The Book Of Evidence

by John Banville

  There now, I have declared my faith.

  Where was I? In Madrid. On my way out of Madrid. I took another train, travelling north. We stopped at every station on the way, I thought I would never get out of that terrible country. Once we halted for an hour in the middle of nowhere. I sat in the ticking silence and stared dully through the window. Beyond the littered tracks of the upline there was an enormous, high, yellow field, and in the distance a range of blue mountains that at first I took for clouds. The sun shone. A tired crow flapped past. Someone coughed. I thought how odd it was to be there, I mean just there and not somewhere else. Not that being somewhere else would have seemed any less odd. I mean – oh, I don't know what I mean. The air in the compartment was thick. The seats gave off their dusty, sat-upon smell. A small, swarthy, low-browed man opposite me caught my eye and did not look away. At that instant it came to me that I was on my way to do something very bad, something really appalling, something for which there would be no forgiveness. It was not a premonition, that is too tentative a word. I knew. I cannot explain how, but I knew. I was shocked at myself, my breathing quickened, my face pounded as if from embarrassment, but as well as shock there was a sort of antic glee, it surged in my throat and made me choke. That peasant was still watching me. He sat canted forward a little, hands resting calmly on his knees, his brow lowered, at once intent and remote. They stare like that, these people, they have so little sense of themselves they seem to imagine their actions will not register on others. They might be looking in from a different world.

  I knew very well, of course, that I was running away.

  I had expected to arrive in rain, and at Holyhead, indeed, a fine, warm drizzle was falling, but when we got out on the channel the sun broke through again. It was evening. The sea was calm, an oiled, taut meniscus, mauve-tinted and curiously high and curved. From the forward lounge where I sat the prow seemed to rise and rise, as if the whole ship were straining to take to the air. The sky before us was a smear of crimson on the palest of pale blue and silvery green. I held my face up to the calm sea-light, entranced, expectant, grinning like a loon. I confess I was not entirely sober, I had already broken into my allowance of duty-free booze, and the skin at my temples and around my eyes was tightening alarmingly. It was not just the drink, though, that was making me happy, but the tenderness of things, the simple goodness of the world. This sunset, for instance, how lavishly it was laid on, the clouds, the light on the sea, that heartbreaking, blue-green distance, laid on, all of it, as if to console some lost, suffering wayfarer. I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us?

  The voices, that was what startled me first of all. I thought they must be putting on this accent, it sounded so like a caricature. Two raw-faced dockers with fags in their mouths, a customs man in a cap: my fellow countrymen. I walked through a vast, corrugated-iron shed and out into the tired gold of the summer evening. A bus went past, and a workman on a bike. The clocktower, its addled clock still showing the wrong time. It was all so affecting, I was surprised. I liked it here when I was a child, the pier, the promenade, that green bandstand. There was always a sweet sense of melancholy, of mild regret, as if some quaint, gay music, the last of the season, had just faded on the air. My father never referred to the place as anything but Kingstown: he had no time for the native jabber. He used to bring me here on Sunday afternoons, sometimes on weekdays too in the school holidays. It was a long drive from Coolgrange. He would park on the road above the pier and give me a shilling and slope off, leaving me to what he called my own devices. I see myself, the frog prince, enthroned on the high back seat of the Morris Oxford, consuming a cornet of ice cream, licking the diminishing knob of goo round and round with scientific application, and staring back at the passing promenaders, who blanched at the sight of my baleful eye and flickering, creamy tongue. The breeze from the sea was a soft, salt wall of air in the open window of the car, with a hint of smoke in it from the mailboat berthed below me. The flags on the roof of the yacht club shuddered and snapped, and a thicket of masts in the harbour swayed and tinkled like an oriental orchestra.

  My mother never accompanied us on these jaunts. They were, I know now, just an excuse for my father to visit a poppet he kept there. I do not recall him behaving furtively, or not any more so than usual. He was a slight, neatly-made man, with pale eyebrows and pale eyes, and a small, fair moustache that was faintly indecent, like a bit of body fur, soft and downy, that had found its way inadvertently on to his face from some other, secret part of his person. It made his mouth startlingly vivid, a hungry, violent, red-coloured thing, grinding and snarling. He was always more or less angry, seething with resentment and indignation. Behind the bluster, though, he was a coward, I think. He felt sorry for himself. He was convinced the world had used him badly. In recompense he pampered himself, gave himself treats. He wore handmade shoes and Charvet ties, drank good claret, smoked cigarettes specially imported in airtight tins from a shop in the Burlington Arcade. I still have, or had, his malacca walking-cane. He was enormously proud of it. He liked to demonstrate to me how it was made, from four or was it eight pieces of rattan prepared and fitted together by a master craftsman. I could hardly keep a straight face, he was so laughably earnest. He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult. Indeed, there was something of the eternal boy about him, something tentative and pubertal. When I think of us together I see him as impossibly young and me already grown-up, weary, embittered. I suspect he was a little afraid of me. By the age of twelve or thirteen I was as big as he, or as heavy, anyway, for although I have his fawn colouring, in shape I took after my mother, and already at that age was inclined towards flab. (Yes, m'lud, you see before you a middling man inside whom there is a fattie trying not to come out. For he was let slip once, was Bunter, just once, and look what happened.)

  I hope I do not give the impression that I disliked my father. We did not converse much, but we were perfectly companionable, in the way of fathers and sons. If he did fear me a little, I too was wise enough to be wary of him, a relation easily mistaken, even by us at times, for mutual esteem. We had a great distaste for the world generally, there was that much in common between us. I notice I have inherited his laugh, that soft, nasal snicker which was his only comment on the large events of his time. Schisms, wars, catastrophes, what did he care for such matters? – the world, the only worthwhile world, had ended with the last viceroy's departure from these shores, after that it was all just a wrangle among peasants. He really did try to believe in this fantasy of a great good place that had been taken away from us and our kind – our kind being Castle Catholics, as he liked to say, yes, sir, Castle Catholics, and proud of it! But I think there was less pride than chagrin. I think he was secretly ashamed not to be a Protestant: he would have had so much less explaining, so much less justifying, to do. He portrayed himself as a tragic figure, a gentleman of the old school displaced in time. I picture him on those Sunday afternoons with his mistress, an ample young lady, I surmise, with hair unwisely curled and a generous décolletage, before whom he kneels, poised trembling on one knee, gazing rapt into her face, his moustache twitching, his moist red mouth open in supplication. Oh but I must not mock him like this. Really, really, I did not think unkindly of him – apart, that is, from wanting deep down to kill him, so that I might marry my mother, a novel and compelling notion which my counsel urges on me frequently, with a meaning look in his eye.

 
; But I digress.

  The charm I had felt in Kingstown, I mean Dun Laoghaire, did not endure into the city. My seat at the front on the top deck of the bus – my old seat, my favourite! – showed me scenes I hardly recognised. In the ten years since I had last been here something had happened, something had befallen the place. Whole streets were gone, the houses torn out and replaced by frightening blocks of steel and black glass. An old square where Daphne and I lived for a while had been razed and made into a vast, cindered car-park. I saw a church for sale – a church, for sale! Oh, something dreadful had happened. The very air itself seemed damaged. Despite the late hour a faint glow of daylight lingered, dense, dust-laden, like the haze after an explosion, or a great conflagration. People in the streets had the shocked look of survivors, they seemed not to walk but reel. I got down from the bus and picked my way among them with lowered gaze, afraid I might see horrors. Barefoot urchins ran along beside me, whining for pennies. There were drunks everywhere, staggering and swearing, lost in joyless befuddlement. An amazing couple reared up out of a pulsating cellar, a minatory, pockmarked young man with a crest of orange hair, and a stark-faced girl in gladiator boots and ragged, soot-black clothes. They were draped about with ropes and chains and what looked like cartridge belts, and sported gold studs in their nostrils. I had never seen such creatures, I thought they must be members of some fantastic sect. I fled before them, and dived into Wally's pub. Dived is the word.

  I had expected it to be changed, like everything else. I was fond of Wally's. I used to drink there when I was a student, and later on, too, when I worked for the government. There was a touch of sleaze to the place which I found congenial. I know much has been made of the fact that it was frequented by homosexuals, but I trust the court will dismiss the implications which have been tacitly drawn from this, especially in the gutter press. I am not queer. I have nothing against those who are, except that I despise them, of course, and find disgusting the thought of the things they get up to, whatever those things may be. But their presence lent a blowsy gaiety to the atmosphere in Wally's and a slight edge of threat. I liked that shiver of embarrassment and gleeful dread that ran like a bead of mercury up my spine when a bevy of them suddenly exploded in parrot shrieks of laughter, or when they got drunk and started howling abuse and breaking things. Tonight, when I hurried in to shelter from the stricken city, the first thing I saw was a half dozen of them at a table by the door with their heads together, whispering and giggling and pawing each other happily. Wally himself was behind the bar. He had grown fatter, which I would not have thought possible, but apart from that he had not changed in ten years. I greeted him warmly. I suspect he remembered me, though of course he would not acknowledge it: Wally prided himself on the sourness of his manner. I ordered a large, a gargantuan gin and tonic, and he sighed grudgingly and heaved himself off the high stool on which he had been propped. He moved very slowly, as if through water, billowing in his fat, like a jellyfish. I was feeling better already. I told him about the church I had seen for sale. He shrugged, he was not surprised, such things were commonplace nowadays. As he was setting my drink before me the huddled circle of queers by the door flew apart suddenly in a loud splash of laughter, and he frowned at them, pursing his little mouth so that it almost disappeared in the folds of his fat chin. He affected contempt for his clientele, though it was said he kept a bevy of boys himself, over whom he ruled with great severity, jealous and terrible as a Beardsleyan queen.

  I drank my drink. There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter. I looked about me. No, Wally's was not changed, not changed at all. This was my place: the murmurous gloom, the mirrors, the bottles ranged behind the bar, each one with its bead of ruby light. Yes, yes, the witch's kitchen, with a horrid fat queen, and a tittering band of fairy-folk. Why, there was even an ogre – Gilles the Terrible, c'est moi. I was happy. I enjoy the inappropriate, the disreputable, I admit it. In low dives such as this the burden of birth and education falls from me and I feel, I feel – I don't know what I feel. I don't know. The tense is wrong anyway. I turned to Wally and held out my glass, and watched in a kind of numbed euphoria as he measured out another philtre for me in a little silver chalice. That flash of blue when he added the ice, what am I thinking of? Blue eyes. Yes, of course.

  I did say dead maidens, didn't I. Dear me.

  So I sat in Wally's pub and drank, and talked to Wally of this and that – his side of the conversation confined to shrugs and dull grunts and the odd malevolent snigger -and gradually the buzz that travel always sets going in my head was stilled. I felt as if, instead of journeying by ship and rail, I had been dropped somehow through the air to land up in this spot at last, feeling groggy and happy, and pleasantly, almost voluptuously vulnerable. Those ten years I had passed in restless wandering were as nothing, a dream voyage, insubstantial. How distant all that seemed, those islands in a blue sea, those burning noons, and Randolph and Senor Aguirre, even my wife and child, how distant. Thus it was that when Charlie French came in I greeted him as if I had seen him only yesterday.

  I know Charlie insists that he did not meet me in Wally's pub, that he never went near the place, but all I am prepared to admit is the possibility that it was not on that particular night that I saw him there. I remember the moment with perfect clarity, the queers whispering, and Wally polishing a glass with a practised and inimitably contemptuous wrist-action, and I sitting at the bar with a bumper of gin in my fist and my old pigskin suitcase at my feet, and Charlie pausing there in his chalkstripes and his scuffed shoes, a forgetful Eumaeus, smiling uneasily and eyeing me with vague surmise. All the same, it is possible that my memory has conflated two separate occasions. It is possible. What more can I say? I hope, Charles, this concession will soothe, even if only a little, your sense of injury.

  People think me heartless, but I am not. I have much sympathy for Charlie French. I caused him great distress, no doubt of that. I humiliated him before the world. What pain that must have been, for a man such as Charlie. He behaved very well about it. He behaved beautifully, in fact. On that last, appalling, and appallingly comic occasion, when I was being led out in handcuffs, he looked at me not accusingly, but with a sort of sadness. He almost smiled. And I was grateful. He is a source of guilt and annoyance to me now, but he was my friend, and -

  He was my friend. Such a simple phrase, and yet how affecting. I don't think I have ever used it before. When I wrote it down I had to pause, startled. Something welled up in my throat, as if I might be about to, yes, to weep. What is happening to me? Is this what they mean by rehabilitation? Perhaps I shall leave here a reformed character, after all.

  Poor Charlie did not recognise me at first, and was distinctly uneasy, I could see, at being addressed in this place, in this familiar fashion, by a person who seemed to him a stranger. I was enjoying myself, it was like being in disguise. I offered to buy him a drink, but he declined, with elaborate politeness. He had aged. He was in his early sixties, but he looked older. He was stooped, and had a little egg-shaped paunch, and his ashen cheeks were inlaid with a filigree of broken veins. Yet he gave an impression of, what shall I call it, of equilibrium, which seemed new to him. It was as if he were at last filling out exactly his allotted space. When I knew him he had been a smalltime dealer in pictures and antiques. Now he had presence, it was almost an air of imperium, all the more marked amid the gaudy trappings of Wally's bar. It's true, there was still that familiar expression in his eye, at once mischievous and sheepish, but I had to look hard to find it. He began to edge away from me, still queasily smiling, but then he in turn must have caught something familiar in my eye, and he knew me at last. Relieved, he gave a breathy laugh and glanced around the bar. That I did remember, that glance, as if he had just discovered his flies were open and was looking to see if anyone had noticed. Freddie! he said. Well well! He lit a cig
arette with a not altogether steady hand, and released a great whoosh of smoke towards the ceiling. I was trying to recall when it was I had first met him. He used to come down to Coolgrange when my father was alive and hang about the house looking furtive and apologetic. They had been young together, he and my parents, in their cups they would reminisce about hunt balls before the war, and dashing up to Dublin for the Show, and all the rest of it. I listened to this stuff with boundless contempt, curling an adolescent's villous lip. They sounded like actors flogging away at some tired old drawing-room comedy, projecting wildly, my mother especially, with her scarlet fingernails and metallic perm and that cracked, gin-and-smoke voice of hers. But to be fair to Charles, I do not think he really subscribed to this fantasy of the dear dead days. He could not ignore the tiny trill of hysteria that made my mother's goitrous throat vibrate, nor the way my father looked at her sometimes, poised on the edge of his chair, tense as a whippet, pop-eyed and pale, with an expression of incredulous loathing. When they got going like this, the two of them, they forgot everything else, their son, their friend, everything, locked together in a kind of macabre trance. This meant that Charlie and I were often thrown into each other's company. He treated me tentatively, as if I were something that might blow up in his face at any moment. I was very fierce in those days, brimming with impatience and scorn. We must have been a peculiar pair, yet we got on, at some deep level. Perhaps I seemed to him the son he would never have, perhaps he seemed to me the father I had never had. (This is another idea put forward by my counsel. I don't know how you think of them, Maolseachlainn.) What was I saying? Charlie. He took me to the races one day, when I was a boy. He was all kitted out for the occasion, in tweeds and brown brogues and a little trilby hat tipped at a raffish angle over one eye. He even had a pair of binoculars, though he did not seem to be able to get them properly in focus. He looked the part, except for a certain stifled something in his manner that made it seem all the time as if he were about to break down in helpless giggles at himself and his pretensions. I was fifteen or sixteen. In the drinks marquee he turned to me blandly and asked what I would have, Irish or Scotch -and brought me home in the evening loudly and truculently drunk. My father was furious, my mother laughed. Charlie maintained an unruffled silence, pretending nothing was amiss, and slipped me a fiver as I was stumbling off to bed.