Ghosts Read online

  Acclaim for John Banville’s

  GHOSTS

  “A dream of more than one world, more than one time.… [Ghosts] is a novel to be read like a poem … or perhaps even like the … biblical Book of Revelation, that prototypical vision by an island castaway.… There are both Joycean and Yeatsian atmospheres about this most ambitious [novel]; Joycean with its madcap mix of vulgar and classical, Yeatsian with its enchanted island and tower, its screaming and circling gulls, its golden world.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Haunting. Ghosts has a melancholy power that will draw the reader back for further bids to plumb its mysteries.”

  —The New Statesman

  “A glimpse inside a man’s haunted chilly soul.… There are magical evocations in these pages of the play of sun and rain on an island’s landscape.… Sights, sounds, smells and moods are all beautifully conjured, then painted over lightly with a chiaroscuro of menace.… The reader is entranced by the virtuosity of Mr. Banville’s prose.”

  —The New York Times

  “Extraordinary.… [Banville] is a writer whose imagery is as gloriously pungent as his metaphysics are dense.… A display of dazzling reflections.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose and has a grim gift of seeing people’s souls.”

  —Don DeLillo

  Also by John Banville

  Long Lankin

  Nightspawn

  Birchwood

  Doctor Copernicus

  Kepler

  The Newton Letter

  Mefisto

  The Book of Evidence

  Athena

  The Untouchable

  Eclipse

  Shroud

  The Sea

  John Banville

  GHOSTS

  John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn, Birchwood, Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter, Mefisto, The Book of Evidence (which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize), Ghosts, Athena, The Untouchable, Eclipse, and Shroud. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea in 2005. He lives in Dublin.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 1994

  Copyright © 1993 by John Banville

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, London, in 1993. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1993.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Banville, John.

  Ghosts: a novel/by John Banville.—1st ed.

  P. CM.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81720-4

  I. Title.

  PR6052.A57G47 1993

  823′.914—DC20 93-2948

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  v3.1

  to Robin Robertson

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases

  Wallace Stevens

  1

  HERE THEY ARE. There are seven of them. Or better say, half a dozen or so, that gives more leeway. They are struggling up the dunes, stumbling in the sand, squabbling, complaining, wanting sympathy, wanting to be elsewhere. That, most of all: to be elsewhere. There is no elsewhere, for them. Only here, in this little round.

  ‘List!’

  ‘Listing.’

  ‘Leaky as a –’

  ‘So I said, I said.’

  ‘Everything feels strange.’

  ‘That captain, so-called.’

  ‘I did, I said to him.’

  ‘Cythera, my foot.’

  ‘Some outing.’

  ‘Listen!’

  Behind them the boat leans, stuck fast on a sandbank, canted drunkenly to starboard, fat-bellied, barnacled, betrayed by a freak wave or a trick of the tide and the miscalculations of a tipsy skipper. They have had to wade through the shallows to get to shore. Thus things begin. It is a morning late in May. The sun shines merrily. How the wind blows! A little world is coming into being.

  Who speaks? I do. Little god.

  Licht spied them from afar, with his keen sight. It was so long since he had seen their like that for a moment he hardly knew what they were. He flew to the turret room at the top of the house where the Professor increasingly spent his time, brooding by himself or idly scanning the horizon through the brass telescope mounted on his desk. Inside the door Licht stopped, irresolute suddenly. It is always thus with him, the headlong rush and then the halt. The Professor turned up his face slowly from the big book open in front of him and stared at Licht with such glassy remoteness that Licht grew frightened and almost forgot what he had come to say. Is this what death is like, he wondered, is this how people begin to die, swimming a little farther out each time until in the end the land is out of sight for good? At last the Professor returned to himself and blinked and frowned and pursed his lips, annoyed that Licht had found him there, lost like that. Licht stood panting, with that eager, hazy smile of his.

  ‘What?’ the Professor said sharply. ‘What? Who are they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Licht answered breathlessly. ‘But I think they’re coming here, whoever they are.’

  Poor Licht. He is anything from twenty-five to fifty. His yellow-white curls and spindly little legs give him an antique look: he seems as if he should be got up in periwig and knee-breeches. His eyes are brown and his brow is broad, with two smooth dents at the temples, as if whoever moulded him had given his big head a last, loving squeeze there between finger and thumb. He is never still. Now his foot tap-tapped on the turret floor and the fist he had thrust into his trousers pocket flexed and flexed. He pointed to the spyglass.

  ‘Did you see them?’ he said. ‘Sheep, I thought they were. Vertical sheep!’

  He laughed, three soft, quick little gasps. The Professor turned away from him and hunched a forbidding black shoulder, his sea-captain’s swivel chair groaning under him. Licht stepped to the window and looked down.

  ‘They’re coming here, all right,’ he said softly. ‘Oh, I’m sure they’re coming here.’

  He shook his head and frowned, trying to seem alarmed at the prospect of invasion, but had to bite his lip to keep from grinning.

  Meanwhile my foundered creatures have not got far. They have not lost their sea-legs yet and the sand is soft going. There is an old boy in a boater, a pretty young woman, called Flora, of course, and a blonde woman in a black skirt and a black leather jacket with a camera slung over her shoulder. Also an assortment of children: three, to be precise. And a thin, lithe, sallow man with bad teeth and hair dyed black and a darkly watchful eye. His name is Felix. He seems to find something funny in all of this, smiling fiercely to himself and sucking on a broken eye-tooth. He urges the others on when they falter, Flora especially, inserting two long, bony fingers under her elbow. She will not look at him. She has a strange feeling, she says, it is as if she has been here before. He wrinkles his high, smooth forehead, gravely bending the full weight of his attention to her words. Perhaps, he says after a moment, perhaps she is remembering childhood outings to the seaside: the salt breeze, the sound of the waves, the cat-smell of the sand, that sun-befuddled, sparkling light that makes everything seem to fold softly into something else.

  ‘What do you think?�
�� he said. ‘Might that be it?’

  She shrugged, smiled, tossed her hair, making an end of it. She thought how quaint yet dangerous it sounded when a person spoke so carefully, with such odd emphasis.

  Softly.

  The boys – there are two of them – watched all this, nudging each other and fatly grinning.

  ‘So strange,’ Flora was saying. ‘Everything seems so …’

  ‘Yes?’ Felix prompted.

  She was silent briefly and then shivered.

  ‘Just … strange,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

  He nodded, his dark gaze lowered.

  Felix and Flora.

  The dunes ended and they came to a flat place of dark-green sward where the sandy grass crackled under their tread, and there were tiny, pink-tipped daisies, and celandines that blossom when the swallows come, though I can see no swallows yet, and here and there a tender violet trembling in the breeze. They paused in vague amaze and looked about, expecting something. The ground was pitted with rabbit-burrows, each one had a little pile of diggings at the door, and rabbits that seemed to move by clockwork stood up and looked at them, hopped a little way, stopped, and looked again.

  ‘What is that?’ said the blonde woman, whose name is Sophie. ‘What is that noise?’

  All listened, holding their breath, even the children, and each one heard it, a faint, deep, formless song that seemed to rise out of the earth itself.

  ‘Like music,’ said the man in the straw hat dreamily. ‘Like … singing.’

  Felix frowned and slowly turned his head this way and that, peering hard, his sharp nose twitching at the tip, birdman, raptor, rapt.

  ‘There should be a house,’ he murmured. ‘A house on a hill, and a little bridge, and a road leading up.’

  Sophie regarded him with scorn, smilingly.

  ‘You have been here before?’ she said, and then, sweetly: ‘Aeaea, is it?’

  He glanced at her sideways and smiled his fierce, thin smile. They have hardly met and are old enemies already. He hummed, nodding to himself, and stepped away from her, like one stepping slowly in a dream, still peering, and picked up his black bag from the grass. ‘Yes,’ he said with steely gaiety, ‘yes, Aeaea: and you will feel at home, no doubt.’

  She lifted her camera like a gun and shot him. I can see from the way she handles it that she is a professional. In fact, she is mildly famous, her name appears in expensive magazines and on the spines of sumptuous volumes of glossy silver and black prints. Light is her medium, she moves through it as through some fine, shining fluid, bearing aloft out of the world’s reach the precious phial of her self.

  Still they lingered, looking about them, and all at once, unaccountably, the wind of something that was almost happiness wafted through them all, though in each one it took a different form, and all thought what they felt was singular and unique and so were unaware of this brief moment of concord. Then it was gone, the god of inspiration flew elsewhere, and everything was as it had been.

  I must be in a mellow mood today.

  The house. It is large and of another age. It stands on a green rise, built of wood and stone, tall, narrow, ungainly, each storey seeming to lean in a different direction. Long ago it was painted red but the years and the salt winds have turned it to a light shade of pink. The roof is steep with high chimneys and gay scalloping under the eaves. The delicate octagonal turret with the weathervane on top is a surprise, people see its slender panes flashing from afar and say, Ah! and smile. On the first floor there is a balcony that runs along all four sides, with french windows giving on to it, where no doubt before the day is done someone will stand, with her hand in her hair, gazing off in sunlight. Below the balcony the front porch is a deep, dim hollow, and the front door has two broad panels of ruby glass and a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s paw. Details, details: pile them on. The windows are blank. Three steps lead from the porch to a patch of gravel and a green slope that runs abruptly down to a stony, meandering stream. Gorse grows along the bank, and hawthorn, all in blossom now, the pale-pink and the white, a great year for the may. Behind the house there is a high ridge with trees, old oaks, I think, above which seagulls plunge and sway. (Oaks and seagulls! Picture it! Such is our island.) This wooded height lowers over the scene, dark and forbidding sometimes, sometimes almost haughty, almost, indeed, heroic.

  The house is a summer house; at other seasons, especially in autumn, it wheezes and groans, its joints creaking. But when the weather turns warm, as now, in May, and the fond air invades even the remotest rooms, something stirs in the heart of the house, like something stirring out of a long slumber, unfolding waxen wings, and then suddenly everything tends upwards and all is ceilings and wide-open windows and curtains billowing in sea-light. I live here, in this lambent, salt-washed world, in these faded rooms, amid this stillness. And it lives in me.

  Sophie pointed her camera, deft and quick.

  ‘Looks like a hotel,’ she said.

  ‘Or a guesthouse, anyway,’ said Croke, doubtfully.

  It is neither. It is the home of Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his faithful companion, Licht. Ha.

  They had come to the little wooden bridge but there they hesitated, even Felix, unwilling to cross, they did not know why, and looked up uncertainly at the impassive house. Croke took off his boater, or do I mean panama, yes, Croke took off his panama and mopped his brow, saying something crossly under his breath. The hat, the striped blazer and cravat, the white duck trousers, all this had seemed fine at first, a brave flourish and just the thing for a day-trip, but now he felt ridiculous, ridiculous and old.

  ‘We can’t stand here all day,’ he said, and glared accusingly at Felix, as if somehow everything were all his fault. ‘Will I go and see?’

  He looked about at the rest of them but all wanly avoided his eye, indifferent suddenly, unable to care.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Hatch said. ‘I want my breakfast.’

  Pound the bespectacled fat boy muttered in agreement and cast a dark look at the adults.

  ‘Where’s that picnic that was promised us?’ Croke said testily.

  ‘Fell in the water, didn’t it,’ Hatch said and snickered.

  ‘Pah! Some bloody outing this is.’

  ‘Listen to them,’ Felix said softly to Flora, assuming the soft mask of an indulgent smile. ‘Rhubarb rhubarb.’

  His smile turned fawning and he inclined his head to one side as if imploring something of her, but she pretended to be distracted and frowned and looked away. She felt so strange.

  Sophie turned with an impatient sigh and took Croke’s arm.

  ‘Come,’ she said. ‘We will ask.’

  And they set off across the bridge, Sophie striding and the old boy going carefully on tottery legs, trying to keep up with her, the soaked and sand-caked cuffs of his trousers brushing the planks. The stream gurgled.

  Licht in the turret window watched them, the little crowd hanging back – were they afraid? – and the old man and the woman advancing over the bridge. How small they seemed, how distant and small. The couple on the bridge carried themselves stiffly, at a stately pace, as if they suspected that someone, somewhere, was laughing at their expense. He was embarrassed for them. They were like actors being forced to improvise. (One of them is an actor, is improvising.) He pressed his forehead to the glass and felt his heart racing. Since he had first spotted them making their meandering way up the hillside he had warned himself repeatedly not to expect anything of them, but it was no use, he was agog. Somehow these people looked like him, like the image he had of himself: lost, eager, ill at ease, and foolish. The glass was cool against his forehead, where a little vein was beating. Silence, deep woods, a sudden wind. He blinked: had he dropped off for a second? Lately he had been sleeping badly. That morning he had been awake at three o’clock, wandering through the house, stepping through vague deeps of shadowed stillness on the stairs, hardly daring to breathe in the midst of a silence where others slept. Whe
n he looked out he had seen a crack of light on the leaden horizon. Was it the day still going down or the morning coming up? He smiled sadly. This was what his life was like now, this faint glimmer between a past grown hazy and an unimaginable future.

  The woman on the bridge stumbled. One moment she was upright, the next she had crumpled sideways like a puppet, all arms and knees, her hair flying and her camera swinging on its strap. Licht experienced a little thrill of fright. She would have fallen had not the old boy with surprising speed and vigour caught her in the crook of an arm that seemed for a second to grow immensely long. His hat fell off. A blackbird flew up out of a bush, giving out a harsh repeated warning note. The woman, balancing on one leg, took off her sodden shoe and looked at it: the heel was broken. She kicked off the other shoe and was preparing to walk on barefoot when Felix, as if he had suddenly bethought himself and some notion of authority, put down his bag and fairly bounded forward, shot nimbly past her and set off up the slope, buttoning the jacket of his tight, brown suit.

  ‘Who is that,’ the Professor said sharply. ‘Mind, let me see.’

  Licht turned, startled: he had forgotten he was not alone. The Professor had been struggling with the telescope, trying in vain to angle it so he could get a closer look at Felix coming up the path. Now he thrust the barrel of the instrument aside and lumbered to the window, humming unhappily under his breath. When Licht looked at him now, in the light of these advancing strangers, he noticed for the first time how slovenly he had become. His shapeless black jacket was rusty at the elbows and the pockets sagged, his bow-tie was clumsily knotted and had a greasy shine. He looked like a big old rain-stained statue of one of the Caesars, with that big balding head and broad pale face and filmy, pale, protruding eyes. Licht smiled to himself hopelessly: how could he leave, how could he ever leave?

  Felix was mounting the slope swiftly, swinging out his legs in front of him and sawing the air with his arms.