Free Mefisto by John Banville Page B

off, like the lights in a blind man’s house. She was so quiet it was hard to find her. I would steal upstairs and along the corridors, my heart unaccountably pounding, and come upon her in one of the empty rooms, standing motionless at the window, her arms folded and her forehead pressed to the glass, so still, it seemed she must have been there for hours, without moving. Sensing me behind her, she would turn slowly, and slowly smile, blinking her dark, doll’s eyes.
    Often too I would find her with Mr Kasperl, sitting quietly in his room in an old deckchair, with her legs folded under her and her hands resting in her lap like a pair of pale birds, while he lay on the bed reading, or working at his charts. The room was dim and hot, like the lair of a large indolent carnivore. He would be in his waistcoat, collarless, his bootlaces untied. He took scant notice of me. His silence was profound, a far place where no one else could follow. Sometimes he worked in his notebook. He would frown over a page for a long time without stirring, then lean forward suddenly with a snort and inscribe a line or two, driving the pen heavily, with grim exactness. He let me see things, certain insoluble niceties, but in such elaborately casual, roundabout ways that it might all have happened by accident. He would leave the notebook open near me and wander off, padding here and there about the room, while I squinted avidly at the place where he had been working. It was always some paradox, some tautology. He was fascinated by things to which there could be at best only an inconclusive result. Strange geometries amused him, their curved worlds where no parallels are possible, where there is no infinity, where all perpendiculars to a line will meet in one mad point. He would come and stand beside me and consider these queer axioms, panting softly, and softly flexing his stubby fingers, and I would seem to hear, deep down within him, a faint, dark laughter.
    I came away from these occasions in a sort of fever, my head humming, as if from a debauch. Things shook and shimmered minutely, in a phosphorescent glow. Details would detach themselves from their blurred backgrounds, as if a lens had been focused on them suddenly, and press forward eagerly, with mute insistence, urging on me some large, mysterious significance. A wash of sunlight on a high white wall, rank weeds spilling out of the windows of a tumbledown house, a dog in the gutter nosing delicately at a soiled scrap of newspaper, such things would strike me with strange force. They were like memories, but of things that had not happened yet. Walking home through the town on those smoky autumn evenings, past lighted pubs, and factory workers on bikes, and the somehow sinister bonhomie of fat shopkeepers standing in their doorways, I would feel a shiver of anticipation, not for what would be there now, the cosy hopelessness of home, but for that vast, perilous sea that lay all before me, agleam and vaguely shifting, in the dim distance.
    One afternoon in November I spied Uncle Ambrose’s car coming down the drive at Ashburn. I hid behind a tree while he went past. When I got home he was there, sitting bolt upright at the tea-table, looking about him with a stunned smile, his small shiny head swivelling slowly and his adam’s apple bouncing.
    – A what? my father was saying, with what in him passed for a laugh. A chauffeur?
    Uncle Ambrose nodded, still dazedly smiling, amazed at his own audacity. He said:
    – From Ashburn to Black’s, just, and then out to the mine.
    My mother had stopped behind him, and was staring at the back of his head.
    – What? she said sharply. What? When is this?
    Uncle Ambrose jerked his chin forward, working a finger in under the collar of his shirt.
    – Oh, every day, he said. Monday to Friday. And bring him home again in the evening.
    – Home, my mother said. Ha!
    He took up duty straight away. He drove out to Ashburn each morning prompt at nine, and pulled