Eclipse: A Novel (14 page)

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.

III

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.