The Book of Evidence by John Banville Page A

pate.
    I waited. All was silent save for the ticking of a tall, seventeenth-century G e r m a n clock. On the wall beside me there was a set of six exquisite little B o n i n g t o n watercolours, I could have put a couple of them under my arm there and then and walked out. T h e clock took a laboured breath and pinged the half-hour, and then, all about me, in farther and farther rooms, other clocks too let fall their single, silvery chimes, and it was as if a tiny tremor had passed through the house. I looked again at the 76

    Tintoretto. T h e r e was a Fragonard, too, and a Watteau.
    A n d this was only the hallway. W h a t was g o i n g on, what had happened, that it was all left unattended like this? I heard the t a x i m a n outside sounding his horn, a tentative, apologetic little toot. He must have thought I had forgotten about him, (I had.) S o m e w h e r e at the back of the house a d o o r b a n g e d shut, and a second later a breath of cool air brushed past my face. ! advanced creakingly along the hall, a hot9 almost sensuous thrill of apprehensiveness pulsing behind my breastbone. I am at heart a timid m a n , large deserted places m a k e me nervous.
    O n e of the figures in the Fragonard, a silken lady with blue eyes and a p l u m p lower lip, was watching me sidelong with what seemed an expression of appalled but lively speculation. Cautiously I opened a door. T h e fat k n o b turned tinder my hand with a wonderful, confiding smoothness. I entered a long, high, narrow, m a n y -
    w i n d o w e d r o o m . T h e wallpaper w a s the colour o f tarnished g o l d . T h e air was golden too, suffused with the heavy soft light of evening. I felt as if I had stepped straight into the eighteenth century. T h e furnishings were sparse, there were no m o r e than five or six pieces — s o m e delicate, lyre-backed chairs, an ornate sideboard, a small o r m o l u table — placed just so, in such a w a y that not the things but the space around them, the light itself, seemed arranged. 1
    stood quite still, listening* 1 did not k n o w for what. On the l o w table there w a s a large and complicated j i g s a w puzzle, half-assembled. S o m e of the pieces had fallen to the floor. I gazed at them, sprinkled on the parquet like puddles of something that had spilled, and once again a faint shiver seemed to pass through the house. At the far end of the r o o m a french w i n d o w stood wide-open, and a gauze curtain billowed in the breeze. Outside there was a long slope of lawn, whereon, in the middle distance, a lone, 77

    heraldic horse was prancing. Farther off was the river bend, the water whitening in the shallows, and beyond that there were trees, and then vague mountains, and then the limitless, gilded blue of summer. It struck me that the perspective of this scene was wrong somehow. Things seemed not to recede as they should, but to be arrayed before me — the furniture, the open window, the lawn and river and far-off mountains — as if they were not being looked at but were themselves looking, intent upon a vanishing-point here, inside the room. I turned then, and saw myself turning as I turned, as I seem to myself to be turning still, as I sometimes imagine I shall be turning always, as if this might be my punishment, my damnation, just this breathless, blurred, eternal turning towards her.
    Y o u have seen the picture in the papers, you know what she looks like. A youngish woman in a black dress with a broad white collar, standing with her hands folded in front of her, one gloved, the other hidden except for the fingers, which are flexed, ringless. She is wearing something on her head, a cap or clasp of some sort, which holds her hair drawn tightly back from her brow. Her prominent black eyes have a faintly oriental slant. The nose is large, the lips full. She is not beautiful. In her right hand she holds a folded fan, or it might be a book. She is standing in what I take to be the lighted doorway of a room.