Free Eclipse: A Novel by John Banville

into my dreams, wan shades mutely clamouring for my attention. In the daytime there are passages when they will flicker about me like wildfire. As I step through this or that picture of their doings I seem to feel a crackle of faint, falling energy, as if I had broken the tenuous connections of a force field. Something is expected of me here, something is being asked of me. They are not even proper spectres, bent on being terrifying or delivering awful warnings. Shrieks in the darkness, groans and clanking chains, such effects, however exhausted or banal, might at least succeed in frightening me, but what am I to make of this little ghost trio to whose mundane doings I am the puzzled and less than willing witness?
    Trio? Why do I say trio? There is only the woman and the even more indistinct child—who is the third? Who, if not I? Perhaps Lydia is right, perhaps I have at last become my own ghost.
    Memories crowd in on me, irresistibly, threatening to overwhelm my thoughts entirely, and I might be a child again, and this arid present no more than a troubled foreglimpse of the future. I dare not go up to the garret for fear I might see my father again, still loitering there. Although he does not figure much in the thumbed and dog-eared photo album that passes for my past—he died young, or youngish, after all—one of the earliest mental snapshots I retain is of being taken late one night to meet him at the train station. I do not know where he can have been coming back from, for he was no traveller, my father. He stepped quickly from the train and held me high on his shoulder and laughed. I was no more than, what, four or five? yet I was struck by the unaccustomed gaiety of the moment. Even my mother was laughing. I remember it like a page out of a children’s storybook, the station lamps aglow in the misty darkness like the furry heads of dandelions, and the looming black steam engine gasping where it stood, and the licorice smell of smoke and cinders. It was Eastertime. My father had brought me a present. What was it? Some kind of bird, a plastic thing, yellow. We cycled home, my father carrying me on the crossbar of his bicycle inside his buttoned-up overcoat and my mother with his cardboard suitcase strapped to the carrier behind her. The night pressed around us, chill and damp and secret. In the house my father sat by the range in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and talking to my mother. I liked to watch my father smoking. He went at it with a kind of negligent deftness, as if it were a tricky exercise in prestidigitation which he had long ago mastered, tapping and twirling the miniature white baton and rolling it along his knuckles with a magician’s fluency. When he put it to his lips he would incline his head sideways and screw up one eye, as if he were taking aim along the barrel of a tiny gun. The smoke that he exhaled—it was blue going in, grey when it came out—had a particular savour that he gave to it, something flat and tarry, the very odour of his insides; I often fancy I can catch a trace of that smell still lingering in odd corners of the house.
    But am I rightly remembering that night? Am I remembering anything rightly? I may be embellishing, inventing, I may be mixing everything up. Perhaps it was another night entirely that he brought me home on the bar of his bicycle, under his coat. And how did his bicycle come to be there, at the station, anyway, if he was arriving by train? These are the telltale threads on which memory snags her nails.
    Here I am, a grown man in a haunted house, obsessing on the past.
    It was summer when my father died. My mother had moved him to the top of the house, to a room across the landing from mine, where he would be out of sight of the lodgers. I would meet him, leaving his tea tray outside his door, or shuffling in his slippers down the hall to the lavatory, and I would avoid his eye, the anguished stoicism of it, like the eye of the Saviour mournfully displaying his