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That, then, was my first encounter with the Graces: the girl's voice coming
down from on high, the running footsteps, and the man here below with the blue
eyes giving me that wink, jaunty, intimate and faintly satanic.
Just now I caught myself at it again, that thin, wintry whistling through the
front teeth that I have begun to do recently. Deedle deedle deedle, it goes,
like a dentist's drill. My father used to whistle like that, am I turning into
him? In the room across the corridor Colonel Blunden is playing the wireless. He
favours the afternoon talk programmes, the ones in which irate members of the
public call up to complain about villainous politicians and the price of drink
and other perennial irritants. "Company," he says shortly, and clears his
throat, looking a little abashed, his protuberant, parboiled eyes avoiding mine,
even though I have issued no challenge. Does he lie on the bed while he listens?
Hard to picture him there in his thick grey woollen socks, twiddling his toes,
his tie off and shirt collar agape and hands clasped behind that stringy old
neck of his. Out of his room he is vertical man itself, from the soles of his
much-mended glossy brown brogues to the tip of his conical skull. He has his
hair cut every Saturday morning by the village barber, short-back-and-sides, no
quarter given, only a hawkish stiff grey crest left on top. His long-lobed
leathery ears stick out, they look as if they had been dried and smoked; the
whites of his eyes too have a smoky yellow tinge. I can hear the buzz of voices
on his wireless but cannot make out what they say. I may go mad here. Deedle
deedle.
Later that day, the day the Graces came, or the following one, or the one
following that, I saw the black car again, recognised it at once as it went
bounding over the little humpbacked bridge that spanned the railway line. It is
still there, that bridge, just beyond the station. Yes, things endure, while the
living lapse. The car was heading out of the village in the direction of the
town, I shall call it Ballymore, a dozen miles away. The town is Ballymore, this
village is Ballyless, ridiculously, perhaps, but I do not care. The man with the
beard who had winked at me was at the wheel, saying something and laughing, his
head thrown back. Beside him a woman sat with an elbow out of the rolled-down
window, her head back too, pale hair shaking in the gusts from the window, but
she was not laughing only smiling, that smile she reserved for him, sceptical,
tolerant, languidly amused. She wore a white blouse and sunglasses with white
plastic rims and was smoking a cigarette. Where am I, lurking in what place of
vantage? I do not see myself. They were gone in a moment, the car's sashaying
back-end scooting around a bend in the road with a spurt of exhaust smoke. Tall
grasses in the ditch, blond like the woman's hair, shivered briefly and returned
to their former dreaming stillness.
I walked down Station Road in the sunlit emptiness of afternoon. The beach at
the foot of the hill was a fawn shimmer under indigo. At the seaside all is
narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed
between earth and sky. I approached the Cedars circumspectly. How is it that in
childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny,
since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a
thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant? So many
unanswerables, this the least of them. As I approached I heard a regular rusty
screeching sound. A boy of my age was draped on the green gate, his arms hanging
limply down from the top bar, propelling himself with one foot slowly back and
forth in a quarter circle over the gravel. He had the same straw-pale hair as
the woman in the car and the man's unmistakable azure eyes. As I walked slowly
past, and indeed I may even have paused, or faltered, rather, he stuck the toe
of his plimsoll into the gravel to stop the swinging gate and looked at me with
an expression of hostile enquiry. It was the way we all looked at each other, we
children, on first encounter. Behind him I could see all the way down the narrow
garden at the back of the house to the diagonal row of trees skirting the
railway line—they are gone now, those trees, cut down to make way for a row of
pastel-coloured bungalows like dolls' houses—and beyond, even, inland, to where
the fields rose and there were cows, and tiny bright bursts of yellow that were
gorse bushes, and a solitary distant spire, and then the sky, with scrolled
white clouds. Suddenly, startlingly, the boy pulled a grotesque face at me,
crossing his eyes and letting his tongue loll on his lower lip. I walked on,
conscious of his mocking eye following me.
Excerpted from The Sea by John Banville Copyright © 2006 by John Banville. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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