Mefisto

by Banville, John

  He looked from me to Sophie and back again. There was silence. I could hear faintly the sound of Jack Kay’s boots crunching away over the gravel. Sophie rose from the bed, brushing at her skirt. She glanced at me vaguely, as if she could not quite remember who I was. Felix offered her the mouse, but she walked past him like a sleepwalker, out of the room. He watched her go, then turned his sly glance on me.

  – All these my creatures, he whispered gaily, making his eyeballs roll.

  He opened his hand and showed me the mouse, lying motionless on its side, its front paws folded, a bubble of ruby blood in its snout.

  At home I found Jack Kay sitting sideways at the kitchen table, ashen with rage, one fist planted among the tea-things and the other clamped on the crook of his stick. For the second time in his life he had been put out of Ashburn Park. Who did they think they were, that fat foreigner and that other, red-headed bastard? What right did they have? He glared about him, knuckles whitening, daring anyone to answer. Felix had laughed at him – laughed, at him, Jack Kay!

  – God blast him for a whore’s melt, he muttered thickly, and dealt the floor a crack with his cane.

  He fixed me with a blood-filled eye and grunted, scowling. My mother was silent. It was she, of course, who had sent him out to Ashburn. Now she wore a chastened, thoughtful air. She brought my tea to the table and stood over me, incensed, and yet unnerved. She had felt today the touch of something cold and cruel, a kind of malignancy, as if an illness had taken hold in her. She too had twice lost Ashburn, once as a girl when she left home, and then a second time with the advent of Mr Kasperl and his familiar. Now they were trying to take me from her too. But she would not let them – no, she would not let them! Her hand shook, the cup and saucer rattled, she set them down hurriedly, with a little crash.

  I RELIVED THAT moment on Sophie’s bed so often in my mind that the details wore out, became hollow, leached of solidity. I alone was always real there, always intensely present. Suddenly I had a vivid sense of myself. I held myself poised, balanced in air, as if I were some precious, polished thing that had been put with ceremonial care into my hands. It was not the kiss that mattered so much, but what it seemed to signify. A world had opened up before me, disordered, perilous and strange, and for the first time in my life I felt almost at home.

  But when I next saw Sophie I experienced a tiny jolt of surprise. She had so throbbed in my imagination that now, when I confronted the real she, it was as if I had just parted from her more dazzling double. She must have caught a flicker of that shock in my eyes, for she smiled strangely, and turned and walked away slowly, looking back at me over her shoulder. That was the day she took me to Mr Kasperl’s room.

  I did not notice her taking me there. We were just trailing aimlessly about the house, as we so often did. But when she pushed open his door I remember feeling a vague, almost pleasurable qualm, as if I were being seduced, gently, with sly blandishments, into hazard. He was not there, he was at the mine. The room was vast, high-ceilinged, crowded with big ugly pieces of furniture, bureaux, a chest of drawers, his enormous, rumpled bed. There was a hushed, watchful atmosphere, as if something had been going on, and had stopped when we came in. It was raining outside, a summer storm was on the way. Sophie wandered to the streaming window and stood with her forehead against the glass, looking out dreamily into a green, liquid world. I glanced at Mr Kasperl’s papers strewn on the bed, his books, his ordnance maps, his charts of the underground workings at Coolmine. There was a big black notebook, thick as a wizard’s codex, with a worn cloth cover and dog-eared pages. I picked it up idly and opened it, and at once it began to speak to me in a strong, clear, familiar voice. I sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

  It was the work of years. Page after page was crammed with calculations, diagrams, algebraic formulas, set out in a minute, square script. Much of it I could not understand. Quaternions, matrix theory, transfinite numbering, I had barely heard of such things. I noticed there were things we had in common, however, a particular fondness for symmetries, for example, for mirror equivalences, and palindromic series. But his was a grandmaster game, and I was a novice. Such intricacy, such elegance! I read on, enraptured. Everything beyond the bed became blurred, as if a kind of luminous dusk had fallen. The girl seemed to flit about the room, there one moment, gone the next, like a vague attendant seen from a sick-bed. For a while she was standing beside me, her hip negligently touching my shoulder, but when she went away it was as if I had imagined it, that warmth, her shadow, her hand resting at her side. The storm arrived, peals of thunder rolled across the sky, rattling the window-frames. The air had a sulphurous glow. Then suddenly it was calm again, and I looked up in undulant rain-light and found Mr Kasperl standing in the doorway, in his drenched dustcoat, watching me.

  He entered the room heavily, mopping the rain on his brow with a large red kerchief. He took off his coat, and, without looking at her, handed it to Sophie. The rain stopped, and the sun came out suddenly, with an almost audible swish, blazing in the window. I closed the notebook quietly and laid it back on the bed. Mr Kasperl paid me no heed, yet his manner was not unfriendly. Sophie fetched a hanger for his coat, and hung it in the window to dry in the sun. He moved here and there about the room, with that slow, deliberate walk, rolling on the balls of his feet. He opened a box of cigars that stood on top of a bureau, selected one, sniffed it, trimmed the end, and lit up. I thought of sidling away quietly. He worked at his cigar unhurriedly, getting it going evenly, then turned at last and came towards the bed. I stood up. He stopped, not looking at me still, and drew a bead on the black notebook, one eye half shut, as if it were a distant target, then picked it up and riffled through the pages. He found what he was looking for, and turned to me, tapping a finger on the page. It was a series of field equations, elegant but enigmatic, their solutions all dissipating towards infinity. He contemplated them for a moment with what seemed a grim satisfaction, then put the open notebook into my hands and walked away from me, leaving cigar smoke, and a faint smell of damp cloth and coal. I sat down on the bed again. The door opened and Felix put in his head. He looked at me with his thin smile, narrowing his eyes.

  – I was looking for you, he said, and here you were in the temple, all the time.

  He followed his head into the room, one hand in a pocket, scratching his groin. Mr Kasperl padded past him and went out, his silent back stooping through the doorway. Sophie turned to the window again. I put the notebook away.

  Jack Kay fell ill. He sat at the range in his rocking-chair, a plaid rug about his knees. He was cold, he said, cold, glaring resentfully at the sunshine streaming in the kitchen window. His large white hands lay motionless in his lap, like a pair of clumsy implements fallen from his grasp. He would not eat. Amber puddles began to appear on the floor under his chair. The doctor was called, and ordered him to bed. We lifted him from the rocker, my father, Uncle Ambrose and I, and carried him upstairs. He lay against us stiffly, a big chalk statue, mute and furious. He was unexpectedly light. The years had been working away at him in secret, hollowing him out. We propped him in bed against a bank of pillows and stepped back, brushing our hands. He gazed up at us fearfully, like a child, his mouth working, his fingers clamped on the fold of blankets at his chest as if it were the rim of a parapet behind which he was slowly, helplessly falling. Days, the doctor said, a week at the most. But the weeks went past and still he lay there, watching the light in the window, the surreptitious sky. He would talk to no one, but raged in silence, like a man betrayed. He developed bedsores, I had to turn him on his side while my mother basted him with ointment. His skin was dry but supple, like wrapping paper with something soft inside it, and I thought of those soft parcels my mother would have me carry home for her from the butcher’s when I was a child. In the narrow bed he looked huge yet insubstantial, a great bleached dead husk, inside of which the living man still cowered, peering out through the eyes in panic and a kind of amazement. Summer was ending, but still the
weather held, as if to mock him. His mind began to wander. He would lie for hours talking to himself in a furious undertone. Sometimes he shouted out suddenly, and threw himself from side to side, plucking at the bedclothes, like a footless drunkard trying to get up and fight. One day he fell out of bed, we found him on the floor in a tangle of sheets, waving his arms weakly as if to ward off an assailant. His pot was overturned.

  – Oh, look what you’ve done, my mother said. Just look!

  He glared at her, suspicious, bewildered, afraid.

  – Mother, he said gruffly, are you there, mother?

  He groaned. There was no way out of the huge confusion into which he had blundered. He let us lift him into bed, and lay back on the pillows meekly. He turned his eyes to the window, and one fat, lugubrious tear ran down his temple, over the livid vein pulsing there.

  At the funeral my mother could not cry. She watched with melancholy interest as the coffin was lowered into the hole. My father stood to one side fingering his tie. The violet shadow of a cloud swept a far-off meadow. At the edge of the small circle of mourners a figure had appeared, half hidden among a cluster of headstones, his hands in his pockets, a lick of foxy hair plastered on his narrow brow. He smiled at me and winked, and made a little sign, raising three fingers and sketching a sort of rapid blessing. Behind him a stained seraph towered on widespread marble wings.

  QUEER THE LANDSCAPES that memory, that old master, chooses for its backgrounds, the twilit distances with meandering rivers and mossy brown crags, and tiny figures in costume doing something inexplicable a long way off. When I think now of that autumn, in a flash I see the malt store, I don’t know why. It was a grey stone fortress with a slate roof, and a row of small, barred windows high up under the eaves. Through an opening over the arched entranceway a block and tackle stuck out, like the arm of a complicated gibbet. The malt was dried there before being sent to the breweries. Insinuations of steam escaped at the windows day and night, and the sour, beery stink of the simmering grain pervaded the air. My father’s job must have taken him there often, though I never saw him – indeed, now that I think of it, I never saw anyone at all there. Where it stood was known as the Folly, a windswept angle between the backs of two mean streets. The place wore an air of dejection, and a sort of weary knowing. It seems always an overcast and cold October there. Dry leaves like the hands of dead pianists skitter along the pavements with a scraping noise. The wind soughs in the trees, and panels of pale, lumpy cloud pour in silence down a tilted rectangle of sky. A dog is barking in the distance, something is monotonously creaking, and I halt and stand expectantly, as if everything might be about to gather itself together and address me.

  School was grotesque now, an absurd and shameful predicament. I had outgrown all this, the noise, the smells, the tedium. Every afternoon when the bell went I set off at once for Ashburn. At Coolmine the gate had been mended, and a warning sign had been put up, with a skull-and-crossbones stencilled on it. From the road I could see the workmen over at the pit-head, toiling like ants. Sometimes I spotted Mr Kasperl too, pacing up and down, or with Felix poring over charts spread out on the bonnet of the lorry. The old women were no longer let in to hunt for coal, I would meet them, with their blurred faces, and their stumpy legs wrapped in rags, wandering dazedly along the road, by the new barbed-wire fence.

  As the year darkened so the house grew sombre, standing stark against a knife-coloured sky, a ragged flock of rooks wheeling above the chimney-pots. The first gales of the season stripped half the trees in the park, opening unexpected vistas. Indoors it was like being on a great ship at sea, the windows in their warped frames banged and boomed, and a grey, oceanic glow suffused the ceilings. Beneath the creaks, the rattlings, there was a deep, undersea silence. This was Sophie’s medium. It was as if something had been left switched off, like the lights in a blind man’s house. She was so quiet it was hard to find her. I would steal upstairs and along the corridors, my heart unaccountably pounding, and come upon her in one of the empty rooms, standing motionless at the window, her arms folded and her forehead pressed to the glass, so still, it seemed she must have been there for hours, without moving. Sensing me behind her, she would turn slowly, and slowly smile, blinking her dark, doll’s eyes.

  Often too I would find her with Mr Kasperl, sitting quietly in his room in an old deckchair, with her legs folded under her and her hands resting in her lap like a pair of pale birds, while he lay on the bed reading, or working at his charts. The room was dim and hot, like the lair of a large indolent carnivore. He would be in his waistcoat, collarless, his bootlaces untied. He took scant notice of me. His silence was profound, a far place where no one else could follow. Sometimes he worked in his notebook. He would frown over a page for a long time without stirring, then lean forward suddenly with a snort and inscribe a line or two, driving the pen heavily, with grim exactness. He let me see things, certain insoluble niceties, but in such elaborately casual, roundabout ways that it might all have happened by accident. He would leave the notebook open near me and wander off, padding here and there about the room, while I squinted avidly at the place where he had been working. It was always some paradox, some tautology. He was fascinated by things to which there could be at best only an inconclusive result. Strange geometries amused him, their curved worlds where no parallels are possible, where there is no infinity, where all perpendiculars to a line will meet in one mad point. He would come and stand beside me and consider these queer axioms, panting softly, and softly flexing his stubby fingers, and I would seem to hear, deep down within him, a faint, dark laughter.

  I came away from these occasions in a sort of fever, my head humming, as if from a debauch. Things shook and shimmered minutely, in a phosphorescent glow. Details would detach themselves from their blurred backgrounds, as if a lens had been focused on them suddenly, and press forward eagerly, with mute insistence, urging on me some large, mysterious significance. A wash of sunlight on a high white wall, rank weeds spilling out of the windows of a tumbledown house, a dog in the gutter nosing delicately at a soiled scrap of newspaper, such things would strike me with strange force. They were like memories, but of things that had not happened yet. Walking home through the town on those smoky autumn evenings, past lighted pubs, and factory workers on bikes, and the somehow sinister bonhomie of fat shopkeepers standing in their doorways, I would feel a shiver of anticipation, not for what would be there now, the cosy hopelessness of home, but for that vast, perilous sea that lay all before me, agleam and vaguely shifting, in the dim distance.

  One afternoon in November I spied Uncle Ambrose’s car coming down the drive at Ashburn. I hid behind a tree while he went past. When I got home he was there, sitting bolt upright at the tea-table, looking about him with a stunned smile, his small shiny head swivelling slowly and his adam’s apple bouncing.

  – A what? my father was saying, with what in him passed for a laugh. A chauffeur?

  Uncle Ambrose nodded, still dazedly smiling, amazed at his own audacity. He said:

  – From Ashburn to Black’s, just, and then out to the mine.

  My mother had stopped behind him, and was staring at the back of his head.

  – What? she said sharply. What? When is this?

  Uncle Ambrose jerked his chin forward, working a finger in under the collar of his shirt.

  – Oh, every day, he said. Monday to Friday. And bring him home again in the evening.

  – Home, my mother said. Ha!

  He took up duty straight away. He drove out to Ashburn each morning prompt at nine, and pulled up at the front door with a discreet toot on the horn. He would not venture into the house, but waited patiently in the car, sitting motionless behind the wheel and gazing off impassively through the windscreen, with an air of disinterested rectitude which he wore like a uniform. Often an hour or more would pass before Mr Kasperl appeared. Uncle Ambrose did not mind. He was nowhere more at ease than in his car. It was a huge, black, old-fashioned sedan with a long slope
d bonnet and a humped back, like a hearse. On a few evenings, returning early from the mine, he stopped – it must have been at Mr Kasperl’s bidding – and picked me up on my way out to the house after school. I sat in the back seat with the fat man, my satchel pressed on my knees. No one spoke. Mr Kasperl looked out his window, his arms folded and his stout legs crossed, puffing on a cigar. Now and then I would catch Uncle Ambrose’s eye in the rearview mirror, and immediately we would both look away, with a guilty start. He drove very slowly, turning the wheel with judicious attention, like a safe-cracker. Each time he changed gear he would hold in the clutch for a moment, and the car would billow forward in a sleek, brief bound, rolling a little, and Mr Kasperl and I would be lifted up an inch and then dropped back gently on the high, soft seat. As soon as we had drawn to a stop at the house, Uncle Ambrose would slide out smartly and turn, in one continuous movement, twirling on his heel in the gravel, and snatch open Mr Kasperl’s door, while I scrambled out the other side and hared off up the steps. Sometimes Felix made him drive me home as well. Those trips were the worst. I sat in the front seat, sweating, while Uncle Ambrose clung to the wheel in an excruciated silence, like a stammerer stuck in the middle of a word.

  Felix seldom travelled in the car, preferring to walk, even in winter weather, with his hands in his pockets and his coat swinging open. But he was delighted with Uncle Ambrose, and studied him enthusiastically, this large swarth moist man, with his queasy smile and his tight suits and his aura of talcum powder and pain. On mornings when Mr Kasperl was late, Felix would come down and lean in the window of the car and hector him gaily, with roguish winks and jabs. Uncle Ambrose responded with a befuddled, panic-stricken grin, nodding and mumbling. Felix looked at me wide-eyed, in mock wonder.