Ghosts

by John Banville

  There are ghosts and ghosts, of course. Banquo was a dampener on the king’s carousings, and Hamlet’s father made what I cannot but think were excessive calls on filial piety. Yet, for myself, I know I would be grateful for any intercourse with the dead, no matter how baleful their stares or unavoidable their pale, pointing fingers. I feel I might be able, not to exonerate, but to explain myself, perhaps, to account for my neglectfulness, my failures, the things left unsaid, all those sins against the dead, both of omission and commission, of which I had been guilty while they were still in the land of the living. But more than that, more important than the desire for self-justification, is the conviction that I have, however preposterous it may sound, that there is an onus on us, the living, to conjure up our particular dead. I am certain there is no other form of afterlife for them than this, that they should live in us, and through us. It is our duty. (I like the high moral tone. How dare I, really!)

  Let us take the hypothetical case of a man surprised by love, not for a living woman – he has never been able to care much for the living – but for the figure of a woman in, oh, a painting, let’s say. That is, he is swept off his feet one day by a work of art. It happens; not very often, I grant you, but it does happen. The fact that the subject is a female perhaps is not of such significance, although it should be perfectly possible to ‘fall in love’, as they like to put it, with a painted image; after all, what is it lovers ever love but the images they have of each other? Freud himself remarked that in the passionate encounter of every couple there are four people involved. Or should it be six? – the two so-called real lovers, plus the images they have of themselves, plus the images that they have of each other. What a tangled web Eros weaves! Anyhow. This man, this hypothetical man, finds himself one day in the house of a rich acquaintance, where he is confronted by a portrait of a woman and knows straight away that at once and by whatever means he must possess it. That is what they mean by love, surely? It is not, mark you, that the woman is beautiful; in fact, the model was evidently a plain, pinched person with fishy eyes and a big nose and too much flesh about the lips. But ah, in her portrait she has presence, she is unignorably there, more real than the majority of her sisters out here in what we call real life. And our Monsieur Hypothesis is not used to seeing people whole, the rest of humanity being for him for the most part a kind of annoying fog obscuring his view of the darkened shop-window of the world and of himself reflected in it. He tells himself he will steal the picture and hold it for ransom, but really that is just for the purposes of the plot. His true and secret desire – secret even from himself, perhaps – is to have this marvellous object, to have and to hold it, to bathe in the brightness of its perfected, still and immutable presence. He is, or at least has been, let us say, a man of some learning, trained to reason and compute, who in the face of a manifestly chaotic world has lost his faith in the possibility of order. He drifts. He has no moral base. Then suddenly one midsummer day he comes upon this painting and is smitten. Some other object might have done as well, a statue, for example (I feel we shall have something to say on the subject of statues before long; yes, definitely I feel that topic coming on), or a beautiful proposition in mathematics, or even, who knows, a real, walking-and-talking, peeing-and-pouting, big live pink mama-doll. Obviously the need was there all along, awaiting its fulfilment in whatever form chance might provide. It is being that he has encountered here, the thing itself, the pure, unmediated essence, in which, he thinks, he will at last find himself and his true home, his place in the world. Impossible, impossible dreams, but for a moment he allows himself to believe in them. He takes the painting.

  Here the plot does not so much thicken as coagulate.

  He is an inept thief, our lovelorn hypothetical hero. He comes along bold as brass in broad daylight and lifts the lady off the wall, then turns and is confronted at once by a living, flesh-and-blood person (oh yes, lots of flesh, lots of blood), a maidservant, perhaps (pretend this is olden times, when domestics were readily available, not to say expendable), who by bad luck happens at that moment to walk into the room. Well, to shorten a long and grisly tale, without ado he bashes in the maid’s head, not because she is a threat to him, really, but because, well, because she is there, or because she is there and he does not see her properly, or – or whatever, what does it matter, for Christ’s sake! He kills her, isn’t that enough? And he makes his get-away. Such things were commonplace in olden times. Suddenly, however, to his intense surprise and deep chagrin, he discovers that the picture has lost its charm for him. Ashes. Daubs. Mere paint on a piece of rag. He tosses it aside as if it were a page of yesterday’s newspaper. What interests him now, of course, is the living woman that he so carelessly did away with. He recalls with fascination and a kind of swooning wonderment the moments before he struck the first blow, when he looked into his victim’s eyes and knew that he had never known another creature – not mother, wife, child, not anyone – so intimately, so invasively, to such indecent depths, as he did just then this woman whom he was about to bludgeon to death. Well, he was shocked. Guilt, remorse, fear of capture and disgrace, he had expected these things, welcomed them, indeed, as a token that he had not entirely relinquished his claim to be considered human, but this, this sudden access to another’s being, this astonished and appalled him. How, with such knowledge, could he have gone ahead and killed? How, having seen straight down through those sky-blue, transparent eyes into the depths of what for want of a better word I shall call her soul, how could he destroy her?

  And how, having done away with her, was he to bring her back? For that, he understood, was his task now. Prison, punishment, paying his debt to society, all that was nothing, was merely how he would pass the time while he got on with the real business of atonement, which was nothing less than the restitution of a life. Restitution, that was the word, he remembered it from when he was a child at school and they told him what the thief must do, which is to make proper restitution.

  Of course, he did not know how to do it, where to begin. He stood aghast before the prospect, baffled and helpless. That moment of ineffable knowing when he had turned on her with the weapon raised was no help to him here, that was a different order of knowledge, the stuff of life, so to speak, while what he needed now was the art of necromancy. The question was how to put into place another’s life, but how could he answer, he who hardly knew how to live his own? A life! with all its ragged complexities, its false starts and sudden closures, the summer solitudes and winter woes, the inexplicable exaltations in April weather, the meals to be eaten, the sleeps to be slept, the blood in its courses, the coat that will go one more season, the new shoes, the old shoes, the afternoons, the nights, the bird-thronged dawns, the old dying and the new ones being born, the prime and then in a twinkling the autumnal shadows, then age, and then the proper death. That was what he had taken from her, and now must restore. He would need help. Oh, he would need help. And so he waits for the rustle in the air, for the moment of sudden cold, for the soundless falling into step beside him that will announce the presence of the ghost that somehow he must conjure.

  As I say, merely a hypothesis.

  Last night I had a dream about my father. This is an unusual occurrence. I rarely think of him, never mind entertain him in my dreams. My mother was a dreadful old brute but we were fond of each other, I believe, in our violent, unforgiving way. For my father, however, I seem never to have felt anything stronger than distaste. I mean, I probably loved him, as sons do love fathers, biologically, as it were, but I had as little to do with him as I could. He was a fearsome little fellow, a constant complainer and prone to sudden, ungovernable rages. I always think of him, God forgive me, as Mr Hyde, in his too-big tweeds, stumping along and snorting and stabbing at things with his stick. He died badly, rotting away before our eyes, shrinking to nothing as if he were consuming himself in his own anger. In my dream we were walking together through a huge and echoing administrative building, a place out of my childh
ood, a town hall or public library or something, I don’t know. Anyway, the light in the dream was the light of childhood, steady and clear and dense with its own insubstantial vastness. Though I could see no one, I could hear distinctly the sounds of the place: the brittle clacking of a typewriter, the laughter of a fellow and a girl larking somewhere, and someone with squeaky shoes walking away very businesslike down a long corridor. Father and I were climbing an interminable, shallow staircase with many turns: I could feel the clammy sheen of the banister rail under my hand and sense the high, domed ceiling far above me. The old man was stamping along at a great rate, a pace in front of me, as usual, head down and elbows going like pistons. Suddenly he faltered, and I, not noticing, came up behind him and collided with him, or perhaps it was that he fell against me, I do not know which it was. Anyway, for an amazing moment I thought he was assaulting me. What I noticed most strongly was his smell, of hair oil and serge and cigarette smoke, and something else, something intimate and sour and wholly, shockingly other. He clung to me for a second to steady himself, fixing iron fingers on my wrist in a grip at once infirm and fierce, and I seemed to feel a sort of oscillation start up suddenly, as if some enormous, general and hitherto unnoticed equilibrium had collapsed. A clerk put his sleek head out of an office doorway below us and quickly withdrew it again. My father thrust me aside with what seemed revulsion. I tripped! he snarled, as if expecting to be contradicted, and glared at the banister, white with fury. He searched his pockets and produced a handkerchief and wiped his hands. We stood panting, as if we had indeed been engaged in a scuffle. A telephone rang nearby, a raucous jangling, like metallic laughter, and someone picked it up and began to speak at once in a low voice, urgently, as if trying to placate the machine itself. And I realised that what we had come there for was my father’s death certificate; this seemed perfectly natural, of course, as such things do in dreams. We went on up the long stairs, and he was very brisk now, cheery, almost, in a pitiful sort of way, trying to pretend nothing of any note was happening, and I was embarrassed for him because I understood that he had already started to die and that death was something that would be shameful for him as a man, like being cuckolded, or going bankrupt. I was hoping that no one would see us there together, for if we got away without being seen we could pretend I did not know that he was doomed and that way he would save face. Then came a confused and hectic digression which I shall not bother with: how strange, the people that pop up in dreams, like the figures that loom at the shrieking travellers in a ghost train, springing out of the surrounding murk for a gesticulating, mad moment before being jerked away again on their strings. Anyway, after that wild interval my father and I found ourselves presently in an enormous room full of people rushing about in all directions, shouting, waving bits of paper at each other, demanding, beseeching, cursing. Father plunged at once, terrier-like, into the thick of this mêlée, shoving and shouting with the best of them, with me after him, desperately trying to keep up. He was outraged that the officials among the throng were not marked off somehow from the rest, and he kept stopping random passers-by, grasping them by the upper arms and rising on tiptoe and roaring in their faces. You don’t understand, he would yell at them, I’m here for my chit, dammit, I’m here for my chit! But no one listened, or even looked at him, so busy were they craning to look past him, trying to glimpse whatever it was they were searching for with such fierce determination. Somehow I lost him, and now I in my turn found myself running here and there in desperation, shouting out his name and plucking at people and demanding if they had seen him. And then all at once, like smoke clearing, the crowd dispersed and I was left alone in the enormous room. After a long, panicky search I found a little door built flush to the wall and so well camouflaged that it could hardly be distinguished from the panelling, though by some means I knew it had been there for me to find. When I went through I was in another, much smaller room, with a barred window looking out on a sunlit, classical landscape of meadows and hills and bosky glades, dotted about with statuary and marble follies and dainty, sparkling waterfalls. My father was sitting crookedly on a chair in the middle of the bare floor with an air of bewilderment, stooped and crumpled, peering up fearfully as if expecting a blow; it was obvious that he had been thrust hurriedly on to the chair as I was about to enter. Behind him a group of silent men in starched high collars and black morning-coats and striped trousers stood about in attitudes of stern pensiveness, frowning at their fingernails, or gazing fixedly out of the window. Father had been weeping, his face was blotched and his nose was runny. All his fierceness was gone. It’s you, he said to me, in a mixture of accusation and pleading, you have to serve your term before they’ll do anything! At that the group of gentlemen behind him sprang at once into action and came forward hurriedly and picked him up, still seated, and bustled him chair and all out of the room, negotiating the narrow door with difficulty, muttering directions to each other and tuttutting irritably. When I opened my eyes and sat up in the dawn light I was lost for a moment in that half-world between sleep and waking, and was convinced I had not been dreaming at all, but remembering; all day there has lingered the uneasy sense of an opportunity missed, of some large significance left unacknowledged. Certain dreams do that, they seem to darken the very air, crowding it with the shadows of another world.

  Dreams bring remembrance, too; perhaps that is what they are for, to force us to dredge up those dirty little deeds and dodges we thought we had succeeded in forgetting. These half-involuntary memories are a terrible thing. There are days like this when they course through me from morning until night like pure pain. They leave me gasping, even the seemingly happy ones, as if they were the living record of heinous yet immensely subtle sins I had thought were covered up forever. And always, of course, there is the unexpected: although last night’s dream was about my father, all day today I have been thinking mainly of my mother. After father died I was surprised by the depth of her grief. It made of her something ancient and elemental, a tribal figure, sitting dry-eyed draped in black, bereft, unmoving, monumentally silent, like a pelt-clad figure in a forest clearing watching over the smouldering ashes of a funeral pyre. Had I misjudged her, thinking she was made of sterner stuff? I believe that was for me the beginning of maturity, if that is the word, the moment when I realised it was too late to readjust my notions of her; too late for atonement, too (there is that word again). I tiptoed around her, not knowing what to say, fearful of intruding on this primitive rite. The house wore the startled, doggy air of having been undeservedly rebuked. I knew the feeling.

  INHABITANTS OF THIS PLACE. What a peculiar collection we must seem, the Professor and Licht, the girl and I, disparates that we are, thrown together here on this rocky isle. The girl has complicated everything, of course. Before her coming things had settled down nicely; even Licht, who at first had been so resentful of me, had reconciled himself to my presence. Yes, without her we might have pottered along indefinitely, I at my art history and Licht at his schemes – he is a great one for schemes – and the Professor doing whatever it is the Professor does. Now we have grown restless, and chafe under the imposed languor of these summer days; time, that before seemed such a calm medium, has grown choppy as a storm-threatened sea. If the others had remained, I mean Sophie and Croke and the children, if they too had stayed behind they might have become a little community, might have formed a little fold, and I could have been the shepherd, guarding them against the prowling wolf. Idle fancies; forgive me, I get carried away sometimes.

  Inevitably of course there has grown up a half-acknowledged divide, with the Professor and Licht on one side, the girl and I on the other, and behind that again there is yet another grouping in which the girl stands between Licht and me, a pair of ragged old rats scrabbling in the dirt and showing each other our sharpest teeth. Licht thinks he is in love with her, of course, and resents what he considers the excessive attentions I pay to her. Her silences torment him and strike him mute in his turn; he creeps
up and stands behind her tongue-tied and quivering, or sits and stares at her across the dinner table, rabbit-eyed, his pink-rimmed nostrils flared and his hands trembling. He devises sly, round-about ways of talking about her, deprecating as Mr Guppy, introducing her name with elaborate casualness into the most unlikely topics and employing laboriously cunning circumlocutions. He is heartsick, mooning about the house with the agonised look of a man nursing an unassuageable toothache. At least it has made him smarten himself up a bit. He runs a comb now and then through that fright-wig of hair, and bathes more frequently than he used to, if my nose is any judge. I suppose she has become associated in his mind with the dream he has of leaving here and finding some more fulfilling life elsewhere; I see them, as in one of those old silent films, in a bare room with a square table, he sitting head in hands and she smiling her Lulu smile at the moustachioed and leering landlord who beckons to her suggestively from the doorway.

  She is a singular creature, or seems so to me, at any rate. She claims to be twenty-one but I think she is no more than eighteen or nineteen. She will not tell me about her life, or at least does not: I mean maybe if I knew how to ask, if I knew the codes that everyone else has been privy to since the cradle, she would prattle away non-stop about her mammy and her daddy and schooldays and the job she did at the hotel and all the rest of it. As it is she wears the dulled, frowning air of an amnesiac. There are times when I catch her studying me with that remote stare that she has as if I were something that had suddenly appeared in her path, like a rock, or a fallen branch, or an unfordable blank span of water. Probably she finds me as baffling a phenomenon as I find her, my songless Mélisande. She trails about the house in an old raincoat of Licht’s that she uses for a dressing-gown, with her lank hair and wan cheeks. I am startled anew each time I encounter her. I am like an anthropologist studying the last surviving specimen of some delicate, elusive species long thought extinct. I am assembling her gradually, with great care, starting at the extremities; I ogle her bare feet – the little toe is curled under its neighbour like a baby’s thumb – her hard little hands, the vulnerable, veined, milk-blue backs of her knees. Sometimes at night she comes and sits in the kitchen while I work. I do not know if she is lonely, or afraid, or if the kitchen is just one of a series of stopping-places in her fitful wanderings; she has a way of touching things as she passes them by, tapping them lightly with her fingertips, like a child touching the markers of a secret game. She is tense, restless, preoccupied, always poised somehow, as if at any moment she might unfurl a set of hidden wings and take flight out of the window into the darkness and be gone. It will happen; some morning I will wake and know at once that she has flown, will feel her absence like a jagged hole in the air through which the wind pours without a sound. What shall I do then, when my term is ended?