Eclipse: A Novel (18 page)

“You brought them into the house,” she said, nodding toward the kitchen and the Quirkes.

“No, I didn’t. They were here when I came.”

“But you let them stay.” So Quirke had confessed all. She put on a big triumphant smile, into the soft centre of which I pictured myself sinking a fist. “You are the one who seems in need of a family.”

Of course, I could think of no reply to that, and came up here to my cubbyhole in a sulk, nursing an irrational and infantile satisfaction at having refused to eat a crumb of breakfast, the foul aromas of which followed me like a taunt up the three steps and through the green door, and which linger faintly even yet. I flung myself down at my bamboo table, ignoring its squeal and crackle of apprehensive protest, and snatched up my pen and scrawled an extended passage of invective against my wife, which when I had finished it I immediately struck out. Terrible things I wrote, unrepeatable, they made me blush even as I set them down. I do not know what it is that comes over me at such moments, this frightening red rage that might make me do anything. What is there for me to be so angry about? I know what Lydia is up to, it is not so reprehensible. She has a great capacity to make the best of the worst predicaments. Finding how things are here, or how she takes them to be, me a landlocked Crusoe, bearded and wild of eye, with not only Quirke as Friday but a surrogate daughter as well—is that what Lily is? the words were written before I had time to think them—she at once set about creating an environment that would simulate, however grisly the likeness, our own dear hearth, which she supposes I am pining for. Ever the home-maker, my Lydia. Well, it will take more than crisped bacon and black pudding to turn this house into a home.

Although I know that nothing can ever be pinpointed so definitively, I date the inauguration of a significant shift in my attitude toward Lydia from the moment, some years back, when I realised that she is mortal. Let me explain, if I can, or let me describe, at least, how the realisation came to me. It was a very odd experience, or perhaps sensation would be a better word. One day, set as usual on the dogged but indisciplined task of self-improvement, I was reading an intricate passage in the work of some philosopher, I forget which one, dealing with the theoretical possibility of the existence of unicorns, when for no reason that I can think of I saw in my mind suddenly the figure of my wife, a very clear and detailed though miniaturised image of her, dressed, most implausibly, in an unbecoming frock of some stiff, brocade-like fabric, which she certainly never possessed in the—what shall I call it?— the empirical world, and with her hair done in that style of frozen rolls of sea-foam so favoured by the second Queen Elizabeth in her latter years, but which Lydia, the living Lydia, would never dream of adopting; I mention these details only in a spirit of scientific rigorousness, for I can think of no explanation for them; in this peculiar image of her—my wife, that is, not the English monarch—she was suspended in a fathomless dark space, a region of infinite emptiness wherein she was the only and only possible specific point, and in which she was receding backwards, at a steady but not rapid rate, with her hands vainly lifted before her as if holding an invisible orb and sceptre—there is the royal note again—wearing an expression of puzzlement and as yet mild though deepening consternation, and it came to me, with ghastly, breathtaking certitude, that one day she would die. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that before then I had imagined her to be somehow immortal. Despite the absurdity of it, what I had understood in that vision of her, simply, astonishingly, was her absolute otherness, not only from me, but from everything else that was in the world, that
was
the world. Up to then, and, indeed, as I have done most of the time since, the mind being a lazy organ, I had conceived her, as I did so much else, to be a part of me, or at least of my immediate vicinity, a satellite fixed and defined within the gravitational field of the body, of the planet, of the red giant that is my being. But if she could die, as I saw now she most certainly could, and would; if some day I was destined to lose her, even in that awful dress and gruesome perm, into the unknowable depths of eternity; if she was to be taken back, bouncing away from me like a ball that has snapped free at the end of its elastic, then how could she be said to be here, fully, palpably, knowably, now? I even saw the circumstances of her death, if I may use that verb of so nebulous a vision. In it, there was a room, in what seemed to be a large apartment, not a remarkable room, rather low-ceilinged, but wide and deep and well appointed. It was night, or late evening, and although there were many lamps about, on tables and bookshelves and even standing, set in heavy broad bases, on the floor, none of them was lit; what light there was came down from the ceiling, a thickish, worn yet unforgiving light that threw no shadows. The atmosphere was heavy, airless, lifeless, though not in any way threatening or distressed. Someone was reclining in a deep armchair, a person whom I could not see, but who I am certain was not Lydia, and someone else was walking past, a woman, a woman I did not know, nondescript and plainly dressed; she had stopped, and turned to ask a question, and waited now, but no answer came, and it was understood that none would come, that there was no answer, and somehow that was death, Lydia’s death, even though Lydia was not there, not there at all. Understand, this was not a dream, or at least I was not asleep. I sat with the book still open in my hands, my eyes still fixed on the page, and went back over it all, carefully, the room, and the tired light, and the woman, and the unseen figure in the chair, and, before that, Lydia herself, still suspended in space, ridiculously coiffed, with her hands held up, but it had all gone inert now, inert and flat, without movement, like a series of badly proportioned photographs, taken by someone else, in places where I had never been. Do not ask me where it came from, this image, illusion, hallucination, call it what you will; I only know what I experienced, and what, for no good reason, it signified.

I have just heard, from down in the house, a sound that for a second I did not recognise. Laughter. They are laughing together, my wife and Quirke. When is it exactly that I last saw my phantoms? Not today, as I have noted, but did I see them yesterday, or even the day before? Perhaps they really have gone for good. Yet somehow I do not think so. The traces of them that persist are all impatience, resentment, envy, even. What there is of them is so little, so faint and insubstantial, that what they leave behind them, their affects, seems more than they are, were, themselves.

An accusation Lydia flung at me last night is that I have always had a deplorable weakness for strays. This was in connection with the Quirkes, obviously, yet I am not clear why she thinks it such a deplorable flaw. After all, I enquired of her, in my most reasoning tone, is not hospitableness a virtue urged on us even by the unaccommodating God of the desert tribes? She laughed at this, one of her large, would-be pitying laughs. “Hospitable?” she cried, throwing back her head. “Hos
pit
able?—You?” What she believes is that I take to strays not out of any charitable urge, but in the spirit of the anthropologist, or, worse, the vivisectionist. “You want to study them,” she said, “take them apart, like a watch, to see how they work.” Her eyes had a malignant gleam, and there was a speck of white spit at one corner of her mouth, and a flake of ash on her sleeve. We were in my bedroom by now, with no lamp lit and the last grainy glow of twilight from the window making the air seem a box full of agitated, wanly illumined dust. The boy and the watch: how often have I heard that tired formulation flung at me, by a succession of disenchanted lovers, each one imagining she has new-minted it. Yet I did once do it, in fact, took a watch apart, when I was a boy. After my father’s death, it was. He had given it to me, brought it home one birthday in a box, with a bow that the girl in the shop had tied for him. A cheap model, Omega, I think the brand was. It boasted seven rubies in the mechanism; I could not find them, search as I would, with my little screwdriver.

Lydia now was speaking of that young fellow who used to come into the house, and how it infuriated her that I would try to talk to him. At first I did not know whom she meant, and said she must be raving—I thought she might hit me for that—but then I remembered him. A big strapping fellow he was, with a shock of yellow hair and amazing big white teeth gapped with caries at regular intervals, so that when he smiled, as he frequently and frighteningly did, it looked as if a miniature piano keyboard had been set into his mouth. He was autistic, although at the outset we did not know it. He first appeared one drowsy hot day in late summer, just walked in through the door with the wasps and the rank tarry stink of the sea. By then we were living in the house above the harbour, where my late father-in-law’s spirit still reigned, keeping a beady eye on me in particular. The boy was sixteen or seventeen, I suppose, the same age as Cass at the time. I met him in the hall as he was coming from the open front doorway with the light behind him, shambling along purposefully with his wrestler’s arms bowed. I thought he must be a delivery boy, or the man to read the gas meter, and I stood back to let him pass, which he did without giving me a glance. I noticed his eyes, flinty blue and alive with what seemed fierce amusement at some private joke. Straight into the drawing room he went, appearing to know exactly where he was going, and I heard him stop. Curious now, I followed him. He was standing in the middle of the floor, big leonine head thrust forward on its thick-veined neck, looking about him slowly, scanning the room, still with that humorous light in his eye but with an air of knowing scepticism, too, as if things were not as they should be, as if he had been here yesterday and come back today to find everything completely changed. From the doorway I asked him who he was and what he wanted. He heard me, I could see that, but as something he did not recognise, a noise from way out beyond his range. His moving glance glided over me, his eyes meeting mine without any sign that he knew who or even what I was, and fixed on something I was holding in my hand, a newspaper, or a tumbler, I cannot remember what it was, and he gave his head a rueful little shake, smiling, as if to say,
No, no, that is not it at all,
and he came forward and pushed past me and strode off quickly down the hall to the front door and was gone. I stood a moment in mild bewilderment, unsure that he had been there at all, that I had not imagined him; thus Mary must have felt when the angel spread his gold wings and whirred off back to Heaven. I went and told Lydia about him, and of course she was able at once to tell me who he was, the retarded son of a fisher family down on the harbour, who now and then eluded the watchful guardianship of his many brothers and roamed the village harmlessly before being recaptured, as he always was, eventually. Security must have been very lax at the end of that summer, for he visited us again two or three times, coming and going as abruptly as he had the first time, and with as little communication. I was fascinated by him, of course, and tried all ways I could think of to provoke a response from him, without success. Why these attempts to communicate, to get through to him, as they say, should so irritate Lydia I could not understand. It happened that at the time I was preparing to play the part of an idiot savant, in an overblown and now long-forgotten drama set in a steamy bayou of the Deep South, and here was a living model, wandering about my own house, as if sent by Melpomene herself—how would I not, I demanded of Lydia, how would I not at least try to get him to babble a sentence or two, so that I might copy his cadences? It was all in the cause of art, and what would it matter to him? She only looked at me and shook her head and asked if I had no heart, if I could not see the poor child was helplessly beyond contact. But there was more than this, I could see, there was something she was not saying, prevented by an embarrassment of some kind, or so I felt. And it is true, my interest in him was not entirely professional. I confess I have always been fascinated by nature’s anomalies. Mine is not the eagerness of the prurient crowd at a freak-show, nor is it, I insist again, the anthropologist’s cold inquisitiveness or the blood-lust of the pitiless dissector; rather, it is the gentle dedication of the naturalist, with his net and syringe. I am convinced I have things to learn from the afflicted, that they have news from elsewhere, a world in which the skies are different, and strange creatures roam, and the laws are not our laws, a world that I would know at once, if I were to see it. Stranger far than Lydia’s irritation at my efforts to provoke the boy was Cass’s anger at me for having anything whatever to do with him, for not bolting the door against him and calling for his keepers. He was dangerous, she said, violently picking at her fingernails, he might fly at any one of us and tear our throats out. Once she even made a go at him herself, confronted him in the garden as he was making his dementedly determined way toward the back door, and went at him with fists flailing. What a sight they were, the pair of them, like two animals of the same implacable species attempting to fight their way past each other on a forest track wide enough only for one. She had been in her room and looked out the window and spied him. My heart had set up its accustomed warning throb—perpetually switched on, that old alarm, when Cass is about—before my ears had properly registered the quick, hollow patter of her bare feet going down the stairs, and by the time I got to the garden she was already locked in a grapple with him. They had collided under the arbour of wisteria, of which Lydia is so proud; odd, in my memory of that day the bush is prodigiously in flower, which it cannot have been, so late in the season. The sun of noon was shining, and a white butterfly was negotiating its drunken way across the burnished lawn, and even in my anxiety I could not help but note the strikingly formal, the almost classical, composition of the scene, the two young figures there, arms hieratically lifted between them, his hands clasping her wrists, with the garden all around them, in the blue and gold light of summer, two wild things, nymph and faun, struggling in the midst of subdued nature, like an old master’s illustration of a moment out of Ovid. Cass was at her most feral, and I think the poor fellow was more than anything amazed to be so violently tackled, otherwise God knows what he might have done, for he looked to be as strong as an ape. I was still sprinting down the garden path, bits of gravel flying out from under my heels like bullets, when with a great heave he lifted her bodily by the wrists and set her behind him like a sack of not very heavy stuff, and resumed his dogged way toward the house. For the first time then they both noticed me. Cass gave an odd sharp cough of laughter. The boy’s step faltered, and he stopped, and as I drew level with him he moved aside deferentially on to the grass to let me go past. As I did, I caught his eye. Cass was trembling, and her mouth was working in that awful sideways shunting movement that it did when she was most intensely agitated. Fearing a seizure was imminent I put my arms about her and held her, resisting, against me, shocked as always by the mixture of tenseness, of fierceness and of frailty that she is; I might have been embracing a bird of prey. The boy was looking all about the garden now, at everything except us, with what in another would have been an expression of profound embarrassment. I spoke to him, something foolish and stilted, hearing myself stammer. He made no response, and suddenly turned and loped away, silent and swift, and leapt the low wall on to the harbour road, and was gone. I led Cass to the house. The crisis in her had passed. She was limp now, and I almost had to hold her up. She was muttering under her breath, inveighing against me, as usual, swearing at me and weeping in fury. I hardly listened to her. I could only think, in pity and a kind of crawling horror, of the look I had caught in the boy’s eye when he had stepped aside to let me pass. It was a look such as one might receive out of a deep-sea diver’s helmet when the air pipe has been severed. Way down in the dazed depths of that murky sea in which he was trapped, he knew; he knew.