John Banville - The Infinities

When you return, who will you be but you?

What other you is there that I might love?

Again now he moves a hand towards her, the hand he had been leaning on, its fingers scurrying crablike playfully over the sheet. She likes his hands, foursquare and always warm, but now she does not want to be touched and draws back an almost imperceptible inch from the edge of the bed. He makes a smiling frown. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Did Duffy spot you in my shirt?”

She considers this. She has had cause before now to remark the cowman’s seeming freedom of the house, his way of popping up at inappropriate moments in unexpected places, with his beetling brow and his bold, undeflectable stare. What if he did see her, scampering out of the bathroom and up the steps with her backside on show? Well, let him see, she does not care.

“Did you go in yet to see your father?” she asks. Her overnight bag is open on the floor, things spilling out of it as if stalled in a desperate scramble to escape. “How is he?”

He stops smiling but continues to frown, his upper lip protruding over the lower. As always when he dips his head a wing of hair falls forward on his brow and he lifts a hand impatiently to brush it back. His hair is soft and pale. His eyes are pale too, a limpid blue, like her own, but uncanny, somehow, uncanny, that word again. In her dream he was himself and yet not, a figure of cold fire, burning her; his mouth was gold.

“I don’t know how he is,” he says. “He’s just there, not doing anything. I hope he is not suffering but how am I supposed to know?” He pauses, and picks at something on the sheet. “I burst into tears at the bedside.”

“Did you?” is all she says, as if she were thinking of something else. He wonders if she will ask to see him, the dying man.

She walks to the window and pulls up the muslin blind and secures its string by winding it on a hook screwed into the sill and stands looking out. It is supposed to be possible to see the sea from here but she never can. “Poor thing,” she says, and neither of them is sure whom she means, Adam’s father or Adam. Below, there is a different field from the one the bathroom window looks down on, or maybe, she thinks, it is the same one but from another angle. Beyond it there is no wood, though, only a long, lush slope — surely even grass should not be that unreally bright shade of green — behind which rise the roof and single chimney of Ivy Blount’s cottage. Three black-and-white cows are desultorily at graze. A tiny bird flits down from a bough as if not flying but falling, a quick, brown leaf, and then can be seen no more. There is something less than real about the look of this place, especially in summer; it all seems got up, to her. Everything is too flat, somehow, the distances especially but the nearer hills, too, and all laid over with a weak lavender wash, like a badly done backdrop.

She has played Hedda, and Miss Julie. She has swept on in a matt-black gown and seduced and scorned. In the farthest back row they saw the flash of her azure eyes. She had the whip and the whip-hand. Now she will play Alcmene, the soldier’s wife, sweet and baffled and beleaguered. How to pitch it?

“What?” She looks back.

When you return, who will you be but you? —

Tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum tee-tum tee -tum . Like Duffy in his big boots.

“I said nothing,” her husband says.

She glances, frowning, about the room. “She even kept your toys,” she says, wonderingly.

“Who?”

“Your mother — who else?”

She recalls again the gold man in her dream, the looming weight of him. She strides quickly to the bed — a maenad! look! — and clambers over the steamer trunk on to the mattress and wades along it on her knees and with an impassioned violence takes her husband’s head between her hands and presses his face to her breast. He wriggles, and says something that is too muffled for her to make out. She feels his breath on her skin and a shirt button that his chin is pressing into her. Although she is slight compared to him she seems to herself a giantess, towering over him, voracious and commanding. He reaches around and lifts the tail of his shirt that she is wearing and puts his hands on her bare behind and they both feel the blood-heat of her flesh. He is trying to speak again but she will not let him, and grinds his face against her, rolling it from side to side. He makes muffled, laughing noises. His nails dig into her behind, stingingly. She throws back her head with a savage sigh.

My father in his lethargy groans, off dreaming in some other place, of some other lass, I hope. But come, Daddums, come put on your horns and take a gander at what these your little ones are up to.

Old Adam plunges , a pearl-diver, into the past, going down deeper with each dive. There is a lost world there, he sees the sunken roofs and spires, the streets where currents glide, the people phosphorescent as fish, drifting in and out of houses, through half-familiar rooms, their seahorse eyes wide open. He is frightened; he does not want to drown, as they have drowned; he knows that he soon will. He feels the tide drawing him on, drawing him on. He grasps at tendrils but they slip through his hands, slimy and cold. There is a gleam, a glint, but when he scrabbles in the sand he finds nothing, only shells and jagged coral and bits of bone, and all around him is soon obscured. His breath is running out. He feels his heart beat, hears the blood in his veins, a hollow, rushing roar. He struggles. The water coils around him, heavy as chains and ungraspable. A great bubble bursts from his mouth. Mother! —

He wakes, but what he wakes to is not waking.

He is once again in the humpbacked town above the estuary, with its church, its ruined tower, its steep-roofed, jostling houses. He sees it in raw April weather, a rinsed blue sky with smudges of cloud, ice-white, bruise-grey, fawn. From all the chimneys flaws of smoke fly back, as if a close-packed flotilla were putting out to sea from here. The wind ruffles the widening river, pricking up white-caps. It is all there, compact and tiny, like a toy town in a snow-globe. He is a child, trudging up a hill beside a high, grey-stone wall. He wears a tweed coat with a half-belt at the back, and a peaked cap, and thick woollen stockings the tops of which are turned down to hide homemade, soiled white elastic garters. He has his satchel on his back. It is four o’clock. There are houses on the other side of the sharply tilted street, each one set a step higher up than the other. On the front door of one a black crape bow is tied to the knocker with a pasteboard card attached with a name on it, and dates, written in black ink. The door is ajar. Someone has died and anyone may go in to view the corpse. The town drunks are always there first, for a free drink in which to toast the dead man on his way. He stops and stands for a moment, looking at the house. He could go in. He could just push open the door and walk straight into the parlour. There would be someone there, a woman wearing black, standing with her hands folded in front of her, her eyes pink-rimmed and her nostrils inflamed along the edges. He would shake her thin, chilly hand and murmur something; it need not even be words. He would cross the room, his school shoes squeaking, and gaze down stonily at the dead person laid out in the coffin in his unreal-looking suit, his waxen knuckles wound round with a rosary. There would be that smell, of lilies and ashes, which the recently dead give off, or which at least is always there when someone has died. The woman would offer him cake on a plate and a tumbler of tepid lemonade. There would be others there before him, sitting in the gloom on straight chairs ranged against the walls, gripping whiskey glasses in red fists or balancing cups and saucers on their knees, sighing and shifting, murmuring pious complacencies that set his teeth on edge.