now. “Older than you. Catherine is her name. We call her Cass.” She might not have heard me. I watched her as she stored away the still-damp cups and saucers; how well she knows their places, it must be a female instinct. When she was done she stood a moment looking about her dimly, then turned to go, but paused, as if she had just remembered my existence, and looked at me, wrinkling her nose.

“Are you famous? ” she said, in a tone of arch incredulity.

It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed. The moment is here when I must bring out into the light one of those scorched patches from my past that I would far prefer to leave in the cool dark of forgetfulness. It is that I began my career, not in a polo-neck part in some uncompromisingly avant-garde production in a basement twenty-seater, but on the amateur stage, in an echoing community hall, in my home town, before an audience of gaping provincials. The piece was one of those rural dramas that were still being written at the time, all cawbeens and blackthorn sticks and shawled biddies lamenting their lost sons beside fake turf fires. I redden even yet when I recall the first night. The comic lines were received in respectful silence while the moments of high tragedy provoked storms of mirth. When the curtain had finally fallen, backstage had the air of an operating theatre where the last of the victims of some natural disaster have been swabbed and sewn and trolleyed away, while we actors stood about like walking wounded, squeezing each other’s upper arms in sympathetic solidarity and hearing ourselves swallow.

I wish I could say we were a colourful troupe, all charming scamps and complaisant local beauties, but in truth we were a sad and shabby little lot. We met for rehearsals three times a week in a freezing church hall lent us by a stage-struck parish priest. I had the part of the brawny hero’s younger brother, the sensitive one, who planned to be a teacher and set up a school in the village. I had not known that I could act, until Dora took me in hand and led me forward into the limelight. Dora: my first manifestation of the muse. She was a stocky, compact person with short-cropped wiry hair and spectacles with frames of clear pink plastic. I recall her provocatively meaty smell, which even the strongest perfume could not entirely overcome. She had joined the Priory Players in search of a husband, I suspect, and instead found me. I was seventeen, and although she cannot have been more than thirty she seemed immensely old to me, excitingly so, a sort of inverted mother, carnal and profane. I thought she had hardly noticed me, until one blustery October evening when we had broken early from rehearsals and she invited me to come with her to the pub for a drink. We were the last to leave the hall. She was busy putting on her raincoat and did not look at me directly. There are occasions when one catches memory at its work, scanning the details of the moment and storing them up for a future time. As she struggled with a recalcitrant sleeve, I noted the oleaginous slither of light down the side of her plastic coat, and the paraffin stove that was ticking in a corner of the hall behind her as the expiring flame ran around the turned-down wick with ever more desperate haste, and the door in the vestibule blowing, and through the doorway massed dark trees and a jagged cleft of molten silver in the stormy western sky. At last she got her arm into that sleeve and looked up at me with a wry half-smile, one defensively ironical eyebrow lifted; a woman like Dora learns to anticipate refusals.

We walked in silence together through a livid twilight down to the quays, where tethered trawlers lurched in the swell and a bell on a buoy out in the harbour clanged and clanged. Dora kept her eyes fixed firmly on the way ahead, and I had the worrying suspicion that she was trying not to laugh. In the pub she sat on a high stool with her legs crossed, displaying a glossy knee. She asked for a gin and tonic and allowed me to strike a match with a shaky hand and hold it to the elusive tip of her cigarette. I had never been in a pub before, had never ordered a drink, or lit a lady’s cigarette. As I sought to catch the barman’s eye I was aware of Dora’s candid gaze roaming over my face, my hands, my clothes. When I turned back to her she did not look away, only lifted her chin and gave me a hard, brazen, smiling stare. I cannot remember what we talked about. She smoked her cigarette like a man, pulling on it with violent concentration, her shoulders hunched and eyes narrowed. Her bust and hips were full, the flesh packed tight inside her short grey dress. The smoke and the silver-sweet fumes of the gin worked on my senses. I would have liked to put my hand on her knee; I could almost feel the taut, silky stuff of her stocking under my fingers. She was still looking into my face with that challenging, half-mocking smile, and I grew flustered and kept trying to avoid her eye. She finished her drink with a toss of the head and got down from the stool and put on her coat and said that she had to go. When we were at the door of the pub she paused, allowing me time to… I did not know what. As she turned away I thought I heard her heave a small sharp sigh. We parted on the quayside. I stood and watched her stride off into the darkness, head down and shoulders braced against the cold. The wind from the sea buffeted her, making her wiry curls shake and plastering her coat against her body. The click of her high heels on the pavement was like the sound of something walking up my spine.

After that she went back to ignoring me, until one night I met her coming through from the lavatory at the back of the hall, frowning to herself and carrying a glass of water, and in an access of daring that made my heart set up a panic-stricken knocking I pushed her into the woolly dark of the alcove where the coats were kept and kissed her clumsily and put a hand on her disconcertingly armoured, firm hot breast. She took off her spectacles accommodatingly and her eyes went vague and swam in their sockets like dreamy fish. Her mouth tasted of smoke and toothpaste and something feety that made my blood flare. After a long, swollen moment she did her throaty chuckle and put a hand against my chest and pushed me away, not ungently. She was still holding the glass; she looked at it, and laughed again, and the surface of the water tinily trembled, and a drop of moisture quick as mercury ran zigzag down the misted side.

So began our liaison, if that is not too large a word. It was hardly more than a matter of a few crushed kisses, a tremulous brushing of hands, a flash of whey-white thigh in the gap between two cinema seats, a silent tussle ending in a hissed No/ and the melancholy snap of released elastic. I suppose she could not take me entirely seriously, callow youth that I still was. “I’m a cradle-snatcher,” she would say, shaking her head and heaving an exaggeratedly rueful sigh. I never felt I had her full attention, for she seemed always faintly preoccupied, as if she were listening past me, intent on some hoped-for response from elsewhere. When I held her in my arms I would have the eerie sensation that she was looking past my shoulder at another presence standing behind me, someone there whom only she could see, watching us in anguish, it might be, or helpless fury. She had too an unsettling way of smiling to herself when we were alone together, her lips twitching and eyes slitted, as if she were enjoying a secret, spiteful joke. I think now there must have been something in her past—dashed hopes, betrayal, an absconded fiancé—for which through me she was taking a phantom revenge.

She would tell me nothing about herself. She lived in the north end of town, in a rough hinterland of council houses and Saturday-night fights. Only once did she allow me to walk her home. It was deep winter by now, and there was a heavy frost and the darkness glistened and everything was very still and silent, and our footsteps rang on the iron of the frozen pavements. There was hardly a soul abroad. The few night walkers we met seemed to me the very picture of loneliness, huddled into their coats and mufflers, and I felt an uneasy sense of pride, going along with this mysterious warm provoking woman on my arm. The icy air was like a shower of tiny needles against my face, and I was reminded of the slap my mother had given me all those years before, on the day of my father’s death. When we were near her house Dora made me stop and kissed me brusquely and hurried on alone. In the stillness of the vast cold night I stood and heard the scrape of coins as she fished in her purse for her key, heard the key going into the lock, heard the door open and then close behind her. A wireless set was playing somewhere, dance band melodies, a tinny music, quaint and mournful. Above me a shooting star whizzed through its brief arc and I fancied I heard it, a rush, a swish, a sigh.

It was for Dora, offstage, that I gave my first real performances, filled my first authentic roles. How I posed and preened in the mirror of her sceptical regard. Onstage, too, I saw my talent reflected in her. One night I turned in the midst of my curtain speech—“And which of us, brother, will Ballybog remember?”—and caught the flash of her specs in the wings from where she was watching me narrowly, and under the heat of her sullen envy something opened in me like a hand and I stepped at last into the part as if it were my own skin. Never looked back, after that.

The curtain goes down, the interval bar is invaded, and in the space of the huge silence that settles on the briefly emptied auditorium, thirty years fleet past. It is another first night and, for me, a last. I am at what the critics would call, reaching down again into their capacious bag of clichés, the height of my powers. I have had triumphs from here to Adelaide and back. I have held a thousand audiences in the palm of my hand, ditto a bevy of leading ladies. The headlines I have made!—my favourite is the one they wrote after my first American tour: Alexander Finds New World to Conquer. Inside his suit of armour, however, all was not well with our flawed hero. When the collapse came, I was the only one who was not surprised. For months I had been beset by bouts of crippling self-consciousness. I would involuntarily fix on a bit of myself, a finger, a foot, and gape at it in a kind of horror, paralysed, unable to understand how it made its movements, what force was guiding it. In the street I would catch sight of my reflection in a shop window, skulking along with head down and shoulders up and my elbows pressed into my sides, like a felon bearing a body away, and I would falter, and almost fall, breathless as if from a blow, overwhelmed by the inescapable predicament of being what I was. It was this at last that took me by the throat onstage that night and throttled the words as I was speaking them, this hideous awareness, this insupportable excess of self. Next day there was a great fuss, of course, and much amused speculation as to what it was that had befallen me. Everyone assumed that drink was the cause of my lapse. The incident achieved a brief notoriety. One of the newspapers—in a front-page story, no less—quoted a disgruntled member of the audience as saying that it had been like witnessing a giant statue toppling off its pedestal and smashing into rubble on the stage. I could not decide whether to feel offended or flattered by the comparison. I should have preferred to be likened to Agamemnon, say, or Coriolanus, some such high doomed hero staggering under the weight of his own magnificence.

I see the scene in scaled-down form, everything tiny and maniacally detailed, as in one of those maquettes that stage designers love to play with. There I am stuck, in my Theban general’s costume, mouth open, mute as a fish, with the cast at a standstill around me, appalled and staring, like onlookers at the scene of a gruesome accident. From curtain-up everything had been going steadily awry. The theatre was hot, and in my breastplate and robe I felt as if I were bound in swaddling clothes. Sweat dimmed my sight and I seemed to be delivering my lines through a wetted gag. “Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?” I cried—it is now for me the most poignant line in all drama—and suddenly everything shifted on to another plane and I was at once there and not there. It was like the state that survivors of heart attacks describe, I seemed to be onstage and at the same time looking down on myself from somewhere up in the flies. Nothing in the theatre is as horribly thrilling as the moment when an actor dries. My mind was whirling and flailing like the broken belt of a runaway engine. I had not forgotten my lines—in fact, I could see them clearly before me, as if written on a prompt card—only I could not speak them. While I gagged and sweated, the young fellow playing Mercury, who in the guise of Amphitryon’s servant Sosia was supposed to be cruelly taunting me on the loss of my identity, stood transfixed behind plywood crenellations, looking down at me with terrified eyes in which I am convinced I could see myself doubly reflected, two tiny, bulbous Amphitryons, both struck speechless. Before me, in the wings, my stage-wife Alcmene was trying to prompt me, reading from the text and frantically mouthing my lines. She was a pretty girl, preposterously young; since the beginning of rehearsals we had been engaged behind the scenes in an unconvinced dalliance, and now as she writhed there in the looming half-darkness, her mouth working mutely like the valve of an undersea creature, I felt embarrassed less for myself than for her, this child who that very afternoon had lain in my arms weeping sham tears of ecstasy, and I wanted to cross the stage quickly and put a restraining finger tenderly to her lips and tell her that it was all right, that it was all all right. At last, seeing in my face, I suppose, something of what I was thinking, she let the text fall to her side and stood and looked at me with a mixture of unconcealable pity, impatience and contempt. The moment was so grotesquely apt to the point we had arrived at in our so-called love affair—both silent, lost for words, confronting each other in dumb hopelessness—that despite my distress I almost laughed. Instead, with an effort, and with more fondness than I had managed to show to her even in the intensest toils of passion, I nodded, the barest nod, in apology and rueful gratitude, and looked away. Meanwhile, behind me in the auditorium the atmosphere was pinging like a violin string screwed to snapping point. There was much coughing. Someone tittered. I glimpsed Lydia’s stricken white face looking up at me from the stalls, and I remember thinking, Thank God Cass is not here. I turned about and with funereal tread, seeming to wade into the very boards of the stage, made a grave, unsteady exit, comically creaking and clanking in my armour. Already the curtain was coming down, I could feel it descending above my head, ponderous and solid as a stone portcullis. From the audience there were jeers now, and a scattering of half-heartedly sympathetic applause. In the dimness backstage I had a sense of figures running to and fro. One of the actors behind me spoke my name in a furious stage whisper. With a yard or two still to go I lost my nerve entirely and made a sort of run for it and practically fell into the wings, while the gods’ vast dark laughter shook the scenery around me.

I should have had another Dora, to mock me out of my malady of selfness. She would have grasped my neck in a wrestler’s hold—she could be rough, could Dora—and rubbed her rubbery breasts against my back and laughed, showing teeth and gums and epiglottis with its quivering pink polyp, and I would have been cured. As it was, I had to flee, of course. How could I show my face in public, to my public, after the mask had so spectacularly slipped? So I ran away, not far, and hid my head here in shame.

Before I fled I did seek help in discovering what might be the exact nature of my malady, though more out of curiosity, I think, than any hope of a cure. In a drinking club late one gin-soaked night I met a fellow thesp who some years previously had suffered a collapse similar to mine. He was far gone in drink by now, and I had to spend a grisly hour listening to him pour out his tale of woe, with many slurs and wearisome repetitions. Then all at once he sobered up, in that disconcerting way that unhappy drunks sometimes manage to do, and said that I must see his man—that was how he put it, in a ringing, cut-glass voice that silenced the surrounding tables, “Cleave, you must see my man!”—and wrote down on the back of a cardboard beer mat the address of a therapist who, he assured me, tapping a finger to the side of his nose, was the very soul of discretion. I forgot all about it, until a week or two later I found the beer mat in my pocket, and looked up the telephone number, and found myself one glassy April evening at the unmarked door of a nondescript red-brick house in a leafy suburb, feeling inexplicably nervous, my heart racing and palms wet, as if I were about to go onstage in the most difficult part I had ever played, which was the case, I suppose, since the part I must play was myself, and I had no lines learned.

The therapist, whose name was Lewis, or Louis—I never did discover whether it was a first or surname—was an oldish young man with very beautiful, dark-brown, haunted eyes. He gave me an undertaker’s handshake and led me up carpeted stairs that made me think of my mother’s lodging house, and deposited me in a cramped and faintly smelly waiting room looking through net curtains down into a yard with dustbins and a cat. A quarter of an hour passed. The house around me had a funereal, tensely waiting atmosphere, as if in certain expectation of frightful occurrences about to take place. Not a sound stirred the silence. I imagined Lewis locked in terrible, wordless commune with some hapless wretch far sicker than I was, and I saw myself a fraud, and was tempted to run away. Presently he came and fetched me to his consulting room on the first floor—gunmetal desk, two armchairs, porridge-coloured carpet—and I launched at once into a gabbling and faintly hysterical confession of how fraudulent I felt. He held up a fine, hairless hand and smiled, closing his eyes briefly, and shook his head. I suppose it was the kind of thing he heard from all first-timers. I could not let it go, however, and said I really did not know why I was there, and was startled when he agreed and said that he did not know, either. I had not realised he was being humorous. “Why don’t you try to tell me,” he said gently, “and then maybe we’ll both know.” My wariness deepened, for I suspected he knew very well who I was, and what the matter was, for it was only a week or two since my disgrace had been splashed, liked vomit, all over the newspapers. I supposed it might be bad manners on his part, professionally speaking—indeed, bad ethics—to admit to any knowledge gathered outside this room. Anyway, so far as our hour together was concerned there was no outside. The therapist’s room, where even the silence is different, is a world to itself. Certainly, my experiences with Cass were of no help to me here. Indeed, Cass did not enter my thoughts at all. One’s troubles are always unique.

We sat in the armchairs, facing each other, with the desk to one side of us like a watchful referee. I have only the haziest recollection of what things I told him. There were frequent, awkward silences. At one point, to my annoyance, though not unexpectedly, tears came into my eyes. He contributed little, in the way of words, though his attendance on mine had a marked if enigmatic eloquence. Two things that he said I do clearly remember. I had complained that I was not happy, and hastened to laugh and say I supposed he was about to ask me why I thought I should be, but to my surprise he shook his head, and turned aside and looked out through the bay window behind the desk into the boughs of the chestnut tree outside that was coming into leaf, and said that no, on the contrary, he believed that joy is the natural state of human beings. He went on to refine this statement, acknowledging that of course we do not always know what is natural or best for us, but I was hardly listening, for the notion was so amazing to me it left me speechless, literally, and the session ended early that day.

The other thing I remember him saying is that I seemed to him to be overwhelmed—that was the word he used. I thought this fanciful, even a touch melodramatic, and said so. He persisted, however, by which I mean that he did not argue or protest, but only sat in silence, watching me with an alert, calm gaze, and after a moment’s consideration I had to agree with him, and said, yes, overwhelmed, that was exactly how I felt. “But what is it that is overwhelming me?” I said, more in impatience than entreaty. “That is what I want to know.” Needless to say, he did not offer an answer. I did not go to him again after that, not because I was disappointed, or angry that he had not been able to help me, but simply because there seemed nothing more for me to say to him. I suspect he felt this too, for when I was leaving that day he shook my hand with a warmer pressure than usual, and his smile was weighed with melancholy sadness; it was the smile of a father seeing his troubled son step out into the world to fend for himself. I think of him with nostalgia, almost with a sense of loss. Perhaps he did help me, without my realising it. The silence in that room of his was like a balm. I wrote to Cass and told her about him. It was a kind of confession, ill-masked with facetious humour; a kind of apology, too, as I took my place shamefacedly in the lower ranks of the high consistory of which she was an adept of long standing. She did not reply. I had signed myself The Overwhelmed.

What am I to do about this girl, this Lily? She preys on my mind, which has, I know, too little to occupy it. I feel like an impotent satrap presented by his subjects with yet another superfluous concubine. Her presence makes the house seem impossibly overcrowded. She has upset the balance of things. My phantom woman and her more phantasmal child were quite enough without this all too corporeal girl to dog my doings. I edge around her presence as though it might explode in my face at any moment. On her first full day in my employ she scrubbed half the kitchen floor, took everything out of the refrigerator and put it all back again, and did something to the downstairs lavatory so that even still it will not flush properly. After these labours her enthusiasm for housework waned. I could get rid of her, of course, could tell Quirke I do not need her, that I can care for the house myself, but something prevents me. Is it that I have been unconsciously pining for company? Not that Lily could be said to be companionable, exactly. She sulks about the place as if she were under house arrest. Why does she stay, if she is so discontent? I pay her a pittance, hardly more than pocket money, so there is no profit in it for her, or for Quirke, either. And anyway, why did he foist her on me in the first place? Perhaps he feels guilty for the years of neglect of the house, although I suspect guilt is not one of the more burdensome affects under which Quirke chafes. She stays late into the evening, asprawl in an armchair in the parlour reading glossy magazines, or brooding chin on fist beside a window, following with inexpectant gaze the few passers-by in the square. It is twilight by the time Quirke comes to fetch her, wobbling to the door on his bike and looming in the hallway in his bicycle clips, uneasy and humble-seeming as a poor relation. I note the heavy hand he lays on her shoulder and the way she tries half-heartedly to squirm out from under his grasp. I do not know where it is they go to at close of day; they trail off aimlessly together into the night, seemingly without fixed direction. I watch the fitful glow of the rear light of Quirke’s bicycle dwindling in the darkness. What sort of life do they lead away from here? When I enquired one day about her mother, Lily’s expression went blank. “Dead,” she said flatly, and turned away.

She is constantly bored; boredom is her mode, her medium. She gives herself up to inaction almost sensuously. She is a voluptuary of indolence. In the midst of performing some common task—sweeping the floor, polishing a windowpane—she will droop gradually to a stop, her arms falling limp, her cheek languishing toward her shoulder, her lips gone slack and swollen. At those moments of stillness and self-forgetting she takes on an unearthly aura, exudes a kind of negative radiance, a dark light. She reminds me of Cass, naturally; in every daughter I see my own. They could not be more different, in almost all ways, this dull slattern and my driven girl, and yet there is something essential that is common to them both. What can it be? There is the same deadened, disenchanted glance, the same way of slowly blinking, and focusing with a frowning effort, that Cass at Lily’s age would turn on me when I tried to cajole or hector her out of one of her melancholy moods. But there must be more than that, there must be something deeper than a look, that makes me tolerate this invasion of my solitude.

I cannot think how Lily fills her day. I find myself straining to monitor her movements. I will stop and stand listening for her, not breathing, in a sort of anxious expectancy, in the same way that in the early days here I would wait for my phantoms to appear. She will be silent for hours, not a sound, and then suddenly, just when I have relaxed my vigilance, there will be a ripping blare of music from her transistor radio—it goes everywhere with her, like a prosthesis—or a bedroom door will bang open and shut, followed by the clatter of her heels on the stairs, like the sound of a window cleaner falling down his ladder. I will come upon her practising her dance steps, shaking and shuffling to the tinny beat in her earphones and singing along to the melody in a bat-squeak nasal falsetto. When she sees me observing her she will snatch off the earphones and turn aside, directing a surly backward glance in the region of my knees, as though I had taken unfair advantage of her. She pokes about the house as I used to do when I was a child here. She has been in the garret—I trust she did not meet my Dad—and in my room, too, I suspect. What secrets does she think she will uncover? There are no more bottled frogs for her to find. My stash of pornography has gone too, thrown out one day in a sudden attack of self-disgust—I think I have at last cured myself of sex; certainly the symptoms are clearing up nicely.

She gets up to things. She started a scrapbook in one of my mother’s old cloth-bound account books, sticking photographs of her pop idols over the columns of pencilled figures with paste that she made herself from flour and water; afterwards I had to call in Quirke to unblock the kitchen sink. I think he hit her for that, for next day she had an angry blue and yellow bruise on her cheekbone. I do not know if I should speak to him about this. Certainly I shall not tell tales on her again. She lay low for a day or two, then yesterday a wall-shaking crash, like that of a heavy piece of furniture falling over, made me leap out of my chair and hare off upstairs three steps at a time, expecting disaster. I found her standing in the middle of my mother’s room with her hands behind her back, grinding the toe of her sandal into an imaginary hole in the linoleum. “What noise?” she said, giving me a look of offended innocence. And indeed, I could find nothing amiss in the room, although there was a strong whiff of stale wood dust, and the sunlight at the window was aswirl with motes. If things go on like this she will have the place down about our ears.

She seems to eat nothing but potato crisps and chocolate bars. The latter come in a baffling variety of flavours and fillings. I find discarded wrappers all over the house, torn and twisted like pieces of shrapnel, and read them, marvelling at the confectioners’ inventiveness. The chocolate seems to be not chocolate at all, but a blend of unpronounceable multisyllabic chemicals. How did I miss all this, the jungly music, the gaudy, fake food, the clumpy shoes and skimpy, acid-coloured skirts, the hairstyles, the vampire make-up, the livid lipsticks and nail polish shiny and thick as clotted blood? Was Cass never young like this? I cannot recall her adolescence. She must have gone straight from stormy childhood to being the mysterious young woman she is now, with nothing in between. I have suppressed the second act, with its cast of consultants and therapists and mind-menders, charlatans all, in my not unbiased opinion. She passed through their ministrations like a sleepwalker pacing the roof’s leads and guttering, beyond the urgent reaching out of hands from attic windows to restrain her. Despite everything, despite all my suspicions, disappointment, fury, even—why could she not be normal? —I always secretly admired her intensity, her drivenness, the unrelenting using up of the store of herself. There were moments onstage, sadly rare, when I felt in my own nerves something of her irresistible repeated compulsion to risk the self’s stability.

As the days progress I have noted a modulation in the jaded indifference with which Lily at first regarded me. She has even initiated a rudimentary attempt at what in other circumstances might be called communication. That is, she asks short questions in expectation of long answers. What can I tell her? I have not mastered the language of Lilyland. It seems she looked me up in a reference book in the town library. I am impressed; a girl of Lily’s tastes and attitudes does not venture lightly among the stacks.

When she confessed to these researches she blushed—quite a thing, to see Lily blush—and then was furious with herself, and frowned fiercely and bit her lip, and gave her hair a hard toss, as if she were giving herself a slap. She marvels at the number of productions I have been in; I tell her I am very old, and that I started young, which bit of winsome bathos makes her curl her lip. She asked if the awards that Who’s Who says I have garnered had a cash element, and was disappointed when I told her sadly no, only useless statuettes. Nevertheless, she has obviously begun to take me for a person of at least some consequence. Her interest in the possibility of knowing someone famous is tempered by her scepticism that anyone famous would choose to come to this dump, which is how she invariably refers to her birthplace, and mine. I asked if she has ever been to the theatre and she narrowed her eyes defensively.

“I go to the pictures,” she said.

“So do I, Lily,” I said, “so do I.”

Thrillers she likes, and horror movies. What about romances? I asked, and she snorted and mimed sticking two fingers down her throat. She is a bloodthirsty child. She recounted in yawn-inducing detail the plot of her favourite film, an action picture called Bloodline. Although I probably saw it, refracted through tears, on one of my clandestine afternoons in the cinema—I must have seen every feature shown in those three or four months—I could not follow her account of it, for the story was as populously complicated as a Jacobean tragedy, though with a far higher quotient of corpses. In the end the heroine drowns.

Lily is sorely disappointed, I can see, that I have not starred in a picture. I tell her of my triumphs and travels, my Hamlet at Elsinore, my Macbeth in Bucharest, my notorious Oedipus at Sagesta—oh, yes, I could have been an international star, had I not been at heart afraid of the big world beyond these safe shores—but what is any of that to her compared with a lead role on the silver screen? I demonstrate the lurch I devised for my Richard the Third at Stratford—Ontario, that is—of which I used to be very proud, though she thinks it comic; she says I look more like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I suspect she finds me generally hilarious, my poses, my actor’s burr, all my little tics and twitches, too funny for laughter. I catch her watching me, moon-eyed with expectation, waiting for me to perform some wonderful new foolishness. Cass used to look at me like that when she was little. Perhaps I should have gone in more for comedy. I might have been a—

Well. I have made a momentous discovery. I hardly know what to think of it, or what to do about it. I should be angry but I am not, although I confess I do feel something of a fool. It might have been ages before I found out had I not decided on a whim to follow Quirke when I spotted him in the town today. I have always been a secret stalker. I mean I follow people, pick them out at random in the street and shadow them, or used to, anyway, before I became what the newspapers, were they still to be interested in me, would call a recluse. It is a harmless vice, and easy to entertain—human beings have scant sense of themselves as objects of speculation in the world outside their heads, and will rarely notice a stranger’s interest in them. I am not sure what it is I hope to find, peering hungrily like this into other lives. I used to tell myself that I was gathering material—a walk, a stance, a way of carrying a newspaper or putting on a hat—some bit of real-life business I could transfer raw on to the stage to flesh out and lend a touch of verisimilitude to whatever character I happened to be playing at the time. But that is not it, not really, or not entirely. And besides, there is no such thing as verisimilitude. Do not misunderstand me, I am no Peeping Tom, hunched over in a hot sweat with throbbing eye glued to keyhole. It is not that kind of gratification I am after.

When Lydia and I were first married we lived in a cavernous third-floor flat in a crumbling Georgian terrace, with a bathroom up a short flight of stairs, through the small high window of which, if I craned, I could see down into the bedroom of a flat in the house next door, where often of a morning, when the weather was clement, I would glimpse a naked girl getting herself ready for her day. Through a whole spring and summer I watched for her there each morning, one knee pressed tremblingly on the lavatory seat and my tortoise neck straining; I might have been an Attic shepherd and she a nymph at her toilet. She was not particularly pretty: red-haired, I remember, rather thick in the waist, and with an unhealthy pallor. Yet she fascinated me. She was not aware of being spied on, and so she was—what shall I say?—free. I had never before witnessed such purity of gesture. All her actions—brushing her hair, pulling on her pants, fastening a clasp behind her back—had an economy that was beyond mere physical adroitness. This was a kind of art, at once primitive and highly developed. Nothing was wasted, not the lift of a hand, the turn of a shoulder; nothing was for show. Without knowing, in perfect self-absorption, she achieved at the start of each day there in her mean room an apotheosis of grace and suavity. The unadorned grave beauty of her movements was, it pained the performer in me to acknowledge, inimitable: even if I spent a lifetime in rehearsal I could not hope to aspire to the thoughtless elegance of this girl’s most trivial gesture. Of course, all was dependent precisely on there being no thought attached to what she was doing, no awareness. One glimpse of my eager eye at the bathroom window, watching her, and she would have scrambled to hide her nakedness with all the grace of a collapsing deck chair or, worse, would have slipped into the travesty of self-conscious display. Innocent of being watched, she was naked; aware of my eye on her, she would have turned into a nude. What was most intensely striking, I think, was her lack of expression. Her face was an utter blank, an almost featureless mask, such that if I had encountered her in the street—which I am sure I must have, often—I would not have recognised her.

It is this forgetfulness, this loss of crearurely attendance, that I find fascinating. In watching someone who is unaware of being watched one glimpses a state of being that is beyond, or behind, what we think of as the human; it is to behold, however ungrasp-ably, the unmasked self itself. The ones I fixed on to trail about the streets were never the freaks, the cripples or dwarves, the amputees, the unfortunates with limps or squints or port-wine stains; or if I did choose some such afflicted wretch, it was not his affliction that drew me but what in him was utterly commonplace and drab. In my table of types, beauty does not make eligible nor ugliness disqualify. Indeed, ugliness and beauty are not categories that apply here—my questing gaze makes no aesthetic measurements. I am a specialist, with a specialist’s dispassion, like a surgeon, say, to whose diagnostic eye a girl’s budding breasts or an old man’s sagging paps are objects of equal interest, equal indifference. Nor would I bother with the blind, as might be expected of a stalker as timid as I am, as leery of notice and challenge. Despite his blank or downcast gaze, the blind man is always more alert than the sighted one—more watchful, even, one might say—unable for an instant to relax his awareness of the self as it negotiates its fastidious way through this menacing, many-angled world.

Among my favourite quarries were the derelicts, the tramps and reeling winos, of whom we have always boasted a thriving community. I knew them all, the fat fellow in the knitted tricolour cap, the one with the look of an anguished ascetic whose left hand was a permanently outstretched begging bowl, the sauntering flâneurs with crusted bare feet, the raging tinker-women, the drunkards spouting obscenities or scraps of Latin verse. This is true theatre of the streets, and they its strolling players. What fascinated me was the distance between what they were now and what they must once have been. I tried to imagine them as babes in arms, or toddling about the floor of some loud tenement or sequestered cottage, watched over by fond eyes, borne up by loving hands. For they had to have been young once, in a past that must seem to them now as far off and impossibly radiant as the dawn of the world.

Apart from their intrinsic interest as a species, I favoured outcasts because, being outcasts, they were not liable suddenly to elude me by disappearing into a smart boutique, or turning in at a suburban garden gate, frowningly fishing for a key. We had the freedom of the streets, they and I, and for hours I would follow after them—an actor, especially in his early years, has a lot of time on his hands—along the dreamy pavements, through the faintly sinister orderliness of public parks, as the afternoons grew loud with the clamour of paroled schoolchildren, and the broad strips of sky above us turned mussel-shell blue, and the evening traffic started up, scurrying in herds through the dusk, hunched and bleating. Along with the peculiar pleasure I derive from this furtive hobby goes a certain melancholy, due to what I think of as the Uncertainty Principle. You see, as long as I only watch them without their knowing, I am in some sense intimately in touch with them, they are in some sense mine, whereas if they were to become aware of me dogging their steps, that which in them is of interest to me—their lack of awareness, their freedom from self-consciousness, their wonderful, vacant ease—would instantly vanish. I may observe, but not touch.

One day one of them confronted me. It was a shock. He was a drinker, a rough, vigorous fellow of about my own age, with a bristling rufous jaw and the stricken eyes of a saint in quest of martyrdom. It was a raw day in March, but I stuck with him. He favoured the quays, I do not know why, for there was a cutting wind from the river. I skulked behind him with my collar turned up, while he went along at a stumbling swagger, his coat-tails billowing and his filthy shirt collar open—do they somehow develop an immunity to the cold? In a pocket of his coat was stowed a large fat bottle, wrapped in a brown-paper bag, the neck exposed. At every dozen paces or so he would stop and with a dramatic sweep bring out the bottle, still in its bag, and take a long slug, rocking back on his heels, his throat working in coital spasms as he swallowed. These mighty quaffings had no discernible effect on him, except perhaps to lend a momentary faltering jerkiness to his stride. We had been promenading like this for a good half-hour, down one side of the quays and up the other—he seemed to have his beat marked out in his head—and I was ready to abandon him, for it was apparent he was going nowhere, when at one of the bridges he swerved aside on to the footway, and when I hastened to catch up I found myself abruptly face to face with him. He had turned back and stopped, and was standing with a steadying hand pressed on the parapet, head lifted and mouth sternly set, regarding me with a challenging glare. I experienced a thrill of alarm—I felt like a schoolboy surprised in a prank—and looked about hurriedly for a way of escape. Yet although the path was wide, and I could easily have sidestepped him, I did not. He continued to look at me out of those imperiously questioning, agonised eyes. I do not know what he expected of me. I was scandalised, it is the only word, to be thus accosted by a quarry, yet partly I was excited, too, and partly—odd though the word will seem—flattered, as one would be flattered to win the attention of some fierce creature of the wild. A blast of wind made the flap of his coat crack like a flag and he gave himself a shuddery shake. I dithered. Passers-by were glancing at us with curiosity and disapproval, suspecting the nature of the commerce they imagined we were engaged in. I reached fumblingly into my pocket and found a banknote and offered it to him. He looked at the money with surprise and even, I thought, a touch of umbrage. I persisted, and even went so far as to press the note into his hot and mottled hand. His demeanour now turned positively patronising; he had the large, half-smiling, half-surprised look of an opponent into whose power I had clumsily allowed myself to fall. I might have spoken, but what would I have said? I stepped past him quickly and hurried on, across the bridge, without daring to look back. I thought I heard him say something, call out something, but still I did not turn. My heart was racing. On the other side of the bridge I slowed my steps. I was badly shaken, I can tell you. Despite the fellow’s fierce appearance there had been something cloyingly intimate in the encounter, something from which my mind’s eye insisted on averting its gaze. Rules had been broken, a barrier had been transgressed, an interdiction breached. I had been forced to experience a human moment, and now I was confused, and did not know what to think. Strange bright fragments of lost possibilities flashed about in my mind. I regretted not having asked the fellow’s name. I regretted not telling him mine. I wondered, with a pang that startled me, if I would ever come across him again. But what did I imagine I would do, if he were to step out boldly into my path on some other bridge, on some other day, and challenge me?

Anyway, as I was saying, today in town I was in a telephone box, calling Lydia, when I spotted Quirke coming out of the solicitor’s office where he works—although the word is, I am sure, overly strong for what he does in the way of earning a living. He was carrying a clutch of manila envelopes under his arm, and wore an aspect of sullen duty. “There’s Quirke,” I said into the phone, in one of my lapses into the inconsequential that Lydia finds so irritating. It was the first time we had talked since I disconnected the telephone in the house, and it felt strange. There was the distance between us—she might have been speaking from the dark side of the moon—yet more marked was the unshakeable sensation I had that it was not really she on the line, but a recording, or even a mechanically generated imitation of her voice. Have I sunk so far into myself that the living should sound like automata? The booth smelled strongly of urine and crushed cigarette ends, and the sun was hot on the glass. I had telephoned to enquire as to Cass’s whereabouts. Although Cass is what I must think of as a grown woman—she is twenty-two, or is it twenty-three? the calendar is a little indistinct, from where I am positioned at present—part of my peace of mind depends on always knowing at least approximately where she is. My peace of mind, that’s a good one. The last I knew of her she was doing research of an unspecified and no doubt arcane—not to say, hare-brained—nature in some unpronounceable declivity of the Low Countries; now, it seems, she is in Italy. “I had a peculiar call from her,” Lydia was saying, as if a call from Cass could be anything other than peculiar. I asked if she was all right. It was what we used to ask each other in the old days, with an unstillable, apprehensive tremor: Is she all right? Lydia’s brief silence on the line was the equivalent of a shrug. For a moment we said nothing, then I began to describe Quirke’s odd, small-footed lope—how daintily he moves, for one so large and top-heavy—and Lydia became angry, and her voice thickened.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she almost wailed.

“Doing what?” I asked, and immediately, without another word, she hung up. I put in more coins and began to dial the number again, but stopped; what more was there to say?—what had there been to say in the first place?

Quirke had not seen me there behind the grimed glass of the booth, crouched over the receiver in the attitude of a man nursing a toothache, and I decided to follow him. But I should not say that I decided. I never do set out wholly consciously to stalk anyone. Rather, I will find myself already on the way, absent-mindedly, as it were, half thinking of something else, yet with my… my victim, I was about to say, firmly fixed in view. It was a morning of warm wind and heavy sunlight. Quirke was going along on the shady side of the street and almost at once I nearly lost him, when he ducked into a post office, but there was no mistaking that broad stooped back and its following down-at-heel grey shoe and grubby white sock. I dawdled at the window of a chemist’s shop opposite, waiting for him. How hard it is, as I the stalker know from long experience, to concentrate on a reflection in a shop window without letting one’s attention drift to the wares on offer, however less solid they may seem than the fleeting, burnished world mirrored on the surface of the glass behind which they stand in uneasy display. Distracted by posters of bathing beauties advertising sun creams, and in particular a coy arrangement of gleaming steel pincers designed, I believe, for castrating calves, I almost missed Quirke’s reappearance. Empty-handed now, he bustled off with accelerated step and turned a corner on to the quays. I hurried across the road, making a delivery boy on a bike swerve and swear, but when I rounded the corner there was no sign of Quirke. I stood and surveyed the scene with a narrowed eye, searching for a sign of him among wheeling gulls, those three rusted trawlers, a bronze statue pointing with vague urgency out to sea. When a stalkee vanishes like this the uncanniness of ordinary things is intensified; a telltale gap opens in the world, like the chink of blue evening sky the Chinaman in the fable spots between the magic city and the hill on which it is supposed to be standing. Then I noticed the pub, wedged into a corner between a fish shop and the gate of a motor car repair yard.

It was an old-style premises, the nicotine-brown varnish on the door and window sills combed and whorled to give the illusion of wood grain, and the window painted inside an opaque sepia shade to a filigreed six inches of the top. The place had somehow the mark of Quirke about it. I went in, stumbling on the worn threshold. The place was empty, the bar untended. In an ashtray on the counter a forgotten cigarette was smoking itself in surreptitious haste, sending up a quick straight plume of blue smoke. On a shelf an old-fashioned wireless muttered. Behind the usual pub smells there was a mingled whiff of machine oil and brine from the next-door premises on either side. I heard from somewhere in the shadowed rear a lavatory flushing and a rickety door opening with a scrape, and Quirke came shambling forward, hitching up the waistband of his trousers and running a quick finger down the flies. I turned aside hastily, but I need not have bothered, for he did not even glance at me, but walked straight past and out the door with a self-forgetting look, squinting into the light.

I am still wondering which of the world’s secret administrators it was who left that cigarette burning on the bar.

In the minute that I had been in the pub the morning had clouded over. A great grey bank of cumulus fringed in silver hung above the sea, moving landward with menacing intent. Quirke had crossed to the wooden quay and was walking along with what seemed a blundering step, like that of a man purblinded by tears. Or was he tipsy, I wondered? Surely he had not been long enough in the pub to drink himself drunk. Yet as I followed along behind him I could not rid myself of the notion that he was somehow incapacitated, in some great distress. All at once I was seized on violently by the memory of a dream that I dreamed one recent night, and that I had forgotten, until now. In the dream I was a torturer, a professional of long experience, skilled in the art of pain, whom people came to—tyrants, spy-catchers, brigand chiefs—to hire my unique services, when their own efforts and those of their most enthusiastic henchmen had all failed. My current victim was a man of great presence, of great resolve and assurance, a burly, bearded fellow, the kind of high-toned hero I used to be cast to play in the latter years of my career, when I was judged to have attained a grizzled majesty of bearing. I do not know who he was supposed to be, nor did I know him in the dream; seemingly it was a condition of my professionalism not to know the identity or the supposed crimes of those on whom I was called to work my persuasive art. The details of my methods were vague; I employed no tools, no tongs or prods or burning-irons, but was myself the implement of torture. I would grasp my victim in some special way and crush him slowly until his bones buckled and his internal organs collapsed. I was irresistible, not to be withstood; all succumbed, sooner or later, under my terrible ministrations. All, that is, except this bearded hero, who was defeating me simply by not paying me sufficient attention, by not acknowledging me. Oh, he was in agony, all right, I was inflicting the most terrible torments on him, masterpieces of pain that made him writhe and shudder and grind his teeth until they creaked, but it was as if his sufferings were his own, were generated out of himself, and that it was himself and not I that he must resist, his own will and vigour and unrelenting force. I might not have been part of the process at all. I could feel the heat of his flesh, could smell the fetor of his anguish. He strained away from me, lifting his face to the smoke-blackened ceiling of the dungeon, where a fitful light flickered; he cried out, he whimpered; sweat dripped from his beard, his eyeballs bled. Never had the person I was in the dream experienced so strongly the erotic intimacy that binds the torturer to his victim, yet never had I been so thoroughly shut out from my subject’s pain. I was not there—simply, for him I was not there, and so, despite the intensity, despite the passion, one might say, of my presence in the midst of his agony, somehow I was absent for myself as well, absent, that is to say, from myself.

Caught up as I was in trying to recapture this dream, in all its cruelty and mysterious splendour, I almost lost Quirke a second time, when just as we were coming to the edge of town he veered off and plunged down a laneway. The lane was narrow, between high whitewashed walls with greenery and clumps of buddleia sprouting along their tops. I knew where it led. I allowed him to get a good way on, so that if he turned and I had nowhere to hide myself he still might not know me, at such a distance. He had quickened his pace, and kept glancing at the sky, which was growing steadily more threatening. A dog sitting at a back-garden gate barked at him and he made an unsuccessful kick at it. The lane dipped and turned and came to a sort of bower, with a pair of leaning beeches and a lichen-spattered horse trough and an old-fashioned green water pump, at which Quirke paused and worked the handle and bent over the trough and cupped the water in his hand and drank. I stopped, too, and watched him, and heard the plash of the water falling on the stone side of the trough, and the murmurous rustling of a breeze in the trees above us. I did not care now that he might see me; even if he had turned and recognised me I think it would not have made any difference, we would have gone on as before, him leading and me following after him with unflagging eagerness, though for what, or with what cause, I could not tell. Still he did not look back, and after a moment of silent pondering, leaning there in the greenish gloom under the trees, he was off again. I went forward and stood where he had stood, and stooped where he had stooped, and worked the handle of the pump and cupped my hands and caught the water and drank deep of that uncanny element that tasted of steel and earth. Above me the trees conferred among themselves in fateful whispers. I might have been an itinerant priest stopping at a sacred grove. Abruptly then it began to rain, I heard the swish of it behind me and turned in time to see it coming fast along the lane like a blown curtain, then it was against my face, a vehement chill glassy drenching. Quirke broke into a canter, scrabbling to turn up the collar of his jacket. I heard him curse. I hastened after him. I did not mind the wetting; there is always something exultant about a cloudburst. Big drops batted the beech leaves and danced on the road. There was a crackling in the air, and a moment later came the thunderclap, like something being hugely crumpled. Now Quirke, head down, his sparse hair flattened to his skull, was fairly sprinting up the last length of the lane, high-stepping among the forming puddles like a big, awkward bird. We came out into the square. I was no more than a dozen paces behind Quirke now. He went along close under the convent wall, clutching the lapels of his jacket closed at his throat. He stopped at the house, and opened the door with a key, slipped into the hall, and was gone.

I was not surprised. From the start I think I had known where our destination lay. It seemed the most natural thing that he should have led me home. I stood shivering in the wet, uncertain of what would come next. The rain was pelting the cherry trees; I thought how patient they were, how valiant. For an instant I had a vision of a world thrashing without complaint in unmitigable agony; I bowed my head; the rain beat on my back. Then gradually there arose behind me the muffled sound of hoofs, and I looked up to see a young boy on a little black-and-white horse trotting bareback toward me across the square. At first I could hardly make out horse and rider, so thick was the web of rain between them and me. It might have been a faun, or centaur. But no, it was a boy, on a little horse. The boy was dressed in a dirty jersey and short pants, with no shoes or socks. His mount was a tired poor creature with a bowed back and distended belly; as it clopped toward me it rolled a cautiously measuring eye sideways in my direction. Despite the downpour the boy seemed hardly to be wet at all, as if he were protected within an invisible shell of glass. When they were almost level with me the boy hauled on the length of rope that was the reins and the animal slowed to a wavering walk. I wanted to speak but somehow felt that I should not, and anyway I could not think what I might say. The boy smiled at me, or perhaps it was a grimace, expressing what, I could not guess. He had a pinched pale face and red hair. I noticed his belt, an old-fashioned one such as I used to wear myself when I was his age, made of red-and-white striped elastic with a silver metal buckle in the shape of a snake. I thought he would say something but he did not, only went on smiling, or grimacing, and then clicked his tongue and heeled the horse’s flanks and they went on again, into the lane whence I had come. I followed. The rain was stopping. I could smell the horse’s smell, like the smell of wetted sacking. Hard by the side gate into the garden of the house they halted, and the boy turned and looked back at me, with a calm, impassive gaze, bracing a hand behind him on the horse’s spine. What passed between us there, what wordless intimation? I was hungry for a sign. After a moment the boy faced forward again and gave the bridle rope a tug, and the little horse started up, as if by clockwork, and off they went, down the lane’s incline, and presently were gone from sight. I shall not forget them, that boy, and his pied nag, cantering there, in the summer rain.

I examined the gate. It is what I think used to be called a postern, a wooden affair, very old now, dark and rotted to crumbling stumps at top and bottom, set into the whitewashed wall on two big rusted rings and held fast with a rusted bolt. Often as a boy I would enter by this gate when coming home from school. I tried the bolt. At first the flange refused to lift, but I persisted and in the end the cylinder, thick as my thumb, turned in its coils with a shriek. Behind the gate was a mass of overgrown creeper and old brambles, and I had to push hard to make a gap wide enough to squeeze through. The rain had fully stopped now and a shamefaced sun was managing to shine. I shoved the gate to behind me and stood a moment in survey. The garden was grown to shoulder-height in places. The rose trees hung in dripping tangles, and clumps of scutch grass steamed; there were jewelled dock leaves big as shovels. The wet had brought the snails out, they were in the grass and on the briars, swaying on the tall thorned fronds. I set off toward the house, the untidy back of which hung out in seeming despair over this scene of vegetable riot. Nettles stung me, cobwebs strung with pearls of moisture draped themselves across my face. All of childhood was in the high sharp stink of rained-on weeds. The sun was gathering strength, my shirt clung wetly warm to my back. I felt like a hero out of some old saga, come at last, at the end of his quest, unhelmed, travel-worn and weary, to the perilous glade. The house out of blank unrecog-nising eyes watched me approach, giving no sign of life. I came into the yard. Rusted bits of kitchen things were strewn about, a washboard and mangle, an old refrigerator with its eerily white innards on show, a pan to the bottom of which was welded a charred lump of something from an immemorial fry-up. On all this I looked with the eyes of an expectant stranger, as if I had seen none of it before.

Now, through the top part of the barred basement window, I caught sight of Quirke, or of his head at least, turned away from me, in quarter-profile. It was an uncanny sight, that big round head resting there behind bars at ground level, as though he were interred up to the neck in the floor of a cage. At first I could not make out what it was he was up to. He would lean his head forward briefly and then straighten again, and would seem to speak in some steady, unemphatic way, as if he were delivering a lecture, or committing lines to memory. Then I stepped forward for a better look and saw that he was sitting at table, with a plate of food before him, on which with knife and fork he was methodically working. The sun was burning the back of my neck now, and my skin smarted from thorns and nettle stings, and the rich deep gloom in which Quirke sat seemed wonderfully cool and inviting. I crossed to the back door. It had the look of a square-shouldered sentry standing in his box, tall and narrow, with a many-layered impasto of black paint and two little panes of meshed glass set high up that seemed to glare out with suspicion and menace. I tried the knob, and at once the door opened before me, smoothly silent, with accommodating ease. Cautiously I crossed the threshold, eager and apprehensive as Lord Bluebeard’s wife. At once, as if of its own volition, the door with a faint sigh closed behind me.

I was in the kitchen. I might never have been here before. Or I might have been, but in another dimension. Talk about making strange! Everything was askew. It was like entering backstage and seeing the set in reverse, all the parts of it known but not where they should be. Where were my chalk-marks now, my blocked-out map of moves? I was seized by a peculiar cold excitement, the sort that comes in dreams, at once irresistible and disabling. If only I could creep up on the whole of life like this, and see it all from a different perspective! The door to the basement scullery was shut; from behind it could be heard the faint clink and scrape of Quirke at his victuals. Softly I stepped into the passageway leading out to the front hall. A gleam in the lino transported me on the instant, heart-shakingly, to a country road somewhere, in April, long ago, at evening, with rain, and breezes, and swooping birds, and a break of brilliant blue in the far sky shining on the black tarmac of the road. Here is the front hall, with its fern dying in a brass pot, and a broken pane in the transom, and Quirke’s increasingly anthropomorphic bike leaning against the hatstand. Here is the staircase, with a thick beam of sunlight hanging in suspended fall from a window on the landing above. I stood listening, and seemed listened back to by the silence. I set off up the stairs, feeling the faintly repulsive clamminess of the banister rail under my hand, offering me its dubious intimacy. I went into my mother’s room, and sat on the side of my mother’s bed. There was a dry smell, not unpleasant, as if something ripe had rotted here and turned to dust. The bedclothes were awry, a pillow bore a head-shaped hollow. Through the window I looked out to the far blue hills shimmering in rain-rinsed air. So I remained for a long moment, listening to the faint sounds of the day, that might have been the tumult of a far-off battle, not thinking, exactly, but touching the thought of thought, as one would touch the tender, buzzing edges of a wound.

Cass was good with my mother. It always surprised me. There was something between them, a complicity, from which I was irritated to find myself excluded. They were alike, in ways. What in my mother was distraction turned out in Cass to be an absence, a lostness. Thus the march of the generations works its dark magic, making its elaborations, its complications, turning a trait into an affliction. Cass would sit here for hours with the dying woman at the end, seeming not to mind the smell, the foulings, the impenetrable speechlessness. They communed in silence. Once I found her asleep with her head on my mother’s breast. I did not wake her. Over the sleeping girl my mother watched me with narrow malignity. Cass was always an insomniac, worse than me. Sleep to her was a dry run for death. Even as a toddler she would make herself stay awake into the small hours, afraid of letting go, convinced she would not wake up again. I would look into her room and find her lying big-eyed and rigid in the darkness. One night when I—

The door was opened from without and Quirke cautiously put in his head. When he saw me his Adam’s apple bobbed.

“I thought I heard someone, all right,” he said, and let a grey tongue-tip snake its way from one corner of his mouth to the other.

I went down again to the hall and sat on the sofa there with my hands in my lap. I could hear Quirke moving about upstairs. I stood up and walked into the kitchen and leaned at the sink and poured a glass of water and drank it slowly, swallow by long swallow, shivering a little as the liquid ran down through the branched tree in my breast. I glanced into the scullery. On the table were the remains of Quirke’s lunch. What pathos in a crust of bread. I heard him come along the hall and stop in the doorway behind me.

“You’re living here,” I said, “aren’t you?”

I turned to him, and he grinned.