Athena by John Banville Read Free Book Online Page A

doubt a first-year psychiatry student could put a name to this mild malady. It’s harmless, like picking my nose or biting my nails, and affords me a certain wan pleasure. I am saying all this in my defence (though who my accusers might be I do not know): when I set off that day in surreptitious pursuit of that young woman, a perfect (oh, perfect!) stranger, I had no object in mind other than to know where she was going. I am aware how strident and implausible these protestations of blamelessness sound. Certainly someone observing us making our way along that street, she in sun and I slinking after her on the other, shadowed side, might well have pondered the advisability of alerting a policeman. She was dressed in a short-sleeved black dress and impossible high heels, on which she teetered along at a remarkably swift pace, herpurse clasped to her breast and her slender neck thrust forward and her head bent, so that as she clicked along she seemed to be all the while peering over the edge of a precipice that was steadily receding before her. Very pale, with black hair cut short in page-boy style (my Lulu!) and high, narrow shoulders and very thin legs; even at this distance I could see her little white hands with their pink knuckles and ill-painted nails bitten to the quick. On this calm, bright day she looked odd in her black dress and those black silk seamed stockings and gleaming black stilettos; a new-made widow, I thought, off to hear the reading of the will. When she came to the corner of Ormond Street she paused again, daunted, it seemed, by the crowd and the noise and the stalled herds of rush-hour traffic throbbing in the sun. She glanced over her shoulder (
that
was when you saw me) and I turned away quickly and peered into a shop window, my throat thick with fright and gleeful panic, for this is how I get, all hot and fluttery, when I am in full pursuit and my quarry hesitates as if sensing a waft of my hot breath on her neck. After a moment I noticed that the shop I had stopped in front of was derelict and that the cobwebbed window in which I was feigning such interest was empty. When I turned to look for her again she was gone. I hurried to the corner but there was no sign of her. As always when the object of my morbid interest eludes me like this I felt a flattish sensation, a mixture of disappointment and not quite comprehensible relief. With a lighter step I turned to go back the way I had come – and there she was right in front of me, so close that I almost collided with her, standing motionless in a plum-coloured pool of shadow with her purse still primly clutched to her breast. She was older than I had at first supposed (her age, I have just counted it on the calendar, was twenty-seven years, four months, eleven days and five hours, approximately). The glossy crown of her head came up to the level of my adam’s apple. Hair really very black, blue-black, likea crow’s wing, and a violet shading in the hollows of her eyes. Identifying marks. Dear God. Absurdly, I see a little black pillbox hat and a black three-quarters veil – a joke, surely, these outlandish accessories, on the part of playful memory? Yet she did reach up to adjust something, a strand of hair or a stray eyelash, I don’t know what, and I noticed the tremor in her hand and the nicotine stains on her fingers. With her small, pale, heart-shaped face averted she was frowning into the middle distance, and when she spoke I was not sure that it was me she was addressing.

2. The Rape of Proserpine 1655
L. van Hobelijn (1608-1674)
    Oil on canvas, 15 × 21½ in. (38.1 × 53.3 cm.)
    Although the grandeur of its conception is disproportionate to its modest dimensions, this is van Hobelijn’s technically most successful and perhaps his finest work. The artist has set himself the task of depicting as many as possible of the elements of the myth of the abduction of Demeter’s daughter by the god of the underworld, and the result is a crowded, not