thing that he should have led me home. I stood shivering in the wet, uncertain of what would come next. The rain was pelting the cherry trees; I thought how patient they were, how valiant. For an instant I had a vision of a world thrashing without complaint in unmitigable agony; I bowed my head; the rain beat on my back. Then gradually there arose behind me the muffled sound of hoofs, and I looked up to see a young boy on a little black-and-white horse trotting bareback toward me across the square. At first I could hardly make out horse and rider, so thick was the web of rain between them and me. It might have been a faun, or centaur. But no, it was a boy, on a little horse. The boy was dressed in a dirty jersey and short pants, with no shoes or socks. His mount was a tired poor creature with a bowed back and distended belly; as it clopped toward me it rolled a cautiously measuring eye sideways in my direction. Despite the downpour the boy seemed hardly to be wet at all, as if he were protected within an invisible shell of glass. When they were almost level with me the boy hauled on the length of rope that was the reins and the animal slowed to a wavering walk. I wanted to speak but somehow felt that I should not, and anyway I could not think what I might say. The boy smiled at me, or perhaps it was a grimace, expressing what, I could not guess. He had a pinched pale face and red hair. I noticed his belt, an old-fashioned one such as I used to wear myself when I was his age, made of red-and-white striped elastic with a silver metal buckle in the shape of a snake. I thought he would say something but he did not, only went on smiling, or grimacing, and then clicked his tongue and heeled the horse’s flanks and they went on again, into the lane whence I had come. I followed. The rain was stopping. I could smell the horse’s smell, like the smell of wetted sacking. Hard by the side gate into the garden of the house they halted, and the boy turned and looked back at me, with a calm, impassive gaze, bracing a hand behind him on the horse’s spine. What passed between us there, what wordless intimation? I was hungry for a sign. After a moment the boy faced forward again and gave the bridle rope a tug, and the little horse started up, as if by clockwork, and off they went, down the lane’s incline, and presently were gone from sight. I shall not forget them, that boy, and his pied nag, cantering there, in the summer rain.
I examined the gate. It is what I think used to be called a postern, a wooden affair, very old now, dark and rotted to crumbling stumps at top and bottom, set into the whitewashed wall on two big rusted rings and held fast with a rusted bolt. Often as a boy I would enter by this gate when coming home from school. I tried the bolt. At first the flange refused to lift, but I persisted and in the end the cylinder, thick as my thumb, turned in its coils with a shriek. Behind the gate was a mass of overgrown creeper and old brambles, and I had to push hard to make a gap wide enough to squeeze through. The rain had fully stopped now and a shamefaced sun was managing to shine. I shoved the gate to behind me and stood a moment in survey. The garden was grown to shoulder-height in places. The rose trees hung in dripping tangles, and clumps of scutch grass steamed; there were jewelled dock leaves big as shovels. The wet had brought the snails out, they were in the grass and on the briars, swaying on the tall thorned fronds. I set off toward the house, the untidy back of which hung out in seeming despair over this scene of vegetable riot. Nettles stung me, cobwebs strung with pearls of moisture draped themselves across my face. All of childhood was in the high sharp stink of rained-on weeds. The sun was gathering strength, my shirt clung wetly warm to my back. I felt like a hero out of some old saga, come at last, at the end of his quest, unhelmed, travel- worn and weary, to the perilous glade. The house out of blank unrecog-nising eyes watched me approach, giving no sign of life. I came into the yard. Rusted bits of kitchen things were strewn about, a washboard and mangle, an old refrigerator with its eerily white innards on show, a pan to the bottom of which was welded a charred lump of something from an immemorial fry-up. On all this I looked with the eyes of an expectant stranger, as if I had seen none of it before.
Now, through the top part of the barred basement window, I caught sight of Quirke, or of his head at least, turned away from me, in quarter-profile. It was an uncanny sight, that big round head resting there behind bars at ground level, as though he were interred up to the neck in the floor of a cage. At first I could not make out what it was he was up to. He would lean his head forward briefly and then straighten again, and would seem to speak in some steady, unemphatic way, as if he were delivering a lecture, or committing lines to memory. Then I stepped forward for a better look and saw that he was sitting at table, with a plate of food before him, on which with knife and fork he was methodically working. The sun was burning the back of my neck now, and my skin smarted from thorns and nettle stings, and the rich deep gloom in which Quirke sat seemed wonderfully cool and inviting. I crossed to the back door. It had the look of a square-shouldered sentry standing in his box, tall and narrow, with a many-layered impasto of black paint and two little panes of meshed glass set high up that seemed to glare out with suspicion and menace. I tried the knob, and at once the door opened before me, smoothly silent, with accommodating ease. Cautiously I crossed the threshold, eager and apprehensive as Lord Bluebeard’s wife. At once, as if of its own volition, the door with a faint sigh closed behind me.
I was in the kitchen. I might never have been here before. Or I might have been, but in another dimension. Talk about making strange! Everything was askew. It was like entering backstage and seeing the set in reverse, all the parts of it known but not where they should be. Where were my chalk-marks now, my blocked-out map of moves? I was seized by a peculiar cold excitement, the sort that comes in dreams, at once irresistible and disabling. If only I could creep up on the whole of life like this, and see it all from a different perspective! The door to the basement scullery was shut; from behind it could be heard the faint clink and scrape of Quirke at his victuals. Softly I stepped into the passageway leading out to the front hall. A gleam in the lino transported me on the instant, heart-shakingly, to a country road somewhere, in April, long ago, at evening, with rain, and breezes, and swooping birds, and a break of brilliant blue in the far sky shining on the black tarmac of the road. Here is the front hall, with its fern dying in a brass pot, and a broken pane in the transom, and Quirke’s increasingly anthropomorphic bike leaning against the hatstand. Here is the staircase, with a thick beam
Cass was good with my mother. It always surprised me. There was something between them, a complicity, from which I was irritated to find myself excluded. They were alike, in ways. What in my mother was distraction turned out in Cass to be an absence, a lostness. Thus the march of the generations works its dark magic, making its elaborations, its complications, turning a trait into an affliction. Cass would sit here for hours with the dying woman at the end, seeming not to mind the smell, the foulings, the impenetrable speechlessness. They communed in silence. Once I found her asleep with her head on my mother’s breast. I did not wake her. Over the sleeping girl my mother watched me with narrow malignity. Cass was always an insomniac, worse than me. Sleep to her was a dry run for death. Even as a toddler she would make herself stay awake into the small hours, afraid of letting go, convinced she would not wake up again. I would look into her room and find her lying big-eyed and rigid in the darkness. One night when I—
The door was opened from without and Quirke cautiously put in his head. When he saw me his Adam’s apple bobbed.
“I thought I heard someone, all right,” he said, and let a grey tongue-tip snake its way from one corner of his mouth to the other.
I went down again to the hall and sat on the sofa there with my hands in my lap. I could hear Quirke moving about upstairs. I stood up and walked into the kitchen and leaned at the sink and poured a glass of water and drank it slowly, swallow by long swallow, shivering a little as the liquid ran down through the branched tree in my breast. I glanced into the scullery. On the table were the remains of Quirke’s lunch. What pathos in a crust of bread. I heard him come along the hall and stop in the doorway behind me.
“You’re living here,” I said, “aren’t you?”
I turned to him, and he grinned.
3
I pause, as a chronicler should, to record the imminence of a great event. There is to be a solar eclipse. Total
