Authors: John Banville
I was describing to Lily the malt store and those rats, making her do her dry-retching routine, when we came into a little open space bounded at the far end by a fragment of the old town wall that Cromwell’s cannons missed. There we sat down on a bench beside a disused public lavatory, under the shade of a gnarled tree, and she began to tell me about her mother. The sun was hot, and there was not a soul about save for a lame dog that circled us warily, wagging a limp tail, before mooching off. I suppose it must have been this deserted atmosphere, the noontide stillness, and the tree, and the glare of the whitewashed lavatory wall beside us and the faint understink of drains, that made it seem that we were somewhere in the far south, somewhere hot and dry, on some harsh coast, with peeling plane trees and cicadas chirring under a merciless sky.
What seas what shores what granite islands . . .
As she talked, Lily picked at a loose thread in the hem of her dress, squinting in the light. A breeze rattled the leaves above us and then all settled down again, like an audience settling down for the next act.
“Where were you living, when she died,” I said, “your mother?” She did not answer, pretending not to have heard.
I have discovered Quirke’s lair, did I say that? I stumbled on it in one of my prowls about the house the other day. He picked a modest room, I will say that for him. It is hardly a room at all, up near the attics; my mother would not have offered it to even the most indigent of our lodgers, and used it for storing lumber, and, after his death, my father’s old suits and shoes that her sense of thrift would not let her throw away. It is low-ceilinged, and slightly wedge-shaped, with a single, crooked window at the narrower end, long ago painted shut, as the cheesy air attested. There is a camp bed with a thin horsehair mattress, and a blanket but no sheets. He uses a chamber pot, I noticed, the handle of it protruded from under the bed like an ear eagerly cocked. He is not the most fastidious of persons. There was dust on everything, and some worrying smears on the walls, and used plates, and a tea mug that does not seem to have been washed for a very long time, and three far from clean shirts hanging in an overlapping row on the wardrobe door, like a trio of close-harmony singers. I trust he will not invite Lydia up here, no matter how chummy they may become, for she would surely smack him smartly on the wrist and have him down on his knees again with the scrubbing brush and pail. Despite the squalor and the sadness of the place—those shirts, that mug, a pair of cracked shoes, one lying on its side, both with their tongues hanging out, that looked as if they had dropped off a corpse as it was being dragged out—I experienced a childish tingle of excitement. I have always been an enthusiastic snooper; diaries, letters, handbags, nothing is safe from me—why, sometimes, though I should not admit it, sometimes I will even take a peek into other people’s laundry baskets, or used to, in the days when Lydia and I had friends, and would go out to their houses, for parties, and dinner, and summer lunches . . . Unimaginable, now. In Quirke’s room, though, the tingly sensation I had was more than merely the pleasure of delving into someone else’s belongings. I am thinking of the hare’s nest I found one day at the seaside when I was a child, a neat deep whorl hollowed out of the coarse grass on the back of a dune, containing three tiny, throbbing leverets huddled so close together they looked like a single animal with three heads. I picked them up and put them inside my jersey and carried them back to the two-roomed wooden chalet where my mother and I were enduring a holiday together. When I showed them to her she gave a small cry of dismay and took a hasty step backward; she was not long a widow, and her nerves were bad. She said the creatures were probably diseased, or had lice, and would I please take the dirty things away this instant. I plodded out to the dunes again, where now a fine rain was slanting in from the sea, but of course I could not find the nest, and in the end I lodged the poor things, unpleasantly slippery now in their wet fur and seeming even tinier than before, in a sandy hollow under a stone, and when I returned the next day they were gone. But I have not forgotten them, their helplessness, the hot soft feel of them against my heart, the faltering way they kept moving their blind heads from side to side and up and down, like those toy dogs that people put in the back windows of motor cars. Quirke, for all his bulk and his sardonic humour, has something of the same motherless lost incompetency about him. I searched his things, of course, but the dearth of secrets, indeed, the absence of anything much of interest, was more dispiriting than would have been the most shaming discovery. As I turned over the bits and pieces of his gimcrack life a bleak awfulness came down on me, and despite myself I felt ashamed, though whether for my prurience or the paltriness of his life I could not rightly tell. In a leather wallet polished with age and shaped to the curve of a buttock I found a photograph, similarly curved, and finely craquelured, in faded shades of pearl and grey. The picture was of a thin, youngish woman with an unfortunate perm, standing in a summer garden smiling bravely into the lens. I took it to the window and scanned it hungrily, cursing the lack of a magnifying glass. The woman was holding herself in an awkward pose before the camera’s bulging eye. She had a hand lifted to her forehead against the glare of the sun, so that most of the upper part of her face was in shadow. Minutely I examined what features I could make out—delicate pointed chin, somewhat vapid mouth, her smile disclosing the hint of a discoloured front tooth, that lifted arm, nicely curved but pathetically skinny, the little, weak, defensive hand—searching for the slightest suggestion of familiarity, the faintest echo. In the bottom left corner a part of the photographer’s shadow was to be seen, a sloping shoulder and one side of a big round head, Quirke’s, most likely. And the garden? At the woman’s back there was a tree of some sort, birch, perhaps, in full leaf, and under her a bit of lumpy lawn. Could be anywhere. Discouraged, I pocketed the photo, and with a last gloomy look around I went out softly and shut the door behind me. On the stairs I stopped, struck by a flaw in the stillness, as if someone, fled now, had been listening at the door, or spying on me through the keyhole. Lily, probably; it did not matter.
What I want to know now is, how long exactly have the Quirkes been living here, and, more important, how many of them were there here to start with? Lily clings to a stubborn vagueness on the matter. Yet she claims to remember clearly the circumstances, even if she will not disclose the precise location, of her mother’s death—too clearly, I surmise, for it happened many years ago, and I do not see Lily as an infant prodigy, beadily recording the events of family history over the rim of her cradle. Her mother woke one night with a pain, she says. The doctor was sent for, but there was a mix-up and he went to the wrong house, and did not realise the mistake because by chance in the other house there was also a mother in distress, though she was giving birth, and did so, successfully, while Lily’s poor Mam was engaged in an opposite exercise, which in time she accomplished, with much anguish. Her Auntie Dora came, Lily says, from the far end of town, wearing a raincoat over her nightdress, but even Auntie Dora, evidently a stalwart among incompetent Quirkes, even she could do nothing to save her sister. She had shouted at Quirke, and said it was all his fault, and said if he was any example of a husband she was glad she had never married, and Quirke had made to hit her and she put up her fists to him, and there might have been a real fight, for Quirke was beside himself and Auntie Dora was ready for him, except that someone else who was there, a neighbour or a family friend, Lily could not recall who it was, had stepped between the opponents and said they should be ashamed of themselves, with Kitty not yet cold. All this I heard, sitting on that bench, in the sun, while Lily picked at that thread in her dress and squinted off. It must have been quite a night, the night that Kitty died. I had the purloined photograph in my pocket. I showed it to Lily, and she looked at it blankly. I asked if it was not her mother. She peered harder and was silent for a long moment.
“I don’t think so,” she said, tentatively. “I don’t think it’s her.”
“Then who is it?” I asked, in some chagrin. I told her where I had got the picture, thinking she might protest my invasion of her father’s privacy, but she only snickered.
“Oh, it’s some girl, then,” she said. “Da always had girls.”
Quirke as Casanova; it does not seem likely, somehow.
“And did you have a brother,” I said, “or a sister, that died?”
At that she took on a furtive, rabbity look, and after hesitating for a moment gave a quick little nod, darting her head forward as if to pluck a morsel of something from my hand.
Is it true? Can this be the identity of the ghostly mother and her child who have been haunting me? I want to believe it, but I cannot. I think Lily was lying; I think there is no dead sibling, except in her fancy.
There was a waiting stillness about us now. The air had grown leaden, and the leaves of the tree above us hung inert. A cloud had risen in the sky, blank as a wall, and now there was a hushing sound, and the rain came, hard quick vengeful rods falling straight down and splattering on the pavement like so many flung pennies. In the three hurried steps that it took Lily and me to get to the doorway of the public lavatory we were wet. The door was sealed with a chain and padlock, and we had to cower in the concrete porch, with its green-slimed wall and lingering ammoniac stink. Even here the big drops falling on the lintel above us threw off a chill fine mist that drifted into our faces and made Lily in her thin dress shiver. She wore a black look, huddled there with her head drawn down between her shoulders and her lips set in a line and her thin arms tightly folded. Meanwhile the air was steadily darkening. I remarked the peculiar light, insipid and shrouded, like the light in a dream.
“It’s the eclipse,” Lily said sullenly. “We’re missing it.”
The eclipse! Of course. I thought of the thousands standing in silence, in the rain, their faces lifted vainly to the sky, and instead of laughing I felt a sharp and inexplicable pang of sadness, though for what, or whom, I do not know. Presently the downpour ceased and a watery sun, unoccluded, struggled through the clouds, and we ventured out of shelter. The streets that we walked through were awash, grey water with brief pewter bubbles running in the gutters and the pavements shining and giving off wavering flaws of steam. Cars churned past like motorboats, drawing miniature rainbows in their wake, while above us a life-sized one, the daddy of them all, was braced across the sky, looking like a huge and perfect practical joke.
When we came to the square again the circus show was still in progress. We could hear the band inside the tent blaring and squawking, and a big mad voice bellowing incomprehensibly, with awful hilarity, through a loudspeaker. The sun was drying off the canvas of the tent in patches, giving a camouflage effect, and the soaked pennant mounted above the entrance was plastered around its pole. It was not the regular kind of circus tent, what they call the Big Top—I wonder why?—but a tall, long rectangle, suggesting equally a jousting tournament and an agricultural show, with a supporting strut at each of the four corners and a fifth one in the middle of the roof. As we drew near there was a hiatus of some kind in the performance. The music stopped, and the audience inside set up a murmurous buzzing. Some people came out of the tent, ducking awkwardly under the canvas flap in the entranceway, and stood about in a faintly dazed fashion, blinking in the glistening air. A fat man leading a small boy by the hand paused to stretch, and yawn, and light a cigarette, while the child turned aside and peed against the trunk of a cherry tree. I thought the show was over, but Lily knew better. “It’s only the interval,” she said bitterly, with revived resentment. Just then the red-haired fellow, the one who had grinned at me from the back step of his trailer, appeared from around the side of the tent. Over his red shirt and clown’s trousers he wore a rusty black tailcoat now, and a dented top hat was fixed somehow at an impossible angle to the back of his head. I realised who it was he reminded me of: George Goodfellow, an affable fox, the villain in a cartoon strip in the newspapers long ago, who sported a slender cigarette holder and just such a stovepipe hat, and whose brush protruded cheekily between the split tails of his moth-eaten coat. When he saw us the fellow hesitated, and that knowing smirk crossed his face again. Before I could stop her—and why should I have tried to?—Lily went forward eagerly and spoke to him. He had been about to slip inside the tent, and now stood half turned away from her, holding open the canvas flap and looking down at her over his shoulder with an expression of mock alarm. He listened for a moment, then laughed, and glanced at me, and said something briefly, and then with another glance in my direction slipped nimbly into the darkness of the tent.
“We can go in,” Lily said breathlessly, “for the second half.”
She stood before me in quivering stillness, like a colt waiting to be loosed from the reins, hands clasped at her back and looking intently at the toe of her sandal.
“Who is that fellow?” I said. “What did you say to him?”
She gave herself an impatient shake.
“He’s just one of them,” she said, gesturing toward the caravans and the tethered horses. “He said we could go in.”
The smell inside the tent struck me with a familiar smack: greasepaint, sweat, dust, and, underneath all, a heavy wet warm musky something that was as old as Nero’s Rome. Benches were set out in rows, as in a church, facing a makeshift trestle stage at the far end. There was the unmistakable atmosphere of a matinée, jaded, restless, faintly violent. People were promenading in the aisles, hands in pockets, nodding to their friends and shouting jocular insults. A gang of youths at the back, whooping and whistling, was hurling abuse and apple cores at a rival gang nearby. One of the circus folk, in singlet and tights and espadrilles—it was the Lothario with greasy curls and the nostril stud whom Lily had spoken to in the morning—loitered at the edge of the stage, absent-mindedly picking his nose. I was looking about for Goodfellow when he came bustling in from the left, carrying a piano accordion in one hand and a chair in the other. At sight of him there was a smattering of ironic applause, at which he stopped in his tracks and gave a great start, peering about with exaggerated astonishment, as if an audience were the last thing he had expected. Then he put on a blissful smile of acknowledgement, closing his eyes, and bowed deeply, to a chorus of jeers; his top hat fell off and rolled in a half circle around his feet, and carelessly he snatched it up and clapped it on again, and proceeded gaily toward the front of the stage, the accordion hanging down at his side with the bellows at full stretch and emitting tortured squeaks and wheezes. At every other step he would pause, pretending not to know where these cat-call sounds were coming from, and would peer over his shoulder, or glare suspiciously at the people in the front row, and once even twisted himself into a corkscrew shape to stare down in stern admonishment past his shoulder at his own behind. When the laughter had subsided, and after essaying a few experimental runs on the keyboard, head inclined and gaze turned soulfully inward, like a virtuoso testing the tone of his Stradivarius, he threw himself back on the chair with a violent movement of the shoulders and began to play and sing raucously. He sang in a reedy falsetto, with many sobs and gasps and cracked notes, swaying from side to side on the chair and passionately casting up his eyes, so that a rim of yellowish white was visible below the pupils. After a handful of rackety numbers—“O Sole Mio” was one, and “South of the Border”— he ended with a broad flourish by letting the accordion fall open flabbily across his knees, producing from it a wounded roar, and immediately slammed it shut again. After that for a long moment he sat motionless, with the instrument shut in his lap, stricken-faced, staring before him with bulging eyes, then rose, wincing, and scuttled off at a knock-kneed run, a hand clutched to his crotch.