Athena by John Banville Read Free Book Online

was a surprise, when I stepped out into the world again, how bright and gay everything seemed, the sun, the gleaming grass, those Van Gogh trees, and the big, light sky with its fringe of coppery clouds; I felt as if I had been away on a long journey and now all at once had arrived back home again. I legged it down the drive as fast as I could go, but when the gate had shut itself behind me I paused and pressed the bell again and the hidden speaker squawked at me as before. But I don’t know what it was I had thought I would say, and after some moments of impatient, metallic breathing the voice-box clicked off, and in the sudden silence I felt foolish and exposed again and turned and skulked away down the hill road.
    As I went along under the beneficence of the September afternoon’s blue and deepening gold my heart grew calm and I felt another pang like the one that had pierced me when I smelled the eucalyptus at the gate. What paradisal longings are these that assail me at unconsidered moments when my mind is looking elsewhere? They are not, I think, involuntary memories such as those the celebrated madeleine is supposed to have invoked, for no specific events attach to them, no childhood landscapes, no beloved figures in rustling gowns or top-hats; rather they seem absences, suddenly stumbled upon, redolent of a content that never was but was only longed for, achingly. This mood of vague, sad rapture persisted even when I got back to the city and my steps took me unresisting and only half aware along the river and down Black Street in the direction of Morden’s house. Some part of me must have been brooding on him and his secret trove of pictures stacked in that sealed room. The street was quiet, one side filled with the calm sunlight of late afternoon and the other masked in shadow drawn down sharply like a deep awning. The Boatman’s double doors stood open wide and from the cavernous gloom of the interior a beery waft came rolling. A three-legged dog passed by and bared its side-teeth silently at me in a perfunctory way. Someone in an upstairs room nearby was listlessly practising scales on an out-of-tune piano. Thus does fate, feigning unconcern, arrange its paltry props, squinting at the sky and nonchalantly whistling. I stood on the corner and looked up along Rue Street at the house with its blank windows and broad black door. I was not thinking of anything in particular, just loitering. Or maybe in that impenetrable maze I call my mind I was turning over Morden’s proposition, maybe
that
was the moment when I decided, in the dreamy, drifting way that in me passes for volition, to take on the task of evaluating and cataloguing his cache of peculiar pictures. (There it is again, that notion of volition, intention, decisiveness;am I weakening in my lack of conviction?) Suddenly the door opened and a young woman dressed in black stepped out and paused a moment on the pavement, checking in her purse – money? a key? – then turned and set off briskly in the direction of Ormond Street. I know you always insisted you saw me there, skulking on the corner, but that’s how I remember it: the door, stop and peer into purse, then turn on heel without a glance and go, head down, and my heart quailing as if it knew already what was in store for it.
    I am not naturally curious about people – too self-obsessed for that – but sometimes when my attention is caught I will go to extraordinary lengths to make the most banal discoveries about total strangers. It’s crazy, I know. I will get off a bus miles before my own stop so I can follow a secretary coming home from the office to see where she lives; I will traipse through shopping malls – ah, those happy hunting-grounds! – just to find out what kind of bread or cabbages or toilet rolls a burdened housewife with two snotty kids in tow will buy. And it is not just women, in case some bloodhound’s nostrils are starting to twitch: I follow men, too, children, anyone. No