Authors: John Banville
Out in the kitchen there was a sudden cacophonous blast from Lily’s radio, immediately silenced.
Lydia was watching me sidelong now, waiting to see what I would do next. Sometimes, for instance at moments like this one, I allow myself to entertain the notion that for all her strengths she is a little afraid of me. I confess I like to keep her on her toes. I am unpredictable. Perhaps she really does think I am mad, and might do her violence. Behind her in the window the garden was an incongruously Edenic medley of gay greens and shimmering, petrol blues. High summer’s abundance is a continuous surprise. “She wants to come home,” she said, “but she can’t, at the moment.” This struck a false note of attempted appeasement, which I refused even to acknowledge.
At the moment,
indeed.
“She confides in you, does she?” I said. “She never used to.”
This is true; whatever differences there may be between my daughter and me, we have always been close enough to read each other’s minds—and it is always, always the two of us against poor Lydia.
I heard Lily’s bare feet slapping along the corridor from the kitchen, and now she came in bearing a tin tray with a teapot and two unmatching mugs, and a plate piled high with thick, crooked slices of haphazardly buttered bread. I noticed Lydia noticing the crusted dirt on the child’s callused feet and etched into the wrinkled red backs of her heels. Lily, biting her lower lip at one side, carefully avoided looking at me, and set the tray down on the hearth, bending from the waist and deliberately showing the backs of her thighs, pale as a fish’s belly, right up to her narrow behind. “Will I pour?” she said from under her hanging hair in a voice strangulate with suppressed mirth.
Lydia came forward quickly from the window. “I’ll do it.”
“Suit yourself,” Lily said, and straightened, still not looking at either of us, and sauntered off, twitching her hips.
To pour the tea Lydia was forced to sit on the hearth rug, leaning aslant with her legs draped together at an awkward angle to one side, which gave her the look, not unfetching, of a beached mermaid.
“What age is that child?” she said, frowning at the teak-coloured tea as it glugged into the mugs.
“Seventeen, she claims.”
Lydia snorted.
“Fifteen, more like,” she said, “if that.” There was something about the clumsy, helpless way she was sitting that set up a metronome beat in my blood. “You had better watch out.”
“She’s practically an orphan,” I said. “Do you think I should make Quirke an offer for her? I’m sure it wouldn’t take more than a shrunken head and pouch of cowrie shells and she could be mine—ours, I mean. What do you say?”
She brought her legs around in a quick, surprisingly graceful sweep and rose to her knees and offered me the mug. She was very close to me, almost kneeling between my knees. Taking the mug, I allowed my fingers to brush against hers. She went still, her calm gaze fixed on our two hands.
“You already have a daughter,” she said quietly.
I took a sip from my mug. I really must instruct Lily in the art of making tea. I am sure she uses tea bags, though I have told her I will not tolerate them, nasty things. Lydia knelt motionless before me, in the attitude of a supplicant, her head hanging.
“I
had,
” I said. “Then she grew up. A woman can’t be a daughter.”
“She needs help, you know.”
“When has she ever not?”
She sighed, and transferred her weight from one knee to the other. Thinking she might be about to embrace me I put down my tea mug quickly and rose and walked past her to the window— stepping over that oddly repellent grey worm of ash she had left on the carpet—and stood where she had stood, contemplating the sunlit garden. There is an archaic quality to certain summer days, the ones that come at the close of July especially, when the season has reached its peak and is already imperceptibly in decline, and the sunlight thickens, and the sky is larger and higher and of a deeper blue than before. On such days, autumn is already sounding its first horn-calls, yet the summer still blithely believes it will never end. In that dreamy stillness, like the stillness in the azure distances of a stage set, all the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge. A breeze will spring up, one of the weather’s half-formed thoughts, and something at the corner of your vision will flap once, languidly, and be still again. Confused soft noises mingle in the air, as of a distant revel. There are bee sounds, bird sounds, the needling buzz of a distant tractor. You will catch a fragrance, one that you know but cannot identify, it will remind you of somewhere else, a meadow, with poppies, beside a dusty road, and someone turning to meet you . . . I realised, there at the window, that something had changed, that I had crossed over into a different place. First there had been me, then me and the phantoms, then me and Quirke and Quirke’s girl, and now—I did not know what now, except that this now was new. Behind me I could hear Lydia rising from her knees, grunting a little from the effort.
“The thing is, my dear,” I said, “I haven’t really got the energy to worry about anyone else, just now.”
She gave a harsh little laugh.
“When did you ever?”
A slug-coloured cat was wading through the garden, batting aside the long grass with large deft subduing gestures of its paws. Life is everywhere, even in the stones, slow, secret, long-enduring. I turned from the window. I have always disliked this room, this quintessential parlour; there is a touch of the manse about it, with its brownish shadows and lumpy furniture and its cowed, unmoving air. Too many people have been unhappy here. Lydia was sitting now in the old armchair by the fireplace with her joined hands clasped between her knees, staring sightlessly into the grate. In the minute my back was turned she had put on years; in another minute she would throw them off again; it is a thing she does. Those charred books were still in the fireplace. Ashes, ashes everywhere. Lily came in at the door and paused, taking an interested measure of the atmosphere. “Mrs. Cleave and I would like to adopt you,” I said to her, summoning up a big, bright smile. “We want to take you away from all this and give you a proper home and turn you into a little princess. What do you think of that?”
Lily looked from me to Lydia and back again and smiled warily, then went forward quickly and picked up the tray. As she was leaving I winked at her and she bit her lip again and smirked again and ducked out the door. Lydia sat on in her chair for a moment, motionless, gazing into the grate, then stirred, and released her hands and clapped them on her knees and stood up briskly with the air of one who has come to a large decision.
“I think the best thing we can do—” she began, when all at once she started to weep. Fast tears coursed down her cheeks, plump and shiny as drops of glycerine. She stood and stared through them for a second, in appalled surprise, then her face collapsed and she made a mewling noise, half in anger and half in woe, and put up her hands helplessly before her face with fingers splayed and hurried blunderingly from the room. That inch of cigarette ash was still where it had fallen, still unbroken.
I found her in the hall, crouched on the old sofa there, furiously rubbing at her tear-stained face with the heels of both her hands, like a cat cleaning its whiskers. I am not good with other people’s distress. How often in our life together had I stood like this, watching her dissolve in grief, as a child might watch a sackful of kittens drowning in a pond. I know I have been a trial to her, in one way or another—indeed, in many ways. The fact is, I have never understood her, what she wants, what she expects. When we were first together she used to accuse me of treating her as if she were a child, and it is true that I liked to keep a fatherly eye on day-to-day matters, from the household accounts to her menstrual cycle—people with a lot of daytime on their hands tend to be busybodies, it is a thing I have noticed among my profession— though I say in my defence that I thought this is what would be required, when she was transferred from her Daddy’s care into mine. Then one day in the midst of one of our rows she turned on me a frighteningly contorted face and screamed that she was
not
my mother!
This was a new one; what was I to make of it? I was nonplussed. I waited until she calmed down and then asked her what she had meant, but that only sent her into another rage, so I dropped the subject, although I did continue to brood on it for a long time. At first I had thought she was accusing me of demanding to be cared for and coddled, but I dismissed that, and in the end decided that what she had most likely meant was that I was behaving toward her as I had toward my real mother, that is, with impatience, resentment, and that tight-lipped, ironical forbearance—the sigh, the small laugh, the upcast eyes—which I know is one of the more annoying ways I have of handling those who are supposedly close to me. A moment’s thought showed me, of course, that what she had screamed at me was simply another form of her assertion that I was treating her like a child, for that, as she never tired of pointing out, was exactly how I had treated my mother. How intricate they are, human relations, so called.
“Darling,” I said now, in a voice athrob with insincerity, “I’m sorry.”
One of the paradoxes of our fights is that almost invariably they do not begin in earnest until the stage has been reached when I first attempt to offer an apology. It is as if some primitive instinct of suppressed female dominance is triggered in Lydia by this hint of weakness on my part. Now she went for my throat at once. It was all the old things, rehearsed so often they have gone stale, for me, certainly, if not for her. I will say one thing, she is comprehensive. She starts off in my infancy, works her way rapidly through youth and early manhood, lingers with loving bitterness over our first years together, takes a diversionary swipe at my acting, both in professional and private life—
“You’re never off the stage, we’re
just the audience”
—then she gets to my relations with Cass and really rolls up her sleeves. Mind you, she is not as savage or relentless as she used to be; the years have tempered her temper. What does not change is the image of me that she propounds. In her version, I have everything all wrong. My mother is sweet-natured, put-upon, long-suffering, her nagging of my father and then of me simply a plea for some demonstration of love or affection, a muffled cry out of a wounded heart. My father, on the other hand, is a secret tyrant, self-muted, vindictive, withholding, whose very death was an act of spite and revenge on the woman who had cherished him. When I remind her, in a tone of no more than mild remonstrance, that my father was dead long before she met me, she brushes the fact aside with a contemptuous gesture; she knows what she knows. In this inverted picture of my family—the Holy Trinity is her sneering nickname for us—I too of course am stood on my head. Did I lead a lonely and puzzled childhood, shocked by the early loss of my father and subject thereafter to the unmeetable emotional demands of a bitterly disappointed mother? No, no: I was the little prince, showered with love, praise, gifts, who quickly saw off a resented father and spent the rest of his widowed mother’s life blaming her for all the things she could not be or do. Did I sacrifice the best years of my adult life working dear in cheap theatre to support my wife and her child in the luxury to which a doting father had irresponsibly accustomed his spoilt daughter? Indeed no: I was the typical monster of selfishness who would have prostituted his wife for a walk-on part. Did I love my daughter, try to wean her away from her darkest obsessions, save her from her worst excesses? Not I: she was a trial to me, an irritation, a stumbling block on the road to stage success, a source of shame and embarrassment before my smart friends in the brittle make-believe world in which I was trying to claw my way to fame. So you see: it was all a lie, all a part I was playing, and playing badly, at that. And now I had done the worst of all, had walked out of the production, leaving the rest of the cast to deal with the cat-calls of the audience and the management’s fury, while the backers all backed off.
As I say, she is not the lioness she once was. In the old days she would frighten even herself with the vehemence of her denunciations. We would rage at each other late into the night, on a battlefield littered with smashed crystal and swirling with cigarette smoke and the fumes of alcohol, and wake in the ashen light of morning, a salt bitterness in our mouths and our throats raw from drink and shouting, and reach out a hand to each other, tremblingly, under the sheets, not daring to move our heads, and one would make a shaky enquiry and the other would croak some hoarse word of reassurance, and then we would lie there, counting our wounds, surprised that the war was done for another day and we were still breathing.
I could hear Lily in the kitchen listening to us, trying not to make a sound. Exciting for a child, a real adults’ fight. Cass used to like to hear us going at it hammer and tongs; perhaps it was a comforting match for the clangour in her own head. Now I waited, and presently Lydia wound down, and leant forward wearily with her arms folded on her knees and her head hanging, great snorting sobs making her shudder now and then, fury’s after-tremors. Around us the shocked shadows congregated, like onlookers cautiously closing in on the still-smouldering scene of an explosion. On the lino near my foot a sunburst streamed and shivered. Odd, how distress gravitates to this passageway, the dank umbilicus of the house, with its windowless stretch of brown wall on one side and the overhang of the stairs on the other. Originally, in grander days, way before our time, it led to the servants’ quarters at the rear; halfway along there is still the frame of what was no doubt a green baize door, long ago removed. Air stands unmoving here, unchanged for centuries, it seems; vague draughts swim through, like slow fish. There is a stale, brownish smell that haunted me as a child; it was like the smell I made when I cupped my hands over my nose and mouth and breathed the same breath rapidly in and out. My mother it was who put the sofa here, dragged it in by herself from the front room one day when I was at school, another of her whims. The lodgers took to it straight away, there was always one of them sitting on it, this one nursing a disappointment in love, that one the unacknowledged beginnings of a cancer. Cass too would perch there, with her thumb in her mouth and her legs folded under her, especially after a seizure, when the light hurt her eyes and she wanted nothing but solitude, and silence, and shadows.