Eclipse

by John Banville

  Yesterday I looked up from where I was sitting and saw one of the adults standing outside on the window sill. I am always startled by the great size of these birds when seen up close. They are so menacingly graceful in flight, yet when they land they become sadly comical, perched on their spindly legs and ridiculous flat feet, like the botched prototype of some far more handsome, far more well-fashioned species. This one just stood there beyond the glass, doing nothing except opening wide its beak in what seemed a yawn or a soundless cry. Curious, I put down my book and went outside. The bird did not fly away at my approach, but held its place, shifting ponderously from foot to foot and regarding me with wary deprecation out of one large, pale, lustrous eye. I saw at once what the matter was: on the ground below the window sill a dead fledgeling lay. It must have fallen from the roof, or failed in flight and plummeted to earth and broken its neck. Its look was glazed already, its plumage dulled. The parent, for I have no doubt that is what it was, made its beak gape again in that odd way, with no sound. It might have been a threat, to warn me off, but I am inclined to believe it was a sign of distress. Even seagulls must have expressions of sorrow or of joy recognisable at least to their fellows. Probably they see our visages as just as blank and inexpressive as theirs seem to us. A man numb with inexplicable misery, for instance, I am sure to them would be merely another dead-eyed dullard gazing pitilessly upon a scene of incommensurable loss. The bird was male, I think; I think, yes, a father.

  I left it to its silent vigil and, prompted somehow by the encounter, made my way down to the sea. I have hardly left the house since coming here, and I went forth almost fearfully, casting an anxious backward look about my little world, like a medieval explorer about to take ship for Cathay. The trek took a good half-hour. I went by what I thought would be a short cut across the fields, and got lost. At last, sweating and shaken, I came out through a hazel wood on to a shingly strip of beach. The usual mingled iodine and cat-piss smell was very strong. Is there anywhere more evocative than these tawny fringes of our dry-land world? At the first crunching footstep I might have been walking these sands all my life, despite the surly and unwelcoming aspect of the spot, that would have been fitted more to brigandage than bathing. The dunes were low, and there was no grass, only a tough, thorny stuff that crackled underfoot. The beach was steeply shelved, and in places the top layer of sand had blown away, exposing striated ridges of a scaly, shale-like stuff that would cut the soles of any swimmer foolhardy enough to venture barefoot over it.

  I wonder if my ghosts would have known I was not in the house. Do they appear when I am not present? Is a rose red in the dark—who said that?

  Not a soul was to be seen on the shore, except, a little way out, a very large black seabird standing motionless on a black rock. It had a long slender neck and a slender body, and seemed unreal in its stillness, more an artist’s stylisation than a living bird. I sat down on one of the exposed ridges of shale. Curious stuff it was, like crumbly stone, and greasy to the touch. The morning was still, under a seamless white sky. There was a full tide, and the surface of the water, taut and burnished like billowing silk, seemed higher than the land, and on the point of spilling over. The waves were hardly waves at all, more a wrinkle running along the edges of a sluggishly swaying vast bowl of water. Why do I find the thought of the sea so alarming? We speak of its power and violence as if it were a species of wild animal, ravening and unappeasable, but the sea does nothing, it is simply there, its own reality, like night, or the sky. Is it the heave and lurch and sudden suck of it that frightens? Or is it that it is so emphatically not our medium? I think of the world beneath the ocean, the obverse of ours, the negative of ours, with its sandy plains and silent valleys and great sunken mountain ranges, and something fails me in myself, something that is mine draws away from me in horror. Water is uncanny in the way, single-minded and uncontrollable, it keeps seeking its own level, like nothing else in the world that we inhabit. There are storms, yes, and tidal waves, and even in these temperate zones the estuarial bore, or eagre, but such phenomena are not due to any inherent qualities of water itself, for water, though fluid and eerily always beyond our grasp, surely is essentially inert. Yet it puts us off balance; one is always at an angle to the ocean—keeping one’s head above water ensures that. To wade into the waves is to seem to fall without falling, feeling the steep squirming sandy incline under one’s slowed-down, leaden tread. Yes, the inhuman constant levelling, and the two-dimensional, angled aspect which we see of it, these are the characteristics of water that unnerve us. And drowning, of course, drowning is strange, I mean strange for those on shore. It all seems done so discreetly. The onlooker, attention caught by a distant feathery cry, peers out intently but sees nothing of the struggle, the helpless silencing, the awful slow-motion thrashing, the last, long fall into the bottomless and ever-blackening blue. No. All that is to be seen is a moment of white water, and a hand, languidly sinking.

  The sea was not blue now, though; it hardly ever is. In our latitudes it is more often a gleaming grey, or purplish, like a bruise, or, after the churnings of a gale, marl-coloured. But rarely, rarely blue.

  The black bird on the rock opened wide its wings and shook them vigorously and after a long moment of absolute, cruciform stillness carefully refolded them.

  When I was young I had no fear of the sea, and loved the beach. Disporting myself on that narrow strip of not-quite-land wedged between sky and water, I would feel all down the imperceptibly declining curve of the afternoon a sense of the great world’s glamour. Some girl in cheap sunglasses and crimpled swimsuit would catch my attention and seem a glimmering naiad. The yard of undersprung soft sand at the edge of the waves was a trampoline on which I trod with a gracefulness not to be achieved elsewhere in the gawky world of boyhood. And then the sea itself, running off flat to the low horizon, like a limitless promise—no, I had no dread of it, then. As a boy I was a fair swimmer, in my unruly way, all splash and thrash. Especially I loved to dive, loved that moment of breathless almost-panic under water, the eerie greenish glow, the bulging silence, the sense of slide and shift and sway. My father too was fascinated by things maritime. He did not swim, had never been out on the ocean, but he was irresistibly drawn to its margins. He would roll up the bottoms of his trousers and paddle in the shallows, like all the other fathers, but away from them, keeping himself to himself. In my memory it is like a scene in one of those gaudy seaside postcards of the time, him there in his sleeveless pullover and sun hat made from a white handkerchief knotted at the corners, paddling in the running surf, while up the beach my mother sits on a towel with her embarrassingly bare legs stuck straight out before her, deep in a novelette. Later, when the sun lost strength and the light grew heavy, and we collected our things and mashed our way back through the dunes in the direction of the train station, my father would maintain a remote, frowning silence, which even my mother would not try to break, as if he had been away somewhere distant, and had seen incommunicable things.

  A shimmer, a shiver in the air. Uncanny sensation, as of a chill presentiment. I peered about the beach. Still there was no one, yet I seemed not alone. I felt a sudden, familiar cold, and scrambled to my feet and at a half-crouch scuttled up the beach in fright. Had my phantoms followed me? At the edge of the hazel wood there was a sort of hut part sunk in the sand, a hide for hunters, I suppose, made of tarred planks warped by sunlight and the salt winds, just three walls and a leaning roof and a board wedged lengthwise to make a bench for sitting. The thing was so old and weathered it had lost almost all trace of human industry, and seemed one with the gnarled trees massed behind it, with the scaly sand and clumps of podded seaweed and strewn driftwood. I went inside and sat down, out of sight of that inhospitable shoreline and the sighing waves. There was the usual litter of cigarette ends and rusty cans and yellowed scraps of newsprint. I imagined myself a fugitive landing up here out of the way of the world’s harm. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps this is what I need to do, finally
to give it all up, home, wife, possessions, renounce it all for good, rid myself of every last thing and come and live in some such unconsidered spot as this. What would I require for survival, except a cup, a dish, a blanket? Free then of all encumbrance, all distraction, I might be able at last to confront myself without shock or shrinking. For is this not what I am after, the pure conjunction, the union of self with sundered self? I am weary of division, of being always torn. I shut my eyes and in a sort of rapture see myself stepping backward slowly into the cloven shell, and the two halves of it, still moist with glair, closing around me . . .

  When I came out of the hut and looked about again the day seemed different, as if the light had shifted, as if a shadow had swept across the sand and left something behind it, a darkening, a chill. Beyond the little waves a patch of water grew a hump, and then there was a heave, and a brief churning, and a figure reared up, clad all in black, with a flashing mask for a face and carrying in one hand what seemed a slender trident. My heart reared on its tethers, bumping like a wind-tossed balloon. The seabird rose from its rock and flew away with a lazily majestic motion. Then Poseidon pulled off his mask and spat, and, seeing me, waved his harpoon gun and flip-flopped away over the shingle. His rubber suit had the same thick dull sheen as the seabird’s plumage. I turned and plunged into the wood, blunderingly. Coming, I had got lost, and now I thought I knew the straight way back, but I was wrong.

  I am thinking of my daughter. At once an angry buzzing of emotions starts up in my breast. She exasperates me, I confess it. I do not trust her. I know, I know, there is even a name for the syndrome from which she suffers, yet half the time I think there is nothing at all the matter with her, that her fits and fallings, her obsessions, her black days and violent sleepless nights, are all no more than a strategy to make me pay for some enormity she imagines I visited on her in the far past. At times she has a look, a fleeting, sidelong, faintly smiling look, in which I seem to glimpse a wholly other she, cold and sly and secretly laughing. With such ingenuity does she connect the workings of the world to her own fate. Everything that happens, she is convinced, carries a specific and personal reference to her. There is nothing, not a turn in the weather, or a chance word spoken in the street, that does not covertly pass on to her some profound message of warning or encouragement. I used to try to reason with her, talking myself into spluttering, head-shaking, wildly laughing transports of frustration and rage, while she stood silently before me, as if in the stocks, shoulders up and arms hanging and her chin drawn down to her collarbone, frowning in sullen refusal and defiance. There was no keeping track of her moods, I never knew when she might veer aside and turn and confront me with a new version of herself, a whole new map of that strange, intense and volatile world that she alone inhabits. For that is how she makes it seem, that she lives in a place where there is no one else. What an actor she is! She puts on a character with an ease and persuasiveness that I could never match. Yet perhaps she is not feigning, perhaps that is her secret, that she does not act, but variously is. Like the sorcerer’s assistant, she steps smiling into the spangled casket and comes out the other side transfigured.

  Lydia never shared my doubts. This is, of course, another source of annoyance to me. How she would run to Cass, breathless with forced enthusiasm, and try to press her into the latest game she had devised to divert the child’s attention from herself and her manias. And Cass would play along for a while, all smiles and trembling enthusiasm, only to turn away in the end and retreat again listlessly into herself. Then Lydia would seem the crestfallen child and Cass the withholding adult.

  She was five or six when she displayed the first symptoms of her condition. I came home late one night after a performance and she was standing in her nightdress in the darkness at the top of the stairs, talking. Even yet, as I remember her there, a slow shiver crawls across the back of my scalp. Her eyes were open and her face was empty of expression; she looked like a waxwork model of herself. She was speaking in a low, uninflected voice, the voice of an oracle. I could not make out what she was saying except that it was something about an owl, and the moon. I thought she must be rehearsing in her sleep a nursery rhyme or jingle out of infancy. I took her by the shoulders and turned her about and walked her back to her room. She is the one who at such times is supposed to experience strange auras, but that night it was I who noticed the smell. It was the smell, I am convinced, of what was, is, wrong with her. It is not at all extraordinary, just a dull flat grey faint stink, like that of unwashed hair, or a garment left in a drawer and gone stale. I recognised it. I had an uncle, he died when I was young, I barely remember him, who played the accordion, and wore his hat in the house, and walked with a crutch. He had that smell, too. The crutch was an old-fashioned one, a single thick rough stave and a curved crosspiece padded with sweat-stained cloth; the part of the upright where his hand grasped it was polished to the texture of grey silk. I thought it was this crutch that smelled, but now I think it was the very odour of affliction itself. Cass’s room in the lamplight was obsessively neat, as always— there is a touch of the nun to our Cass—yet to my alarmed heart it seemed a site of wild disorder. I made her lie down on the bed, still murmuring, her eyes fixed on my face, her hands clutching mine, and it was as if I were letting her sink into some dark deep pool, under a willow, at dead of night. Sleepily Lydia appeared in the doorway behind us, a hand in her hair, wanting to know what was the matter. I sat down on the side of the narrow bed, still holding Cass’s cold pale hands. I looked at the toys on the shelves, at the lampshade stuck with faded transfers; on the wallpaper, cartoon characters pranced and grinned. I felt the darkness pressing around our cave of lamplight like the ogre in a fairy tale. A gloating moon hung crookedly in the window above the bed and when I looked up it seemed to tip me a fat wink, knowing and horrible. Cass’s voice when she spoke was scratchy and dry, a fall of dust in a parched place.

  “They’re telling me things, Daddy,” she said, and her fingers holding mine tightened like wires. “They’re telling me things.”

  What things the voices told her, what actions they urged, she would never say. They were her secret. She had periods of respite, weeks, months, even, when of their own accord they would go silent. How still the house seemed then, as if a clamour audible to all had lapsed. But presently, when my ears had adjusted, I would become aware again of that sustained note of anxiety that was always there, in every room, thin and piercing enough to shatter the frail glass of any hope. Of the three of us, Cass was the calmest in face of these disorders. Indeed, such was her calm at times that she would seem to be not there at all, to have drifted off, lighter than air. It is a different air in which she moves, a separate medium. For her I think the world is always somewhere other, an unfamiliar place where yet she has always been. This is for me the hardest thing, to think of her out there, standing on some far bleak deserted shore, beyond help, in unmoving light, with an ocean of lostness all before her and the siren voices singing in her head. She was always alone, always outside. One day when I was collecting her from school I came upon her looking down the length of a long, green-painted corridor to where at the far end a raucous group of girls was gathered. They were preparing for some game or outing, and their laughter and sharp cries made the deadened air ring. Cass stood with her schoolbag clasped to her breast, leaning forward a little, with her head on one side, frowning, helplessly eager, like a naturalist glimpsing some impossible, brilliant-hued new species that had alighted on the far bank of an unfordable river and in a moment would rise and fly away again, into the deeps of the forest, where she could not hope to follow. When she heard my step she looked up at me and smiled, my Miranda, and her eyes did that trick they had of seeming to turn over in their sockets like two flat metal discs to show their blank, defensive backs. We walked together in silence out to the street, where she stopped and stood for a moment motionless, looking at the ground. A March wind grey as her school overcoat whipped up an eddy of dust on the pavement a
t our feet. The cathedral bell had been ringing, the last reverberations fell about us, wrinkling the air. She told me how in history class they had learned about Joan of Arc and her voices. She raised her eyes and narrowed them and smiled again, looking off toward the river.

  “Do you think they’ll burn me at the stake, too?” she said. It was to become one of her jokes.

  Memory is peculiar in the fierce hold with which it will fix the most insignificant-seeming scenes. Whole tracts of my life have fallen away like a cliff into the sea, yet I cling to seeming trivia with a pop-eyed tenacity. Often in these idle days, and in the wakeful nights especially, I pass the time picking over the parts of this or that remembered moment, like a blackbird grubbing among dead leaves, searching for the one telling thing lurking in the clay, among the wood-scurf and dried husks and discarded wing casings, the morsel that will give meaning to a meaningless remembrance, the fat grub concealed in open sight under the camouflage of the accidental. There are times with Cass that should be burned into the inner lining of my skull, times that I thought as I endured them I would never be so fortunate as to forget—the nights by the telephone, the hours spent watching over the crouched unmoving form under the tangled sheets, the ashen waits in anonymous consulting rooms—that yet seem to me now no more than the vague remnants of bad dreams, while an idle word of hers, a look thrown back from a doorway, an aimless car journey with her slumped silent beside me, resonate in my mind, rife with significance.