John Banville - The Infinities

“God almighty,” she said, “how did you get in?”

“Down the chimney,” I answered, rather overdoing the gruffness, I suspect — it takes a moment to slip fully into character, even for a god. But Duffy the cowman is a fine big chap and his frame fits me well. He is called Adrian, unlikely as it may seem. I note that Ivy does not address him by this name, or by any other, for that matter, out of a reserve natural to her class and vintage — she is a daughter of the demure fifties — along with an inability to take as genuine the attentions he persists in pressing upon her. Mind, she is not indifferent to his rough charms, not at all, only she cannot make herself believe that such a strapping fellow could possibly be romantically drawn to the dry old maid she has reconciled herself to being — he must be a good ten years younger than she is. She darkly suspects it is the house, her little house, that he is after.

Anyway, there I was, incorrigible prankster that I am, got up as a horny-handed son of the soil, Gabriel Oak to the life, in an old torn tweed jacket and corduroy trews, a calico shirt sans collar and a red kerchief knotted carelessly at my throat. I fancy a pair of leather gaiters would have rounded off the picture nicely, but at that, prudently, I drew the line, though with regret.

Those green window-frames are still troubling me, I wonder why.

Ivy was sitting on a kitchen chair in the sunlight in the open back-doorway. She held a freshly killed chicken in her lap — yes, the speckled brown one, with the orange feet — which she was plucking. When she turned, startled by the sound of my step behind her, the legs of her chair shrieked on the slate doorstep. The early sun was shining full in the doorway and there was a mingled smell of poultry and stewed tea-leaves and damp grass, and that particular sharp, gooseberryish something that the countryside exhales on summer mornings. I had put on the look — earnest, awkward, annoyed — that Duffy seems always to adopt in Miss Blount’s presence. The annoyance springs from that resentment all mortal men feel towards those to whom they are attracted; I imagine even the brow of Peleus’s son Achilles must on occasion have darkened when lover-boy Patroclus came clanking into his tent for the umpteenth time. Ivy’s face is long and sharp and her unruly brown hair resembles a rook’s nest, yet for all this, and the fact that the first blush of youth has long ago faded from her cheeks, she is possessed of a peculiar, subtle beauty. Her smile, rare and radiant, flips open a charming little fan of crow’s-feet at either temple, and when she smiles she dips her head quickly in shyness, and for a second seems a girl again. “I wanted to talk to you,” I said.

She had turned back to her grisly task — is not the skin of a plucked chicken horribly reminiscent of what I imagine is the look and texture of the back parts of an old man? — and gave a laughing sniff. “Oh, do you now? And what about, may I ask?” Ivy has a sweet voice, too, light and mellow; in it, she used to speak three or four languages, thanks to her time at a Swiss finishing school, whence she was bundled without notice in the middle of a spring term when the family’s fortunes went wallop.

“The future,” I said.

“Well, that is a big enough topic.”

I went and stood in the doorway with my hands in the pockets of my trousers, looking down on her. I noticed that her nest of hair, so abundant elsewhere, is thinning at the crown, and the white skin shines through, as if mother rook had laid an egg there.

“Are you not going to offer me a cup of tea?” I said.

She did not look up from her work. “I’m busy, as you see.” How deft she is, the feathers fairly flew. “Anyway, you’re out early.”

“They’re all business up at the house, too,” I said, “just like yourself.”

“You came that way?”

“I did.”

“No news?”

“No news.”

Which is their coded way of conferring together on the question of old Adam’s expected demise.

I went to the dresser that stands against the wall opposite the back door and took a big brown mug down from its hook. There was a pitcher of milk on the table. I filled the mug and drank deep. The milk was barely cool and noticeably soured; one of the incidental interests of taking on temporary mortal form is the opportunity it affords of sampling new sensations. I had never tasted sour milk before; I shall not taste it again. I went back to the doorway. Ivy looked askance at me from under a straggle of that hair. “You have a white moustache,” she said. I flew a finger to my upper lip, fearing I had made a blunder when getting into my disguise, but of course it was only a moustache of milk. I speculated afresh as to the extent of the freedoms Duffy enjoys here. I had helped myself to the milk with an almost proprietorial bravado and had met with not a peep of protest. It was a modest liberty, I admit, but in this area the small things can be the greatest giveaways.

“What I’m saying,” I said, squinting off into the sunlight, “is that the upkeep of a house of your own these days is no joke.” Ivy’s vegetable garden, modest but scrupulously tended, is bordered at its far end by a fuchsia hedge hung with a profusion of intense red blossoms. It made a pretty picture, the scarlet bells and the dark hedge and then the green beyond, of bank and field and tree, in all its shades. Ivy had made no response to my gambit, but was waiting to hear how I would proceed, and waiting with pricked-up interest, as I could sense. Yet I paused. I would have been glad of a helping word from her. You must understand, a god is not a gentleman and likes nothing better than to trifle with a lady’s affections, but there are rules that apply even to a divinity, and it was incumbent on me to proceed with caution and deference, if the niceties of the game were to be preserved. Nevertheless, I did not have all day. “That place of mine,” I said, “is beggaring me.” Duffy too has a cottage, not unlike this one, crooked, stark, stone-faced, on the other side of the hill, in which he has lived all his life, until recently in uneasy cohabitation with his widowed mother, a rough-edged baggage generally considered to have been a witch, who died at a great age only last year.

“Beggaring you!” Ivy said in false wonderment, mildly mocking me. “That’s terrible.”

Ivy’s cat appeared, slinking out of the grass on the far side of the cobbled yard. He is a ragged old tom called Tom, mottled in grey-brown shades that make me think of slugs; he has a great star-burst of spiked fur surrounding his face, like a tilted, horrent ruff, as if at some time in the uncertain past he had been given a great fright and had not yet recovered his composure. Seeing me he stopped and stared, his green eyes narrowed and a paw lifted. Baffling for him, I suppose, a Duffy who seemed Duffy in all particulars and yet was not Duffy.

“The roof on my place is gone,” I said, “or going, anyway.”

I brought out a tin box of tobacco from the partly ripped left pocket of my jacket and a packet of papers from the right and rolled a cigarette, one-handed. Not easy. What skills they acquire, in their little span of life!

“Well, yes, a new roof would be an expense,” Ivy said, in a studiedly neutral tone. She was meant to admire my trick with the fag but refused to be impressed. She knows that Duffy’s mother left a wad of banknotes stuffed in a nylon stocking under the mattress of her bed, but guesses the stash cannot have amounted to much. Oh, yes, she thinks, oh, yes, it is the house he has his eye on.

By the way, I am glad to say this is the last we shall hear of the tedious and hexish Ma Duffy.

“I’d sell up tomorrow,” I said, “if I thought I’d get a decent price.”