Ghosts (29 page)

Authors: John Banville

Who’s ’at little girl I sawre yer wiv larst night?

He mused a while, gazing into the thickening shadows.

‘I cannot set my foot on board a ship,’ he said, ‘without the memory coming back of sailing to the frozen northern pole. I wonder, have you ever been up there? The tundra and the towering bergs, the sun that never sets: such solitude! such cold! And yet how beautiful, this land of ice! We sailed out of Archangel and due north we ploughed our way, all day, and all the night, for weeks. And then one morning when I looked out from the deck I saw the strangest sight: a figure, in the distance, on a sled, a giant man, it seemed, with whip and dogs, at great speed travelling on the floes, due north, like us. And then another – ’ There he paused, and said: ‘I think you know this story, though?’

A drowsy bird in the branches above us stirred a wing. The stream muttered to itself. Felix considered me with his head on one side.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘don’t I know you? I mean from somewhere else. Your face looks familiar.’

The last light was ascending in the zenith. Stars swarmed. A big white gloating moon had hoisted itself clear of the velvet heights behind us.

‘Time to go, I think,’ he said. ‘I had thought of staying for a bit, but now you’re here there is no need. Definitely
de trop
, what?’ He lowered his lashes almost shyly and smiled a thin-lipped smile that made it seem as if he were nibbling a tiny seed between his teeth. ‘Anyway, you’re inviting me to leave, aren’t you.
Luxe, calme et volupté
, eh?’

In the gathering dark the trees kept lisping the same slurred phrase over and over. Felix sighed and unwound his legs and nimbly scrambled down from the wall. ‘Time to go, yes,’ he said, brushing himself off, and linked his arm in mine and together we set off down the hill towards the bay.
On the brow of the hill he paused and looked back and laughed and waved a hand and softly cried:

‘Farewell, happy fields!’

None of it was as I had thought it would be. I do not know what I had expected – some sort of tussle, I suppose, a contest on the road, maybe even fisticuffs, and then me pushing him protesting down to the boat, his nose bleeding and his collar sticking up and his heels furrowing the dust. What did I think I was, the avenging angel of the Lord? No, Felix would not fight, he would go quietly, or pretend to. I know his type, I know it only too well.

‘And you are going to stay here, are you?’ he said. ‘You have it all worked out?’ He laughed in the dark. We could see below us now the lights of the harbour and the dark bulk of the waiting boat crouched at the jetty. We heard the noise that the island makes, that deep, dark note rising through the gloom. We paused to listen, and Felix struck a dramatic pose and inclined an ear and shouted out softly in a stage-actor’s voice, making it seem uncannily as if it were someone calling to us from an immense distance:

‘Thamous! Thamous! The great god Pan is dead!’

And laughed.

We walked on.

‘You know I too knew the Professor, long ago?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes. As you are now so I was once, his friend, his confidant.’ He squeezed my arm against his side and I felt the meagre armature of his ribs. ‘Tell me,’ he said in a confidential tone, ‘do you respect him? I mean, is he a great man, do you think? I thought so, at first. Alas, we all have our weaknesses. You realise that painting is a fake? Yes, more of gilt in it than gold, I fear. Poor Miss Behrens was taken in. Do you know her too? What a coincidence! She does not know she bought a fake. I may tell her, or I may not. What do you think? Which is better, ignorance or enlightenment? The Professor was the one who verified it.
And made a killing on it, of course. Not for the first time either.’ He chuckled. ‘Curious phrase, that, don’t you think – a killing?’

We had reached the harbour, and walked out now along the pier still arm in arm. The boat reared gently at its moorings, sending up a soft puttering of smoke from the rusted stack. The skipper was in his lighted wheelhouse, the others stood about the deck, dim shadows of themselves, like the Pequod’s swarth phantoms, fading already. A storm lantern hanging in the bow shed a frail, apricot glow around which the night seemed to gather itself and find a brief definition. Felix stopped on the dockside and released my arm only to take my hand in both of his.

‘I say, old chap,’ he said in his actor’s voice with a fake sob in it, ‘look after the girl for me, will you? She likes a bit of rough stuff, but these things can go too far, as you well know.’

I should have seen him go. I should have waited until he was safely on board and the boat under way. When I had walked back along the pier and turned he was still standing where I had left him on the dock, waving one hand slowly, like a mechanical man. Was he smiling?

No riddance of him.

Flora has decided she is recovered. She is getting ready to leave, I can feel it, the change in her, like the season changing. She is ruffling her feathers, testing the buoyant air. I shall be glad to see her go – glad, that is, as the hand is glad when the arrow flies from the bow. If she were to remain I should only engrey her life. Better that, you will say, than if I had incarnadined it, but that is not the issue. There was never any question but that I would lift her up and let her go; what else have I been doing here but trying to beget a girl? Licht of course will be heartbroken. We shall stand on
the windy headland, he and I, bereft together, and watch her skim away over the waves. The Professor will hardly notice she is gone. I think he is the one whose heart is really breaking. I make no mention to him of the Golden World and its clouded provenance; we have both made killings, he in his way, I in mine; there is no comparison. I am still puzzling over the problem: if this is a fake, what then would be the genuine thing? And if Vaublin did not paint it, who did? Who was
his
dark double? Perhaps the Professor will tell me, in his own time; I think I detect a speculative something in his filmy glance these days; I fear a deathbed confession. Maybe he painted it himself? He does have a touch of the old master to him; I can just picture him in velvet cap and ruff, peering from under the murk of centuies, one bleared, pachydermous eye following the viewer round the room and out the gilded door:
Self-portrait in the Guise of a Dutchman.
Well. He does not mention Felix, any of that. Matters go on as before, as if nothing had happened. My writing is almost done: Vaublin shall live! If you call this life. He too was no more than a copy, of his own self. As I am, of mine.

No: no riddance.

V
INTAGE
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