Long Lankin: Stories (11 page)

Authors: John Banville

George stood in the bedroom.

—I had better stay here for a day or two, he said. Clear things up. You know.

She nodded absently, wandering about the room, picking up things, a newspaper, clothes, a tube of lipstick. She seemed hardly to notice him, and avoided meeting his eyes. He stood in the drawing-room and watched her clatter away down the drive, stumbling in her high heels, and then he went down and pushed the piano against the door.

Glorious weather, days drenched with sun and the singing of larks, a lavender haze over the sweltering meadows, the silence trembling on the upper airs of evening, and then the nights, the glossy black and the pale radiance, Sirius ascending, a smokewhite breeze at dawn. He spent his time in the garden, tending the roses, the vegetables, the hives. Sometimes he took the hose and sprayed the parched plants, the trees, the earth, and then sat for hours studying the surging life around him, the spiders, the birds and flies, his beloved bees. A swarm of them settled in a corner of the drawing room, under the ceiling. That was fine with him. Life everywhere.

Author’s Note

Eight of these nine stories were published, under the title
Long Lankin
, by Secker & Warburg, London, in 1970. Another story, ‘Persona’, and a longer tale, or novella, called ‘The Possessed’, I have decided not to republish. For the present edition, slight revisions to the 1970 text have been made, mainly in punctuation. The final story here, ‘De Rerum Natura’, was first published in the
Transatlantic Review
.

November 1984

Long Lankin

John Banville, the author of sixteen novels, has been the recipient of the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.

John Banville’s
Athena, Birchwood, The Book of Evidence, Doctor Copernicus, Eclipse, Ghosts, The Infinities, Kepler, The Sea, Shroud, The Untouchable
, and
Ancient Light
are available in Vintage paperback and eBook.

ALSO BY JOHN BANVILLE

Nightspawn

Birchwood

Doctor Copernicus

Kepler

The Newton Letter

Mefisto

The Book of Evidence

Ghosts

Athena

The Untouchable

Eclipse

Shroud

The Sea

The Infinities

Ancient Light

THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE

Freddie Montgomery is a highly cultured man, a husband and father living the life of a dissolute exile on a Mediterranean island. When a debt comes due and his wife and child are held as collateral, he returns to Ireland to secure funds. That pursuit leads to murder. And here is his attempt to present evidence, not of his innocence, but of his life, of the events that lead to the murder he committed because he could.

Fiction/Literature

DOCTOR COPERNICUS

It is the sixteenth century. Princes and bishops send armies careening across Europe and order assassins into the bedchambers of their enemies. And in a remote corner of Poland, a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe. This astonishing work offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence, haunted by a malevolent brother and baffled by the conspiracies that rage around him and his ideas. For in a world that is equal parts splendor and barbarism, an obscure cleric who seeks “the secret music of the universe” poses a most devastating threat.

Fiction/Literature

ECLIPSE

When renowned stage actor Alexander Cleave was a boy living in a large house with his widowed mother and various itinerant lodgers, he encountered a strikingly vivid ghost of his father. Now that he’s fifty and has returned to his boyhood home to recover from a nervous breakdown suffered mid-performance, he is not surprised to find the place still haunted. He is surprised, however, by the presence of two new lodgers who have covertly settled into his old roost. And he is soon overwhelmed by how they, coupled with an onslaught of disturbing memories, compel him to confront the clutter that has become his life: ruined career, tenuous marriage, and troubled relationship with an estranged daughter.

Fiction/Literature

GHOSTS

On an unnamed island, a dayboat runs aground, forcing its group of shaken travelers to wade ashore. There they encounter a reclusive art historian and his assistant. But is this meeting truly an accident? If so, why does one of the castaways appear to know the reclusive scholar—and why is the latter so afraid of him? And who is the stranger who moves among them, as omnipresent as a little god, as haunted as a fleeting murderer, observing their actions with longing, dread, and sinister amusement?

Fiction/Literature

SHROUD

Axel Vander is very old, recently widowed, and the bearer of a fearsome reputation as a literary dandy and bully. A product of the Old World, he is also an escapee from its conflagrations, with the wounds to prove it. And everything about him is a lie. Now those lies have been unraveled by a mysterious young woman whom Vander calls “Miss Nemesis.” Is her purpose to destroy Vander or save him—or simply to show him what lies beneath the shroud in which he has wrapped his life?