Her eyes turned glossy and she ducked into the car and slammed the door. The tyres skidded as she drove away. The last I saw of her she was leaning forward over the wheel with a knuckle stuck into an eye. I turned back to the house. Cass, I was thinking. Cass, now.
Things to do, things to do. Store the kitchen supplies, set out my books, my framed photographs, my lucky rabbit’s paw. Too soon it was all done. There was no avoiding upstairs any longer. Grimly I mounted the steps as if I were climbing into the past itself, the years pressing down on me, like a heavier atmosphere. Here is the room looking out on the square that used to be mine. Alex’s room. Dust, and a mildew smell, and droppings on an inside sill where birds had got in through a broken windowpane. Strange, how places, once so intimate, can go neutral under the dust-fall of time. First there is the soft detonation of recognition, and for a moment the object throbs in the sudden awareness of being unique—that chair, that awful picture—then all composes itself into the drear familiar, the parts of a world. Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averting itself from my unwelcome return. I lingered a moment, feeling nothing except a heavy hollowness, as if I had been holding my breath—as perhaps I had—then I turned and went down a flight, to the first floor, and entered the big back bedroom there. It was light still. I stood at the tall window, where that other day I had seen my not-wife not- standing, and looked out at what she had not-seen: the garden straggling off into nondescript fields, then a huddle of trees, and beyond that, where the world tilted, an upland meadow with motionless miniature cattle, and in the farthest distance a fringe of mountains, matt blue and flat against the sky where the sun was causing a livid commotion behind a heaping of clouds. Having used up the outside, I turned to the in: high ceiling, the sagging bed with brass knobs, a night table with wormholes, a solitary, resentful-looking bentwood chair. The floral-patterned linoleum—three shades of dried blood—had a worn patch alongside the bed, where my mother used to pace, unsubduably, night after long night, trying to die. I felt nothing. Was I here at all? I seemed to be fading in face of these signs, the hollow in the mattress, the wear in the lino; a watcher outside the window would hardly see me now, a shadow only.
There were traces here too of an intruder; someone had been sleeping in my mother’s bed. Outrage flared briefly, then faded; why should not some Goldilocks lay down her weary head where my poor mother would never again lay hers?
I loved to prowl the house like this when I was young. Afternoons were my favourite time, there was a special quality to afternoons indoors, a wistfulness, a sense of dreamy distance, of boundless air all around, that was at once tranquil and unsettling. There were hidden portents everywhere. Something would catch my attention, anything, a cobweb, a damp patch on a wall, a scrap of old newspaper lining a drawer, a discarded paperback, and I would stop and stand gazing at it for a long time, motionless, lost, unthinking. My mother kept lodgers, clerks and secretaries, schoolteachers, travelling salesmen. They fascinated me, their furtive and somehow anguished, rented lives. Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves. When one of them moved out I would slip into the vacated room and breathe its hushed, attentive air, turning things over, poking into corners, searching through drawers and mysteriously airless cupboards, diligent as a sleuth hunting for clues. And what incriminating leavings I came up with—a set of horribly grinning false teeth, a pair of underpants caked and brittle with blood, a baffling contraption like the bellows of a bagpipes made of red rubber and bristling with tubes and nozzles, and, best of all, pushed to the back of a wardrobe’s highest shelf, a sealed jar of yellowish liquid in which a preserved frog was suspended, its slash of mouth blackly open, its translucent toes splayed and touching delicately the clouded glass walls of its tomb…
Anaglypta! That was the name of that old-fashioned wallpaper stuff, stiff with layers of yellowed white paint, with which every other wall in the house is covered to the height of the dado. I wonder if it is manufactured any more. Anaglypta. All afternoon I had been searching for the word and now I had found it. Why glyp not glyph? This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.
Eight o’clock. The curtain would be going up and I not there. Another absence. I would be missed. When an actor walks out of a performance no understudy can entirely fill his place. He leaves the shadow of something behind him, an aspect of the character that only he could have conjured, his singular creation, independent of mere lines. The rest of the cast feel it, the audience feels it too. The stand-in is always a stand-in: for him there is always another, prior presence, standing in him.
I heard a noise from downstairs and a shock of fright passed through me, making my shoulder blades quiver and my head feel momentarily hot. I have always been a timid soul, for all the blackness of my heart. I went out creakingly on to the landing and stood amid the standing shadows and listened, clutching the banister rail, registering the clammy texture of old varnish and the oddly unresistant hardness of the wood. The noise came faintly again up through the stairwell, an intermittent, brittle scratching. I recalled the strange animal on the road that night. Then a surge of indignation and impatience made me frown and shake my head. “Oh, this is all completely… !” I began to say, and stopped; the silence took my words and tittered over them. Down there, someone uttered a low, guttural oath, and I went still again. I waited—
“Ah, it’s only me.”
Quirke.
He was in the parlour, on his hunkers in front of the grate, with a blackened bit of stick in his hand. He had been poking among the remains of the charred books. He turned up his head, an amiable eyebrow cocked, and watched me as I entered.
“Some tinker must have got in here,” he said without rancour. “Or was it you was burning the books?” This amused him. He shook his head and made a clicking noise in his cheek. “You can’t leave a thing untended.”
Stalled at the foot of the stairs I nodded, for want of better. Quirke’s sardonical composure is both annoying and unchallengeable. He is the superannuated office boy a solicitor in the town appointed years ago at my request to look after the house. That is, I requested a caretaker: I did not bargain on it being Quirke. He tossed the stick into the fireplace and rose to his feet with surprising agility, brushing his hands. I had already noticed those unlikely hands: pale, hairless, plump in the palm, with long, tapering fingers, the hands of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden. The rest of him is shaped like a sea elephant. He is large, soft-skinned, sandy-haired, in his middle forties, with the ageless aspect of a wastrel son.
“There was someone living here, some intruder,” I said, with a heavy emphasis of reproof, wasted on him, as I could see by his unruffled look. “He left more than burned books.” I mentioned, with a qualm of disgust, the thing Lydia had found in the lavatory. Quirke was only the more amused.
“A squatter is right,” he said, and grinned.
He was quite at his ease, standing on the hearth rug—another furrow there, kin to the one beside the bed upstairs—and looking about him with an expression of arch scepticism, as if the things in the room had been arranged to deceive him and he was not deceived. His protuberant pale eyes reminded me of a virulent kind of boiled sweet much fancied when I was a boy. There was a raw patch on his chin where the morning razor had scraped too closely. From the pocket of his balding corduroy jacket he brought out a bottle in a brown-paper bag. “Warm the house,” he said, with a lopsided leer, showing the whiskey.
We sat at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen and drank while the day died. Quirke was not to be got rid of. He squirmed his big backside down on a kitchen chair and lit up a cigarette and planted his elbows on the table, regarding me the while with an air of high expectancy, his boiled eyes roaming speculatively over my face and frame like those of a rock climber searching for a handhold on a not very serious but tricky piece of cliff. He told of the history of the house before my family’s time—he had gone into it, he said, it was a hobby of his, he had the documents, the searches and affidavits and deeds, all done out in sepia copperplate, beribboned, stamped, impressed with seals. I meanwhile was recalling the first time I had found myself weeping in the cinema, soundlessly, unstoppably. It was the ache in my constricted throat that I registered first, then the salt tears that were seeping in at the corners of my mouth. It was deep winter, the middle of a sleety afternoon. I had ducked out
