Ghosts (12 page)

Dreams bring remembrance, too; perhaps that is what they are for, to force us to dredge up those dirty little deeds and dodges we thought we had succeeded in forgetting. These half-involuntary memories are a terrible thing. There are days like this when they course through me from morning until night like pure pain. They leave me gasping, even the seemingly happy ones, as if they were the living record of heinous yet immensely subtle sins I had thought were covered up forever. And always, of course, there is the unexpected: although last night’s dream was about my father, all day today I have been thinking mainly of my mother. After father died I was surprised by the depth of her
grief. It made of her something ancient and elemental, a tribal figure, sitting dry-eyed draped in black, bereft, unmoving, monumentally silent, like a pelt-clad figure in a forest clearing watching over the smouldering ashes of a funeral pyre. Had I misjudged her, thinking she was made of sterner stuff? I believe that was for me the beginning of maturity, if that is the word, the moment when I realised it was too late to readjust my notions of her; too late for atonement, too (there is that word again). I tiptoed around her, not knowing what to say, fearful of intruding on this primitive rite. The house wore the startled, doggy air of having been undeservedly rebuked. I knew the feeling.

I
NHABITANTS OF THIS PLACE
. What a peculiar collection we must seem, the Professor and Licht, the girl and I, disparates that we are, thrown together here on this rocky isle. The girl has complicated everything, of course. Before her coming things had settled down nicely; even Licht, who at first had been so resentful of me, had reconciled himself to my presence. Yes, without her we might have pottered along indefinitely, I at my art history and Licht at his schemes – he is a great one for schemes – and the Professor doing whatever it is the Professor does. Now we have grown restless, and chafe under the imposed languor of these summer days; time, that before seemed such a calm medium, has grown choppy as a storm-threatened sea. If the others had remained, I mean Sophie and Croke and the children, if they too had stayed behind they might have become a little community, might have formed a little fold, and I could have been the shepherd, guarding them against the prowling wolf. Idle fancies; forgive me, I get carried away sometimes.

Inevitably of course there has grown up a half-acknowledged divide, with the Professor and Licht on one side, the girl and I on the other, and behind that again there is yet another grouping in which the girl stands between Licht and me, a pair of ragged old rats scrabbling in the dirt and
showing each other our sharpest teeth. Licht thinks he is in love with her, of course, and resents what he considers the excessive attentions I pay to her. Her silences torment him and strike him mute in his turn; he creeps up and stands behind her tongue-tied and quivering, or sits and stares at her across the dinner table, rabbit-eyed, his pink-rimmed nostrils flared and his hands trembling. He devises sly, round-about ways of talking about her, deprecating as Mr Guppy, introducing her name with elaborate casualness into the most unlikely topics and employing laboriously cunning circumlocutions. He is heartsick, mooning about the house with the agonised look of a man nursing an unassuageable toothache. At least it has made him smarten himself up a bit. He runs a comb now and then through that fright-wig of hair, and bathes more frequently than he used to, if my nose is any judge. I suppose she has become associated in his mind with the dream he has of leaving here and finding some more fulfilling life elsewhere; I see them, as in one of those old silent films, in a bare room with a square table, he sitting head in hands and she smiling her Lulu smile at the moustachioed and leering landlord who beckons to her suggestively from the doorway.

She is a singular creature, or seems so to me, at any rate. She claims to be twenty-one but I think she is no more than eighteen or nineteen. She will not tell me about her life, or at least does not: I mean maybe if I knew how to ask, if I knew the codes that everyone else has been privy to since the cradle, she would prattle away non-stop about her mammy and her daddy and schooldays and the job she did at the hotel and all the rest of it. As it is she wears the dulled, frowning air of an amnesiac. There are times when I catch her studying me with that remote stare that she has as if I were something that had suddenly appeared in her path, like a rock, or a fallen branch, or an unfordable blank span of water. Probably she finds me as baffling a phenomenon as I
find her, my songless Mélisande. She trails about the house in an old raincoat of Licht’s that she uses for a dressing-gown, with her lank hair and wan cheeks. I am startled anew each time I encounter her. I am like an anthropologist studying the last surviving specimen of some delicate, elusive species long thought extinct. I am assembling her gradually, with great care, starting at the extremities; I ogle her bare feet – the little toe is curled under its neighbour like a baby’s thumb – her hard little hands, the vulnerable, veined, milk-blue backs of her knees. Sometimes at night she comes and sits in the kitchen while I work. I do not know if she is lonely, or afraid, or if the kitchen is just one of a series of stopping-places in her fitful wanderings; she has a way of touching things as she passes them by, tapping them lightly with her fingertips, like a child touching the markers of a secret game. She is tense, restless, preoccupied, always poised somehow, as if at any moment she might unfurl a set of hidden wings and take flight out of the window into the darkness and be gone. It will happen; some morning I will wake and know at once that she has flown, will feel her absence like a jagged hole in the air through which the wind pours without a sound. What shall I do then, when my term is ended?

Felix she does not mention.

I tell her about the painter Vaublin, what little is known of him. She listens, large-eyed, nodding faintly now and then, taking it all in or thinking of something else, I do not know which. Perhaps I am talking to myself, telling myself the same story all over again. Listen –

Who does not know, if only from postcards or the lids of superior chocolates boxes, these scenes suffused with tenderness and melancholy that yet have something harsh in them, something almost inhuman?
Le monde d’or
is one of those
handful of timeless images that seem to have been hanging forever in the gallery of the mind. There is something mysterious here beyond the inherent mysteriousness of art itself. I look at this picture, I cannot help it, in a spirit of shamefaced interrogation, asking, What does it mean, what are they doing, these engimatic figures frozen forever on the point of departure, what is this atmosphere of portentousness without apparent portent? There is no meaning, of course, only a profound and inexplicable significance; why is that not enough for me? Art imitates nature not by mimesis but by achieving for itself a natural objectivity, I of all people should know that. Yet in this picture there seems to be a kind of valour in operation, a kind of tight-lipped, admirable fortitude, as if the painter knows something that he will not divulge, whether to deprive us or to spare us is uncertain. Such stillness; though the scene moves there is no movement; in this twilit glade the helpless tumbling of things through time has come to a halt: what other painter before or after has managed to illustrate this fundamental paradox of art with such profound yet playful artistry? These creatures will not die, even if they have never lived. They are wonderfully detailed figurines, animate yet frozen in immobility: I think of the little manikins on a music-box, or in one of those old town-hall clocks, poised, waiting for the miniature music that will never start up, for the bronze bell that will not peal. It is the very stillness of their world that permits them to endure; if they stir they will die, will crumble into dust and leave nothing behind save a few scraps of brittle lace, a satin bow, a shoe buckle, a broken mandolin.

I admire the faint but ever-present air of concupiscence that pervades all of this artist’s work. Viewed from a certain angle these polite arcadian scenes can seem a riotous bacchanal. How lewdly his ladies look out at us, their ardent eyes shiny as marbles, their cheeks pinkly aglow as if from a gentle smacking. Even the props have something tumescent
about them, these smooth pillars and thick, tall trees, these pendulous and smoothly rounded clouds, these mossy arbours from within which there seem to issue the sighs and soft laughter of breathless lovers. Even in
Le monde d’or
, apparently so chaste, so ethereal, a certain hectic air of expectancy bespeaks excesses remembered or to come. The figure of Pierrot is suggestively androgynous, the blonde woman walking away on the arm of the old man – who himself has a touch of the roué – wears a wearily knowing air, while the two boys, those pallid, slightly ravaged putti, seem to have seen more things than they should. Even the little girl with the braided hair who leads the lady by the hand has the aura of a fledgling Justine or Juliette, a potential victim in whom old men might repose dark dreams of tender abuse. And then there is that smirking Harlequin astride his anthropomorphic donkey: what sights he seems to have seen, what things he knows!

I pause to record an infestation of flies, minute, glittering black creatures with disproportionately large yet impossibly delicate wings shaped like sycamore seeds. I think they must be newly hatched. What is a blow-fly? That is what I thought when I saw them: blow-flies. Is there something dead around here that has not yet begun to stink? I cannot discover where they are coming from; they just appear in the light of the lamp, attracted by the warmth, I suppose, and fly up against the bulb and then drop stunned on the table and flop about groggily until I sweep them away with my sleeve. They have got into my papers, too, I lift a page and find them squashed flat there, tiny black and crimson bursts of blossom stuck with wing-petals. It is eerie, even a bit alarming, yet I am almost charmed. It is like something out of the Bible. What does it portend? I have become superstitious, the result no doubt of living for so long with ghosts. Down here in
the underworld things give the uncanny impression of being other things, all these Pierrots and Colombines in their black masks, and even flies, looked at in a certain light, can seem celestial messengers. When they first began to appear I did not feel repugnance, only a sort of pleased surprise. I sat for a long time watching them, head on hand, lost to myself and inanely smiling, like one of those bewhiskered dreamers fluttered about by fairies in a Victorian engraving. I know that the reality they inhabit is different from mine, that for them this world they have blundered into is all struggle and pain and sudden, inexplicable fire – they are only flies after all, and I am only I – yet as they rise and fall, fluttering in the light, they might be a host of shining seraphim come to comfort me.

Today in my reading I chanced upon another jewel:
Hard beside the woe of the world, and often upon its volcanic soil, man has laid out his little garden of happiness.
Yes, you have guessed it, I have taken up gardening, even in the shadow of my ruins. It is a relaxation from the rigours of scholarship. (Scholarship!) But no, no, it is more than that. Out here among these greens, in this clement weather, I have the irresistible sensation of being in touch with something, some authentic, fundamental thing, to which a part of me I had thought atrophied responds as if to a healing and invigorating balm. So many things I have missed in my life; there are moments, rare and brief, when I think it might not be too late after all to experience at least some of them. My needs are modest; a spell of husbandry will do, for now. (Later will there come the tree of knowledge, Eve, the fatal apple, and all the rest of it, Cain included?) Perhaps I shall make a little statue of myself and grind it up and mix it with the clay, as the philosopher so charmingly recommends, and that way come to live again through these growing things.

I found down at the side of the house the remains of what must once have been a kitchen garden. Everything was choked with weeds and scutch grass, but the outlines of bed and drill were still there. I cleared the ground and found good black soil and put in vegetables – runner beans, mainly, I’m afraid, for I love their scarlet flowers. Already the first fruits have appeared (shall I hear the voice of the turtle, too?). I cannot express the excitement I felt when these tender seedlings began to come up. They were so fragile and yet so tenacious, so – so valiant. I have a great fondness for the stunted things, the runts, the ones that fail to flower and yet refuse to die, or are beaten down by the wind and still put out blossoms on the fallen stems. I have the notion, foolish, I know, that it is because of me that they cling on, that my ministrations, no, simply my presence gives them heart somehow, and makes them live. Who or what would there be to notice their struggles if I did not come out and walk among them every day? It must mean something, being here. I am the agent of individuation: in me they find their singularity. I planted them in neat rows, just so, and gave each one its space; without me only the madness of mere growth. Not a sparrow shall fall but I … how does it go? I have forgotten the quotation, the misquotation. Just as well, I am getting carried away; next thing I shall be hearing voices. It is just that there are days when, like Rameau’s nephew, I have to reflect: it is an affliction that must run its course.

Where was I? My garden, yes. I entertain high hopes of a bumper crop. What shall I do with such abundance, though? Perhaps Mr Tighe will take some of it to sell in his shop? If not, what matter. Let it all go to waste. Life, growth, this tender green fighting its way up through the dirt, that’s all that interests me. Obvious, of course, but what do I care about that? The obvious is fine, for me. Sometimes, anyway.

And then there are the weeds; I know that if I were a real gardener I would do merciless and unrelenting battle against
weeds, but the fact is I cherish them. They seem to me even more fiercely alive than the planted things they flourish among. Cut them down today and tomorrow they will be back; tear them out of their holes and leave the merest thread of root behind and they will come shouldering their way up again, stronger than ever. Compared to these ruffians even my hardiest cabbages are namby-pambies. How cunning they are, too, how cleverly they choose their spot, growing up slyly beside those cultivated plants they most resemble. Against whom are they adopting this camouflage? Pests do not seem to eat them, having my more tender produce to gorge upon, and birds leave them alone. Is it me they fear? Do they see me coming, with my boots and blade? I wonder if they feel pain, experience terror, if they weep and bleed, in their damp, vermiculate world, just as we do, up here in the light? I look at the little sprigs of chickweed trembling among the bean shoots and I am strangely moved. Such steadfastness, such yearning! They want to live too. That is all they ask: to have their little moment in the world.