Eclipse: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

distant to be called plans. Hopes, then? Not that, either. Dreams, I suppose. Fantasies. Delusions.
    With a grunt and a heave I got myself up from the bed and stood scratching. I suspect I am coming more and more to look like my father, especially as he was at the end, with that same peering, apprehensive stance. It is a parent’s posthumous revenge, the legacy of increasing resemblance. I padded to the window and opened the tattered curtains, wincing in the light. It was early still. The square was deserted. Not a soul, not even a bird. A tall sharp wedge of sunlight leaned against the white wall of the convent, motionless and menacing. One Maytime here when I was a boy I built a shrine to the Virgin Mary. What inspired me to this uncommon enterprise? Some visionary moment must have been granted me, some glimpse of matutinal blue, or radiance in a limitless sky at noon, or lily-scented exaltation, at Evening Devotions, in the midst of the Rosary, as the Glorious Mysteries were given out. I was a solemn child, prone to bouts of religious fervour, and that May, which is the month of Mary—and also, curiously, of both Lucifer and the wolf; who decides these matters, I wonder?—I had determined I would make her a shrine, or grotto, as such things were called, at that time, in this part of the world, and probably are still so called. I chose a spot in the lane beside the house where a little brown stream squirmed along under a hawthorn hedge. I was not sure if stones were free, and gathered them with circumspection from the fields and vacant lots roundabout, prizing in particular the flinty white ones. From hedgerows I plucked primroses, and when I saw how quickly the blossoms died I dug the plants out roots and all and sowed them on my bit of bank, among the stones, first filling the holes with water and watching with satisfaction the muddy bubbles rise and fatly plop as the tufted sods sank and settled and I trod them home with the heel of my wellington boot. The statue of the Virgin must have come from the house, or perhaps I persuaded my mother to buy one specially: I fancy I can recall her grumbling a the expense. She viewed this venture of mine with grudging regard, distrustful of such a show of piety, for despite her own veneration of the Virgin she liked a boy to be a boy, she said, and not a namby-pamby. When the work was finished I sat contentedly for a long time by myself looking at the shrine and feeling proud, and virtuous in a cloying sort of way. I heard old Nockter the apple-seller with his horse and cart calling his wares in a far street, and mad Maude up in her attic crooning to her dollies. Later still, as the sun declined and shadows lengthened, my father came out of the house in shirtsleeves and braces and looked at the grotto and at me and at the grotto again, and sucked his teeth, and smiled a little and said nothing, remote and sceptical, as always. When it rained the Virgin’s face seemed tear-stained. One day a gang of older boys passing by on their bikes saw the shrine and dismounted and grabbed the statue and tossed it from one to another, laughing, until one of them fumbled it and it fell on the road and shattered. I retrieved a fragment of blue mantle and kept it, awed by the exposed whiteness of the plaster; such purity was almost indecent, and whenever afterwards I heard the priests recall that the Blessed Virgin had been born without stain of sin I experienced a troubled, dark excitement.
    She must be of Minoan origin, the Virgin; even her colours, cobalt and lime-white, suggest the Isles of Greece. Mary as Pasiphaë, serpent in hand and her conical bare breasts on show, there is a thought to frighten the priests.
    I have remained a devotee of the goddess, and she in turn has been attentive to me, in the various forms in which she has been manifest in my life. First of course there was my mother. She tried to but could not understand me, her changeling. She was a querulous, distracted person,