Eclipse: A Novel by John Banville Page B

its own reality, like night, or the sky. Is it the heave and lurch and sudden suck of it that frightens? Or is it that it is so emphatically not our medium? I think of the world beneath the ocean, the obverse of ours, the negative of ours, with its sandy plains and silent valleys and great sunken mountain ranges, and something fails me in myself, something that is mine draws away from me in horror. Water is uncanny in the way, single-minded and uncontrollable, it keeps seeking its own level, like nothing else in the world that we inhabit. There are storms, yes, and tidal waves, and even in these temperate zones the estuarial bore, or eagre, but such phenomena are not due to any inherent qualities of water itself, for water, though fluid and eerily always beyond our grasp, surely is essentially inert. Yet it puts us off balance; one is always at an angle to the ocean—keeping one’s head above water ensures that. To wade into the waves is to seem to fall without falling, feeling the steep squirming sandy incline under one’s slowed-down, leaden tread. Yes, the inhuman constant levelling, and the two-dimensional, angled aspect which we see of it, these are the characteristics of water that unnerve us. And drowning, of course, drowning is strange, I mean strange for those on shore. It all seems done so discreetly. The onlooker, attention caught by a distant feathery cry, peers out intently but sees nothing of the struggle, the helpless silencing, the awful slow-motion thrashing, the last, long fall into the bottomless and ever-blackening blue. No. All that is to be seen is a moment of white water, and a hand, languidly sinking.
    The sea was not blue now, though; it hardly ever is. In our latitudes it is more often a gleaming grey, or purplish, like a bruise, or, after the churnings of a gale, marl-coloured. But rarely, rarely blue.
    The black bird on the rock opened wide its wings and shook them vigorously and after a long moment of absolute, cruciform stillness carefully refolded them.
    When I was young I had no fear of the sea, and loved the beach. Disporting myself on that narrow strip of not-quite-land wedged between sky and water, I would feel all down the imperceptibly declining curve of the afternoon a sense of the great world’s glamour. Some girl in cheap sunglasses and crimpled swimsuit would catch my attention and seem a glimmering naiad. The yard of undersprung soft sand at the edge of the waves was a trampoline on which I trod with a gracefulness not to be achieved elsewhere in the gawky world of boyhood. And then the sea itself, running off flat to the low horizon, like a limitless promise—no, I had no dread of it, then. As a boy I was a fair swimmer, in my unruly way, all splash and thrash. Especially I loved to dive, loved that moment of breathless almost-panic under water, the eerie greenish glow, the bulging silence, the sense of slide and shift and sway. My father too was fascinated by things maritime. He did not swim, had never been out on the ocean, but he was irresistibly drawn to its margins. He would roll up the bottoms of his trousers and paddle in the shallows, like all the other fathers, but away from them, keeping himself to himself. In my memory it is like a scene in one of those gaudy seaside postcards of the time, him there in his sleeveless pullover and sun hat made from a white handkerchief knotted at the corners, paddling in the running surf, while up the beach my mother sits on a towel with her embarrassingly bare legs stuck straight out before her, deep in a novelette. Later, when the sun lost strength and the light grew heavy, and we collected our things and mashed our way back through the dunes in the direction of the train station, my father would maintain a remote, frowning silence, which even my mother would not try to break, as if he had been away somewhere distant, and had seen incommunicable things.
    A shimmer, a shiver in the air. Uncanny sensation, as of a chill presentiment. I