Eclipse

rejected life coming back to claim me. After all, here I am, living in the house of the dead. It is such a strange sensation, being once more among the surroundings of my growing up. I was never fully at home here. If the lodgers led unreal lives, so too did we, the permanent inhabitants, so called. Doubtless this is a reason why the apparitions do not frighten me, that the place was always haunted. I spent my childhood among alien presences, ghostly figures. How meek they were, our lodgers, how self-effacing, blurring themselves to a sort of murmur in the house. I would meet them on the stairs, squirming sideways as they edged past me and smiling their fixed smiles of pained politeness. In what was called the dining room they would sit stooped over their plates of rashers or meat and mash in the watchful, downcast attitude of children being punished. At night I would seem to hear their presence all around me, a tossing, a shifting, a low, restless sighing. Now here I am, a lodger myself, no more real than the phantoms that appear to me, a shadow among insubstantial shadows.

What is it about the past that makes the present by comparison seem so pallid and weightless? My father, for instance, is more alive to me now than he was when he was living. Even my mother was not wholly there for me until she had safely become a memory. I see them as a sort of archaic double-act, a Baucis and Philemon, bound together here, tending to the needs of others, both of them slowly turning to grey stone as the days rose and fell, each new day indistinguishable from the one that had gone before, slow grains accumulating, becoming the years. As a child I took it that when the time came for me to leave they would stand back, two humble caryatids holding up the portal to my future, watching patiently, in uncomplaining puzzlement, as I strode away from them with hardly a backward glance, each league that I covered making me not smaller but steadily more vast, their overgrown, incomprehensible son. When they died I did not grieve for them. And so I ask myself, are these hauntings now their revenge, a forcing on me of some part of a lost life I did not attend to properly when I had the chance? Are they demanding the due of mourning that I did not pay? For there is a sense of sorrow here, and of regret; of promises unkept, of promise unfulfilled.

In those first days alone here I saw no one, or not in the flesh, at least. After the call from Lydia I would not answer the telephone, and grew so to fear its abrupt harsh summonings that in the end I disconnected it. Such silence after that! I let myself sink down into it as into some motionless warm sustaining stuff. But I did not bask, no, I did not. In the beginning I was all energy, up and doing every day at dawn’s first light. I tackled the overgrown garden, ripping up armfuls of scutch grass and hacking at the brambles until my hands bled and sweat ran into my eyes. My mother’s rose bushes are still here, all gone wild. The spade turned up ancient potatoes, hollowed-out carcasses that burst under my heel with a plop and oozed a whitish fluid. Spiders scuttled, grubs writhed. I was in my element. Labouring there in the midsummer heat I experienced a demented euphoria. I would find myself muttering snatches of wild talk, or singing, or laughing, and sometimes even weeping, not in sorrow but a kind of awful glee. I had no aim in view, I was not going to plant anything; I was just working for the sake of work, and presently I gave it up, and left the briars and the mounds of uprooted grass to swelter and rot in the sun until new growth covered them over.

Now, my fruitless labours abandoned, I felt an unshakeable lassitude settling on me like a net. At evening, slumped on the sofa in a daze, I would look back over the eventless day and wonder what it could have been that had so wearied me. I am calm, if calm is the way to put it; numb, perhaps, would be a better. My nights are long, twelve, fourteen hours of turbulent drowsing and dreaming from which I wake exhausted, cast up on the morning like a survivor from a shipwreck. I thought that by coming here I would find a perspective on things, a standpoint from which to survey my life, but when I look back now to what I have left behind me I am afflicted by a disabling wonderment: how did I manage to accumulate so much of life’s clutter, apparently without effort, or even full consciousness?—so much, that under the weight of it I cannot begin to locate that singular essential self, the one I came here to find, that must be in hiding, somewhere, under the jumble of discarded masks. It is a dizzying sensation, as when a word or an object will break free for a moment from the mind’s grasp and drift out into the empty space of its own utter separateness. Everything is strange now. The most humdrum phenomena fill me with slow astonishment. I feel at once newborn and immensely old. I have a dotard’s fondness for my chair, my cup of grog, my warm bed, while in my clumsy groping after things that keep eluding my grasp I am as helpless as an infant. I have fallen into thrall with myself. I marvel at the matter my body produces, the stools, the crusts of snot, the infinitesimal creep of fingernails and hair. I have as good as given up shaving. I like the scratchy feel of my face and the sulphur smell of the brisdes and the sandpapery rasp when I run a hand along the line of my jaw. After that short-lived attempt at gardening my palm turned septic where a thorn from a rose bush had lodged, and I would stand motionless and rapt at the window with my hand held up to the daylight, studying the swelling with its shiny meniscus of purplish skin, taut and translucent as the stuff of an insect’s wing; at night, when I woke in the dark, the hand would seem a separate, living thing throbbing beside me. The dull hot pain of it was almost voluptuous. Then one morning when I was getting myself out of bed I stumbled and caught my hand on something sharp, and a tattoo of pain drummed up my arm and the swelling burst and the splinter popped out in a blob of pus. I sank back on the bed clutching my wrist and whimpering, but whether from pain or pleasure I could not exactly say.

There are more well-defined if no less shameful pleasures. I found a cache of dirty pictures thrown on top of a wardrobe in one of the rooms, left behind no doubt by some long-gone travelling salesman. Antique smut it is, hand-tinted photographs of paintings from the last century, postcard-sized but rich in detail, all creams and crimsons and rose-petal pinks. They are mostly oriental scenes: a bevy of pneumatic harem wives in a Turkish bath touching each other up, a blackamoor in a turban doing it from behind to a girl on her knees, a naked wanton on a couch being pleasured by her black slave. I keep them under my mattress, from where in guilty heat I will bring them out and plump up my pillows and sink back with a hoarse sigh into my own vigorous embraces. Afterwards, there is as always a small, sad hollow inside me, that seems in volume to match exactly what I have got rid of, as if the stuff I have pumped out of myself has made a space my body does not quite know how to fill. Yet it is not all anticlimax. There are occasions, rare and precious, when, having brought myself to the last hiccupy scamper, with the pictures fanned out before me and my eyes agoggle, I will experience a moment of desolating rapture that has nothing to do with what is happening in my lap but seems a distillation of all the tenderness and intensity that life can promise. The other day, at one of those moments of swollen bliss, as I lay gasping with my chin on my breast, I heard faintly through the stillness of afternoon the ragged sound of a children’s choir in the convent across the way, and it might have been the seraphs singing.

The house attends me, monitoring my movements, as if it had been set the task of keeping track of me and will not let its vigilance slip even for an instant. Floorboards creak under my tread, door hinges squeal tinnily behind me when I walk into a room; if I am sitting at a certain angle by the fireplace in the living room and make some sudden noise—if I cough, or slam shut a book—the whole house like a struck piano will give me back in echo a low, dark, jangling chord. At times I have the feeling that the very air in the rooms is congregating to discuss me and my doings. Then I will jump up and pace about, wringing my hands and muttering to myself, halting to stand motionless, glaring at some object, or into a corner or an open doorway, daring—willing—some hobgoblin to appear there; but the apparitions will never come at my bidding, and at once I am off again headlong, pace and turn, pace and turn. Mostly, though, I am at peace, and want for no one. When I am in the garden and a person goes by on the road, a farmer on his tractor or the postman on his bike, I will turn aside hurriedly, hunching a shoulder, poor Quasimodo, skulking behind the hump of my incomprehensible troubles.

As well as the ghostly ones there are phenomena that seem too solid not to be real, if I may be said to know what real means any more. I hear soft footsteps on the stair, and what seem distant mur-murings down in the depths of the house; now and then I have the sense of a general pausing and standing still, as when one stops on a country road at night and the imagined footsteps at one’s back stop also on the instant. Surely these are not spirit sounds. The phantom woman appears to me always in a silence deeper than silence, a silence that is an unheard hum. No, these are sounds such as the living make. Is there an interloper in the house, another, or the same one as before, the book-burner come back, some rough brute who might rear up behind me at an unguarded moment and put his terrible hands on my neck or leap from the darkness and dash my brains out with a cudgel? I have taken to keeping a poker by the bed for self-defence. But what if the ruffian were to fall upon me while I was asleep? I have the feeling I am being observed by living eyes. Last evening when I was doing my washing at the kitchen sink I turned my head quickly and caught sight of something in the doorway, not a presence but an intense absence, the vacated air quivering where a second ago I am convinced someone more substantial than a ghost had been standing, watching me.

No, the phantoms will not come when I bid them, and that puzzles me. For I do seem to have some control over them, as one has control, however weak or contingent, over the riotous tumble of happenings in a dream. They