Eclipse: A Novel (9 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll be off,” he said.

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

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