Eclipse: A Novel (7 page)

Now, my fruitless labours abandoned, I felt an unshakeable lassitude settling on me like a net. At evening, slumped on the sofa in a daze, I would look back over the eventless day and wonder what it could have been that had so wearied me. I am calm, if calm is the way to put it; numb, perhaps, would be a better. My nights are long, twelve, fourteen hours of turbulent drowsing and dreaming from which I wake exhausted, cast up on the morning like a survivor from a shipwreck. I thought that by coming here I would find a perspective on things, a standpoint from which to survey my life, but when I look back now to what I have left behind me I am afflicted by a disabling wonderment: how did I manage to accumulate so much of life’s clutter, apparently without effort, or even full consciousness?—so much, that under the weight of it I cannot begin to locate that singular essential self, the one I came here to find, that must be in hiding, somewhere, under the jumble of discarded masks. It is a dizzying sensation, as when a word or an object will break free for a moment from the mind’s grasp and drift out into the empty space of its own utter separateness. Everything is strange now. The most humdrum phenomena fill me with slow astonishment. I feel at once newborn and immensely old. I have a dotard’s fondness for my chair, my cup of grog, my warm bed, while in my clumsy groping after things that keep eluding my grasp I am as helpless as an infant. I have fallen into thrall with myself. I marvel at the matter my body produces, the stools, the crusts of snot, the infinitesimal creep of fingernails and hair. I have as good as given up shaving. I like the scratchy feel of my face and the sulphur smell of the bristles and the sandpapery rasp when I run a hand along the line of my jaw. After that short-lived attempt at gardening my palm turned septic where a thorn from a rose bush had lodged, and I would stand motionless and rapt at the window with my hand held up to the daylight, studying the swelling with its shiny meniscus of purplish skin, taut and translucent as the stuff of an insect’s wing; at night, when I woke in the dark, the hand would seem a separate, living thing throbbing beside me. The dull hot pain of it was almost voluptuous. Then one morning when I was getting myself out of bed I stumbled and caught my hand on something sharp, and a tattoo of pain drummed up my arm and the swelling burst and the splinter popped out in a blob of pus. I sank back on the bed clutching my wrist and whimpering, but whether from pain or pleasure I could not exactly say.

There are more well-defined if no less shameful pleasures. I found a cache of dirty pictures thrown on top of a wardrobe in one of the rooms, left behind no doubt by some long-gone travelling salesman. Antique smut it is, hand-tinted photographs of paintings from the last century, postcard-sized but rich in detail, all creams and crimsons and rose-petal pinks. They are mostly oriental scenes: a bevy of pneumatic harem wives in a Turkish bath touching each other up, a blackamoor in a turban doing it from behind to a girl on her knees, a naked wanton on a couch being pleasured by her black slave. I keep them under my mattress, from where in guilty heat I will bring them out and plump up my pillows and sink back with a hoarse sigh into my own vigorous embraces. Afterwards, there is as always a small, sad hollow inside me, that seems in volume to match exactly what I have got rid of, as if the stuff I have pumped out of myself has made a space my body does not quite know how to fill. Yet it is not all anticlimax. There are occasions, rare and precious, when, having brought myself to the last hiccupy scamper, with the pictures fanned out before me and my eyes agoggle, I will experience a moment of desolating rapture that has nothing to do with what is happening in my lap but seems a distillation of all the tenderness and intensity that life can promise. The other day, at one of those moments of swollen bliss, as I lay gasping with my chin on my breast, I heard faintly through the stillness of afternoon the ragged sound of a children’s choir in the convent across the way, and it might have been the seraphs singing.

The house attends me, monitoring my movements, as if it had been set the task of keeping track of me and will not let its vigilance slip even for an instant. Floorboards creak under my tread, door hinges squeal tinnily behind me when I walk into a room; if I am sitting at a certain angle by the fireplace in the living room and make some sudden noise—if I cough, or slam shut a book—the whole house like a struck piano will give me back in echo a low, dark, jangling chord. At times I have the feeling that the very air in the rooms is congregating to discuss me and my doings. Then I will jump up and pace about, wringing my hands and muttering to myself, halting to stand motionless, glaring at some object, or into a corner or an open doorway, daring—willing—some hobgoblin to appear there; but the apparitions will never come at my bidding, and at once I am off again headlong, pace and turn, pace and turn. Mostly, though, I am at peace, and want for no one. When I am in the garden and a person goes by on the road, a farmer on his tractor or the postman on his bike, I will turn aside hurriedly, hunching a shoulder, poor Quasimodo, skulking behind the hump of my incomprehensible troubles.

As well as the ghostly ones there are phenomena that seem too solid not to be real, if I may be said to know what real means any more. I hear soft footsteps on the stair, and what seem distant murmurings down in the depths of the house; now and then I have the sense of a general pausing and standing still, as when one stops on a country road at night and the imagined footsteps at one’s back stop also on the instant. Surely these are not spirit sounds. The phantom woman appears to me always in a silence deeper than silence, a silence that is an unheard hum. No, these are sounds such as the living make. Is there an interloper in the house, another, or the same one as before, the book-burner come back, some rough brute who might rear up behind me at an unguarded moment and put his terrible hands on my neck or leap from the darkness and dash my brains out with a cudgel? I have taken to keeping a poker by the bed for self-defence. But what if the ruffian were to fall upon me while I was asleep? I have the feeling I am being observed by living eyes. Last evening when I was doing my washing at the kitchen sink I turned my head quickly and caught sight of something in the doorway, not a presence but an intense absence, the vacated air quivering where a second ago I am convinced someone more substantial than a ghost had been standing, watching me.

No, the phantoms will not come when I bid them, and that puzzles me. For I do seem to have some control over them, as one has control, however weak or contingent, over the riotous tumble of happenings in a dream. They depend on me for their autonomy, however paradoxical that may sound. They yearn toward me, one of the living, toward my living light, like invisible plants invisibly at feed on the sky’s radiance. This is the pathos of their predicament. I seem to be the engine of action for them, the source that feeds them the sustenance for their frail existence. The woman’s manner, if it is possible to speak of such an evanescent being as having a manner, is one of surmise and vague expectation; she is tentative, bemused, uncertain. Oh, I am not so deluded as not to know that these images are the product of my imagination—but they
are
a product; they are not in my head, they are outside; I see them, clear as anything I cannot touch, the sky, clouds, those far blue hills. At night they press into my dreams, wan shades mutely clamouring for my attention. In the daytime there are passages when they will flicker about me like wildfire. As I step through this or that picture of their doings I seem to feel a crackle of faint, falling energy, as if I had broken the tenuous connections of a force field. Something is expected of me here, something is being asked of me. They are not even proper spectres, bent on being terrifying or delivering awful warnings. Shrieks in the darkness, groans and clanking chains, such effects, however exhausted or banal, might at least succeed in frightening me, but what am I to make of this little ghost trio to whose mundane doings I am the puzzled and less than willing witness?

Trio? Why do I say trio? There is only the woman and the even more indistinct child—who is the third? Who, if not I? Perhaps Lydia is right, perhaps I have at last become my own ghost.

Memories crowd in on me, irresistibly, threatening to overwhelm my thoughts entirely, and I might be a child again, and this arid present no more than a troubled foreglimpse of the future. I dare not go up to the garret for fear I might see my father again, still loitering there. Although he does not figure much in the thumbed and dog-eared photo album that passes for my past—he died young, or youngish, after all—one of the earliest mental snapshots I retain is of being taken late one night to meet him at the train station. I do not know where he can have been coming back from, for he was no traveller, my father. He stepped quickly from the train and held me high on his shoulder and laughed. I was no more than, what, four or five? yet I was struck by the unaccustomed gaiety of the moment. Even my mother was laughing. I remember it like a page out of a children’s storybook, the station lamps aglow in the misty darkness like the furry heads of dandelions, and the looming black steam engine gasping where it stood, and the licorice smell of smoke and cinders. It was Eastertime. My father had brought me a present. What was it? Some kind of bird, a plastic thing, yellow. We cycled home, my father carrying me on the crossbar of his bicycle inside his buttoned-up overcoat and my mother with his cardboard suitcase strapped to the carrier behind her. The night pressed around us, chill and damp and secret. In the house my father sat by the range in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and talking to my mother. I liked to watch my father smoking. He went at it with a kind of negligent deftness, as if it were a tricky exercise in prestidigitation which he had long ago mastered, tapping and twirling the miniature white baton and rolling it along his knuckles with a magician’s fluency. When he put it to his lips he would incline his head sideways and screw up one eye, as if he were taking aim along the barrel of a tiny gun. The smoke that he exhaled—it was blue going in, grey when it came out—had a particular savour that he gave to it, something flat and tarry, the very odour of his insides; I often fancy I can catch a trace of that smell still lingering in odd corners of the house.

But am I rightly remembering that night? Am I remembering anything rightly? I may be embellishing, inventing, I may be mixing everything up. Perhaps it was another night entirely that he brought me home on the bar of his bicycle, under his coat. And how did his bicycle come to be there, at the station, anyway, if he was arriving by train? These are the telltale threads on which memory snags her nails.

Here I am, a grown man in a haunted house, obsessing on the past.

It was summer when my father died. My mother had moved him to the top of the house, to a room across the landing from mine, where he would be out of sight of the lodgers. I would meet him, leaving his tea tray outside his door, or shuffling in his slippers down the hall to the lavatory, and I would avoid his eye, the anguished stoicism of it, like the eye of the Saviour mournfully displaying his pierced heart in the silver and neon-pink picture that hung beside the hatstand in the hall. I see him, ashen, lost inside his clothes, and always, like me now, with a three-day stubble, moving wraithlike without sound through rooms gaunt with summer’s stillness, a stooped figure flickering from sunlight into shadow, fading with no footfall, leaving no trace of his passing save a sort of shimmer, a fold in the air, and a coiling question mark of cigarette smoke.

The day of his death is memorable too as the day my mother slapped my face. When she turned from the range I thought she was reaching out quickly to give me something. I can feel still the hard hot quick smack of her hand on my jaw, the jolt of it. She had never hit me before. She did it too not as a parent slapping a child, but as one angry adult turning suddenly on another. I do not remember what I had said or done to provoke her. Her look immediately afterwards was one almost of triumph. She lifted her head back and widened her nostrils, like Snow White’s wicked step-mother, and something came at me out of her eyes, sharp and glittering and swift, like a blade shown and promptly pocketed. Then without a word she turned back to whatever it was she had been doing at the range. I did not cry, I was too surprised to cry, but only sat with one hand laid flat before me on the table, feeling the tingle along my jaw where she had slapped me, as if tiny droplets of something scalding were falling on my skin. The oilcloth cover on the table was wonderfully cool and smooth and moist under my hand, almost like something living, almost like skin. Then my father came down, clutching a blanket tight around his drawn, ill-shaven neck. There were shadows in the hollows of his face and feverish red spots on his cheekbones that looked as if they had been painted there. My mother’s expression was blank, as though nothing had happened, but my father wrinkled his nose, testing the pressure of her anger on the air, and gave me an odd, sidewise glance, half-smiling, almost sly. Late that night I was wakened by muffled noises outside my room. When I went to the door and looked out I saw my mother in her nightdress crossing the landing hastily with a blue bowl in her hands, and heard through the open door of my father’s room a high whistling noise that was the noise of him struggling for breath, and I shut my door hurriedly and got back into bed, and when I woke again it was morning, and I knew that my father was gone.

At the funeral it rained briefly, as if just for us. A small round cloud appeared in an otherwise empty sky above the cemetery and let fall upon the circle of mourners a gentle drizzle, warm and fine. I watched every step of the ceremony with frowning attention, determined not to miss a thing. My mother kept glancing off with a vague, anxious look in the direction of the cemetery gate, as if there were something far more urgent elsewhere calling out plaintively for her attention. Later in the day, when the mourners had all dispersed, I came upon her sitting on the sofa in the parlour, weeping, with her face in her hands, and feeling grown-up and solemnly responsible I walked up quietly and stopped just behind her and laid a hand gently on her shoulder. I can still feel the cool smooth brittle texture of her newly bought black dress. She wrenched herself away from me, making cat noises and scrubbing at her cheeks, and I had the sense of a small, slightly shameful and gratifying victory.