Eclipse: A Novel (4 page)

This is how I wake now, sidling warily out of sleep as though I had spent the night in hiding. That falling shaft of gold at the window was blinding. In the corners of the room brownish shadows thronged. I have a deep dislike of mornings, their muffled, musty texture, like that of a bed too long slept in. Latterly there are dawns when I wake up wishing it were night again and the day done with. I have come to think of my life as altogether like a morning’s interminable passing; whatever the hour, it is always as if I have just risen and am trying to clear my head and get a grip on things. I sighed, and kicked back the covers and squirmed my limbs on the lumpy mattress. The day would be hot. Last night, in my drunkenness, I had thought to sleep in my mother’s bed—yes, there is the Herr Doktor again, with his beard and his cigar—but must have changed my mind, for here I was in my old room. How often I had lain here as a boy on summer mornings just like this one, afloat in a gauze of expectation, convinced of great events being just about to happen, of a bud inside me waiting to burst into the marvellously intricate blossom of what would be my life when at last it really began. Such plans I had! Or no, not plans, they were too vague and large and distant to be called plans. Hopes, then? Not that, either. Dreams, I suppose. Fantasies. Delusions.

With a grunt and a heave I got myself up from the bed and stood scratching. I suspect I am coming more and more to look like my father, especially as he was at the end, with that same peering, apprehensive stance. It is a parent’s posthumous revenge, the legacy of increasing resemblance. I padded to the window and opened the tattered curtains, wincing in the light. It was early still. The square was deserted. Not a soul, not even a bird. A tall sharp wedge of sunlight leaned against the white wall of the convent, motionless and menacing. One Maytime here when I was a boy I built a shrine to the Virgin Mary. What inspired me to this uncommon enterprise? Some visionary moment must have been granted me, some glimpse of matutinal blue, or radiance in a limitless sky at noon, or lily-scented exaltation, at Evening Devotions, in the midst of the Rosary, as the Glorious Mysteries were given out. I was a solemn child, prone to bouts of religious fervour, and that May, which is the month of Mary—and also, curiously, of both Lucifer and the wolf; who decides these matters, I wonder?—I had determined I would make her a shrine, or grotto, as such things were called, at that time, in this part of the world, and probably are still so called. I chose a spot in the lane beside the house where a little brown stream squirmed along under a hawthorn hedge. I was not sure if stones were free, and gathered them with circumspection from the fields and vacant lots roundabout, prizing in particular the flinty white ones. From hedgerows I plucked primroses, and when I saw how quickly the blossoms died I dug the plants out roots and all and sowed them on my bit of bank, among the stones, first filling the holes with water and watching with satisfaction the muddy bubbles rise and fatly plop as the tufted sods sank and settled and I trod them home with the heel of my wellington boot. The statue of the Virgin must have come from the house, or perhaps I persuaded my mother to buy one specially: I fancy I can recall her grumbling a the expense. She viewed this venture of mine with grudging regard, distrustful of such a show of piety, for despite her own veneration of the Virgin she liked a boy to be a boy, she said, and not a namby-pamby. When the work was finished I sat contentedly for a long time by myself looking at the shrine and feeling proud, and virtuous in a cloying sort of way. I heard old Nockter the apple-seller with his horse and cart calling his wares in a far street, and mad Maude up in her attic crooning to her dollies. Later still, as the sun declined and shadows lengthened, my father came out of the house in shirtsleeves and braces and looked at the grotto and at me and at the grotto again, and sucked his teeth, and smiled a little and said nothing, remote and sceptical, as always. When it rained the Virgin’s face seemed tear-stained. One day a gang of older boys passing by on their bikes saw the shrine and dismounted and grabbed the statue and tossed it from one to another, laughing, until one of them fumbled it and it fell on the road and shattered. I retrieved a fragment of blue mantle and kept it, awed by the exposed whiteness of the plaster; such purity was almost indecent, and whenever afterwards I heard the priests recall that the Blessed Virgin had been born without stain of sin I experienced a troubled, dark excitement.

She must be of Minoan origin, the Virgin; even her colours, cobalt and lime-white, suggest the Isles of Greece. Mary as Pasiphaë, serpent in hand and her conical bare breasts on show, there is a thought to frighten the priests.

I have remained a devotee of the goddess, and she in turn has been attentive to me, in the various forms in which she has been manifest in my life. First of course there was my mother. She tried to but could not understand me, her changeling. She was a querulous, distracted person, given to worries and vague agitations, always labouring under unspecified grievances, always waiting, it seemed, tight-lipped and patiently sorrowing, for a general apology from the world. She was afraid of everything, of being late and of being too early, of draughts and of stuffiness, of germs and crowds and accidents and neighbours, of being knocked down in the street by a stranger and robbed. When my father died she took to widowhood as if it were the natural state for which her life with him had been merely a long and heartsore preparation. They had not been happy; happiness had not been part of life’s guarded promise to them. They did not quarrel, I think they were not intimate enough for that. My mother was voluble, at times to the point of hysteria, while my father kept silence, and so they struck a violent equilibrium. After he died, or finished fading—his physical demise was only the official end of a slow dissolution, like the full stop the doctor stabbed into his death certificate that day, leaving a shiny blot—she in her turn began gradually to fall silent. Her voice itself turned thin and papery, with a whining cadence, like that of one left standing in the dust of the road, watching the carriage wheels roll away, with a sentence half finished and no one left to finish it for. All her dealings with me then became a kind of ceaseless pleading, by turns piteous and angry. What she wanted was for me to explain myself to her, to account for what I was, and why I differed so from her. It was as if she believed she could through me somehow solve the riddle of her own life and of the things that had happened to her, and of the so many more things that had not. But I could not help her, I was not the one to take her and lead her back along that shadowed pathway past the shut gates guarding all the unspent riches of what she might have been. The end for her was bafflement and furious refusal, as she clung to the posts of the last gate, the one that had finally opened for her, bracing her feet against the threshold, until the gateman came and prised her fingers loose and brought her onward finally, into the dark place. No, I could not help her. I did not even weep at the graveside; I think I was thinking of something else. There is in me, deep down, as there must be in everyone—at least, I hope there is, for I would not wish to be alone in this—a part that does not care for anything other than itself. I could lose everything and everyone and that pilot light would still be burning at my centre, that steady flame that nothing will quench, until the final quenching.

I clearly recall the day I first became truly aware of myself, I mean of myself as something that everything else was not. As a boy I liked best those dead intervals of the year when one season had ended and the next had not yet begun, and all was grey and hushed and still, and out of the stillness and the hush something would seem to approach me, some small, soft, tentative thing, and offer itself to my attention. This day of which I speak I was walking along the main street of the town. It was November, or March, not cold, but neutral. From a lowering sky fine rain was falling, so fine as to be hardly felt. It was morning, and the housewives were out, with their shopping bags and headscarves. A questing dog trotted busily past me looking neither to right nor left, following a straight line drawn invisibly on the pavement. There was a smell of smoke and butcher’s meat, and a brackish smell of the sea, and, as always in the town in those days, the faint sweet stench of pig-swill. The open doorway of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me as I went past. Taking in all this, I experienced something to which the only name I could give was happiness, although it was not happiness, it was more and less than happiness. What had occurred? What in that commonplace scene before me, the ordinary sights and sounds and smells of the town, had made this unexpected thing, whatever it was, burgeon suddenly inside me like the possibility of an answer to all the nameless yearnings of my life? Everything was the same now as it had been before, the housewives, that busy dog, the same, and yet in some way transfigured. Along with the happiness went a feeling of anxiety. It was as if I were carrying some frail vessel that it was my task to protect, like the boy in the story told to us in religious class who carried the Host through the licentious streets of ancient Rome hidden inside his tunic; in my case, however, it seemed I was myself the precious vessel. Yes, that was it, it was
I
that was happening here. I did not know exactly what this meant, but surely, I told myself, surely it must mean something. And so I went on, in happy puzzlement, under the small rain, bearing the mystery of myself in my heart.

Was it that same phial of precious ichor, still inside me, that spilled in the cinema that afternoon, and that I carry in me yet, and that yet will overflow at the slightest movement, the slightest misbeat of my heart?

I passed the years of my youth practising for the stage. I would prowl the back roads of the town, always alone, playing out solitary dramas of struggle and triumph in which I spoke all the parts, even of the vanquished and the slain. I would be anyone but myself. Thus it continued year on year, the intense, unending rehearsal. But what was it I was rehearsing for? When I searched inside myself I found nothing finished, only a permanent potential, a waiting to go on. At the site of what was supposed to be my self was only a vacancy, an ecstatic hollow. And things rushed into this vacuum where the self should be. Women, for instance. They fell into me, thinking to fill me with all they had to give. It was not simply that I was an actor and therefore supposedly lacking an essential part of personality; I was a challenge to them, to their urge to create, to make life. I am afraid they did not succeed, with me.

Lydia had seemed the one capable of concentrating sufficient attention on me to make me shine out into the world with a flickering intensity such that even I might believe I was real. When I first encountered her she lived in a hotel. I mean, her family home was a hotel. That summer, more than half my lifetime ago now, I would see her almost every day as she came and went through the revolving glass doors of the Halcyon, got up in outlandish confections of cheesecloth and velvet and beads. She wore her black hair very straight, in the soulful style of the day, the bold silver streak in it less pronounced than it would be in later years but still striking. She became an object of keen speculation for me. I had a room in a rotting tenement in one of those cobbled canyons off the river, where at dawn the drays let loose from the brewery gates woke me with the thunder of apocalyptic hoofs, and the nights were permeated with the sickly sweet smell of roasting malt. Loitering along the embankment I watched for Lydia by the hour, in the gritty airlessness of the summer city. She was an exotic, a daughter of the desert. She walked with a sort of sulky swing, rolling her shoulders a little, always with her head down, as if she were meticulously retracing her steps to somewhere or something momentous. When she pushed through the hotel door the revolving glass panels threw off a splintered multiple image of her before she disappeared into the peopled dimness of the lobby. I made up lives for her. She was foreign, of course, the runaway daughter of an aristocratic family of fabulous pedigree; she was a rich man’s former mistress, in hiding from his agents here in this backwater; certainly, she must have something in her past, I was convinced of it, some loss, some secret burden, some crime, even. When by chance I was introduced to her at an opening night—she was a great one for the theatre, in those days, and seemed to go to every production that was put on, with undiscriminating enthusiasm—I experienced an inevitable jolt of disappointment, as of something subsiding with a crunch under my diaphragm. Just another girl, after all.

“I’ve seen you,” she said, “hanging about on the quays.” She was always disconcertingly direct.

But that Levantine tinge to her looks, the hothouse pallor and stark black brows and faintly shadowed upper lip, remained a powerful attraction. The Hotel Halcyon took on for me the air of an oasis; before I entered there I imagined behind that revolving door a secret world of greenery and plashing water and sultry murmurings; I could almost taste the sherbet, smell the sandalwood. Lydia had a magnificence about her that was all the more enticing for her seeming unawareness of it. I admired her fullness, the sense she gave of filling whatever she wore, no matter how ample or flowing. Even her name bespoke for me a physical opulence. She was my big sleek slightly helpless princess. I loved to watch her as she walked to meet me, with that heavy-hipped slouch and that distracted, always vaguely dissatisfied smile. I basked in her; she seemed the very source and origin of the word uxorious; I decided at once, without having to think about it, that I would marry her.

I should say in fact that my tender-eyed wife’s real, or given, name is Leah; in the hubbub of the crush bar that night when I was introduced to her I misheard it as Lydia, and when I repeated it later she liked it, and we kept it between us as a love-name, and eventually it became established, even among the more easygoing members of her family. It occurs to me to wonder now if this surrender and substitution of names worked a deeper change in her than one of mere nomenclature. She had relinquished a part of herself, so surely she took something on, as well. From Leah to Lydia is no small journey. When I was starting out in the theatre I toyed with the possibility of taking a stage name, but there was already so little of me that was real, I felt I could not afford to sacrifice the imperial label my mother—I am sure my father had no say in the matter—pinned on me so that I might be at least a noise in the world, though at once everyone, including my mother, went to work shortening my name to Alex. In my first parts I billed myself as Alexander, but it did not stick. I wonder what it takes to be proof against abbreviation.