Mefisto by John Banville

Suddenly I wanted to tell him something, anything, to confide in him, the urge was so strong that for a second tears prickled under my eyelids and my throat grew thick. He was watching me with a little smile, his eyes narrowed against the light.
    – I’d say we’re a lot alike, you know, he said, you and me.
    A flock of starlings rose from the trees and flew over our heads in a rush of wings, briefly darkening the air. My mother came to the front door of our house and stood with her sleeves rolled, watching us. Felix met her baleful stare with a mockingly apologetic smile. I turned my back on her. She went inside again, and slammed the door. Felix stretched himself, yawning. He considered the sky, the rooftops, the delicate green of the trees.
    – But seriously, he said, figures, now, that’s very interesting. Mr Kasperl is very interested, really.
    When I went into the house my mother said nothing. I went up to my room. My books, papers, pencils, were on the table, by the window. They wore somehow a knowing air.
    I began to go out regularly then to Ashburn. My presence was accepted without remark, I might have been part of the household. Felix and I played cards at the kitchen table, and ate Sophie’s stews. I walked with her in the grounds, or explored the house with her. Mr Kasperl paid me no heed at all, except that sometimes when we came face to face unexpectedly he would give me one of his remote, dull stares and frown vaguely, as if he thought he might vaguely know me.
    My mother wanted to know where I was spending my time now. She had preferred it when I shut myself away in my room, that silence above her head had been less alarming than these inscrutable absences. But at home these days I felt like an exile come back on a brief, bored visit. How small it all seemed, how circumscribed. At Ashburn the horizon was limitless. I moved in a new medium there, a dense, silvery stuff that flashed and shimmered, not like air at all, but a pure fluid that held things fixed and trembling, like water in the brimming jet of a fountain.
    I brooded on Sophie as one of Mr Pender’s more difficult puzzles. She would not solve. There was a flaw in her, a tiny imbalance, that would not let the equation come out, it showed in the slope of her shoulders, in her delicate, long, lopsided face. Her walk was a swift, strong swimming in air. She favoured her left side, so that at every step she seemed about to veer away impetuously to the right, as if there were things out there clamouring softly for her attention. She was always moving, always ahead of me, I knew intimately the shell-like hollows behind her ankle-bones, the fissured porcelain at the backs of her knees, the syncopated slow wingbeat of her shoulder-blades. She seemed built not on bone but on some more supple framework. Her thumbs were double-jointed. She could pick up things with her toes. She was given to rushes of playful violence, she would turn on me suddenly with a gagging laugh and give me a push, or hit me hard on the shoulder with her sharp little fist. She had a way of stiffening suddenly with a gasp and clasping herself in her arms, as if to keep herself from exploding. Even at her stillest she gave off ripples of excitement, like a huntress poised behind a pillar with bent bow. She was a sealed vessel, precarious, volatile, filled to bursting with all there was to say. She might have been not mute but merely waiting, holding her breath. Her deafness was like vigilance. She would fix on the most trivial thing with rapt attention, as if anything, at any moment, might begin to speak to her, in a small voice, out of that huge, waveless sea of silence in which she was suspended. She communicated in an airy, insubstantial language consisting not of words but moving forms, transparent, yet precise and sharp, like glass shapes in air. When I was away from her I could not think how exactly she managed it. She seldom resorted to the sign alphabet, and then impatiently,