Mefisto by John Banville Page A

making a wry face, as if she had been forced to shout. However, these quick, deft displays never failed to surprise and impress me. They seemed a sort of sleight of hand, adroit and faintly jubilant. Mr Kasperl, though he appeared to understand what she was saying, would make little response, but stand before her with his head lowered, looking at her blankly from under his brow, his mysterious thoughts elsewhere. Felix just laughed at her, waving his arms to fend her off, as if she were making preposterous demands of him.
    – Listen to her! he would say to me merrily. She’s mad, mad!
    And she too would laugh, and mime exasperation, shaking a playful fist in his face.
    Felix was always busy, in a vague, haphazard way. He never seemed to finish anything, or to have started anywhere, but was always just doing. The keys he had been sorting the first time I came to the house lay for weeks on the kitchen table. He would walk up and stand looking at them, his hands in his pockets and his chin sunk on his breast, and heave a histrionic, weary sigh before wandering off to tackle some other obscure task. He spent hours prowling about upstairs, rummaging in closets and under beds, or going through the wardrobes that stood, like broad sarcophagi, in dank dressing rooms and faded boudoirs, still thronged with clothes, the moth-eaten relics of generations of Ashburns. He would salvage odds and ends of antique outfits – a pair of check plus-fours, a mildewed dinner jacket, a cricket umpire’s floppy hat – and wear them around the house with bland aplomb. I came upon him one day in the grounds, strolling through the trees in baggy tweeds and a norfolk jacket and carrying a rusty shotgun.
    – Thought I’d take a bang at the birds, don’t you know, he said. Care to be my loader?
    It had been raining, and now a sharp sun was shining. The drenched woods glittered. We walked along a winding path. There were rustlings and slitherings all about us in the grass, under the leaves. I had not rid myself of a faint unease in his presence. I always answered his remarks too eagerly, smiled too quickly at his jokes, as if to hold him at arm’s length. He made fun of everything. He pulled faces at Mr Kasperl behind his back, imitating his matronly walk. He would throw back his head and feign loud laughter, as if someone had said something wonderfully funny, until Sophie, with the inept cunning of the deaf, began to laugh along with him, then he would put up a hand and hide his face from her and chuckle, winking at Mr Kasperl and me. Yet it was not his mockery I feared. We came to a viridian field. The verdure shimmered. A little band of grazing deer saw us and fled silently into a copse. We paused, and Felix looked about him, beaming.
    – What a paradise it seems, all the same, he said. I sometimes wonder if we deserve this world. What do you think, bird-boy?
    He laughed and sauntered on, hefting the shotgun in the crook of his arm. We walked along the margin of the field until we came to the high hedge and the drive. The house was handsome with the sun on it, the windows ablaze. Birds swooped through the rinsed air, the great trees stood as if listening. For a moment I experienced a pure, piercing happiness, unaccountable, fleeting, like a fall of light. A delivery boy was coming up the drive behind us on his bike, pedalling leisurely, with one hand on the handlebar and his knees splayed. I knew him. His name was Clancy, a short, muscular fellow with a swatch of coarse black hair and a crooked jaw, and a bad cast in one eye. He wore big boots with cleats, and a long, striped apron. He had been in my class at school years ago. He was a dunce, and sat at a desk by himself in a corner. The teachers made fun of him, holding up his copybooks for us to see his slovenly work, while he crouched in his seat and looked around at us murderously out of his crooked eye. Sometimes on these occasions he would break down and weep, shockingly, like an adult, in