Eclipse

of a matinee performance—young Sniveling my understudy’s impossible dream come true—and sloped off on my own to the pictures, feeling foolish and elated. Then when the film started there were these inexplicable tears, hiccups, stifled wails, as I sat shuddering with fists clenched in my lap, the hot drops plopping off my chin and wetting my shirt-front. I was baffled, and mortified, too, of course, afraid the afternoon’s other shadowy voyeurs around me would notice my shameful collapse, yet there was something glorious too in such abandon, such childish transgression. When the picture ended and I skulked out red-eyed into the cold and the early dark I felt emptied, invigorated, rinsed. It became a shameful habit then, twice, three times a week I would do it, in different picture- houses, the dingier the better, with still no notion of what I was weeping for, what loss I might be mourning. Somewhere inside me there must be a secret well of grief from which these springs were pouring. Sprawled there in the phantasmally peopled darkness I would sob myself dry, while some extravaganza of violence and impossible passions played itself out on the vast screen tilted above me. Then came the night when I dried onstage—cold sweat, mute helpless fish-mouths, the works—and I knew I must get away.

“So what are you up to?” Quirke said. “Down here, I mean.” Last of evening in the window, dishwater light and the overgrown grass in the garden all grey. I wanted to say, I have lived amid surfaces too long, skated too well upon them; I require the shock of the icy water now, the icy deeps. Yet wasn’t ice my trouble, that it had penetrated me, to the very marrow? A man thronged up with cold… Fire, rather; fire was what was needed…

With a start I came back to myself, from myself. Quirke was nodding: someone must have said something of moment—Lord, I wondered, was it me? Often lately I would be startled to hear people replying to things I had thought I had only spoken in my head. I wanted to jump up now and tell Quirke to leave, to leave and leave me alone, to my own devices, my own voices.

“That’s the trouble, all right,” he was saying, nodding slowly, solemnly, like that black saint on the collection box who nodded when as a little boy you put a penny in. Mnemosyne, mother of sorrows!

“What is?” I said.

“What?”

” The trouble—what is the trouble? “

“What?”

A kind of quacking. We gaped at each other helplessly.

“I’m sorry,” I said then, lifting a hand wearily to shade my eyes. “I have forgotten what we were talking about.”

But Quirke’s attention too had wandered, and he sat motion-lessly at gaze with one shoulder hunched and his virginal hands with fingers palely linked resting on the table before him. I stood up at an angle and everything in the world slid abruptly to one side and I realised I was drunk. I said that I must go to bed. Quirke looked up at me in hurt amazement. He too must be drunk, but evidently he was not ready to go home. He made no stir, and let his wounded gaze drift to the window.

“Not dark yet,” he said, “look. And still when it does get dark the nights seem like they’ll never end. This is a terrible time of the year, if you’re not a sleeper.”

I would speak no more, but stood with steepled fingers pressed on the table, softly snorting, head ahang. Quirke heaved a sigh that turned into an involuntary sorrowful little chirrup at the end and hauled himself to his feet at last and yanked open the door to the hall, making the tongued lever of the latch joggle in its worn hole, quirquirquirke. He staggered going out into the passageway, lurched hugely sideways and struck his shoulder on the door jamb, swore, chuckled, liquidly coughed. “Good luck, then,” he said, bowing under the low lintel and giving a stiff-armed salute behind him. Wordlessly we walked in single file through the dark house. When I opened the front door the smells of the summer night came into the hall, of tar and lupins, and something mushroomy, of sun-warmed pavements gone cold now, of salt sea-mist, and a myriad of other, nameless things. Quirke’s bicycle, a high, black, old-fashioned affair, was tethered to a lamppost. He tarried a moment, looking blearily about him. The deserted square at dusk, with its low, humped roofs and windows sullenly aglow, has a slightly sinister, alien air, a touch almost of Transylvania. “Good luck,” Quirke said again, loudly, and uttered a phrase of mournful laughter, as at some painful joke. The saddle of his bicycle was furred with dew. Indifferent to damp discomfort he mounted up and pedalled away unsteadily, as I turned back and shut the door, maundering chaotically in my disordered heart.

As I drifted toward sleep, my whiskeyed breath staling the air, I seemed to feel another rise up out of me into the room and hang there on the dark like smoke, like thought, like memory. A night breeze stirred the hem of the dusty lace curtain at the window. There was a glimmer even yet in the far sky. I fell into a dream. There was a room, cool, marble tiled, as in a Roman villa, with a view through unglazed windows of a stepped ochre hill and a line of sentinel trees. Scant furnishings: a couch with ornately scrolled ends and a low table nearby bearing unguents in porphyry pots and coloured glass phials, and in a far corner a tall urn in which a single lily leaned. On the couch, of which I was permitted only a three-quarters view, a woman was lying back, young, ample, impossibly pale skinned, her naked arms lifted and hiding her face in abandonment and shame. Beside her sat a turbaned negress, naked also, a mountainous figure with polished melony thighs and big hard gleaming breasts and broad pink palms. The middle finger and thumb of her right hand were plunged to the knuckle and ball in the two holes of the woman’s wantonly offered lap. I noted the angry-pink frilling of the vagina, dainty as the volutes of a cat’s ear, and the taut oiled tea-coloured cincture of the anus. The slave turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder with a broad, jaunty grin and for my benefit joggled her mistress’s gaping flesh, and the woman shuddered and made a mewling sound. In succubus sleep my face formed a rictus, and as the little seizure took me I arched my back and pressed the back of my head into the pillow and then went still and lay like that for a long moment, like a dead dictator lying in state sunk to his ears in the plush.

I opened my eyes and did not know where I was. The window was in the wrong place, the wardrobe too. Then I remembered, and the old, mysterious foreboding seized on me again. There was neither darkness nor light, but a dim grainy glow that seemed to have no source, unless the source were the room itself, the very walls. I felt the patter and skip of my labouring heart. The sticky wetness on my thigh was growing cold already. I thought I should get up and go to the lavatory and wipe myself, I even saw myself rise and fumble for the light switch—was I still dreaming, half asleep?—yet I lay on, swaddled in flocculent warmth. Languorously my fancy found its way back to the woman in the dream and traced again the outline of her white limbs and touched her secret places, but without agitation now, curious only, mildly wondering at the unreally white flesh, the fantastical lewdness. Musing thus in drowsy torpor I turned my head on the pillow and it was then I saw the figure in the room, standing motionless a little way from the side of the bed. I took it for a woman, or womanish old man, or even a child, of indeterminate gender. Shrouded and still it stood facing in my direction, like one of those guardians of the sickroom long ago, the dim attendants of childhood fevers. The head was covered and I could make out no features. The hands were clasped at the breastbone in what seemed an attitude of beseeching, or of anguished prayer, or some other extreme of passionate striving. I was frightened, of course—cold sweat stood on my forehead, hairs prickled at the nape of my neck—but what I registered most strongly was a sense of being the object of intense concentration, a kind of needful scrutiny. I tried to speak but could not, not because I was struck dumb with fear but because the mechanism of my voice could not be made to work in the other-world between dream and waking in which I was suspended. Still the figure did not stir, nor give any sign, only stood in that pose of ambiguous extremity, waiting, it might be, for some desired response from me. I thought: The Necessary… and as I did, in that momentary blink of the mind, the figure faded. I was not aware of its going. There seemed no transition between its state of being seen and its invisibility, as if it had not departed but only changed its form, or refined itself into a frequency beyond the reach of my coarse senses. At once relieved and regretful at its going I closed my eyes, and when I unwillingly opened them again, no more than a moment later, so it seemed, a streaming blade of sunlight had already made a deep slash through the parting in the curtains.

This is how I wake now, sidling warily out of sleep as though I had spent the night in hiding. That falling shaft of gold at the window was blinding. In the corners of the room brownish shadows thronged. I have a deep dislike of mornings, their muffled, musty texture, like that of a bed too long slept in. Latterly there are dawns when I wake up wishing it were night again and the day done with. I have come to think of my life as altogether like a morning’s interminable passing; whatever the hour, it is always as if I have just risen and am trying to clear my head and get a grip on things. I sighed, and kicked back the covers and squirmed my limbs on the lumpy mattress. The day would