Authors: John Banville
The worst part, for me, of these extravaganzas of anguished hue and cry comes at the end, when she is all contrition, berating herself for her foolishness and begging to be forgiven for waking me so violently and causing such needless panic. It is just, she says, that in her sleepwalking state it seems to her so real a thing that Cass is alive, her living daughter, trapped in one of the rooms of the house, terrified and unable to make herself heard as she calls for help. Last night she was so ashamed and angry that she swore at herself, using horrible words, until I hunkered down beside her and held her in an awkwardly simian embrace and made her lay her head in the hollow of my shoulder, and at last she grew quiet. Her nose was running and I let her wipe it on the sleeve of my pyjamas. She was shivering, but when I offered to fetch her dressing-gown or a blanket she clung to me the more tightly and would not let me leave her. The faintly stale smell of her hair was in my nostrils and the ball of her bare shoulder was chill and smooth as a marble globe under my cupped hand. Around us the hall furniture stood dimly in the gloom like shocked and speechless attendants.
I think I know what it is that torments Lydia, besides the unassuageable grief she has been nursing in her heart throughout the ten long years since our daughter died. Like me, she was never a believer in any of the worlds to come, yet I suspect she fears that through a cruel loophole in the laws of life and death Cass did not fully die but is somehow existing still, a captive in the land of the shades and suffering there, half of the pomegranate seeds still unswallowed in her mouth, waiting in vain for her mother to come and claim her back to be among the living again. Yet what is now Lydia’s horror was once her hope.
How could anyone die who was so much alive?
she demanded of me that night in the hotel in Italy where we had come to claim Cass’s body, and so fierce was her tone and so compelling her look that for a moment I too thought that a mistake might have been made, that it might be someone else’s unrecognisable daughter who had smashed herself to death on those wave-washed rocks below the bare little church of San Pietro.
As I have said, we had not ever believed in the immortal soul, Lydia and I, and would smile in gentle condescension when others spoke of their hopes of some day seeing again departed loved ones, but there is nothing like the loss of an only child to soften the wax of sealed convictions. After Cass’s death—to this day I cannot see those words written down without a disbelieving shock, they seem so unlikely, even as I grave them on the page—we found ourselves venturing, tentatively, shamefacedly, to entertain the possibility not of the next world, exactly, but of a world next to this one, contiguous with it, where there might linger somehow the spirits of those no longer here and yet not entirely gone, either. We seized on what might be signs, the vaguest portents, wisps of intimation. Coincidences were not now what they had been heretofore, mere wrinkles in the otherwise blandly plausible surface of reality, but parts of a code, large and urgent, a kind of desperate semaphoring from the other side that, maddeningly, we were unable to read. How we would begin to listen now, all else suspended, when, in company, we overheard people speaking of having been bereaved, how breathlessly we hung on their words, how hungrily we scanned their faces, looking to see if they really believed their lost one not entirely lost. Certain dispositions of supposedly chance objects would strike us with a runic force. In particular those great flocks of birds, starlings, I think they are, that gather out over the sea on certain days, amoebically swooping and swirling, switching direction in perfect, instantaneous co-ordination, seemed to be inscribing on the sky a series of ideograms directed exclusively at us but too swiftly and fluidly sketched for us to interpret. All this illegibility was a torment to us.
I say us, but of course we never spoke of these pathetic hopes of a hint from the beyond. Bereavement sets a curious constraint between the bereaved, an embarrassment, almost, that is not easy to account for. Is it the fear that such things if spoken of will take on an even greater weight, become an even heavier burden? No, that is not it, not quite. The reticence, the tactfulness, that our mutual grieving imposed on Lydia and me was at once a measure of magnanimity, the same that makes the gaoler tiptoe past the cell in which the condemned man on his last night is asleep, and a mark of our dread of stirring up and provoking to even more inventive exercises those demonic torturers whose special task it was, is, to torment us. Yet even without saying, each knew what the other was thinking, and, more acutely, what the other was feeling—this is a further effect of our shared sorrow, this empathy, this mournful telepathy.
I am thinking of the morning after the very first one of Lydia’s nocturnal rampages when she had started up from the pillow convinced our recently dead Cass was alive and in the house somewhere. Even when the panic was over and we had dragged ourselves back to bed we did not get to sleep again, not properly—Lydia doing hiccuppy after-sobs and my heart tom-tomming away—but lay on the bed on our backs for a long time, as if practising to be the corpses that one day we shall be. The curtains were thick and drawn tightly shut, and I did not realise the dawn had come up until I saw forming above me a brightly shimmering image that spread itself until it stretched over almost the entire ceiling. At first I took it for an hallucination generated out of my sleep-deprived and still half-frantic consciousness. Also I could not make head or tail of it, which is not surprising, for the image, as after a moment or two I saw, was upside-down. What was happening was that a pinhole-sized opening between the curtains was letting in a narrow beam of light that had turned the room into a camera obscura, and the image above us was an inverted, dawn-fresh picture of the world outside. There was the road below the window, with its blueberry-blue tarmac, and, nearer in, a shiny black hump that was part of the roof of our car, and the single silver birch across the way, slim and shivery as a naked girl, and beyond all that the bay, pinched between the finger and thumb of its two piers, the north one and the south, and then the distant, paler azure of the sea, that at the invisible horizon became imperceptibly sky. How clear it all was, how sharply limned! I could see the sheds along the north pier, their asbestos roofs dully agleam in the early sunlight, and in the lee of the south pier the bristling, amber-coloured masts of the sailboats jostling together at anchor there. I fancied I could even make out the little waves on the sea, with here and there a gay speckle of foam. Thinking still that I might be dreaming, or deluded, I asked Lydia if she could see this luminous mirage and she said yes, yes, and reached out and clutched my hand tightly. We spoke in whispers, as if the very action of our voices might shatter the frail assemblage of light and spectral colour above us. The thing seemed to vibrate inside itself, to be tinily atremble everywhere, as if it were the teeming particles of light itself, the streaming photons, that we were seeing, which I suppose it was, strictly speaking. Yet surely, we felt, surely this was not entirely a natural phenomenon, for which there would be a perfectly simple scientific explanation, preceded by a soft little cough and followed by an apologetic hum—surely this was a thing given to us, a gift, a greeting, in other words a sure sign, sent to comfort us. We lay there watching it, awestruck, for, oh, I do not know how long. As the sun rose the inverted world above us was setting, retreating along the ceiling until it developed a hinge at one edge and began sliding steadily down the far wall and poured itself at last into the carpet and was gone. Straight away we got up—what else was there to do?—and started our dealings with the day. Were we comforted, did we feel lightened? A little, until the wonder of the spectacle to which we had been treated began to diffuse, to slip and slide and be absorbed into the ordinary, fibrous texture of things.
It was by the coast too that our daughter died, another coast, at Portovenere, which is, if you do not know it, an ancient Ligurian seaport at the tip of a spit of land stretching out into the Gulf of Genoa, opposite Lerici, where the poet Shelley drowned. The Romans knew it as Portus Veneris, for long ago there was a shrine to that charming goddess on the drear promontory where now stands the church of St Peter the Apostle. Byzantium harboured its fleet in the bay at Portovenere. The glory is long faded, and it is now a faintly melancholy, salt-bleached town, much favoured by tourists and wedding parties. When we were shown our daughter in the mortuary she had no features: St Peter’s rocks and the sea’s waves had erased them and left her in faceless anonymity. But it was she, sure enough, there was no doubting it, despite her mother’s desperate hope of a mistaken identity.
Why Cass should be in Liguria, of all places, we never discovered. She was twenty-seven, and something of a scholar, though erratic—she had suffered since childhood from Mandelbaum’s syndrome, a rare defect of the mind. What may one know of another, even when it is one’s own daughter? A clever man whose name I have forgotten—my memory has become a sieve—put the poser: what is the length of a coastline? It seems a simple enough challenge, readily met, by a professional surveyor, say, with his spyglass and tape measure. But reflect a moment. How finely calibrated must the tape measure be to deal with all those nooks and crannies? And nooks have nooks, and crannies crannies,
ad infinitum
, or
ad
at least that indefinite boundary where matter, so-called, shades off seamlessly into thin air. Similarly, with the dimensions of a life it is a case of stopping at some certain level and saying this,
this
was she, though knowing of course that it was not.
She was pregnant when she died. This was a shock for us, her parents, an after-shock of the calamity of her death. I should like to know who the father was, the father not-to-be; yes, that is something I should very much like to know.
The mysterious movie woman called back, and this time I was first to get to the phone, hurrying down the stairs from the attic with my knees going like elbows—I had not been aware I was so eager, and felt a little ashamed of myself. Her name, she told me, was Marcy Meriwether, and she was calling from Carver City on the coast of California. Not young, with a smoker’s voice. She asked if she was speaking personally with Mr Alexander Cleave the actor. I was wondering if someone of my acquaintance had set me up for a hoax—theatre folk have a distressing fondness for hoaxes. She sounded peeved that I had not returned her original call. I hastened to explain that my wife had not caught her name, which prompted Ms Meriwether to spell it for me, in a tone of jaded irony, indicating either that she did not believe my excuse—it had sounded limp and unlikely even to me—or just that she was tired of having to spell her mellifluous but faintly risible moniker for people too inattentive or dubious to have registered it properly the first time round. She is an executive, an important one, I feel sure, with Pentagram Pictures, an independent studio which is to make a film based on the life of one Axel Vander. This name too she spelled for me, slowly, as if by now she had decided she was dealing with a halfwit, which is understandable in a person who has spent her working life among actors. I confessed I did not know who Axel Vander is, or was, but this she brushed aside as of no importance, and said she would send me material on him. Saying it, she gave a dry laugh, I do not know why. The film is to be called
The Invention of the Past
, not a very catchy title, I thought, though I did not say so. It is to be directed by Toby Taggart. This announcement was followed by a large and waiting silence, which it was obvious I was expected to fill, but could not, for I had never heard of Toby Taggart either.
I thought that by now Ms Meriwether would be ready to give up on a person as ill-informed as I clearly am, but on the contrary she assured me that everyone involved in the project was very excited at the prospect of working with me, very excited, and that of course I had been the first and obvious choice for the part. I purred dutifully in appreciation of this flattery, then mentioned, with diffidence but not, I judged, apologetically, that I had never before worked in film. Was that a quick intake of breath I heard on the line? Is it possible a film person of long experience as Ms Meriwether must be would not know such a thing about an actor to whom she was offering a leading part? That was fine, she said, just fine; in fact Toby wanted someone new to the screen, a fresh face—mark, I am in my sixties—an assertion that I could tell she no more believed in than I did. Then, with an abruptness that left me blinking, she hung up. The last I heard of her, as the receiver was falling into its cradle, was the beginning of a bout of coughing, raucous and juicy. Again I wondered uneasily if it was all a prank, but decided, on no good evidence, that it was not.
Axel Vander. So.
Mrs Gray and I had our first—what shall I call it? Our first encounter? That makes it sound too intimate and immediate—since after all it was not an encounter in the flesh—and at the same time too prosaic. Whatever it was, we had it one watercolour April day of gusts and sudden rain and vast, rinsed skies. Yes, another April; in a way, in this story, it is always April. I was a raw boy of fifteen by then and Mrs Gray was a married woman in the ripeness of her middle thirties. Our town, I thought, had surely never known such a liaison, though probably I was wrong, there being nothing that has not happened already, except what happened in Eden, at the catastrophic outset of everything. Not that the town came to know of it for a long time, and might never have found out had it not been for a certain busybody’s prurience and insatiable nosiness. But here is what I remember, here is what I retain.
I hesitate, aware of a constraint, as if the prudish past were plucking at my sleeve to forestall me. Yet that day’s little dalliance—there is the word!—was child’s play compared with what was to come later.
Anyway, here goes.
Lord, I feel fifteen again.