TWO

I took a long, hot bath that I badly needed and would have found relaxing in normal circumstances. I debated with myself whether I was overreacting and concluded that, even if I was, my mother was certainly underreacting. I’d refrained from asking her whether she thought Dad, if he’d still been alive, would have taken Eldritch in. Pretending he was dead as he had, I seriously doubted it. But maybe Dad had had the advantage of knowing what those mysterious ‘offences against the state’ were. Maybe he’d feigned ignorance on the point because he couldn’t bear to admit to his wife what his own brother had actually done.

While I was soaking in the tub my mother had dug out the letter Eldritch had sent her from prison. It was waiting for me on the bedside cabinet in my room. I read it as I dressed.

It was written in copperplate ballpoint on lined paper, under the printed address Portlaoise Prison.

The old fellow had a nice line in self-pitying ingratiation. There was no doubt about that. Though he had never met my mother, he had pitched his appeal to her softer instincts perfectly.

I caught my first sight of him while I was unpacking. I passed the window and glimpsed a figure in the street. I knew it was him before I’d even stopped to look down. There was something in his build and posture that reminded me of my father. And surely, yes, the raincoat he was wearing had belonged to my father. Mum must have kept it, though hardly with this contingency in mind. It was another reason to dislike the man, to add to all the other reasons to distrust him.

He was walking slowly towards Zanzibar, one hand thrust into a pocket of the raincoat, the other busy with a cigarette. I couldn’t see much of his face beneath the brim of his hat – a jauntily angled fedora that certainly wasn’t my father’s. He was thin and slightly stooped. He stopped at the pavement’s edge as I watched to take a last drag on the cigarette before tossing it into the gutter. My mother abhorred smoking and used to banish Dad to the back garden to indulge the vice. It looked as if she’d made no concessions to Eldritch on that point at least.

He stood where he was for a moment, apparently lost in thought. Then he raised his head and looked straight up at me. His face was grey and lined, the tendons of his neck stretched like cords beneath the skin. His eyes remained in shadow, but I sensed them meeting mine. There was the faintest of acknowledging nods. Then he pressed on towards the house.

I heard the front door close down in the hall. My mother was in the kitchen. Whether she was aware of his arrival I couldn’t tell. He started up the stairs, climbing slowly, but treading lightly. I wondered if he meant to carry straight on up to his room and decided to leave him no choice in the matter. I stepped out on to the landing and watched him as he reached the top of the first flight of stairs, his hand grasping the acorn cap on the head post for support. He was breathing heavily and wheezily.

‘Hi,’ I said expressionlessly as he turned and saw me.

He didn’t reply at first, either because he didn’t have the breath or because he wanted me to understand he wasn’t about to let me intimidate him. I could see his eyes now, the same washed-out hazel as my father’s. His face was even greyer than I’d first thought. He looked as weary as he was wary, an old man with an extra decade or so loaded on to him by long-term imprisonment, a ghost in more ways than one on account of his eerie resemblance to my father and his recent return from the supposedly dead.

‘You must be Stephen,’ he said at last, in a low, cultured voice that somehow sounded as if it had spoken from the past.

‘That’s right.’

He took off his hat, revealing a sparse covering of oil-darkened hair and a deeply furrowed forehead. Then he stepped towards me and extended a hand. ‘Eldritch Swan. Your uncle. Pleased to meet you.’

There seemed nothing for it but to shake his hand. His grip was surprisingly strong, though dismayingly cold. ‘They told me you were dead,’ I said, aware that he couldn’t have judged from my tone whether I regarded the news that he wasn’t as either good or bad.

‘I might as well have been.’ He released my hand. ‘I never thought they’d let me out.’

‘Why did they?’

He shaped a crooked little half-smile. ‘Bit of a shock for you, was it, son? Finding out I was still in the land of the living.’

‘Don’t call me son.’

‘Fair enough.’ He nodded a restrained apology. ‘I don’t want to upset anyone.’

‘Mum says you’re here till Easter.’

‘Unless she asks me to leave sooner.’

‘I doubt she will. She has a soft heart.’

‘I expect you could talk her into it, though, Stephen.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know. How long are you here for, yourself ?’

‘A few weeks at least.’

‘Right. So, we’ll have to … rub along, won’t we?’

‘Apparently.’

A brief, heavy silence. Then he said, ‘Come up to my room. There’s something I want to show you.’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing really. But you should see it even so.’

The attic room had the lowest ceiling but the finest view in the house. From the dormer window you could see the whole expanse of the bay towards Berry Head. It was furnished simply, with its own tiny en-suite bathroom. At first glance, it would have been hard to tell anyone was staying in it, apart from the fact that the bed was made up and my father’s old dressing-gown was hanging on the hook behind the door. Eldritch hadn’t exactly stamped his personality on the room. I wondered if that was what he wanted me to see: visible proof that he wasn’t trying to put down roots.

But no. As it transpired, that wasn’t quite the point he was anxious to make.

Breathless again from the climb, he took off his raincoat and opened the rickety wardrobe. The only item of clothing already hung up was an old brown and gold pinstripe suit. The jacket had wide lapels and there were turn-ups on the trousers. He hung the raincoat beside it and slid his hat on to the shelf above. Then, leaving the door open, he moved away and sat down on the chair by the dressing-table.

I recognized the tweed jacket he was wearing as another handout from Mum’s hoard of my father’s clothes. The shirt and trousers looked new, though I couldn’t be sure. The tie was a narrow, striped number, possibly contemporary with the suit. Likewise the ancient brogues. It was more obvious now how thin he was, little more than skin and bone, driven falteringly on by some stubbornly functioning mechanism.

He was seven years older than Dad, which made him sixty-eight. And every one of those years had left its mark. But then I didn’t imagine Portlaoise Prison had been an easy place to grow old in.

‘Tell me, Eldritch,’ I said, ‘if Dad had still been alive, would you have asked him to take you in?’

‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘But I wouldn’t have known where to find him. He never wrote to me. And I wouldn’t have expected a welcoming answer even if I had.’

‘But still you’d have asked if you could?’

‘Oh yes. Thirty-six years in prison sucks all the pride out of you.’

‘What did you want to show me?’

‘That suit in the wardrobe.’

‘What about it?’

‘The suit and the hat – and this tie and these shoes – are what I was wearing when they arrested me. The sixth of July, 1940. They gave them back to me when they discharged me two months ago. Plus one wristwatch.’ He raised his left arm to show me the watch. ‘Along with my cigarette case and lighter.’ He took them from his pocket, then dropped them back in. ‘Also my fountain pen.’ He tapped its clip where it was hung inside his jacket. ‘And a quantity of cash that was no longer legal tender.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because I want you to understand. That was it. The sum total of my possessions, parcelled up and waiting for me. And it wasn’t a very big parcel. I didn’t want to leave, you know. I had wanted to, of course, more than I’d wanted anything in the world. But at some point – I can’t say when exactly – I gave up dreaming of freedom. And at some other point – also indefinable – I realized I preferred to stay where I was. It was safe in its way. The outside world was strange and vast and … frightening. It’s the final phase of institutionalization. The victory of the system over the individual.’

‘Is that why they let you go? Because they knew they’d beaten you?’

Eldritch chuckled drily. ‘Good question, Stephen. Actually, no. There was a more specific reason. But I can’t tell you what that was without explaining why I was imprisoned in the first place. And I gave them a written undertaking I wouldn’t tell anyone. A breach of that undertaking could land me behind bars again. And I couldn’t bear that. Strange and vast and frightening as it is, this world I don’t belong in is preferable to the one I reluctantly left behind.’

‘This undertaking you gave is very convenient, isn’t it?’

He frowned. ‘How so?’

‘Well, it neatly relieves you of the need to admit what you did, doesn’t it?’

He smiled thinly. ‘As a matter of fact, I did nothing.’

‘You’re an innocent man?’

‘Not particularly. Something of a rogue in my day, to be honest, as I’m sure your father must have told you. But I wasn’t guilty of what they said I did in Dublin. I was fitted up.’

‘Of course.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘I don’t know you, Eldritch. And apparently you can’t tell me what happened to you in Dublin back in 1940. So, how am I to believe or disbelieve you?’

‘Good point.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘I can’t argue with that.’

‘Excuse me.’

I turned to leave, exasperated by his hangdog evasiveness. I was already through the door when he called after me, in a curiously antique turn of phrase, ‘Hold up.’

I stopped and turned round. ‘Yes?’

He waved me back into the room. I went as far as the threshold. ‘Could you do me one favour, Stephen?’

‘What?’

‘If anyone – any stranger – asks you about me, could you tell them … you don’t know anything … about my past … or my plans for the future?’

‘Of course.’ I treated him to an openly sarcastic grin. ‘After all, it’d be nothing less than the truth.’