Athena

by John Banville

  How powerfully affecting they are, though, these reflexive moments when you not only feel something but also feel yourself feeling it. As I lay on that frowsty bed in Ma Murphy’s gazing down at that strip of windswept night street I had a kind of out-of-body experience, seeming to be both myself and the trembling image of myself, as if my own little ghost had materialised there, conjured out of equal measures of stark self-awareness on one side and on the other the fearful acknowledgment of all there was that I was not. Me and my ectoplasm. And yet at the same time at moments such as this I have the notion of myself as a singular figure, a man heroically alone, learned in the arts of solitude and making-do, one with those silent, tense characters you come across of a night standing motionless in the hard-edged, angled shadows of shop doorways or sitting alone in softly purring parked cars and who make you jump when you catch sight of them, their haunted eyes and glowing cigarette-tips flaring at you briefly out of the dark. Esse est percipi. And vice versa (that is, to see is to cause to be; how would I put that into bog Latin?) You see what you have done to me by your going? You have made me an habitué of this flickering, nocturnal demi-monde I was always afraid I would end up in at the last. Oh, I know, at heart I was ever a loner – who, at heart, is not? – but that was different to this. This is another kind of isolation, one I have not experienced before.

  Yet I am not what you could properly call alone. There is a sort of awful, inescapable intimacy among us solitaries. I know all the signs by now, the furtive, involuntary signals by which the members of our brotherhood recognise each other: the glance in the street that is quickly averted, the foot tensely tapping amid the straggle of pedestrians waiting on the windy corner for the lights to change and the little green man to appear (the emblem of our kind, our very mascot!), the particular presence behind me in the supermarket queue: a pent, breathy silence at my shoulder that seems always about to break out into impossible babblings and never does. Children of the dark, we make diurnal night for ourselves in the bare back rooms of pubs, in the echoing gloom of public libraries and picture galleries, in churches, even – churches, I have noticed, are for some reason especially popular when it rains. Our favourite haunt, however, our happiest home, is the afternoon cinema. As we sit star-scattered there in that velvety dark, the lonely and the lovelorn, the quiet cranks and mild lunatics and serial killers-in-waiting, all with our pallid faces lifted to the lighted screen, we might be in the womb again, listening in amazement to news from the big world outside, hearing its cries and gaudy laughter, watching huge mouths move and speak and feed on other mouths, seeing the gun-barrels blaze and the bright blood flow, feeling the beat of life itself all around and yet beyond us. I love to loll dreamily there, lost to all sense, and let the images play over me like music, as you materialise enormously in these moving sculptures with their impossible hair and bee-stung lips and rippling, honeyed flanks. Where are you. Tell me. Where are you. What we see up there are not these tawdry scenes made to divert and pacify just such as we: it is ourselves reflected that we behold, the mad dream of ourselves, of what we might have been as well as what we have become, the familiar story that has gone strange, the plot that at first seemed so promising and now has fascinatingly unravelled. Out of these images we manufacture selves wholly improbable that yet sustain us for an hour or two, then we stumble out blinking into the light and are again what we always were, and weep inwardly for all that we never had yet feel convinced we have lost.

  What shall I do with myself? I could get a job, I suppose. Often I think it might be something as simple as that that would be the saving of me. Nothing serious, of course, nothing to do with science or art, none of that old pretence, that worn-out fustian. I could be a clerk, say, one of those grey, meek men you glimpse in the offices of large, established firms, padding about in the background furtive as mice, with dandruff on their collars and their suits worn shiny. I can see myself there, bleakly diligent, keeping myself to myself, suffering the banter of the younger clerks with a thin unfocused smile and going home in the evening to cold cuts and the telly. Dreams, idle dreams; I wouldn’t last a wet week. The junior partner would be given the task of talking to me. Ahem, yes, well – frowning out of the window at the rain and jingling coins in his trouser pocket – Oh, the work is fine, fine, very satisfactory. It’s your manner, you see; that’s the problem. A bit on the gloomy side. The girls complain, you know what they’re like, and Miss McGinty says you’re inclined to stare in a way she finds unnerving … Had a bereavement recently, have you? Yes, sir; sort of.

  I went to see Hackett. His office was in a big grey mock-Gothic fortress with wire mesh on the windows and a pillared porch where I waited meekly, trying to look innocent, while a bored young policeman in shirt-sleeves phoned the Inspector’s office, leaning on his counter with the receiver tucked under his chin like a fiddle and looking me up and down with a gaze at once bored and speculative. Flyblown notices warned of rabies and ragweed. Two detectives in padded jerkins went out laughing, leaving behind them a mingled smell of cigarette smoke and sweat. Police stations always remind me of school, they have the same dishevelled, sullen, faintly desperate air. A billow of wind bustled in from the street, bringing dust and the smell of approaching rain. The young policeman’s voice made me start. He slung down the phone. ‘Third floor, first on the left.’ Brief pause, a sour smirk. ‘Sir.’ They can always recognise an old gaolbird.

  Hackett’s office was a partitioned-off corner of a large, low-ceilinged, crowded room where angry-looking men walked here and there carrying documents, or sat with their feet on their desks or hunched over and glaring at big, old-fashioned typewriters. That schoolroom smell again: dust, stale paper, rotten apple-cores. Through the glass of his door Hackett motioned me to enter. He stood up awkwardly, smiling his shy smile. He wore a broad, greasy tie with a windsor knot, and his too-tight jacket was buttoned as always, the gaps between the buttons pulling agape like vertical, fat, exclaiming mouths. On the floor beside his incongruously grand mahogany desk an electric fire was tinily abuzz; the sight of it almost made me sob. In the corner, at a smaller, metal desk, an elderly policeman in uniform was poking with the smallest blade of a penknife at the innards of a half-dismantled pocket-watch; he was balding, and had the leathery look of a countryman; he gave me a friendly nod and winked. Crêpe paper decorations were strung across the ceiling, and there were sprigs of holly, and Christmas cards pinned to a notice board. One of the cards was inscribed To Daddy in tall, wobbly lettering. I would not have taken Hackett for a family man; I pictured two scale-models of him, globe-headed and chicken-eyed, one in britches and the other in a gym-slip, and had to think of death to keep from laughing. He saw me looking at the card and gave what I realised was a sympathetic cough. ‘And you buried your poor auntie,’ he said, and lowered his eyes and shook his great head slowly from side to side.

  Despite everything I know, despite all the things I have seen, and done, I persist in thinking of the world as essentially benign. I have no grounds for this conviction – I mean, look at the place – yet I cannot shake it off. Even those – and I have encountered a few of them, I can tell you – who have perpetrated the most appalling wickednesses, can seem after the event as mild and tentative as any of … of you (us, I almost said). This is what is known, I believe, as the problem of evil. I doubt I shall ever solve it to my satisfaction. Hackett, now, with his shy smile and buttoned-up look of sorrow and sympathy, seemed the soul of harmlessness.

  ‘I saw Francie,’ I said.

  Hackett beamed as if I had mentioned an old, fond friend of his.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Had to give him a tap or two. The Sergeant there couldn’t hear him and I had to keep asking him to speak up. That right, Sergeant?’ The elderly policeman, without looking up from the intricacies of his watch, delivered himself of a rich, low chuckle. ‘Brought the Da in too,’ Hackett said. ‘Couldn’t get a thing out of him. Do you know what he does when—

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘He
told me.’

  ‘Dirty bugger,’ Hackett said, but laughed, rueful and admiring. He sat back on his swivel chair and laced his fingers together on his chest and contemplated me. ‘I’d have had you in, too,’ he said, ‘but I knew you knew nothing.’ He waited, smiling with fond contempt, but I did not speak. What was there for me to say? I was beginning to have an inkling of his sense of humour. ‘Any word?’ he said. ‘Of your friends, I mean. Morden, and …’ He raised his eyebrows. I shook my head. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said as if he had just remembered, ‘you were right about the pictures. Or about one of them, at least.’ He leaned forward and searched among the papers on his desk and handed me a postcard. A crease ran aslant the coloured reproduction on the front like a vein drained of blood. The butcher’s art. Birth of Athena: Jean Vaublin (1684-1721). I turned it over. Behrens Collection, Whitewater House. It was addressed to Hackett. The message was scrawled in a deliberately clumsy hand: ‘Who’s the daddy of them all?’ ‘He’s fond of a joke,’ Hackett said. He watched me with that gentle smile. He pointed to the postcard. ‘They wanted to get that one out,’ he said. ‘They must have had a buyer for it. Some moneybags somewhere. The rest will be in store, for another day.’ Brown light of the winter afternoon pressed itself against the meshed windows, the electric fire fizzed. In the office outside someone laughed loudly. Hackett gave himself a sort of doggy shake, and turned aside in his chair and set one shiny brown brogue on the corner of the desk and shut an eye and took a sighting along the toe. ‘Seven fakes,’ he said dreamily. ‘Who would have thought the eighth would be the real thing? Not our friend Sharpe, anyway. Not when he had you to laugh at.’ He looked at me again with that lopsided stare, that saddest smile. His eyes seemed crookeder than ever. A muscle in his jaw was jumping. ‘We’ve been at this for years, the Da and me. It’s like one of them long-distance chess games. He’ll make a move, send it to me, I’ll make a move, send it to him.’ He swung his leg to the floor and leaned forward and shifted the invisible pieces before him on the desk. He smiled. ‘He wins, I lose; I win, he loses. This time it was his turn. He stuck that real one in with the duds and gambled that we’d all miss it. And we did. But he wouldn’t have cared if we had spotted it. He doesn’t care about anything, only the game. I’m telling you, mad as a hatter.’

  ‘What about the other seven?’ I said.

  He shrugged, and shifted bunched fingers this way and that over the desk-top again. ‘He’ll wait, then make another move. We’ll see who’ll win next time. It’s a great match we have going.’ He gazed toward the window with an almost happy sigh. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes: the daddy of them all.’

  The Sergeant at the desk pressed something in the recesses of his timepiece and the mechanism returned a tiny, silver chime.

  Hackett and I walked down the echoing stairs. Below us men were talking loudly, their voices came to us in a blare. There had been another murder, the last, as it turned out. ‘Bled her white,’ Hackett said. ‘It’s a bad world.’ On the last step a young detective sat staring at a splash of vomit on his shoes, grey-faced and breathing deeply, while two older men stood over him shouting at each other. They did not look at us as we sidled past. In the porch we paused, not knowing quite how to part. Outside, the grimed December dusk was flecked with rain.

  ‘And the daughter,’ Hackett said, ‘you haven’t heard from her?’

  I looked at the rain drifting in the light at the doorway. Behind us the two detectives were still arguing.

  ‘Daughter?’ I said, and was not sure that I had spoken. ‘What daughter?’

  Hackett looked at me. I wonder what it was he thought of in order to keep himself from laughing?

  ‘The girl,’ he said. ‘Morden’s sister. The two of them; the Da is their …’ He touched my arm with a sort of solicitude, awkwardly, like a mourner offering comfort to one bereaved. ‘Did you not know?’ he said.

  What I thought of immediately was her telling me one day how in her bored childhood she used to spend hours alone hitting a tennis ball against the gable end of a house. At the time of course I pictured a tranquil suburb in the hills above some great city, dappled sunlight in the planes and a chauffeur in shirt-sleeves and leggings polishing the ambassador’s limousine. Now what I saw was a mean terrace with defeated scraps of garden and a woman leaning out of an upstairs window raucously calling her name, while a toddler on a tricycle upends himself into the gutter and begins to whinge, and pock! goes the ball as the girl swings her racquet with redoubled fury. It was no dead twin that walked beside her always, but the ghost of that ineluctable past.

  Birth of Athena. Behrens Collection.

  Consider these creatures, these people who are not people, these inhabitants of heaven. The god has a headache, his son wields the axe, the girl springs forth with bow and shield. She is walking towards the world. Her owl flies before her. It is twilight. Look at these clouds, this limitless and impenetrable sky. This is what remains. A crease runs athwart it like a bloodless vein. Everything is changed and yet the same.

  I saw her yesterday, I don’t know how, but I did. It was the strangest thing. I have not got over it yet. I was in that pub on Gabriel Street that she liked so much. The place is fake, of course, with false wood panelling and plated brass and a wooden fan the size of an aeroplane propeller in the ceiling that does nothing except swirl the drifting cigarette smoke in lazy arabesques. I go there for the obvious reason. I was in the back bar, nursing a drink and my sore heart, sitting at that big window – I always think of windows like that as startled, somehow, like wide-open eyes – that looks down at the city along the broad sweep of Ormond Street. The street was crowded, as it always is. The sun was shining, in its half-hearted way – yes, spring has come, despite my best efforts. Suddenly I saw her – or no, not suddenly, there was no suddenness or surprise in it. She was just there, in her black coat and her black stilettos, hurrying along the crowded pavement in that watery light at that unmistakable, stiff-kneed half-run, a hand to her breast and her head down. Where was she going, with such haste, so eagerly? The city lay all before her, awash with April and evening. I say her, but of course I know it was not her, not really. And yet it was. How can I express it? There is the she who is gone, who is in some southern somewhere, lost to me forever, and then there is this other, who steps out of my head and goes hurrying off along the sunlit pavements to do I don’t know what. To live. If I can call it living; and I shall.

  Write to me, she said. Write to me. I have written.

  Also by

  JOHN BANVILLE

  “What Banville writes is historically accurate, but his are a novelist’s truth, and a lover’s prose.”

  —Newsweek

  GHOSTS

  On an unnamed island, a day boat runs aground, forcing its group of shaken travelers to wade ashore. There they encounter a reclusive art historian and his assistant. But is this meeting truly an accident? Why does one of the castaways seem to know the eminent scholar? And who is the stranger who moves among them, observing their every action?

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-75512-8

  KEPLER

  Wars, witchcraft, and disease rage throughout Europe. For Kepler, the court mathematician, vexed by domestic strife, appalled by the religious upheavals that have driven him from exile to exile, and vulnerable to the whims of his eccentric patrons, astronomy is a quest for some form of divine order.