Eclipse

3

I pause, as a chronicler should, to record the imminence of a great event. There is to be a solar eclipse. Total occlusion is predicted, though not for all. The Scandinavians are not to get a look-in, likewise the inhabitants of the Antipodes. Even within the relatively narrow band over which the moon’s cloak will sweep, there are to be appreciable variations. In this latitude it is expected we shall have about ninety-five per cent coverage of the disc. For others, however, notably the beggars on the streets of Benares, a treat is in store: they are to enjoy approximately two and a half minutes of noontime night, the longest to be experienced anywhere on the globe. I deplore the lack of precision in these forecasts. Today, when there are clocks that work on the oscillations of a single atom, one surely might expect better than about ninety-five per cent, or approximately two and a half minutes—why are these things not being measured in nanoseconds? Yet people are agog. Tens of thousands are said to be already on the move, flocking to the rocky coasts of the south, on which the full shadow will fall. I wish I could share their enthusiasm; I should like to believe in something, or at least be in expectation of something, even if only a chance celestial conjunction. I see them, of course, as a great band of pilgrims out of an old tale, trudging down the dusty roads with staff and bell, archaic faces alight with longing and hope. And I, I am the scoffer, lounging in doublet and hose in an upstairs window of some half-timbered inn, languidly spitting pomegranate seeds on their bowed heads as they pass below me. They yearn for a sign, a light in the sky, a darkness, even, to tell them that things are intended, that all is not blind happenstance. What would they not give for a glimpse of my ghosts? Now, there is a sign, there is a portent, of what, I am still not sure, although I am beginning to have my suspicions.

I was right, they have been here all along, the two of them, Quirke and the girl. I am more baffled than indignant. How did they manage it without my noticing? Haunted, I was ever on the watch for phantoms, how then could I overlook the presence of two of the living? But perhaps the living are not my kind, any more, perhaps they do not register with me as once they would have done. Quirke of course is embarrassed to have been found out, but I can see from his look that he is amused, too, in a rueful sort of way. When I confronted him there in the kitchen he looked me boldly in the eye, still grinning, and said he had considered it a perk of the job of caretaker that he and his girl should be allowed to live on the premises. I was so taken aback by the brazenness of this that I could think of nothing to say in reply. He went on to assure me that he had kept up the charade only out of a desire that I should not be disturbed; I would have laughed, in other circumstances. Nor has he offered to move out. He sauntered off, quite breezy, whistling through his teeth, and presently appeared at the door on his bicycle as usual, and he and Lily straggled away into the twilight quite as they have done every evening. Later, when I was in bed, I heard them stealthily returning. These must be the sounds I have been hearing every night since I came here, and which I failed to interpret. How simple and dull and disappointing things become when they are explained; maybe my ghosts will yet step forward, bowing and smirking, and I shall be allowed to see the mirrors and the smoke.

How the two of them—Quirke and Lily, I mean—how they pass the hours between their twilight departure and their return in the dark I cannot say. Lily goes to the pictures, I suppose, or to the disco—there is one somewhere nearby, half the night I feel its dull pulse drumming through the air—while Quirke haunts the pub; I can see him, with his pint and his cigarette, chaffing the barmaid, or gloomily ogling the bare-chested lovelies in someone else’s discarded newspaper. I asked him where it is in the house that he and Lily sleep and he shrugged and said with deliberate vagueness that they bunk down wherever is handy. I believe it is the girl who sometimes uses my mother’s bed. I do not know what to think of this. It is not yet acknowledged, between Lily and me, that I know her secret. Something prevents me from mentioning it, an obscure squeamishness. There are no rules of etiquette to cover a situation such as this. Although Quirke must have told her I am on to them, for her part she goes on just as before, with the same air of general resentment and bored disinclination.

What is most remarkable to me is the transformation my discovery has wrought in the house, or at least in my attitude toward it. That sense of goggle-eyed alienation that came over me yesterday when I stalked Quirke into the kitchen still persists. I have stepped through the looking-glass into another world where everything is exactly as it was and at the same time entirely transformed. It is a disconcerting sensation, but not, I discover, unwelcome—after all, this is exactly the kind of dislocated stance to things that I had hoped but failed to maintain by my own efforts. So really, Quirke and his girl have done me a service, and I suppose I should be grateful. True, I could have wished for more stimulating sharers of my solitude. I have the uneasy feeling that I should assert my rights. For a start I shall stop paying Lily for her domestic services, such as they are, and performed with such ill grace. Quirke too must be required to fill some necessary function. He could be my major-domo; I have always wanted a major-domo, even though I am not entirely certain what duties such a personage performs. I amuse myself by imagining him, pigeon-breasted in frock coat and striped trousers, creaking about the place on those dainty pigeon feet. I doubt that he can cook; on the evidence of that plate he left on the scullery table he is strictly a sausage-and-egg man. The matter, I can see, is going to take some pondering. And to think I feared an excess of solitude!

My discovery has made me look anew not only at the house, but at my two houseguests, also. I feel that I am seeing them, too, for the first time. They have come into focus, in a way that I am not sure I like, and that certainly I did not expect. It is as if they had stood up in their seats and ambled on to the stage while the play was going on, interrupting me in the middle of an intense if perhaps overly introspective soliloquy, and to save the show I must find a means somehow of incorporating them into the plot, despite their incurious and lackadaisical and wholly unprofessional air. It is the kind of thing an actor has nightmares about, yet I am strangely calm. Of course, the son of lodging-house keepers will necessarily have a diminished territorial sense, but there is more to it than that. I am puzzled, as I am when I try to identify what it is of Cass that I detect in Lily. She is a strange girl. This morning when I came down, a little bunch of wild violets was set in a jam jar beside my place at the kitchen table. There was still dew on the petals, and the stems were crushed where she had clutched them. At what time did she get up to go out and pick flowers?—for I assume it was she, and not Quirke, whom I cannot see tiptoeing out to the dewy fields of morn to pluck a nosegay, for me or anyone else. How does a girl like Lily know where to find wild violets? But I must bethink myself and stop these generalisations into which I have always fallen too easily. It is not a girl like Lily I am dealing with—it is Lily herself, unique and mysterious, for all her ordinariness. Who knows what longings burn in that meagre breast?

I study her now with an almost ogreish intensity. She is an animate riddle that I have been set to solve. I watch her painting her nails. She attends to the task with stern concentration, dabbing and smoothing with her little brush, careful as a medieval miniaturist. Often when she is finished she will hold her hands splayed out before her and, spotting some failure of execution, some flaw in the glaze, she will wrinkle her nose in annoyance and bring out her bottle of remover and wipe off every speck of the polish she has just finished applying and start all over again. She pays an equal attention to her toes. She has long, slender, lemur feet, not unlike Lydia’s, roughly callused along the outer edges. On each foot the littlest toe is turned in under its neighbour like the handle of a little cup. She perches on the edge of the big winged armchair in the parlour with her leg up and her chin pressed on her knee and the oily coils of her hair hanging down about her face; the room smells like a spray-painter’s workshop. I wonder if she is aware of my gaze idly roving the shadowed, mossy places under her uplifted skirts. Sometimes I catch her eyeing me with a heavy-lidded something that I cannot allow myself to believe is tumescence. I recall those violets, and contemplate with mild unease the milk-blue backs of her knees, each with its parallel pair of hairline cracks, her coarse dark hair that seems always in need of washing, and the outlines of her shoulder blades, like little stunted wings, printed on the skimpy stuff of her summer dress. She is, I have found out, fifteen.

The phantoms work their immanent magic on her. She reclines in the places where they appear, in their very midst, a grubby and all too actual odalisque, scanning her mags, and sipping her cola with subdued snorkelling noises. Does she sense their presence? Yesterday she looked up quickly from her comic, frowning, as if she had felt a ghostly touch on her shoulder. Then she glared at me suspiciously, chin tucked into her throat and brows drawn darkly down, and demanded to know what I was smiling at. Had I been smiling? She thinks me a fond old fool; she is right. I wonder if the ghost woman, on her side, registers the living girl? Am I right in feeling I detect in the ghostly one’s appearances now a growing sense of puzzlement, of faint dismay, even? Can she be jealous? I await the moment, which is bound to come, when she will exactly coincide with Lily, will descend on her like the annunciatory angel, like the goddess herself, and illumine her with the momentary benison of her supernatural presence.

Here now in this for me transfigured house I have an inkling of how it must be for Cass, moving always in the midst of familiar strangers, uncertain as to what is real and what is not, unable quite to recognise the perfectly recognisable, spoken at by voices out of the air. The presence of living people in it has robbed the house for me of an essential solidity. The Quirkes have made me too into a ghost—I am not sure I would not be able to walk through walls, now. Does my daughter, I wonder, have this abiding sensation of lightness, of volatility, of there being always a sustaining skim of nothingness between foot and floor? Yet everywhere around me there is substance, eminently tangible stuff, the common old world itself, hard and dense and warm to the touch. The other night, instead of taking the girl away with him as usual, Quirke parked his bicycle in the hall and came into the kitchen and boldly brought a chair up to the table and sat down. There was a momentary pause while he waited to see what I would do. I did nothing, of course, only sat down, and we played cards, the three of us. I am no good at cards, never was. I sit and frown wildly at my hand, making a lunge for the dwindling deck when it seems required of me, uncertain even as to what suit or value I should be hoping to draw. Quirke plays with elephantine circumspection, holding the cards close up to his face and peering over them craftily at Lily and at me, one eye shut and the other a slit. He loses too, though. Lily is the one who wins. In the excitement of the game she is transformed, becomes a different child, whooping and cackling when she picks the right card, groaning at reverses and rolling her eyes and banging her forehead dully on the table in simulated despair. When she has assembled the winning trick she slams the cards down with a Red Indian ululation of triumph. We are too slow for her, Quirke and I, as we fumble and sigh over our hopeless hands. She screams at Quirke to hurry up, shaking her head disgustedly, and when I am being particularly dilatory she punches me in the small of the back, or painfully on the upper arm, with her hard little pointed fist. Waiting for the last required card she goes silent, fixing her eye on the deck, watchful as a vixen. She calls the three a trey, and what I know as knaves are jacks to her. We play by candlelight, at Lily’s insistence; she says it is romantic, pronouncing the word with a deep-voiced trill—“soo romawntic”—in a way that I suspect is meant to be a parody of me. Then she crosses her eyes and lets her mouth sag in an idiot leer. The weather is still warm, we leave the windows open on the vast soft star-struck night. Moths come in and do their drunken clockwork spirals around the candle flame, and the dust of their wings falls into the shivering, soot-black puddle of shadow in which the candle stands. Tonight when the game was over and Lily was gathering up the cards and Quirke sat vacantly at gaze I heard an owl out in the darkness, and I thought of Cass, and wondered where she might be at that moment, and what doing, my Minerva. Perilous speculation. Even in the softest lee of summer night the mind can conjure horrors.

I was right again, Lily is sleeping in my mother’s room. I looked in early this morning and there she was, in the smouldering dawn light, crouched in a heap in a corner of the big bed, snoring. She did not wake up, even when I came to the side of the bed and put my face down close to hers. What a strange spectacle it is, the slumbering human. She smelled of sleep and young sweat and that sickly sweet cheap perfume that she douses herself with. Except for the scent and the snores it might have been Cass. Whole days my girl would keep to her bed, ignoring all entreaties, all reproaches. I would tiptoe into her room and lift a corner of the sheet and there she would be, like something that had crept in from the wild, stark pale and tousled, lying stiffly on her side and staring at nothing, a knuckle pressed against two bared front teeth. Then at dead of night she would drag herself up at last and come down and sit with her knees against her chest in front of the television with the sound turned off, watching the flickering images with a fixed, hungry stare, as if they were so many hieroglyphs she was struggling to decipher.

Over our nightly card games Quirke has been telling me his life story, such as it is: mother ran a pub, father drank it dry, Quirke fils sent to work at fourteen as a solicitor’s runner, been there ever since; wife, child; later, dead wife, widower. He recounts all this with a bemused air, shaking his head, as if these were things that had happened to someone else, someone he had heard of, or read about in the papers. The family home he lost through legal finagling of some kind, whether by him or another he does not say, and I do not press for details. From an inner pocket he produced a creased and yellowed newspaper cutting announcing the sale of a house by auction. “Ours,” he said, nodding. “Went for a song.” The paper is warm from being close to his chest with its womanly bubs; squeamishly, between thumb and forefinger, I hand the clipping back to him, and he studies it a moment, making that clicking noise in his cheek, then stows it and turns his attention to the cards again.

The future he seems to regard as an entirely improbable prospect, like a win of the sweepstakes, or the promise of eternal life. How long does he think I will allow him to live here, I wonder? I marvel at his equanimity. His mother knew my mother, he says. He remembers well this house when there were lodgers here, claims he was brought on visits with his Ma. He says he remembers me, too. I find all this obscurely disquieting. It is like being told of indecent things that had been done to one in sleep, or under anaesthesia. I trawled and trawled my memory and at last obligingly the deeps gave up an image that might be him, not as he would have been then but, ludicrously, as he is now, got up in a schoolboy’s outfit bursting at the buttons, with a skullcap perched on his big round head, a Tweedledum to my identically attired Tweedledee. We have been sent into the garden to play, while our mothers sit in the parlour murmuring over their tea and fairy cakes. We stand in moody silence, the man-child Quirke and I, looking away from each other and kicking holes in the lawn with the toecaps of our school shoes. Even the sunlight seems bored. Quirke treads on a slug and squashes it, leaving a long smear like snot on the grass. I would have been his senior by some years, yet we seem to be the same age. From the back pocket of his short trousers he brings out a photograph, which shows a fat girl in a cloche hat and flapper’s silks lolling on a kitchen chair with her legs wide open, insouciantly inserting a cucumber into herself; he says I can keep it, if I want, he is fed up looking at it. A thunder-head is forming in the sky above the garden. We stand with heads bent, gazing down at the picture of the girl. I can hear him breathing. “Some tart,” he says, “what?” A first fat splash of rain falls on the photo. The day is darkening like a bruise.

Is it Quirke I am remembering, really, or another, for instance that boy who was my first love? Have I mentioned him? I cannot remember his name. He lodged at our house one summer with his mother. They were English, or Welsh, maybe: I recall some oddity of accent. The mother must have been in some terrible trouble, fleeing debts, perhaps, or a brutal husband. She would spend entire days in bed, not making a sound, until my mother, unable any longer to stand the suspense, would go up to her with the excuse of a cup of tea, or a vase of roses from the garden. The boy and I were of an age, nine, I suppose, not more than ten, certainly. He was not good-looking, or striking in any particular way. He had thin, reddish hair and freckles and weak eyes, and big hands, I remember, and big, bristly, porcine knees. I adored him; I would lie in bed at night and think about him, devising adventures in which he and I joined forces against robbers and bands of Redskins. My love for him was innocent of all carnal yearnings, of course, and went undeclared; I would not even have known to call it love, would have been shocked at the word. Nor did I know if he knew what I felt for him, nor what he might feel for me, if he felt anything. One day when we were walking through the town together—I was always brimmingly proud to be seen in his company, thinking everyone was noticing and admiring us—all casually I linked my arm in his, and he stiffened and frowned, and looked away, and after a step or two, keeping up a carefully preoccupied air, withdrew his arm delicately from mine. On his last night I crept down, in a fever of sorrow already, and stood outside the door of the room he shared with his mother and tried to hear him breathing as he slept or, better still, as he lay awake, thinking of me, as it might be, and presently, to my dismay and joy, I heard from within the sound of jagged, muffled sobs, and hoarsely I whispered his name, and a moment later the door opened an inch and not his but his mother’s blotched and tear-stained face appeared in the crack. She said nothing, only looked at me, a novice in the art of sorrow, and gave a grim, shallow sigh and without a word withdrew and shut the door. Next morning they left early, and he did not come to say goodbye. I stood at my window and watched them struggling across the square with their bags, and even when they were gone from sight I could still see him, his big feet in cheap sandals, his rounded shoulders, the back of his head with its whorl of colourless hair.

We turn away from the sunlight, from the squashed slug, the dirty picture, turn back to the house, and decades flash past.

“Ever see a ghost here?” Quirke asked. “They used to say this place was haunted.”

I looked at him. He was absorbed in his cards.

“Haunted?” I said. “By what?”

He shrugged.

“Just old stories,” he said. “Old pishogues.”

“What sort of stories? “

He sat back on his chair, which gave a shriek, and squinted up into a far corner of the darkness beyond the candlelight. Now Lily was looking at him too, her mouth crookedly open a little way; I wish she would not do that, it makes her look like a retard.

“Don’t remember,” Quirke said. “Something about a child.”

“A child.”

“That died. The mother, too. Probably one of the ones that was lodging here…” He looked at me and indicated the girl and let an eyelid flicker.

“He means,” Lily said to me with ironic emphasis, “someone that got pregnant. I, of course, don’t know where babies come from.”

Quirke ignored her.

“Always queer goings-on, in an old house, like this,” he said mildly. “I’ll play the seven.”

Life, life is always a surprise. Just when you think you have got the hang of it, have learned your part to perfection, someone in the cast will take it into her head to start improvising, and the whole damned production will be thrown into disorder. Lydia turned up today, unannounced. “Well, how could I let you know I was coming,” she snapped, “since you seem to have torn the telephone out of the wall?” When she arrived I was sitting in my eyrie, scribbling away. Have I described this little room, my hidey-hole and refuge? It is at the back of the house, up three high concrete steps, and through a little arched, green-painted door that gives a queer monastic effect. I judge that the room was built on after the house was finished, as a chambre de bonne, though any maid the builder had in mind would have had to be a midget. Only in the middle of the room is there space to stand upright, for the ceiling slopes down steeply, almost to the floor at one side. It is like being in a tent, or the attic of a big doll’s house. I have a little bamboo table at which I write, and a straw-bottomed chair brought up from the scullery. At my elbow, in the end wall opposite the door, a single small square window gives on to a sunny corner of the garden. Outside, just below the window, there is a clump of old geraniums, whose blossoms when the sun is at a certain angle throw a pinkish cast across the pages of my notebook. In the mornings I clamber in here as into a diving bell and shut myself away from the Quirkes, and brood, and dream, and remember, now and then setting down a sentence or two, a stray thought, a dream. There is a distinct rhetorical cast to the tone of these jottings, inevitable, I suppose, given my actor’s training, yet often I catch myself speaking the words aloud as I write them, as if I were addressing them directly to some known and sympathetic ear. Since I found out that the Quirkes are living in the house I have been spending more and more of my time here. I am happy, or happiest, at least, in this sealed chamber, suspended in the tideless sea of myself.

My wife is a considerable person in many ways. She has been a staunch defence against whatever arrows and bomb-balls the world outside might sling into the compound of our lives together. You should have seen the first-night critics shrink when they beheld her descending on them armed with cigarette and wineglass. However, she is not at her best in emotional adversity. Daddy was too indulgent toward her, I believe, with the result that she has never lost the expectation that there will always be someone in charge who will deal with, for instance, the unanticipated eventualities of marriage and its inevitable woes. Not that she would be incapable of handling such things herself; as I say, she is far more formidable than I am when it comes to practical matters. It is just that she has the queenly conviction that she should not be compelled to spend from her store of strength, which she maintains as if for the commonweal, against the day when a real crisis shall arise, and she will be called upon to burst forth in breastplate and plumed helmet, all pennants flying. When I heard her voice today from far off beyond my little green door I experienced a moment of panic, as if I were a fugitive in hiding behind a false wall and she the head of the secret police. Venturing down from my lair I found her striding about the hall in an angry fluster. She was wearing black leggings and a bright-red, hip-length smock that gave her an ungainly and unbecomingly corpulent aspect. When she is angry a high warbling tearful note rises in her voice.

“Where were you, for God’s sake?” she said when she saw me. “What’s going on? Who is this girl?”

Lily, barefoot, in her crooked dress, was standing at a slouch some way behind her in the hall, chewing on a wad of gum and wearing a sullen look. The panic I had felt a minute ago was now replaced by a chilly calm. I have a gift, if gift it is, of quenching in myself at a stroke any fever of the blood or brain. There are, I mean there were, nights when I would cower in the wings, shaking, in a wet funk, as I awaited my cue, only a moment later to step forward in perfect poise, thundering out my lines without trace of tremor or fluff. A floating sensation comes over me at such moments, as if I were being buoyed up on some dense, fluent medium, a Dead Sea of the emotions. From out of this state of almost pleasant detachment I regarded Lydia now with a mild, enquiring air. I noticed my fountain pen was still in my fingers, cocked like a pistol. I almost laughed. Lydia stood with her head held up and to one side, in the attitude of a startled thrush, staring at me, her face set in a sort of rictus of baffled incredulity.

“That’s Lily,” I said lightly. “She’s the housekeeper.”

It sounded improbable even to me.

“The what?” Lydia cried, an avian squawk. “Have you gone completely off your head?”

“Lily,” I called, “this is Mrs. Cleave.” Lily said nothing, and did not stir, except to shift her slouch from one hip to the other, still rhythmically chewing. Lydia went on looking at me with that large surprised angry expression, leaning backward a little now as if to avoid the possibility of a wildly thrown punch.

“Look at you, the state of you,” she said, wonderingly. “Is that a beard?”

“Lily takes care of me,” I said. “Of the house, that is. She came most opportunely. I had been about to ask the nuns across the way if they might have a couple of orphans to spare.” This time I did laugh, an unfamiliar sound. “I could have dressed them up in knee breeches and powdered wigs,” I said, “my Justine and Juliette.” I once played the divine Marquis, in a headband and flounced shirt open to the navel; I quite fancied myself in the part.

A hurt helpless something came into Lydia’s look and it seemed for a moment she might cry. Instead she sighed heavily down her nostrils and tightened her mouth into a grim line, and turned on her heel and stalked off into the parlour. Lily’s eyes met mine and she could not suppress a little grin, showing the glint of an eye-tooth.

“Some tea, Lily,” I said softly, “for Mrs. Cleave and me.”

When I followed her into the parlour Lydia was standing at the window as she had that first day we had come here, with her back to the room and one arm tightly folded across her chest, smoking a cigarette in short, violent puffs.

“What are you doing, Alex?” she said, in a quavery voice. She did not turn. I hate it when she tries to act, it is embarrassing. She only addresses me by name when she is being theatrical. I let a moment lapse.

“You’ll be glad to hear,” I said in a bright voice, “that the house is known to be haunted. So you see, I am not losing my marbles after all. Quirke says some child—”

“Stop,” she said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to hear.” I shrugged. She turned to the room and looked about vaguely with a frown. “This place is filthy,” she murmured. “What does that girl do?”

“I don’t pay her much,” I said. “In fact, since recently I haven’t been paying her at all.”

I hoped she would ask why this was, thus giving me the opportunity of breaking to her the delicate news of my uninvited house-guests, but she only sighed again, still with that preoccupied frown, and shook her head. “I’m not interested in your domestic arrangements here,” she said, with large but unconvinced disdain. She looked at the cigarette in her hand as if she had not noticed it before now. Her voice grew thick with breathy distress. “I take it you have left me and will not be coming back,” she said in a rush, still glaring at the cigarette with glistening eyes.

I made a show of pondering hard.

“Now, was that a line of anapaests, do you think,” I said, “or the rarer, shyer amphibrach? I ask out of professional interest. You really should be a poet.” I still had that bloody pen in my hand. I put it down on the mantelpiece, concentrating, so as not to forget later where I had left it; I am becoming very absent-minded, in the matter of small, inanimate things. I could see Lydia in the mirror above the mantelpiece, glaring at the back of my neck. “I’m content here, for the moment,” I said, in a considered tone, turning to her. “You see, it offers me a way of being alive without living.”

“Of course,” she said. “You’ve always been in love with death.”

“Spinoza says—”

“Oh, fuck Spinoza,” she said, but with little force, almost wearily.

She glanced about for an ashtray, and not finding one shrugged and dropped an inch of ash on the carpet, where it landed softly and did not crumble. I asked if she had heard again from Cass. She shook her head, but I could see she was lying. “Where is she, exactly?” I asked. Again that stubborn shake of the head, as if she were a child refusing to tell on a playmate who has been naughty in the nursery. I tried another approach. “What is the surprise you said she has for me?”

“She told me not to tell you anything.”

“Oh, did she.”

One of the things, the very few things, I have learned, or realised, about myself since coming here is that I am always on the lookout for someone or something on whom to wreak revenge. I do not know what I might be seeking revenge for, or what form my vengeance would take, exactly. I am like my mother waiting for the world to apologise to her for the nameless wrongs she believed it had done her. Like her, I cannot rid myself of the conviction that there is indeed blame to be apportioned, a score to be settled. I am content to wait, to take things slowly, to bide my time, but I am always sure that I shall be avenged, somehow, sometime. Perhaps when that time comes I shall know what the original insult or injustice was. What confusion there is in me; I really am a stranger to myself.

Out in the kitchen there was a sudden cacophonous blast from Lily’s radio, immediately silenced.

Lydia was watching me sidelong now, waiting to see what I would do next. Sometimes, for instance at moments like this one, I allow myself to entertain the notion that for all her strengths she is a little afraid of me. I confess I like to keep her on her toes. I am unpredictable. Perhaps she really does think I am mad, and might do her violence. Behind her in the window the garden was an incongruously Edenic medley of gay greens and shimmering, petrol blues. High summer’s abundance is a continuous surprise. “She wants to come home,” she said, “but she can’t, at the moment.” This struck a false note of attempted appeasement, which I refused even to acknowledge. At the moment, indeed.

“She confides in you, does she?” I said. “She never used to.”

This is true; whatever differences there may be between my daughter and me, we have always been close enough to read each other’s minds—and it is always, always the two of us against poor Lydia.

I heard Lily’s bare feet slapping along the corridor from the kitchen, and now she came in bearing a tin tray with a teapot and two unmatching mugs, and a plate piled high with thick, crooked slices of haphazardly buttered bread. I noticed Lydia noticing the crusted dirt on the child’s callused feet and etched into the wrinkled red backs of her heels. Lily, biting her lower lip at one side, carefully avoided looking at me, and set the tray down on the hearth, bending from the waist and deliberately showing the backs of her thighs, pale as a fish’s belly, right up to her narrow behind.

“Will I pour?” she said from under her hanging hair in a voice strangulate with suppressed mirth.

Lydia came forward quickly from the window. “I’ll do it.”

“Suit yourself,” Lily said, and straightened, still not looking at either of us, and sauntered off, twitching her hips.

To pour the tea Lydia was forced to sit on the hearth rug, leaning aslant with her legs draped together at an awkward angle to one side, which gave her the look, not unfetching, of a beached mermaid.

“What age is that child?” she said, frowning at the teak-coloured tea as it glugged into the mugs.

“Seventeen, she claims.”

Lydia snorted.

“Fifteen, more like,” she said, “if that.” There was something about the clumsy, helpless way she was sitting that set up a metronome beat in my blood. “You had better watch out.”

“She’s practically an orphan,” I said. “Do you think I should make Quirke an offer for her? I’m sure it wouldn’t take more than a shrunken head and pouch of cowrie shells and she could be mine—ours, I mean. What do you say?”

She brought her legs around in a quick, surprisingly graceful sweep and rose to her knees and offered me the mug. She was very close to me, almost kneeling between my knees. Taking the mug, I allowed my fingers to brush against hers. She went still, her calm gaze fixed on our two hands.

“You already have a daughter,” she said quietly.

I took a sip from my mug. I really must instruct Lily in the art of making tea. I am sure she uses tea bags, though I have told her I will not tolerate them, nasty things. Lydia knelt motionless before me, in the attitude of a supplicant, her head hanging.

“I had,” I said. “Then she grew up. A woman can’t be a daughter.”

“She needs help, you know.”

“When has she ever not?”

She sighed, and transferred her weight from one knee to the other. Thinking she might be about to embrace me I put down my tea mug quickly and rose and walked past her to the window—stepping over that oddly repellent grey worm of ash she had left on the carpet—and stood where she had stood, contemplating the sunlit garden. There is an archaic quality to certain summer days, the ones that come at the close of July especially, when the season has reached its peak and is already imperceptibly in decline, and the sunlight thickens, and the sky is larger and higher and of a deeper blue than before. On such days, autumn is already sounding its first horn-calls, yet the summer still blithely believes it will never end. In that dreamy stillness, like the stillness in the azure distances of a stage set, all the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge. A breeze will spring up, one of the weather’s half-formed thoughts, and something at the corner of your vision will flap once, languidly, and be still again. Confused soft noises mingle in the air, as of a distant revel. There are bee sounds, bird sounds, the needling buzz of a distant tractor. You will catch a fragrance, one that you know but cannot identify, it will remind you of somewhere else, a meadow, with poppies, beside a dusty road, and someone turning to meet you… I realised, there at the window, that something had changed, that I had crossed over into a different place. First there had been me, then me and the phantoms, then me and Quirke and Quirke’s girl, and now—I did not know what now, except that this now was new. Behind me I could hear Lydia rising from her knees, grunting a little from the effort.

“The thing is, my dear,” I said, “I haven’t really got the energy to worry about anyone else, just now.”

She gave a harsh little laugh.

“When did you ever?”

A slug-coloured cat was wading through the garden, batting aside the long grass with large deft subduing gestures of its paws. Life is everywhere, even in the stones, slow, secret, long-enduring. I turned from the window. I have always disliked this room, this quintessential parlour; there is a touch of the manse about it, with its brownish shadows and lumpy furniture and its cowed, unmoving air. Too many people have been unhappy here. Lydia was sitting now in the old armchair by the fireplace with her joined hands clasped between her knees, staring sightlessly into the grate. In the minute my back was turned she had put on years; in another minute she would throw them off again; it is a thing she does. Those charred books were still in the fireplace. Ashes, ashes everywhere. Lily came in at the door and paused, taking an interested measure of the atmosphere. “Mrs. Cleave and I would like to adopt you,” I said to her, summoning up a big, bright smile. “We want to take you away from all this and give you a proper home and turn you into a little princess. What do you think of that?”

Lily looked from me to Lydia and back again and smiled warily, then went forward quickly and picked up the tray. As she was leaving I winked at her and she bit her lip again and smirked again and ducked out the door. Lydia sat on in her chair for a moment, motionless, gazing into the grate, then stirred, and released her hands and clapped them on her knees and stood up briskly with the air of one who has come to a large decision.

“I think the best thing we can do—” she began, when all at once she started to weep. Fast tears coursed down her cheeks, plump and shiny as drops of glycerine. She stood and stared through them for a second, in appalled surprise, then her face collapsed and she made a mewling noise, half in anger and half in woe, and put up her hands helplessly before her face with fingers splayed and hurried blunderingly from the room. That inch of cigarette ash was still where it had fallen, still unbroken.

I found her in the hall, crouched on the old sofa there, furiously rubbing at her tear-stained face with the heels of both her hands, like a cat cleaning its whiskers. I am not good with other people’s distress. How often in our life together had I stood like this, watching her dissolve in grief, as a child might watch a sackful of kittens drowning in a pond. I know I have been a trial to her, in one way or another—indeed, in many ways. The fact is, I have never understood her, what she wants, what she expects. When we were first together she used to accuse me of treating her as if she were a child, and it is true that I liked to keep a fatherly eye on day-to-day matters, from the household accounts to her menstrual cycle—people with a lot of daytime on their hands tend to be busybodies, it is a thing I have noticed among my profession—though I say in my defence that I thought this is what would be required, when she was transferred from her Daddy’s care into mine. Then one day in the midst of one of our rows she turned on me a frighteningly contorted face and screamed that she was not my mother! This was a new one; what was I to make of it? I was nonplussed. I waited until she calmed down and then asked her what she had meant, but that only sent her into another rage, so I dropped the subject, although I did continue to brood on it for a long time. At first I had thought she was accusing me of demanding to be cared for and coddled, but I dismissed that, and in the end decided that what she had most likely meant was that I was behaving toward her as I had toward my real mother, that is, with impatience, resentment, and that tight-lipped, ironical forbearance—the sigh, the small laugh, the upcast eyes—which I know is one of the more annoying ways I have of handling those who are supposedly close to me. A moment’s thought showed me, of course, that what she had screamed at me was simply another form of her assertion that I was treating her like a child, for that, as she never tired of pointing out, was exactly how I had treated my mother. How intricate they are, human relations, so called.

“Darling,” I said now, in a voice athrob with insincerity, “I’m sorry.”

One of the paradoxes of our fights is that almost invariably they do not begin in earnest until the stage has been reached when I first attempt to offer an apology. It is as if some primitive instinct of suppressed female dominance is triggered in Lydia by this hint of weakness on my part. Now she went for my throat at once. It was all the old things, rehearsed so often they have gone stale, for me, certainly, if not for her. I will say one thing, she is comprehensive. She starts off in my infancy, works her way rapidly through youth and early manhood, lingers with loving bitterness over our first years together, takes a diversionary swipe at my acting, both in professional and private life—“You’re never off the stage, we’re just the audience “—then she gets to my relations with Cass and really rolls up her sleeves. Mind you, she is not as savage or relentless as she used to be; the years have tempered her temper. What does not change is the image of me that she propounds. In her version, I have everything all wrong. My mother is sweet-natured, put-upon, long-suffering, her nagging of my father and then of me simply a plea for some demonstration of love or affection, a muffled cry out of a wounded heart. My father, on the other hand, is a secret tyrant, self-muted, vindictive, withholding, whose very death was an act of spite and revenge on the woman who had cherished him. When I remind her, in a tone of no more than mild remonstrance, that my father was dead long before she met me, she brushes the fact aside with a contemptuous gesture; she knows what she knows. In this inverted picture of my family—the Holy Trinity is her sneering nickname for us—I too of course am stood on my head. Did I lead a lonely and puzzled childhood, shocked bythe early loss of my father and subject thereafter to the unmeetable emotional demands of a bitterly disappointed mother? No, no: I was the little prince, showered with love, praise, gifts, who quickly saw off a resented father and spent the rest of his widowed mother’s life blaming her for all the things she could not be or do. Did I sacrifice the best years of my adult life working dear in cheap theatre to support my wife and her child in the luxury to which a doting father had irresponsibly accustomed his spoilt daughter? Indeed no: I was the typical monster of selfishness who would have prostituted his wife for a walk-on part. Did I love my daughter, try to wean her away from her darkest obsessions, save her from her worst excesses? Not I: she was a trial to me, an irritation, a stumbling block on the road to stage success, a source of shame and embarrassment before my smart friends in the brittle make-believe world in which I was trying to claw my way to fame. So you see: it was all a lie, all a part I was playing, and playing badly, at that. And now I had done the worst of all, had walked out of the production, leaving the rest of the cast to deal with the cat-calls of the audience and the management’s fury, while the backers all backed off.

As I say, she is not the lioness she once was. In the old days she would frighten even herself with the vehemence of her denunciations. We would rage at each other late into the night, on a battlefield littered with smashed crystal and swirling with cigarette smoke and the fumes of alcohol, and wake in the ashen light of morning, a salt bitterness in our mouths and our throats raw from drink and shouting, and reach out a hand to each other, tremblingly, under the sheets, not daring to move our heads, and one would make a shaky enquiry and the other would croak some hoarse word of reassurance, and then we would lie there, counting our wounds, surprised that the war was done for another day and we were still breathing.

I could hear Lily in the kitchen listening to us, trying not to make a sound. Exciting for a child, a real adults’ fight. Cass used to like to hear us going at it hammer and tongs; perhaps it was a comforting match for the clangour in her own head. Now I waited, and presently Lydia wound down, and leant forward wearily with her arms folded on her knees and her head hanging, great snorting sobs making her shudder now and then, fury’s after-tremors. Around us the shocked shadows congregated, like onlookers cautiously closing in on the still-smouldering scene of an explosion. On the lino near my foot a sunburst streamed and shivered. Odd, how distress gravitates to this passageway, the dank umbilicus of the house, with its windowless stretch of brown wall on one side and the overhang of the stairs on the other. Originally, in grander days, way before our time, it led to the servants’ quarters at the rear; halfway along there is still the frame of what was no doubt a green baize door, long ago removed. Air stands unmoving here, unchanged for centuries, it seems; vague draughts swim through, like slow fish. There is a stale, brownish smell that haunted me as a child; it was like the smell I made when I cupped my hands over my nose and mouth and breathed the same breath rapidly in and out. My mother it was who put the sofa here, dragged it in by herself from the front room one day when I was at school, another of her whims. The lodgers took to it straight away, there was always one of them sitting on it, this one nursing a disappointment in love, that one the unacknowledged beginnings of a cancer. Cass too would perch there, with her thumb in her mouth and her legs folded under her, especially after a seizure, when the light hurt her eyes and she wanted nothing but solitude, and silence, and shadows.

The fact is, Lydia has always been jealous of Cass and me. Oh yes, she has. That was the way it was right from the beginning. It was into my arms that Cass as an infant would come tottering, no matter what blandishments her mother might be offering, what coos of encouragement or flattering cries. Even later, when her world was steadily darkening, it was I that our daughter would seek out first, it was my hand she would clutch to keep from falling past all help into the abyss of herself. Whose eyes did she seek when she came back from that first seizure, gazing up from the floor beside her bed with the bloody froth still on her mouth and that look on her face we thought was an unearthly smile but was only the effect of the contracted muscles relaxing? Who did she run to, laughing in terror, when she knew an attack was coming on? Who did she describe her aural visions to, the shattering glass cliffs and terrible birds made of metal and rags that flew at her eyes? Who did she turn to one day by that bed of lilies in someone’s garden and whisper in the thrilled rush of discovery that that, that was the smell, as of some wonderful delicate sweet rotted meat, that filled the air around her in the seconds before a seizure? Who was the one who woke first when that cry rose up through the night, that long high thin ululation, like a nerve being drawn slowly out of its sheath?

I sat beside Lydia on the sofa, easing myself down as if she were asleep and I unwilling to wake her. The sunspot on the lino had shifted a stealthy inch or two. The moon in its course must be swinging ever closer to the sun, homing in on the light, like a moth. A faint whiff of strawy smoke drifted on to the air; a field of stubble somewhere was burning. The silence had a buzz to it, as of harp strings rubbed not plucked. My upper lip was unpleasantly damp. Long ago, when I was a boy, on a summer day like this one, still and hot, I walked across the fields, oh, for miles, it seemed, to a farm, to buy apples. I had brought with me my mother’s oilcloth shopping bag; it had an unpleasant, greasy smell. I wore sandals, and a horsefly stung me on an instep. The farmhouse was all overgrown with ivy and had many small dark gleaming windows. It was the kind of place where in a boy’s adventure book dark deeds would be afoot, and the farmer would wear gaiters and a waistcoat and carry a menacing pitchfork. In the yard a black-and-white dog growled at me and turned in cringing circles, its belly almost scraping the gravel. I stood in the stone-flagged porch while a fat surly woman in a flowered apron took my bag and went off into the shadowed depths of the house. There were gnarled geraniums in clay pots and a grandfather clock that seemed to hesitate before each tick. I paid the woman a shilling and she said nothing, watching me go. The dog in the yard growled again and licked its lips. The bag was heavy now, and kept bumping against my leg. In a lane I paused beside a soupy pond and watched the water-skimmers; their feet made pewtery dents in the surface; they moved as if worked by wires. The sunlight came through the trees like hot gold smoke. Why that day, that farm, the farmer’s wife, the apples, those insects on that pond—why any of it? Nothing happened, no grand vision was granted me, no blinding insight or sudden understanding, yet it is all there, clear as yesterday—clearer!—as if it were something momentous, a key, a map, a code, the answer to a question I do not know how to ask.

“What is it?” Lydia said without looking up, and for a second I thought she had somehow been reading my mind. “What’s wrong with you, what is the matter? What”—wearily—“what has happened to you?”

The apples were a pale whitish green and each bite came away with a satisfying, woody snap. I remember them; to this day I remember them.

“I have the feeling,” I said, “the conviction, I can’t rid myself of it, that something has happened, something dreadful, and I haven’t taken sufficient notice, haven’t paid due regard, because I don’t know what it is.”

She was silent, then gave a sort of laugh, and sat up and rubbed her hands vigorously on her upper arms, as if she had become chilled, keeping her face turned away from me.

“Maybe it’s your life,” she said. “That’s disaster enough, isn’t it?”

Evening, and she is still here. At least, I have not heard her departing. I do not know what she is up to, there has not been a sound from her, from anyone, for hours. It is worrying. Perhaps she has encountered Quirke, and is with him now, pouring out her troubles. Serve him right. Or she might have cornered the girl, might be quizzing her, wanting to know if I have interfered with her. I am skulking in my hideout, hunched over my bamboo table, feeling cross and ill at ease. Why must I always be the guilty one? I did not ask her to come here, I did not invite her. All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up. I am sick of them all. I shall not come out until she is gone.