John Banville - The Infinities

The little station when Adam arrives there is deserted, no station master, no porter, no waiting passengers. He is early, the train is not due for another fifteen minutes, and besides it is sure to be late, as it usually is. The station is by the river, miles from anywhere, not even attached to a village — why was it built here, at the desolate edge of a marsh? It must have been for the convenience of some grand house nearby that is now long gone. Adam thinks of the past piled up behind him, its countless overlapping layers, and of what will have been his own brief moment on this so tender, frail and suffering earth. He parks outside the ticket office and walks through to the platform unchallenged. The pair of tweed trousers he is wearing, which he found in the wardrobe in the Sky Room, have begun to chafe the inner sides of his thighs. What was he thinking, to put them on? It seemed the necessary thing, at the time. This is another mark of his inherent and humble piety, this sense he has of the sacramental in even the smallest, even the most absurd, of actions. Well, holy these trousers may be, but he suspects they are not clean: they have an unpleasant smell, at once stale and sharp. They are the wrong fit, being tight at the waist and short in the leg, like the pyjamas he wore last night. Still, small as they are on him they are too roomy to have been Pa’s, so whose, again, can they have been? He experiences a flash of anger. Is the house itself set on making a fool of him, getting him up in these laughable outfits and sending him stumbling into the world like a village idiot? But he knows it is not the house’s fault that he looks foolish: it is his own.

He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the black hoop thing that porters carry on their shoulders, who used to be a fixture of the place? The emptiness is eerie. He paces for a while, then sits down on one of the benches; the new varnish with the sun on it is hot and gummy to the touch. Beyond the tracks the grass is sere and ticks faintly in the heat.

Beyond that again the broad reach of the river is a whitish-blue drift throwing off fish-scales of platinum light. The silence buzzes. Down on the track a ragged grey crow hops jerkily from sleeper to sleeper, looking for something, does not find it, gives a disgruntled croak and flaps away. The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlit surface of the day, like a clumsy gardener putting his foot through a vegetable frame to the humid tangle of things beneath. He gets up from the bench and paces anew, more agitatedly this time.

He is prey again to the fear that his marriage is failing. There is nothing definite he can point to, as that big red hand points towards the jakes, only over the past year he has been aware of an increasing vagueness, an increasing insubstantiality, in his life with Helen. Something is fading, becoming bleached and dry. Does she blame him for the miscarriage? He does not see how it could have been his fault but maybe in some way it was. He cannot be sure; he cannot be sure of anything. The fact of the lost baby, the non-fact of it, is a tiny, desolate presence always between them, getting in the way. Sometimes when Helen looks at him it is as if she does not know who he is. He feels he is retreating in her sight, like a man standing on a railway platform, being looked back at from a window as the train pulls out, slowly at first, then gradually gaining speed. He imagines her turning from the window and settling herself on the plush seat, smiling at the other passengers in that unfocused way that she does, and taking up a magazine, and him already growing distant in her mind—

Suddenly, as if the thought had conjured the thing, the real train comes shuffling into view down the line, one of the newfangled models that run on steam, the big imperial-blue engine with the black cow-catcher and the carriages after it, scarlet with gold piping around the doors and windows, all shimmering in a silky veil of heat-haze rising from the track. On time, for once!

— And yet, an hour ago, when she came stumping comically on her knees over the bed to him and seized his face and pressed it against her breasts and laughed her tigerish laugh, surely he was wholly there, wholly himself, flesh and blood and solidly present in her arms?

What casuistries they are capable of, even the simplest-minded among them, what fine distinctions and discriminations they devise! This is what we never cease to marvel at, the mountains they make out of the molehills of their passions, while all the time their real, their savage, selves are crouched in hiding behind those outcrops, scanning the surrounds for danger or opportunity, for predators or prey.

When the train draws to a stop Roddy Wagstaff is the only passenger to get down. Tall and slender and slightly stooped, Roddy has the aspect of a film heart-throb of a former time. He wears narrow fawn slacks sharply pressed, and pale-tan, slip-on shoes, and a white shirt that fairly shines in the sunlight, the collar open over a loosely knotted yellow cravat. His caramel-coloured hair is parted at the side and carefully arranged in a casual sweep across his brow. He has green eyes and a phthisic pallor. A white linen jacket is folded over one arm, and he carries a slim pigskin suitcase, old but good, which for some reason adds a touch of the sinister to his appearance. When he sees who is there to meet him a delicate frown concentrates itself between his rather close-set eyes. He casts a dubious glance at Adam’s rust-coloured trousers and the three inches of ankle showing below the turn-ups. “Oh, hello,” he says without warmth. Like Adam’s father, Roddy does not bother with proper names.

The two young men walk side by side along the platform. Adam spots on the wall outside the waiting room a faded tin advertisement for Player’s Navy Cut — lifebuoy with rope, stout Jack Tar, and distantly behind him on the rolling main a pair of three-masters under full sail — that he has never noticed until now although it must have been there since before he was born. Time once again brushes him glancingly with its cold wing. As if prompted by the advertisement Roddy pauses to take out of the pocket of his linen jacket a flat silver cigarette case, flips it open and chooses a cigarette and lights it with a petrol lighter of the same antique vintage as the silver case. A waft of rich, exotic smoke reaches Adam’s nostrils. They walk on.

“Your father,” Roddy says between puffs, “how is he?” He does not look at Adam. Roddy affects always a distracted mien, distracted and faintly gloomy, as if he were in constant anticipation of something that he is certain will displease him. His hands betray a slight tremor.

“Much the same,” Adam says.

“The same as what?” Roddy almost snaps. “You forget, I haven’t seen him since he suffered the stroke.”

They come out on the station steps. Roddy’s sour expression softens when he sees the familiar old Salsol with its lacquered, brown wooden trim waiting for them on the gravel in the sun. Moving forward they pass under a nondescript tree that stands in the heat with its head hanging, and for a second it seems to Adam that Roddy as he enters its shadow fades somehow, becoming a blur, almost transparent, almost vanishing. He blinks, and then Roddy has stepped through into the sunlight again, and is turning back to him, saying something. “Yes,” Adam replies, “yes,” not knowing what he is agreeing to, not listening. He is carrying Roddy’s suitcase, which Roddy set down on the platform when he stopped to light his cigarette and did not bother to pick up again, and now he goes to stow it in the back seat of the station-wagon, and leaning in at the door he pauses and closes his eyes and breathes deep the car’s familiar smells of crusted salt and mildewed leather and human sweat, and at once he catches again faintly a snatch of the melody of that happiness he felt only a little while ago, driving along, and he recalls again too his wife kneeling before him on the bed, her hot hands on his face, her glittering, avid eyes. When he clambers in behind the steering-wheel — even the big station-wagon is too confining for his bulk — he finds Roddy already settled in the passenger seat with his jacket on his lap. He has not finished smoking his cigarette and waves it now airily and says, “You don’t mind, do you?”