Athena

by John Banville

  I came forward hesitantly, feeling an ingratiating smile spreading across my face like treacle. What would be the rules of comportment here?

  ‘I was just passing,’ the Da said and did that cracked laugh of his, making a sound like that of something sharp and brittle being snapped, and his veil trembled. Dressed up like this he bore a disconcerting resemblance to my mother in her prime.

  ‘I believe you’re working together,’ Aunt Corky said and gave me a smile of teasing admonishment, shaking her head, every inch the grande dame; she turned back to the Da. ‘He never tells me anything, of course.’

  The Da regarded me calmly.

  ‘Is Cyril still out there?’ he said. ‘The son,’ he told Aunt Corky; ‘he’s a good lad but inclined to be forgetful.’

  ‘Oh, don’t I know!’ Aunt Corky said and cocked her head at me again. ‘Will you take off your coat,’ she said, ‘and join us?’

  I drew up a chair and sat down. I kept my coat on.

  Cyril.

  The Da took a draught of tea. He was having trouble with his veil.

  ‘He was to blow the horn when you arrived,’ he said. ‘Did he not see you, or what?’

  I shrugged, and said he must not have noticed me; I felt suddenly protective toward young Popeye, now that I knew his real name, and had seen that moustache.

  There was a silence. A coal in the fire whistled briefly. The Da stared before him with a bilious expression, pondering the undependability of the young, no doubt. Really, it was uncanny how much he reminded me of my mother, God rest her fierce soul; something in the stolid way he sat, with feet apart and planted firmly on the rug, was her to the life.

  Aunt Corky’s attention had wandered; now she gave a little start and looked about her guiltily.

  ‘We were discussing art,’ she said. ‘Those pictures.’ She smiled dreamily with eyes turned upward and sighed. ‘How I would love to see them!’

  The Da winked at me and with mock gruffness said, ‘Why don’t you take your auntie down to that room and let her have a look?’ He turned to Aunt Corky. ‘They’re all the same,’ he said, ‘no regard.’ He put down his cup and heaved himself from the chair with a grunt and walked to the window, stately, imperious and cross. ‘Look at him,’ he said disgustedly, glaring down into the street. ‘The pimply little get.’

  While his back was turned I looked at Aunt Corky with an eyebrow arched but she only gazed at me out of those hazed-over eyes and smiled serenely. Her head, I noted, had developed a distinct tremor. I had a vision of her dying and the Da and me carrying her downstairs to the ambulance, I at the head and the Da, his hat raked at a comical angle and his veil awry, clutching her feet and walking backwards and shouting for Cyril.

  The Da came back and resumed his seat, arranging his skirts deftly about his big, square knees. His fur coat fell open to reveal a black velvet dress with bald patches. He eyed me genially.

  ‘Have you seen our friend at all?’ he said. ‘Mr Morden.’ I shook my head. He nodded. ‘They seek him here, they seek him there,’ he said.

  I considered for a moment and then asked him if he realised that the police were on to him. He only beamed, lifting his veil to get a better look at me.

  ‘You don’t say!’ he said. ‘Well now.’

  I mentioned Hackett’s name.

  ‘I know him!’ he cried happily, slapping his knee. ‘I know him well. A decent man.’

  ‘He asked me about the pictures,’ I said.

  His shoulders shook. ‘Of course he did!’ he said, as if this were the best of news.

  Aunt Corky had been following these exchanges like a spectator at a tennis match. Now she said, ‘A headache for the police, I am sure, such valuable things.’ We looked at her. ‘Guarding them,’ she said. ‘And then there would be the question of insurance. I remember dear Baron Thyssen saying to me …’

  The Da was watching her brightly, with keen attention, like Prince the dog.

  ‘Oh, we don’t need that,’ he said, ‘the Guards, or insurance, any of that. No, no. We can look after our own things by ourselves.’ He turned to me again. ‘That right, Mr M.?’ M for Marsyas, slung upside-down between two bent laurels with his innards on show and blood and gleet dripping out of his hair. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I had a dream about you last night.’ He lifted a finger and circled it slowly in the air above his head. ‘I see things in my dreams. You were in a little room with your books. You weren’t happy. Then you were outside and this fellow came along and offered you a job. He knew you were a man he could trust.’

  I think of fear as a sort of inner organ, something like a big pink and purple bladder, that suddenly swells up and squeezes everything else aside, heart, liver, lights. It is always a surprise, this sudden, choking efflorescence, I can’t say why; God knows, I should be familiar with it by now. The Da’s pale eye in its pachydermous folds was fixed on me, and now something in it flashed and it was as if his face were a disguise within a disguise and behind it someone else entirely had stepped up and put a different eye to the empty socket and looked out at me with casual and amused contempt, taking the measure of me, and I flinched and heard myself catch my breath sharply.

  The doorbell rang, two short bursts and then a long, and Aunt Corky’s teacup rattled. The Da, become his genial self again, grasped his handbag and stood up, grunting. ‘There’s my call,’ he said. Aunt Corky smiled up at him sweetly, her faltering mind elsewhere by now. He took her hand and shook it solemnly. ‘Goodbye now, missus,’ he said. ‘And remember what I say – water, that’s the thing for you. Take five or six good big glasses of water a day and you’ll be right as rain. I’m a great believer in it.’ He nodded slowly, still shaking her hand, his head and arm moving in unison; then he turned and stumped to the door. On the way he paused and peered at himself in the mirror above the sideboard and adjusted his hat and veil. He winked at me over his shoulder and said, ‘Are my seams straight?’ I opened the door for him. It felt as massive as a bulkhead. My hand on the latch would not be steady. ‘Well, ta ta for now,’ he said, and wiggled his broad rump and went off cackling down the stairs.

  When I came back into the room Aunt Corky gave me a roguish little grin and shook her head.

  ‘The company you keep!’ she said.

  That was to be her last levee. She sat on for a while gazing vacantly before her and when she stood up she took a tottery step backwards and I was afraid she would fall into the fire. I held her arm and she looked through me with an expression of vast, vague amazement, as if everything inside her had been suddenly transformed and she could no longer recognise the features of this internal landscape. ‘I think,’ she said with a shake in her voice, ‘I think I would like to lie down.’ Her meagre forearm – a stick in a brown-paper bag – quaked where I held it. She leaned her weight on me and looked at the morning light in the window and gave a fluttery sigh. ‘How bright the evenings are becoming,’ she said.

  I left her and fled back to the house in Rue Street, but you had left. I lay down in my coat again on the couch. Our stain on the sheet had gone cold but was still damp; I took some of the pearly slime on my fingertip and tasted it. Sometimes after we had made love and were walking through the streets she would give an involuntary shiver and make a face, turning her mouth down at the corners, and say accusingly, ‘I’m leaking.’ These small vicissitudes amidst the logistics of love were always my fault. ‘Look at me!’ she would cry, showing me this smear, that bruise, ‘look what you’ve done to me!’ And then a sullen flush would spread up from her throat and her face would go fat with resentment, and I would have to spend a quarter of an hour abasing myself at her feet before she would unbend and let me touch her. But afterwards how she would leap under me, lithe as a fish, her ankles locked behind my back and her poor bitten nails searching for a purchase in the quivering muscles of my shoulders. She smelled of brine and bread and something excitingly musty and mushroomy. Her spit tasted of violets, whatever violets taste of. She licked my hands, took my
fingers one by one into her mouth and softly sucked them. In the street she would stop suddenly and draw me into a doorway and make me put my hand inside her dress; ‘Feel me,’ she would say, her breath booming in my ear, ‘feel how wet I am.’ But most affecting of all, I think, were the times when she forgot about me altogether, standing by the window in afternoon light with her arms folded, looking out vague-eyed over the roofs, or in a shop beadily scanning the magazine racks, or just walking along the leaf-strewn pavements, with her head down, thinking; what moved me, I suppose, was that at those moments she was most nearly herself, this stranger every inch of whose flesh I knew better than I knew my own. She could change from one second to the next, now child, now crone. She had a short-sighted way of peering into her purse, the tip of her grey-pink tongue stuck in the corner of her mouth, while she rummaged for her lipstick or a cigarette lighter, and crouched thus she would look like one of those ancient little bird-like women you see in off-licences buying their nightly naggin. I told her so once, thick-throated with emotion, thinking of her old and of me gone. She said nothing, only considered me for a beat or two in silence and then decided – I could see her doing it – that she had not heard me.

  Despite the physical attentions that I lavished on her – the demented gynaecologist, speculum in hand – there were areas into which I did not venture. I never knew, for instance, what precautions she took, if she took any. I never thought about it; I could not conceive of her conceiving. She was already her own child, a frail, suffering creature to be nursed and fondled and cooed over. She would speak of herself – her health, her looks, her desires – with the transparently false off-handedness of a doting mother holding up her little girl for general admiration. There were things she must have, especially if they belonged to others, whose relinquishing of them was an added savour. My past was a place for her to plunder: my childhood, my family, my school friends (that one was quickly exhausted), first loves, the gradual disaster of adulthood, all was a playground for her imagination. She would have stories, she insisted on stories. She had a particular craving for the lore of life in prison (have I mentioned my prison days, I wonder?), and would sit rapt as I described – not without embellishing them for her sake – the sexual transactions, the rituals of punishment and reward, the fevered excitement and alarm of visiting-day, the strange torpor of afternoons, the nights restless with sighs and whisperings, the silence of those interminable, louse-grey dawns. It might have been the lost world of the Incas I was describing. How passionately, with what gentle abandon, she would give herself to me at the end of these narratives, sinking against me with her face lifted and pale throat exposed and her shadowed eyelids twitching.

  These memories. Where is she in them? A word, a breath, a turning look. I have lost her. Sometimes I wish that I could lose all recollection of her, too. I suppose I shall, in time. I suppose memory will simply fall away from me, like hair, like teeth. I shall be glad of that diminishment.

  We never spoke of the pictures, or Morden, or any of that, yet it was always there. It was as if at some immemorial time we had discussed everything and then put it aside, never to be mentioned again. Sometimes this feeling was so strong that I would wonder confusedly if there really had been such a conversation and that somehow I had forgotten it. On the rare occasions when I did let slip this or that reference to my predicament – for by now it had become a predicament – she would turn aside vaguely and her eyes would swim and her face become slack, as if she were suppressing a yawn. Yet I seemed to feel too an awareness in her, a sort of steady, perhaps resentful yet vigilant wakefulness, such as a fitful sleeper would sense in one sitting all night unmoving by his bedside. Did you betray me, my love? Well, I don’t care if you did. If we had it all to do over again I would not hesitate, not for a second.

  Now I fell asleep, huddled there on the couch in my coat with my knees drawn up and my arms clenched around myself. I had a dream of you. We were here together, but now there was a third with us, a great pale naked woman, majestic and matronly, with broad hips and narrow shoulders. Her white breasts were tipped with pink and her eyes, fixed dreamily on nothing, were of a washed-blue shade. She was sprawled between us where we sat on either side of the couch, unfettered and yet our prisoner. I touched her rosebud mouth and she made a vague, lost sound deep in her throat. You smiled at me with great sadness and I guided your hand and laid it on her breast; my own hand was buried in the thick fleece of her lap, which felt warm and dry and inexplicably familiar. She was us and yet not us, our conduit and ourselves. You leaned down and kissed that red, pursed mouth, and your blue-black hair fell over her face like a bird’s wing.

  When I woke the day was already failing. I was cold and there were pins-and-needles in my fingers. Something had followed me out of that dream, a dark, slow, dragging something. I lay blank and unmoving for a while with my eyes open, clutched in fear. I had thought, before Morden and the pictures and you, that I would never be afraid again, that I had been immunised against it. I got myself up and stood by the window lost in a kind of unfocused anguish. Around me the house squatted sullenly in silence. I wanted to put my face into my hands and howl. Something was moving under me, I felt it, the first, infinitesimal shift of the glacier.

  I left the house. On the doorstep the cold air filled my mouth like water and made me gag. The false spring had ended and the air was bruised and darkened by the first of winter’s winds. Why is it, I wonder, that certain brownish, raw, late days like this make me think of Paris? Is that where you are? I can see you in your black coat and needle heels clicking along one of those mysteriously deserted, teetering little streets – rue de Rue! – off the Luxembourg Gardens. You stop on a corner and glance up at a window. Who is waiting for you in that shuttered room, with his smouldering Gauloise and smoky eyes and his air of moody insolence? Big hand-shaped leaves scrabble along the pavement. Children are at play in the Gardens under the shedding planes, their voices come to you like memories. You think you will live forever, that you will be young forever. I hope he abandons you. I hope he breaks your heart. I hope that one day without a word he will walk out of your life and destroy you.

  Why do I goad myself like this? I am so tired, so tired.

  In Hope Alley a man in a raincoat and a pixie’s woollen cap with a bobble walked along sobbing harshly and wiping his raw and reddened eyes with the heel of his hand.

  As I passed through those wind-haunted streets I had again that creepy sense of being followed, and felt again that tingling target-point between my shoulder-blades. I kept stopping to look in shop windows or tie my shoelaces and covertly scanned the streets. It is remarkable how strange people come to seem when you are searching anxiously amongst them for a particular face. They turn into walking waxworks, minutely detailed yet not quite convincing copies of themselves, their features blurred to anonymity, their movements stiff and curiously uncoordinated. Yet when at last Inspector Hackett’s grinning, globular head and cubist countenance materialised out of the crowd I did not recognise him until he spoke. I had been expecting Popeye or the Da or someone even worse. He was standing under the archway in Fawn Street with his hands in the pockets of his buttoned and belted raincoat. He looked more than ever like a life-sized toy man, overstuffed, and tacky with too many coats of varnish. We shook hands; always that odd, impressive formality. ‘How is it going?’ he said, another of those ambiguous openers that he and the Da both favoured.

  We went through the archway and turned on to the quays. The wind whistled in the spumy air above the river and the water heaved and tumbled like a jumble of big square brown boxes. ‘Winter coming on,’ Hackett said and stuck his hands deeper into the pockets of his rat-coloured mac and gave himself a shivery squeeze with his elbows. ‘I suppose,’ he said musingly, ‘it takes a lot of work to become an expert? Lot of reading and so on?’ He glanced at me sideways with his jester’s grin. ‘Of course, you had plenty of time for it, didn’t you.’

  We stopped. He leaned on the river
wall and watched the jostling water for a while. Cold spits of rain were falling at a steep slant. I told him how the Da had come to the flat dressed in his fur coat and velvet dress. He laughed.

  ‘That’s the Da, all right,’ he said, ‘mad as a hatter. He writes to me, you know. All sorts of topics: how to cure cancer, the Pope is a Jew, that kind of thing. Stone mad. He knows I know he has those pictures. The question is, where are they?’

  Sometimes I think all of the significant occasions of my life have been marked only by misery and fright and a sort of disbelieving slow sense of shock as I step outside myself and stare aghast at what I am doing. Your face appeared and hung in my head like a Halloween mask, gazing at me with lips pressed shut, warningly.

  ‘Morden has them,’ I said, in a voice so faint I hardly heard it myself, and immediately had a dismaying urge to weep. ‘There is a room …’ And in my head you slowly turned your face away from me and I remembered you lifting your hand and floating it on the air and saying, Free.

  Hackett kept his gaze fixed on the river, frowning, as if he were idly doing calculations in his head.

  ‘Is that so?’ he said at last, mildly. ‘And you’d say they’re the real thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s them; they’re genuine.’

  A wash of watered sunlight from somewhere briefly lit the emerald moss on the river wall and made it glisten. Hackett blew into his hands and rubbed them together vigorously.