had imagined her to be somehow immortal. Despite the absurdity of it, what I had understood in that vision of her, simply, astonishingly, was her absolute otherness, not only from me, but from everything else that was in the world, that was the world. Up to then, and, indeed, as I have done most of the time since, the mind being a lazy organ, I had conceived her, as I did so much else, to be a part of me, or at least of my immediate vicinity, a satellite fixed and defined within the gravitational field of the body, of the planet, of the red giant that is my being. But if she could die, as I saw now she most certainly could, and would; if some day I was destined to lose her, even in that awful dress and gruesome perm, into the unknowable depths of eternity; if she was to be taken back, bouncing away from me like a ball that has snapped free at the end of its elastic, then how could she be said to be here, fully, palpably, knowably, now? I even saw the circumstances of her death, if I may use that verb of so nebulous a vision. In it, there was a room, in what seemed to be a large apartment, not a remarkable room, rather low-ceilinged, but wide and deep and well appointed. It was night, or late evening, and although there were many lamps about, on tables and bookshelves and even standing, set in heavy broad bases, on the floor, none of them was lit; what light there was came down from the ceiling, a thickish, worn yet unforgiving light that threw no shadows. The atmosphere was heavy, airless, lifeless, though not in any way threatening or distressed. Someone was reclining in a deep armchair, a person whom I could not see, but who I am certain was not Lydia, and someone else was walking past, a woman, a woman I did not know, nondescript and plainly dressed; she had stopped, and turned to ask a question, and waited now, but no answer came, and it was understood that none would come, that there was no answer, and somehow that was death, Lydia’s death, even though Lydia was not there, not there at all. Understand, this was not a dream, or at least I was not asleep. I sat with the book still open in my hands, my eyes still fixed on the page, and went back over it all, carefully, the room, and the tired light, and the woman, and the unseen figure in the chair, and, before that, Lydia herself, still suspended in space, ridiculously coiffed, with her hands held up, but it had all gone inert now, inert and flat, without movement, like a series of badly proportioned photographs, taken by someone else, in places where I had never been. Do not ask me where it came from, this image, illusion, hallucination, call it what you will; I only know what I experienced, and what, for no good reason, it signified.
I have just heard, from down in the house, a sound that for a second I did not recognise. Laughter. They are laughing together, my wife and Quirke. When is it exactly that I last saw my phantoms? Not today, as I have noted, but did I see them yesterday, or even the day before? Perhaps they really have gone for good. Yet somehow I do not think so. The traces of them that persist are all impatience, resentment, envy, even. What there is of them is so little, so faint and insubstantial, that what they leave behind them, their affects, seems more than they are, were, themselves.
An accusation Lydia flung at me last night is that I have always had a deplorable weakness for strays. This was in connection with the Quirkes, obviously, yet I am not clear why she thinks it such a deplorable flaw. After all, I enquired of her, in my most reasoning tone, is not hospitableness a virtue urged on us even by the unaccommodating God of the desert tribes? She laughed at this, one of her large, would-be pitying laughs. “Hospitable?” she cried, throwing back her head. “Hospitable?—You?” What she believes is that I take to strays not out of any charitable urge, but in the spirit of the anthropologist, or, worse, the vivisectionist. “You want to study them,” she said, “take them apart, like a watch, to see how they work.” Her eyes had a malignant gleam, and there was a speck of white spit at one corner of her mouth, and a flake of ash on her sleeve. We were in my bedroom by now, with no lamp lit and the last grainy glow of twilight from the window making the air seem a box full of agitated, wanly illumined dust. The boy and the watch: how often have I heard that tired formulation flung at me, by a succession of disenchanted lovers, each one imagining she has new-minted it. Yet I did once do it, in fact, took a watch apart, when I was a boy. After my father’s death, it was. He had given it to me, brought it home one birthday in a box, with a bow that the girl in the shop had tied for him. A cheap model, Omega, I think the brand was. It boasted seven rubies in the mechanism; I could not find them, search as I would, with my little screwdriver.
Lydia now was speaking of that young fellow who used to come into the house, and how it infuriated her that I would try to talk to him. At first I did not know whom she meant, and said she must be raving—I thought she might hit me for that—but then I remembered him. A big strapping fellow he was, with a shock of yellow hair and amazing big white teeth gapped with caries at regular intervals, so that when he smiled, as he frequently and fright-eningly did, it looked as if a miniature piano keyboard had been set into his mouth. He was autistic, although at the outset we did not know it. He first appeared one drowsy hot day in late summer, just walked in through the door with the wasps and the rank tarry stink of the sea. By then we were living in the house above the harbour, where my late father-in-law’s spirit still reigned, keeping a beady eye on me in particular. The boy was sixteen or seventeen, I suppose, the same age as Cass at the time. I met him in the hall as he was coming from the open front doorway with the light behind him, shambling along purposefully with his wrestler’s arms bowed. I thought he must be a delivery boy, or the man to read the gas meter, and I stood back to let him pass, which he did without giving me a glance. I noticed his eyes, flinty blue and alive with what seemed fierce amusement at some private joke. Straight into the drawing room he went, appearing to know exactly where he was going, and I heard him stop. Curious now, I followed him. He was standing in the middle of the floor, big leonine head thrust forward on its thick-veined neck, looking about him slowly, scanning the room, still with that humorous light in his eye but with an air of knowing scepticism, too, as if things were not as they should be, as if he had been here yesterday and come back today to find everything completely changed. From the doorway I asked him who he was and what he wanted. He heard me, I could see that, but as something he did not recognise, a noise from way out beyond his range. His moving glance glided over me, his eyes meeting mine without any sign that he knew who or even what I was, and fixed on something I was holding in my hand, a newspaper, or a tumbler, I cannot remember what it was, and he gave his head a rueful little shake, smiling, as if to say, No, no, that is not it at all, and he came forward and pushed past me and strode off quickly down the hall to the front door and was gone. I stood a moment in mild bewilderment, unsure that he had been there at all, that I had not imagined him; thus Mary must have felt when the angel spread his gold wings and whirred off back to Heaven. I went and told Lydia about him, and of course she was able at once to tell me who he was, the retarded son of a fisher family down on the harbour, who now and then eluded the watchful guardianship of his many brothers and roamed the village harmlessly before being recaptured, as he always was, eventually. Security must have been very lax at the end of that summer, for he visited us again two or three times, coming and going as abruptly as he had the first time, and with as little communication. I was fascinated by him, of course, and tried all ways I could think of to provoke a response from him, without success. Why these attempts to communicate, to get through to him, as they say, should so irritate Lydia I could not understand. It happened that at the time I was preparing to play the part of an idiot savant, in an overblown and now long-forgotten drama set in a steamy bayou of the Deep South, and here was a living model, wandering about my own house, as if sent by Melpomene herself—how would I not, I demanded of Lydia, how would I not at least try to get him to babble a sentence or two, so that I might copy his cadences? It was all in the cause of art, and what would it matter to him? She only looked at me and shook her head and asked if I had no heart, if I could not see the poor child was helplessly beyond contact. But there was more than this, I could see, there was something she was not saying, prevented by an embarrassment of some kind, or so I felt. And it is true, my interest in him was not entirely professional. I confess I have always been fascinated by nature’s anomalies. Mine is not the eagerness of the prurient crowd at a freak-show, nor is it, I insist again, the anthropologist’s cold inquisitiveness or the blood-lust of the pitiless dissector; rather, it is the gentle dedication of the naturalist, with his net and syringe. I am convinced I have things to learn from the afflicted, that they have news from elsewhere, a world in which the skies are different, and strange creatures roam, and the laws are not our laws, a world that I would know at once, if I were to see it. Stranger far than Lydia’s irritation at my efforts to provoke the boy was Cass’s anger at me for having anything whatever to do with him, for not bolting the door against him and calling for his keepers. He was dangerous, she said, violently picking at her fingernails, he might fly at any one of us and tear our throats out. Once she even made a go at him herself, confronted him in the garden as he was making his dementedly determined way toward the back door, and went at him with fists flailing. What a sight they were, the pair of them, like two animals of the same implacable species attempting to fight their way past each other on a forest track wide enough only for one. She had been in her room and looked out the window and spied him. My heart had set up its accustomed warning throb—perpetually switched on, that old alarm, when Cass is about—before my ears had properly registered the quick, hollow patter of her bare feet going down the stairs, and by the time I got to the garden she was already locked in a grapple with him. They had collided under the arbour of wisteria, of which Lydia is so proud; odd, in my memory of that day the bush is prodigiously in
