Free Eclipse: A Novel by John Banville Page B

distant from myself. I flushed the lavatory, careful not to look into the bowl, and knelt and hauled her up and held her to me. She was warm and flaccid and faintly atremble, and I was shocked to find myself thinking of Lydia as she would be at the climax of love-making. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open, and she sighed as if from a great weariness, and a glistening bubble came out of her mouth and swelled, and swelled, and burst.
    For weeks she lay unmoving in a metal-framed bed in a bright room at the corner of the hospital wing that looked out on a cindered pathway and a row of cherry trees. I sat with her through long hours of wakeful dreaming; it was almost restful there. The sunlight threw complicated shapes across the bed that would spend the afternoon inching their way slowly along the blanket and on to the floor like things making an elaborately stealthy getaway. Hospital sounds came to me, soothingly muffled. My mother’s hands rested on the sheet, unmoving, pale as paper, impossibly large. She looked like a more than life-sized statue of herself. Some error had been made, some bit of celestial business had gone awry and she had been left like this, felled by death yet still alive, stranded between two imperceptibly darkening shores. When I was leaving at the end of the day’s vigil I would lean over her, teetering a little, and kiss her self-consciously on the forehead, smelling her mingled smell of soap and washed-out cotton and dried skin and musty hair.
    The cherry trees blossomed, and the blossoms fell, and then the leaves fell. Eventually she regained a sort of consciousness. I arrived one late autumn afternoon and she was sitting up at an angle wearing a pink cardigan that was not hers, with a look of wild enquiry in her eye. When I spoke to her she jerked her head back on its wattled neck like a startled hen. She came home that evening. They brought her in an ambulance, which impressed her, I could see, for all her distractedness; she descended from the wide-flung back doors with an almost queenly step, laying a hand imperiously on my offered arm.
    It was strange, the silent clamour of her presence in the house. I felt like an attendant set to watch over a large, dangerous machine that had seized up and that no one knew how to set going again. It was always there, under everything, the sense of her, all that stalled potential, the house hummed with it. Inside her somewhere the dynamo was still spinning; where did the energy go to, what invisible elaborations was it generating? She unnerved me. She seemed no longer human, she seemed something more than that, ancient and elemental. I tended her like a priest at a shrine, with weary reverence, resignedly, stooping under that silent stare, that mute mixture of pleading and disdain. She took to pushing things off the bedside table, pill boxes, the night-light holder, the glass for her false teeth; she even developed a knack of overturning her chamber pot. Word of her condition got round among the lodgers, and soon the commercial travellers stopped coming and the clerks and secretaries found digs elsewhere. Now the deserted house became her shell, her sounding-box. Despite the ruin of her mind I credited her with uncanny powers of perception. I fancied I could hear her breathing wherever I was in the house, even down in the back scullery, where I brewed her tea and mashed the slops for her that were all she could manage now. She seemed never to sleep. I would look into her room and there she would be, no matter how late the hour, sprawled in the foul roost of her bed, propped up crookedly in the corner against a bank of pillows, in the tallowy glow of the night light, an elbow wedged against the wall, grey hair a fright and her jaw set and the little hard blue teary eyes fixed on me furiously, brimming with all that was pent in her, the years. Despite myself, I would step inside, and shut the door, and the flame of the night light would waver and the room