John Banville - The Infinities

The chicken was plucked but still Ivy did not raise her head to look at me. The backs of her hands are liver-spotted and her fingers are like bunches of fine, dry twigs. Across the yard, Tom the cat abruptly lost interest in me and sat down on his hunkers and lifted high a straightened hind leg and began nonchalantly licking the puckered grey eyelet under his tail. I listened to the medleyed buzz that summer makes, and thought how tentative these humans are, how they grope and fumble among their motives, hiding their desires, their hopes and trepidations from each other and themselves, perennial children that they are.

“And what,” Ivy asked in a faraway, muffled voice, still leaning forward and away from me, “what would you do then?”

She lifted her feet out of the wellingtons and set them on the sun-warmed slate. Her arthritic toes are all knobbled and crooked. She waggled them slowly. Feet: how strange they are, tuberous and pulpy, like things growing under water. I looked away, embarrassed; strange that the littlest intimacies, such as a pair of bared feet, can make a mortal flinch, even one as stoutly bucolic as Mr. Duffy. Above the hollow where the house is set the sky was a deep, packed blue, with here and there small clouds stuck to it like dabs of cotton wool — what a make-believe world it seems sometimes, no more than a child’s bright daub. The cat came stalking across the cobbles and, ignoring me — obviously he had decided I must be a phantom — rubbed his flank against Ivy’s bony bare shins that are diamonded all over with the marks of old chilblains.

“You mean,” I said, “where would I live?” I ran a hand through my hair. Duffy is vain of this hair, so black, so glossy, so extravagantly waved. He never washes it, but lets it maintain itself, as an animal its pelt. He does not take care of his teeth, either, it seems, for when I sucked on them just now at the side I got a most unpleasant bitter taste, like wormwood. “That’s the question, though, isn’t it?” I said.

As can be seen, in the matter of wooing I am not my father’s son. What I lack in intensity, however, I make up for in cunning. You shall see.

Suddenly, violently, almost, Ivy rose from the chair and pushed past me into the room carrying the chicken cradled in her arms, where now it suggested not an oldster’s backside but a fat, grey baby. Her damp soles had left wonderfully slim, stylised outlines of themselves on the blue step — odd, that such ugly extremities should make such lovely prints. The cat scampered nimbly after her without a sound. I did not quit the doorway but continued leaning against the jamb and turned my head and followed Ivy with my eye. What have I done with my cigarette? She set the chicken on its back on the table with its neck dangling over the edge and its claws retracting on themselves slowly in a gruesome and unnerving fashion.

“If you have something to say to me,” she said, in a voice that had a noticeable shake to it, “come out and say it, then.”

What a striking tableau we must have made, a genre scene by one of the minor Dutch masters, me in the bright doorway and she in the smouldering dimness of the room and the still-life chicken on the table; look at the cat, the crockery on the dresser, delph, they call it — from Delft! — the red and black floor-tiles, and that glimpse of the sunlit day behind me in the door, mute and calm as money. Poor Ivy braced a hand on the table to support herself and looked at me with a look so needy and defenceless even I experienced a qualm. Something to say? I had nothing to say. I was just amusing myself, toying with one of my creatures, as so often is the way.

Turning to go, I nodded in the direction of the jug. “That milk,” I said, “is gone sour.”

Adam feels like Adam on the first day in the Garden. He is bowling along, yes, bowling along a country lane in his father’s ancient station-wagon with his elbow set in the rolled-down window, whistling “Lillibullero,” the only tune he knows. The car is one of the original Salsol models, fitted with a prototype salt-water converter, which makes such a racket, housed in a big black box set lengthways under the front seats. The passenger window also is wide open and in the straight stretches where he puts his foot down there is a wild green rushing and thrashing on either side of him that makes his heart pound with a childish excitement. The mid-morning sun is shining strongly and the air flowing in from outside is redolent of fragrant dust and grass and a myriad growing things too faint and jumbled together to identify or name, even if he knew the names. At one time, when he was young, he had thought of becoming a professional gardener, not that he had a great feeling for husbandry or a great knowledge of what it entails, but he had believed it would be a pleasant and productive way of making a living. His interest had been sparked by the recent overturning of Wallace’s theory of evolution and the resulting to-do in the natural sciences that everyone was talking about; however, nothing came of his plan — another false start. Through gaps in the hedge he catches glimpses of gorse bushes yellowly aflame on the low hillsides, and in the hollows there are lingering blurs of morning mist. He is absurdly happy, perilously so — as is well known, human happiness is a great provocation to us. Under the flaccid worm in his lap he harbours still a warm, sticky smear of juices, his and Helen’s mingled. At the thought of his golden wife he stops whistling and closes his eyes for a moment, remembering her this morning in the bedroom, in his shirt, advancing on him bare-legged along the length of the bed. The wind seizes his hair and shakes it. Yes, we gods do sometimes smile on our creation, but only sometimes, and never for long.

Is it not affecting to see him so pleased with himself, when we think of all that occurred earlier up there in his old room, while he was prowling the house unsuspectingly in that delayed hour before dawn? Mind you, it is a nice question whether he was betrayed by Helen and my Dad, in the technical sense, I mean. After all, Helen did not know the true identity of her divine lover, and thought he was her Adam, as why would she not? Then she decided it was all a dream and proceeded to reenact as best she could what had happened in it, this time with her true, that is, her real, husband. And so passionate was she, fired with the godhead’s inspiration, so wanton, indeed, to her husband’s surprise and somewhat scandalised delight — after all, they were in the very bedroom where his hottest boyhood dreams were dreamt — that it could be said my father did nothing but prepare the way for the young man, this fellow whistling for happiness now as he steers the rattly old Salsol one-handed along these green lanes, bathed in remembering bliss.

He has a secret, one he will tell to no one, not even his wife, for fear of ridicule. He believes unshakeably in the possibility of the good. Not the transcendent piety of the saints, not the abstract entity of the philosophers, but that unemphatic impulse which, he is convinced, is the source of countless humble and largely unregarded decencies, decencies that in turn feed and sustain the source of their inspiration. Now, this would be a harmless fancy, if he did not conceive of the good as a thing in itself, active and forceful, and independent of any agent. For him, good and evil are two species of virus competing against each other for hegemony in the heart of man, with good managing to hold the upper hand, though barely. It is a not uncommon delusion among many millions since the days when the pale Galilean walked amongst you, or from earlier still, from the dawn of that awful day when Moses came marching down the mount with the news inscribed in stone that there is but one God and thou shalt have no other. But thou shouldst have stuck with us. We offer you no salvation of the soul, but no damnation, either; no afterlife in which to be bored for all eternity; no parousia, no day of reckoning and divine retribution, no kingdom of heaven on earth; nothing, in fact, except stories, comforting or at least comfortingly reasonable accounts of how and why things are as they are and by what means they may be maintained or even, on occasion, rare occasion, altered. If the wise man suffers it is due to a hidden flaw in him that we deplore, if the tyrant prospers it is because we admire his overweening and irresistible will. Why plague? — because your king is cursed. How shall your armies be victorious in battle? — place oxen and the odd virgin before our graven images and slit their throats. Sometimes we ask terrible things of you — think of Iphigenia, think of Iphigenia’s father — and often we give you nothing in return. It is our way of demonstrating to you the inscrutable action of Fate. Above all, we would have you acknowledge and accept that the nature of your lives is tragic, not because life is cruel or sad — what are sadness and cruelty to us? — but because it is as it is and Fate is unavoidable, and, above all, because you will die and be as though you had never been. That is the difference between us and your mealy-mouthed Saviour, so-called — we do not pretend to be benign, but are playful only, and endlessly diverted by the spectacle of your heart-searchings and travails of the spirit.