Ghosts by John Banville Read Free Book Online Page A

indignation, tinged with fear: this was my place and they were invading it. And yet, although I had only been here a few weeks, like Licht Itoo was eager already for change, for disorder, for the mess and confusion that people make of things. It was simple, you see, no matter how much of a mystery I may make the whole thing seem. Company, that was what we wanted, the brute warmth of the presence of others to tell us we were alive after all, despite appearances. They were crowded at the long pine table nursing mugs of the tea that Licht had made for them and looking distinctly queasy. Their shoes were lined up on top of the stove to dry. It was still early, and outside a flinty sun was shining and piled-up vastnesses of luminous silver and white clouds were sailing over the oak ridge. When I came in from the hall the back door flew open in the wind and everything flapped and rattled and something white flew off the table, and poor Licht waded forward at an angle with one arm outstretched and his coattails flying and slammed the door, and all immediately subsided, and our galleon ploughed serenely on again.
    ‘This milk is sour,’ said Pound.
    I forget: is he the comedian or the fat one with the specs? I can see I shall have trouble with these two.
    You would think I would have asked myself questions, as characters such as I are expected to do: for instance, Who can they be? or, What are they doing here? or, What will this mean to me? But no, not a bit of it. And yet I must have been waiting all along for them, or something like them, without knowing it, perhaps. Biding my time, that is the phrase. It has always been thus with me, not knowing myself or my velleities, drifting in ignorance. Now as I stood there gazing at them in dull wonderment, with that eerie sense of recognition that only comes in dreams, a memory floated up – though memory is too strong a word, and at the same time not strong enough – of a room in the house where I was born. It is a recurring image, one of a handful of emblematic fragments from the deep past that seem mysteriously to constitute something of the very stuff of which I am made.It is a summer afternoon, but the room is dim, except where a quartered crate of sunlight, seething with dustmotes, falls at a tilt from the window. All is coolness and silence, or what passes for silence in summer. Outside the window the garden stands aghast in a tangle of trumpeting convolvulus. Nothing happens, nothing will happen, yet everything is poised, waiting, a chair in the corner crouching with its arms braced, the coiled fronds of a fern, that copper pot with the streaming sunspot on its rim. This is what holds it all together and yet apart, this sense of expectancy, like a spring tensed in mid-air and sustained by its own force, exerting an equal pressure everywhere. And I, I am there and not there: I am the pretext of things, though I sport no thick gold wing or pale halo. Without me there would be no moment, no separable event, only the brute, blind drift of things. That seems true; important, too. (Yes, it would appear that after all I am indeed required.) And yet, though I am one of them, I am only a half figure, a figure half-seen, standing in the doorway, or sitting at a corner of the scrubbed pine table with a cracked mug at my elbow, and if they try to see me straight, or turn their heads too quickly, I am gone.
    ‘That skipper,’ Felix was saying. ‘What a fellow! Listing? I said to him, listing? More like we are in danger of turning tortoise, I believe!’ And he laughed his laugh.
    I was thinking how strangely matters arrange themselves at times, as if after all there were someone, another still, whose task it is to set them out just so.
    Licht from across the room gave me one of his mournfully accusing glares.
    ‘It’s all right,’ he called out loudly, ‘it’s all right, don’t trouble yourself, I’ll light the stove.’

P ROFESSOR K REUTZNAER in his eyrie sat for a long time