If anyone ventures a word of criticism he will remind them all how strongly he advised against their taking the old man out of the hospital and returning him here.
He is well familiar with the house and advances through it confidently, though still with a somewhat quailing heart. Families are impossible when an illness strikes. As if they imagined Grandpa Gaffer and Granny Groat should live forever. There is the faint sound of music coming from somewhere. He crosses the central hall, where for some reason the chequerboard floor tiles always give him the jitters, stops to tap the face of the big, oak-framed barometer there — the thing has not worked in years — then raps a knuckle on the door of the music room, where the voices are coming from, and, getting no response, pushes open the door and steps inside.
So strange and strangely quaint is the scene that greets him that in the first moment he thinks he is the dupe of an elaborately staged prank. Ivy Blount and Duffy the cowman stand each in one of the two tall windows, facing into the room, like figures in a pantomime, a faded Columbine and her rustic Harlequin, gilded both of them down their backs by the evening’s tawny sunlight slanting through the glass. The dog is there, playing the sphinx again; when he sees the doctor he hardly stirs, except for his tail, which gives a languishing thump or two. The french doors are opened, the gauze curtains drawn aside, and a sofa has been brought right up to the doorway, and on it Adam Godley reclines full length, wrapped in a red blanket to his chin, though his pyjamaed arms are free and draped along his chest. His drip stand is by him and the tubes are still in his nose, his waste jar is pushed under the sofa, where it gleams. His eyes are open, and he gazes into the garden, yearningly. His wife is perched awkwardly by his side, and is holding one of his hands and stroking it. One of his feet is visible too, long and slender and pale, like a prehistoric artefact, and this in turn is being stroked by his son, who kneels cumbersomely by the end of the sofa, in a pose that seems designed to illustrate filial subjection, filial love. Hand and foot, hand and foot, as ever. Petra is the most striking figure of this tableau, standing off to the side with her arms folded around herself, each of her hands clutching an opposite flank, and gazing at her father with a look of — of what? Sorrow, anger, pain, all of these, and more? Although her sleeves are buttoned at the wrists the doctor sees at once by her pallor and the leaden shadows under her eyes that she has been cutting herself again. Poor child, poor child. He notices the bandage on young Adam’s thumb; surely he too has not, surely—?
“Oh, Ferdy,” Ursula says, seeing him. She smiles, and blushes. “I — we—”
The doctor says nothing; what is there for him to say? He makes a gesture, helpless and accepting. He looks at the figure on the sofa, waited on hand and foot, as he would wish. As well end here, he thinks, as anywhere.
On the mantelpiece there stands an old-fashioned wireless set, its green eye pulsing. From there it issues ancient music of pipes and plucked strings, tiny and far, as from another world.
Those shiny green shutters, I see them again.
And where is Benny Grace? The last anyone saw of him he had a finger to his lips, saying Ssh. Benny has gone, has stepped back into that old rackety machine to be winched up into the flies. Shortly the contraption will return for my father, who would be gone, now that he has given up his girl. See how he strides, as strong as ever was? It is always this way, when he lets them go. Debilitating business, being in love; it puts a hundred thousand years on him, the fond old fool. Well, Father, and what now?
They shall be happy, all of them. Ursula will drink no more, she and her son will go down and ceremonially empty the laurel hedge of its burden of bottles and the rats will come out and frolic like lambs. Adam and Helen will move here to Arden to live, Adam will delve and till as his originary namesake did, while Helen will wear a bonnet and carry a pail, like Marie Antoinette at the Petit Hameau. Petra will put away the razor and wound herself no more. Will Roddy come back and make amends to her? Perhaps that is a little too much to decree — we shall find someone else for her to love and be loved by in the short time left to her. Ivy Blount and Duffy we have already accounted for. What else? Adam, of course. What gift shall we give him? A hitherto unsuspected letter will turn up, a final note written by Dorothy, his dead wife, exonerating him of any blame for her sad end. Will that do?
He gazes into the twilit garden. Thick, tawny sunlight creeps along the grass, drawing spiked shadows in its wake. The trees tremble, talking of night. The birds, the clouds, the far, pale sky. This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.
Wait, who is this? Helen, of course. She rises from the armchair by the fireplace where she was sitting all unnoticed and comes forward now, smiling. Light swells in the windows, the evening’s last effulgence. The doctor expects to be spoken to but Helen seems to pass through him, somehow, a golden breath. Beyond him she stops, starts, as at a touch — it is my father, bidding her farewell, his hand on her cheek. He nods to me. I fly to Helen’s husband, where he kneels, and breathe a word into his ear. What have I to tell him? Why, that his wife is, as in our antique way we quaintly put it, with child. He hastens to his feet and turns. Helen looks back, and sees his look. She presses a hand to her womb.
“Oh!”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. His other books are Nightspawn, Birchwood, Doctor Copernicus (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1976), Kepler (which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Award in 1981), The Newton Letter (which was filmed for Channel 4), Mefisto, The Book of Evidence (which was short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize and winner of the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award), Ghosts, Athena, The Untouchable, Eclipse, Shroud, and The Sea (which was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2005). He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation and was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. He lives in Dublin.