Athena

by John Banville

  I am still not sure which one of Aunt Corky’s many versions of her gaudy life was true, if any of them was. Her papers, I have discovered, tell another story, but papers can be falsified, as I know well. She lied with such simplicity and sincere conviction that really it was not lying at all but a sort of continuing reinvention of the self. At her enraptured best she had all the passion and rich inventiveness of an improvvisatrice and could hold an audience in a trance of mingled wonder and embarrassment for a quarter of an hour or more without interruption. I remember when I was very small listening to her recount to my mother one day the details of the funeral of the young wife of a German prince she claimed to have witnessed, or perhaps even to have taken part in, and I swear I could see the coffin as it was borne down the Rhine on the imperial barge, accompanied only by seine königliche Hoheit in his cream and blue uniform and plumed silver helmet while his grieving subjects in their thousands looked on in silence from the river banks. As so often, however, Aunt Corky went too far, not content until narrative had been spun into yarn: the barge passed under a bridge and when it came out the other side the coffin, bare before, was suddenly seen to be heaped with white roses, hundreds of them, in miraculous profusion. ‘Like that,’ she said, making hooped gestures with her big hands, piling imaginary blossoms higher and higher, her eyes shining with unshed tears, ‘so many, oh, so many!’

  How did she come to have all that money when she died? It is a mystery to me. She never had a job, that I know of, and had seemed to live off the charity of a network of relatives here and abroad. There was a prolonged liaison with an Englishman, a lugubrious and decidedly shifty character with a penchant for loud ties and two-tone shoes; he strikes me as an unlikely provider of wealth; rather the opposite, I should say. They married, I think – Aunt Corky’s morals were a subject our family passed over in tight-lipped silence – and she moved with him to England where they travelled about a lot, mainly in the Home Counties, living in genteel boarding houses and playing a great deal of whist. Then something went wrong and Basil – that was his name, it’s just come back to me – Basil was dismissed, never to be spoken of again, and Aunt Corky returned to us with another weight added to her burden of sorrows, and whenever there was talk of England or things English she would flinch and touch a hand to her cheek in a gesture at once tragic and resigned, as if she were Dido and someone had mentioned the war at Troy. I was not unfond of her. From those early days I remembered her curious, stumping walk and parroty laugh; I could even recall her smell, a powerful brew of cheap scent, mothballs and a dusty reek the source of which I was never able to identify but which was reminiscent of the smell of cretonne curtains. And cigarette smoke, of course; she certainly had the true continental’s dedication to strong tobacco, and wherever she went she trailed an ash-blue cloud behind her, so that when I thought of her from those days I saw a startlingly solid apparition constantly stepping forth from its own aura. She wore sticky, peach-coloured make-up, and rouge, and painted her large mouth, always slightly askew, with purplish lipstick; also she used to dye her hair a brassy shade of yellow and have it curled and set every Saturday morning.

  How pleasant it is, quietly turning over these faded album leaves.

  I don’t know why I allowed myself to go and to see her after all those years. I shy from the sickroom, as who does not, and so much had happened to me and to my life since those by now archaic days that I was not sure I would still speak a language comprehensible to this fading relic of a lost age. I had assumed that she was already dead; after all, everyone else was, both of my parents, and my … and others, all gone into the ground, so how should she, who seemed ancient when they were young, be surviving still? Perhaps it was merely out of curiosity then that I—

  Ah, what a giveaway it is, I’ve noticed it before, the orotund quality that sets in when I begin consciously to dissemble: and so much had happened to me and to my life since those by now archaic days – dear, oh dear! Whenever I employ locutions such as that you will know I am inventing. But then, when do I not use such locutions? (And I said that Aunt Corky was a liar!)

  She was living, if that is the way to put it, in a nursing home outside the city called The Cypresses, a big pink and white gazebo of a place set in a semi-circle of those eponymous, blue-black, pointy trees on the side of a hill with a sweeping and slightly vertiginous view of the sea right across to the other side of the bay. There was a tall, creosote-smelling wooden gate with one of those automatic locks with a microphone that squawked at me in no language that I recognised, though I was let in anyway. Tarmac drive, shrubs, a sloping lawn, then suddenly, like an arrow flying straight out of the past, the sharp, prickly smell of something I knew but could not name, some tree or other, eucalyptus, perhaps, yes, I shall say eucalyptus: beautiful word, with that goitrous upbeat in the middle of it like a gulp of grief. I almost stumbled, assailed by the sweetness of forgotten sorrows. Then I saw the house and wanted to laugh, so delicate, spindly and gay was it, so incongruous, with its pillared arches and filigree ironwork and glassed-in verandah throwing off a great reflected sheet of afternoon sunlight. Trust Aunt Corky to end up here! As I followed the curve of the drive the sea was below me, far-off, blue, unmoving, like something imagined, a sea of the mind.

  The verandah door was open and I stepped inside. A few desiccated old bodies were sunning themselves in deckchairs among the potted palms. Rheumed yellowish eyes swivelled and fixed on me. A door with glass panels gave on to an interior umber dimness. I tapped cautiously and waited, lightly breathing. ‘You’ll have to give that a good belt,’ one of the old-timers behind me said quaveringly, and coughed, making a squelching sound like that of a Wellington boot being pulled out of mud. There was a pervasive mild smell of urine and boiled dinners. I knocked again, more forcefully, making the panes rattle, and immediately, as if she had been waiting to spring out at me, a jolly, fat girl with red hair threw open the door and said, ‘Whoa up there, you’ll wake the dead!’ and grinned. She was dressed in a nurse’s uniform, with a little white cap and those white, crêpe-soled shoes, and even had a wristwatch pinned upside down to her breast pocket (why do they do that?), but none of it was convincing, somehow. She had a faint air of the hoyden, and reminded me of a farm girl I knew when I was a child who used to give me piggyback rides and once offered to show me what she called her thing if I would first show her mine (nothing came of it, I’m afraid). I asked for Aunt Corky and the girl looked me up and down with an eyebrow arched, still grinning sceptically, as if she in her turn suspected me of being an impostor. A blue plastic tag on her collar said her name was Sharon. ‘Are you the nephew?’ she asked, and I answered stoutly that I was. At that moment there materialised silently at my side a plump, soft, sandy-haired man in a dowdy, pinstriped dark suit who nodded and smiled at me in a wistfully familiar way as if we were old acquaintances with old, shared sorrows. I did not at all like the look of him or the sinister way he had crept up on me. ‘That will be all right, Sharon,’ he murmured in a low and vaguely ecclesiastical-sounding voice, and the girl shrugged and turned and sauntered off whistling, her crêpe soles squeaking on the black-and-white tiled floor. ‘Haddon is the name,’ the pinstriped one confided, and waited a beat and added, ‘Mr Haddon.’ He slipped a hand under my arm and directed me towards a staircase that ascended steeply to a landing overhung by a broad window with gaudily coloured panes that seemed to me somehow menacing. I had begun to feel hindered, as if I were wading through thick water; I also had a sense of a suppressed, general hilarity of which I felt I was somehow the unwitting object. As I was about to mount the stairs I caught a flurry of movement from the corner of my eye and flinched as a delicate small woman with the face of an ancient girl came scurrying up to me and plucked my sleeve and said in a flapper’s breathless voice, ‘Are you the pelican man?’ I turned to Haddon for help but he merely stood gazing off with lips pursed and pale hands clasped at his flies, biding and patient, as if this were a necessary but tiresome initiatory test
to which I must be submitted. ‘The pelican man?’ I heard myself say in a sort of piteous voice. ‘No, no, I’m not.’ The old girl continued to peer at me searchingly. She wore a dress of dove-grey silk with a gauzy silk scarf girdling her hips. Her face really was remarkable, soft and hardly lined at all, and her eyes glistened. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘then you are no good to me,’ and gave me a sweetly lascivious smile and wandered sadly away. Haddon and I went on up the stairs. ‘Miss Leitch,’ he murmured, as if offering an explanation. When we reached the landing he stopped at a door and tapped once and inclined his head and listened for a moment, then nodded to me again and mouthed a silent word of encouragement and softly, creakingly, descended the stairs and was gone. I waited, standing in a lurid puddle of multi-coloured light from the stained-glass window behind me, but nothing happened. I became at once acutely aware of myself, as if another I, mute and breathing, had sprouted up out of the balding carpet to loom over me monstrously. I put my face to the door and whispered Aunt Corky’s name and immediately seemed to feel another heave of muffled laughter all around me. There was no response, and in a sudden bluster of vexation I thrust open the door and was blinded by a glare of light.

  By now I had begun seriously to regret having breached this house of shades, and would have been thankful if Mr Haddon or some other guardian of the place had come and stepped firmly in front of me and shut the door and ushered me down the stairs and out into the day, saying, There there, it is all a mistake, you have come to the wrong place, and besides your aunt is dead. I thought with panicky longing of the blue sea and the sky out there, those swaying, sentinel trees. That’s me all over, forever stepping unwillingly into one place while wishing for another. I had the impression, and have it still despite the evidence of later experience, that the room was huge, a vast, white, faintly humming space at the centre of which Aunt Corky lay tinily trapped on the barge of a big high bed, adrift in her desuetude. She had been dozing and at my approach her eyes clicked open as if the lids were controlled by elastic. In my first glimpse of her she did that trick that people do when you have not seen them for a long time, thrusting aside a younger and now not very convincing double and slipping deftly into its place. She lay still and stared at me for a long moment, not knowing, I could see, who I was or whether I was real or a figment. In appearance she seemed remarkably little changed since the last time I had seen her, which must have been thirty years before. She was wrinkled and somewhat shrunken and had exchanged her dyed hair for an even more startlingly lutescent wig but otherwise she was unmistakably Aunt Corky. I don’t know why this should surprise me but it did, and even made me falter for a second. Without lifting her head she suddenly smiled and said, ‘Oh, I would not have recognised you!’ Did I ever describe to you Aunt Corky’s smile? She opened her eyes wide and peeled her lips back from a set of dentures that would have fitted a small horse, while her head very faintly trembled as if she were quaking from the strain of a great though joyous physical effort. A mottled hand scrabbled crabwise across the sheet and searched in space for mine; I grasped her hooked fingers and held her under the elbow – what a grip she had: it was like being seized on by a branch of a dead tree – and she hauled herself upright in the bed, grunting. I did the usual business with pillows and so on, then brought a chair and sat down awkwardly with my hands on my knees; is there any natural way to sit beside a sickbed? She was wearing a not very clean white smock with short sleeves, the kind that patients are made to don for the operating theatre; I noticed bruises in the papery skin of the crook of her arm where blood must have been put in or taken out. She sat crookedly with her mouth open and gazed at me, panting a little, her unsteady smile making it seem as if she were shaking her head in wonderment. Two big tears brimmed up in her eyes and trembled on the lower lids. As ever in the presence of the distress of others I found myself holding my breath. I asked her how she was and without a trace of irony she answered, ‘Oh, but wonderful, wonderful – as you see!’

  After that, conveniently enough, there are gaps in my memory, willed ones, no doubt. I suppose we must have talked about the past, the family, my so-called life – God knows, Aunt Corky was not one to leave any chink of silence unstopped – but what I best recall are things, not words: that white smock, for instance, bleached by repeated use (how many had died in it, I wondered), an overflowing tinfoil ashtray on the bedside table, the livid smear of lipstick she hastened to put on with an unsteady hand. She was a little dazed at first, but as the anaesthetic of sleep wore off she became increasingly animated. She was annoyed to be discovered in such a state of disarray, and kept making furtive adjustments – that lipstick, a dab of face powder, a rapid tongue-test of the state of her dentures – assembling herself in flustered stages, a prima donna preparing for the great role of being what she imagined herself to be. And as the physical she became firmly established so too the old manner strongly reasserted itself, as she sat there, fully upright now, smoking and complaining, at once haughty, coquettish and put-upon. Aunt Corky had an intimately dramatic relationship with the world at large; no phenomenon of history or happenstance was so momentous or so trivial that she would not see it as an effect directed solely at her. In her version of it the most recent world war had been an act of spite got up to destroy her life, while she would look out at a rainy day with a martyr’s sorrowing gaze and shake her head as if to say, Now look what they have sent to try me! But a moment later she would shrug and gamely tip her chin (each whisker sprouting on it dusted with a grain or two of face powder) and flash that equine smile that never failed to make me think of the talking mule in those films from my childhood, and be her usual, chirpy self again. Always she bobbed up, pert and bright and full of jauntiness, a plucky swimmer dauntlessly breasting a sea of troubles.

  But none of this was as I had expected it would be. After all, they had summoned me to what I had assumed would be a deathbed scene, with my aunt, a serene and quietly breathing pre-corpse, arranged neatly among the usual appurtenances (crisp linen, tweed-suited doctor, and in the background the wordless nurse with glinting kidney-dish), instead of which here she was, as talkative and fantastical as ever. She was frail, certainly, and looked hollow, as old people do, but far from being on her last legs she seemed to me to have taken on a redoubled energy and vigour. The Aunt Corky of my memories of her had by now dwindled so far into the past that I could hardly make her out any more, so vivid was this new, wizened yet still spry version before me. The room too seemed to diminish in size as she grew larger in it, and the glare of sea-light abated in the window, dimmed by the smoke of her cigarettes.

  ‘Of course, these are forbidden,’ she said, tapping the barrel of her fag with a scarlet fingernail, and added darkly, ‘They are telling me all the time to stop, but I say, what concern is it of theirs?’

  The bed, the chair, the little table, the lino on the floor, how sad it all seemed suddenly, I don’t know why, I mean why at just that moment. I rose and walked to the window and looked down over the tilted lawn to the sea far below. A freshening wind was smacking the smoke-blue water, leaving great slow-moving prints, like the whorls of a burnisher’s rag on metal. Behind me Aunt Corky was talking of the summer coming on and how much she was looking forward to getting out and about. I had not the heart to remind her that it was September.

  ‘They are all so kind here,’ she said, ‘so good. And Mr Haddon – you have met him, I hope? – he is a saint, yes, a saint! Of course, he is trained for it, you know, he has diplomas. I knew the moment I saw him that he was an educated man. I said to him, I said, I recognise a person of culture when I meet him. And do you know what he did? He bowed, and kissed my hand – yes, kissed my hand! And I, he said, in that very quiet voice he has, I, dear madam, I too recognise breeding when I see it. I only smiled and closed the conversation; it does not do to be too much familiar. He sees to everything himself, everything. Do you know—’ she twisted about to peer at me wide-eyed where I stood by the window ‘—do you know, he even makes
out the menus? This is true. I complimented him one day on a particularly good ragout – I think it was a ragout – and he became so embarrassed! Of course, he reddens easily, with that fair colouring. Ah, Miss Corky, he says – that is what he calls me – ah, I can have no secrets from you!’ She paused for a moment thoughtfully, working at her cigarette with one eye shut and her mouth pursed and swivelled to one side. ‘I hope I do not go too far,’ she murmured. ‘Sometimes these people … But—’ with an airy toss of the head that made the gilded curls of her wig bounce ‘—what can I do? After all, since I am here I must—’