Eclipse: A Novel (10 page)

“And tell me, Lily,” I said, “what age are you?”

I detected a sinister, oily smoothness in my voice, the voice of a sly old roué trying to sound harmless.

“Seventeen,” she answered without hesitation; I am sure she is far younger than that.

“And do you go to school?”

A crooked shrug, the right shoulder rising, the left let fall.

“Used to.”

I rose from the table and went and stood beside her, leaning back against the draining board with my arms and ankles crossed. Stance, and tone, these are the important things; once you have the tone and the stance the part plays itself. Lily’s hands in the hot water were raw to the wrists, as if she were wearing a pair of pink surgical gloves. They are Quirke’s hands, shapely and delicate. She set a mug upside down on the board in a froth of opalescent bubbles. I enquired mildly if she did not think she should rinse off the suds. She went still and stood a moment, looking into the sink, then turned her head slowly and gave me a dead-eyed stare that made me blench. Deliberately she picked up the mug and held it under the running tap and thumped it down again. I tottered hurriedly back to my place at the table, feathers all awry. How do they manage to be so discomfiting, the young, with no more than a glance, a grimace? Presently she finished the dishes, and dried her hands on a rag; her fingers, I noticed, were nicotine-stained. “I have a daughter, you know,” I said, sounding the fond old fumbling booby now. “Older than you. Catherine is her name. We call her Cass.” She might not have heard me. I watched her as she stored away the still-damp cups and saucers; how well she knows their places, it must be a female instinct. When she was done she stood a moment looking about her dimly, then turned to go, but paused, as if she had just remembered my existence, and looked at me, wrinkling her nose.

“Are you famous?” she said, in a tone of arch incredulity.

It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed. The moment is here when I must bring out into the light one of those scorched patches from my past that I would far prefer to leave in the cool dark of forgetfulness. It is that I began my career, not in a polo-neck part in some uncompromisingly avant-garde production in a basement twenty-seater, but on the amateur stage, in an echoing community hall, in my home town, before an audience of gaping provincials. The piece was one of those rural dramas that were still being written at the time, all cawbeens and blackthorn sticks and shawled biddies lamenting their lost sons beside fake turf fires. I redden even yet when I recall the first night. The comic lines were received in respectful silence while the moments of high tragedy provoked storms of mirth. When the curtain had finally fallen, backstage had the air of an operating theatre where the last of the victims of some natural disaster have been swabbed and sewn and trolleyed away, while we actors stood about like walking wounded, squeezing each other’s upper arms in sympathetic solidarity and hearing ourselves swallow.

I wish I could say we were a colourful troupe, all charming scamps and complaisant local beauties, but in truth we were a sad and shabby little lot. We met for rehearsals three times a week in a freezing church hall lent us by a stage-struck parish priest. I had the part of the brawny hero’s younger brother, the sensitive one, who planned to be a teacher and set up a school in the village. I had not known that I could act, until Dora took me in hand and led me forward into the limelight. Dora: my first manifestation of the muse. She was a stocky, compact person with short-cropped wiry hair and spectacles with frames of clear pink plastic. I recall her provocatively meaty smell, which even the strongest perfume could not entirely overcome. She had joined the Priory Players in search of a husband, I suspect, and instead found me. I was seventeen, and although she cannot have been more than thirty she seemed immensely old to me, excitingly so, a sort of inverted mother, carnal and profane. I thought she had hardly noticed me, until one blustery October evening when we had broken early from rehearsals and she invited me to come with her to the pub for a drink. We were the last to leave the hall. She was busy putting on her raincoat and did not look at me directly. There are occasions when one catches memory at its work, scanning the details of the moment and storing them up for a future time. As she struggled with a recalcitrant sleeve, I noted the oleaginous slither of light down the side of her plastic coat, and the paraffin stove that was ticking in a corner of the hall behind her as the expiring flame ran around the turned-down wick with ever more desperate haste, and the door in the vestibule blowing, and through the doorway massed dark trees and a jagged cleft of molten silver in the stormy western sky. At last she got her arm into that sleeve and looked up at me with a wry half-smile, one defensively ironical eyebrow lifted; a woman like Dora learns to anticipate refusals.

We walked in silence together through a livid twilight down to the quays, where tethered trawlers lurched in the swell and a bell on a buoy out in the harbour clanged and clanged. Dora kept her eyes fixed firmly on the way ahead, and I had the worrying suspicion that she was trying not to laugh. In the pub she sat on a high stool with her legs crossed, displaying a glossy knee. She asked for a gin and tonic and allowed me to strike a match with a shaky hand and hold it to the elusive tip of her cigarette. I had never been in a pub before, had never ordered a drink, or lit a lady’s cigarette. As I sought to catch the barman’s eye I was aware of Dora’s candid gaze roaming over my face, my hands, my clothes. When I turned back to her she did not look away, only lifted her chin and gave me a hard, brazen, smiling stare. I cannot remember what we talked about. She smoked her cigarette like a man, pulling on it with violent concentration, her shoulders hunched and eyes narrowed. Her bust and hips were full, the flesh packed tight inside her short grey dress. The smoke and the silver-sweet fumes of the gin worked on my senses. I would have liked to put my hand on her knee; I could almost feel the taut, silky stuff of her stocking under my fingers. She was still looking into my face with that challenging, half-mocking smile, and I grew flustered and kept trying to avoid her eye. She finished her drink with a toss of the head and got down from the stool and put on her coat and said that she had to go. When we were at the door of the pub she paused, allowing me time to . . . I did not know what. As she turned away I thought I heard her heave a small sharp sigh. We parted on the quayside. I stood and watched her stride off into the darkness, head down and shoulders braced against the cold. The wind from the sea buffeted her, making her wiry curls shake and plastering her coat against her body. The click of her high heels on the pavement was like the sound of something walking up my spine.

After that she went back to ignoring me, until one night I met her coming through from the lavatory at the back of the hall, frowning to herself and carrying a glass of water, and in an access of daring that made my heart set up a panic-stricken knocking I pushed her into the woolly dark of the alcove where the coats were kept and kissed her clumsily and put a hand on her disconcertingly armoured, firm hot breast. She took off her spectacles accommodatingly and her eyes went vague and swam in their sockets like dreamy fish. Her mouth tasted of smoke and toothpaste and something feety that made my blood flare. After a long, swollen moment she did her throaty chuckle and put a hand against my chest and pushed me away, not ungently. She was still holding the glass; she looked at it, and laughed again, and the surface of the water tinily trembled, and a drop of moisture quick as mercury ran zigzag down the misted side.

So began our liaison, if that is not too large a word. It was hardly more than a matter of a few crushed kisses, a tremulous brushing of hands, a flash of whey-white thigh in the gap between two cinema seats, a silent tussle ending in a hissed
No!
and the melancholy snap of released elastic. I suppose she could not take me entirely seriously, callow youth that I still was. “I’m a cradle-snatcher,” she would say, shaking her head and heaving an exaggeratedly rueful sigh. I never felt I had her full attention, for she seemed always faintly preoccupied, as if she were listening past me, intent on some hoped-for response from elsewhere. When I held her in my arms I would have the eerie sensation that she was looking past my shoulder at another presence standing behind me, someone there whom only she could see, watching us in anguish, it might be, or helpless fury. She had too an unsettling way of smiling to herself when we were alone together, her lips twitching and eyes slitted, as if she were enjoying a secret, spiteful joke. I think now there must have been something in her past—dashed hopes, betrayal, an absconded fiancé—for which through me she was taking a phantom revenge.

She would tell me nothing about herself. She lived in the north end of town, in a rough hinterland of council houses and Saturday-night fights. Only once did she allow me to walk her home. It was deep winter by now, and there was a heavy frost and the darkness glistened and everything was very still and silent, and our footsteps rang on the iron of the frozen pavements. There was hardly a soul abroad. The few night walkers we met seemed to me the very picture of loneliness, huddled into their coats and mufflers, and I felt an uneasy sense of pride, going along with this mysterious warm provoking woman on my arm. The icy air was like a shower of tiny needles against my face, and I was reminded of the slap my mother had given me all those years before, on the day of my father’s death. When we were near her house Dora made me stop and kissed me brusquely and hurried on alone. In the stillness of the vast cold night I stood and heard the scrape of coins as she fished in her purse for her key, heard the key going into the lock, heard the door open and then close behind her. A wireless set was playing somewhere, dance band melodies, a tinny music, quaint and mournful. Above me a shooting star whizzed through its brief arc and I fancied I heard it, a rush, a swish, a sigh.

It was for Dora, offstage, that I gave my first real performances, filled my first authentic roles. How I posed and preened in the mirror of her sceptical regard. Onstage, too, I saw my talent reflected in her. One night I turned in the midst of my curtain speech—
“And which of us, brother, will Ballybog remember?”
—and caught the flash of her specs in the wings from where she was watching me narrowly, and under the heat of her sullen envy something opened in me like a hand and I stepped at last into the part as if it were my own skin. Never looked back, after that.

The curtain goes down, the interval bar is invaded, and in the space of the huge silence that settles on the briefly emptied auditorium, thirty years fleet past. It is another first night and, for me, a last. I am at what the critics would call, reaching down again into their capacious bag of clichés, the height of my powers. I have had triumphs from here to Adelaide and back. I have held a thousand audiences in the palm of my hand, ditto a bevy of leading ladies. The headlines I have made!—my favourite is the one they wrote after my first American tour:
Alexander Finds New World to Conquer.
Inside his suit of armour, however, all was not well with our flawed hero. When the collapse came, I was the only one who was not surprised. For months I had been beset by bouts of crippling self-consciousness. I would involuntarily fix on a bit of myself, a finger, a foot, and gape at it in a kind of horror, paralysed, unable to understand how it made its movements, what force was guiding it. In the street I would catch sight of my reflection in a shop window, skulking along with head down and shoulders up and my elbows pressed into my sides, like a felon bearing a body away, and I would falter, and almost fall, breathless as if from a blow, overwhelmed by the inescapable predicament of being what I was. It was this at last that took me by the throat onstage that night and throttled the words as I was speaking them, this hideous awareness, this insupportable excess of self. Next day there was a great fuss, of course, and much amused speculation as to what it was that had befallen me. Everyone assumed that drink was the cause of my lapse. The incident achieved a brief notoriety. One of the newspapers—in a front-page story, no less—quoted a disgruntled member of the audience as saying that it had been like witnessing a giant statue toppling off its pedestal and smashing into rubble on the stage. I could not decide whether to feel offended or flattered by the comparison. I should have preferred to be likened to Agamemnon, say, or Coriolanus, some such high doomed hero staggering under the weight of his own magnificence.

I see the scene in scaled-down form, everything tiny and maniacally detailed, as in one of those maquettes that stage designers love to play with. There I am stuck, in my Theban general’s costume, mouth open, mute as a fish, with the cast at a standstill around me, appalled and staring, like onlookers at the scene of a gruesome accident. From curtain-up everything had been going steadily awry. The theatre was hot, and in my breastplate and robe I felt as if I were bound in swaddling clothes. Sweat dimmed my sight and I seemed to be delivering my lines through a wetted gag.
“Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?”
I cried—it is now for me the most poignant line in all drama—and suddenly everything shifted on to another plane and I was at once there and not there. It was like the state that survivors of heart attacks describe, I seemed to be onstage and at the same time looking down on myself from somewhere up in the flies. Nothing in the theatre is as horribly thrilling as the moment when an actor dries. My mind was whirling and flailing like the broken belt of a runaway engine. I had not forgotten my lines—in fact, I could see them clearly before me, as if written on a prompt card—only I could not speak them. While I gagged and sweated, the young fellow playing Mercury, who in the guise of Amphitryon’s servant Sosia was supposed to be cruelly taunting me on the loss of my identity, stood transfixed behind plywood crenellations, looking down at me with terrified eyes in which I am convinced I could see myself doubly reflected, two tiny, bulbous Amphitryons, both struck speechless. Before me, in the wings, my stage-wife Alcmene was trying to prompt me, reading from the text and frantically mouthing my lines. She was a pretty girl, preposterously young; since the beginning of rehearsals we had been engaged behind the scenes in an unconvinced dalliance, and now as she writhed there in the looming half-darkness, her mouth working mutely like the valve of an undersea creature, I felt embarrassed less for myself than for her, this child who that very afternoon had lain in my arms weeping sham tears of ecstasy, and I wanted to cross the stage quickly and put a restraining finger tenderly to her lips and tell her that it was all right, that it was all all right. At last, seeing in my face, I suppose, something of what I was thinking, she let the text fall to her side and stood and looked at me with a mixture of unconcealable pity, impatience and contempt. The moment was so grotesquely apt to the point we had arrived at in our so-called love affair— both silent, lost for words, confronting each other in dumb hopelessness —that despite my distress I almost laughed. Instead, with an effort, and with more fondness than I had managed to show to her even in the intensest toils of passion, I nodded, the barest nod, in apology and rueful gratitude, and looked away. Meanwhile, behind me in the auditorium the atmosphere was pinging like a violin string screwed to snapping point. There was much coughing. Someone tittered. I glimpsed Lydia’s stricken white face looking up at me from the stalls, and I remember thinking,
Thank God
Cass is not here.
I turned about and with funereal tread, seeming to wade into the very boards of the stage, made a grave, unsteady exit, comically creaking and clanking in my armour. Already the curtain was coming down, I could feel it descending above my head, ponderous and solid as a stone portcullis. From the audience there were jeers now, and a scattering of half-heartedly sympathetic applause. In the dimness backstage I had a sense of figures running to and fro. One of the actors behind me spoke my name in a furious stage whisper. With a yard or two still to go I lost my nerve entirely and made a sort of run for it and practically fell into the wings, while the gods’ vast dark laughter shook the scenery around me.