Eclipse: A Novel (11 page)

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 cheek-bone. 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.