John Banville - The Infinities

The heat of the latening morning has intensified and as they drive back along the narrow roads the scent of dry grass and baking earth is stronger than ever and stings their nostrils. Roddy has shut his window but the shuddering rush of air from Adam’s side scatters burning specks of ash from the tip of his cigarette and forces him to stub out the last quarter of it in the ashtray under the dashboard.

“Pete is looking forward to seeing you,” Adam says. “She has been up since dawn, talking about you.”

“Oh, God,” Roddy murmurs, and looks out at the high hedgerow streaming past. Roddy knows what Petra’s day-long monologues are like. “Is she still collecting diseases?”

“Still at it,” Adam answers with spiteful cheer. Roddy finds Petra’s projects exasperating. Her latest is an almanac of ailments in which she aims to list, complete with clinical definitions, all the illnesses known to afflict mankind. “How far has she got?”

“Astasia-abasia is the most recent one I heard her mention.” Roddy turns to look at him. “Losing the will to stand up and walk. Rare, but recorded, so she claims.”

“God,” Roddy moans again.

I, by the way, in case you have forgotten me, am perched in the middle of the back seat, leaning forward eagerly with my hands pressed between my knees — I have knees, I can perch — taking in everything, words, gestures, looks, noting it all, for this that is happening, or not happening, between these two is what they call life.

“You should take her out somewhere,” Adam says.

Roddy snickers. “A hike, you mean, something like that? A tramp in the hills?”

“Why not? Or take her into town.”

“Into town?”

“Yes, take her out to lunch.”

Roddy is looking at him again. “Take Petra, to town, for lunch?”

“Well, just for a walk, then — anything. She’s lonely, Roddy. She’s too much on her own. It is not good for her.”

To this Roddy makes no reply, only turns to the windscreen again with a deep, irritated sigh. Roddy’s ways are older than his years would warrant. In his middle twenties, he has the manner, by turns prickly and jaded, of a much more elderly man. He leads a mysterious life, being of shadowy provenance and uncertain intent. It is hard to know exactly how he makes his living. Pieces by him appear occasionally in the pages of broadsheet newspapers and in the glossier magazines, on abstruse subjects — Byzantine ceramics, American vernacular furniture of the nineteenth century, contemporary monastic life on Mount Athos — but these can hardly provide an income sufficient to keep him in the Turkish cigarettes and silk foulards to which he is so partial. His people are said to have money, but his relatives, those numerous rich great-aunts and venerable landed cousins whom he makes frequent mention of, all seem to be distressingly long-lived. One night when he was staying for the weekend at Arden he drank a glass of wine too many and confessed to young Adam his plan to persuade young Adam’s father to appoint him his official biographer. Adam laughed at this, to Roddy’s hurt surprise. The following morning, crapulent and shaky, Roddy took Adam off into a corner and swore him to secrecy on the night’s blurted indiscretion, and even yet Adam is aware of a certain restraint towards him, however grudging, on the part of an otherwise sharp-tongued Roddy.

They hurtle down the green lane and then come out on the Hunger Road, a long, straight stretch of smooth tarmac running beside the river. It dates from the famine times, a make-work project for the unemployed poor and starving of the county. Adam feels uneasy on this road. A sense of its desperate purposelessness weighs on him. All this area of marsh and slobland is uncanny. Everything seems to face away, looking stolidly elsewhere, and even when it is sunny the sunshine appears watered and weak. The river drifts into the estuary here, and the widening expanse of water, flatter somehow than even water should be, is featureless and forlorn. There are wide stands of sedge, dry and grey — why is it, Adam wonders, that one never sees green sedge? — and herons and an occasional egret, the latter seeming the smaller, pure-white ghosts of the former, and a black cormorant perched on a log with wings spread wide to dry, as though posing for its portrait as an imperial emblem. Forgotten jetties, their silvered planking smashed or crumbling, extend a yard or two into the water and abruptly halt. There are broad sheets of shiny, indigo-tinted mud arrowed all over with the prints of wading birds, and here and there a rowing boat or a duck-shooter’s white-painted punt is stuck at a drunken angle in the sludge. At a point where the river narrows, a mysterious wooden footbridge with a rusted hand-rail crosses from one sodden bank to the other, going from nowhere to nowhere.

Adam is wondering idly where exactly it is that the river ends and the estuary begins. Beside him Roddy is trying to light another cigarette but the draught keeps snatching the flame of his lighter. Adam pretends not to notice, and will not roll up his window despite the sulphurous reek of mud and rotting seaweed being borne in from outside. “How was the journey down?” he asks. Roddy, annoyedly fitting the unlit cigarette back into its case, looks askance with an exaggerated frown, pretending to find the question too baffling in its simple-mindedness for him to begin to comprehend it. “The train,” Adam says, in a louder voice. “How was it?”

Roddy shrugs. “I don’t know. Same as usual, I suppose — dirty, slow.”

Adam nods absently; he is used to Roddy’s languid rudenesses. Of course, he is thinking, there would be no line or boundary at which the river stops being the river and the estuary starts being the estuary: they would flow into each other, necessarily, back and forth, according to the onward rush of the river and the more or less pressure of the alternating tides. Yet there must be some area of demarcation, surely, however broad or amorphous. He ponders the problem and, having pondered, comes to the conclusion that it is not a matter of the river being one thing and the estuary another; all that separates them, really, and it is not a real separation at all, is his having put the question in the first place. For the question is premised on two, manmade, terms — river, estuary — whereas in fact there is but one body of water, commingling here at the whim of unceasing flow on one side and of changing tides on the other; any separation is a separation made only by the action of his asking. This is strange.

“Does your father speak at all?” Roddy enquires. “I mean, can he?” There is a tinge of umbrage to his tone. The world keeps putting hindrances in his way, of which Adam Godley’s sudden collapse is the most recent and, for the moment, most serious example.

“Oh, no,” Adam says. “He’s in a coma.” Roddy nods. “But of course,” Adam continues, “no one can say how deep the coma is. He may be aware at some level, and able to think, and hear, for all we know. La says she’s convinced he’s conscious but just can’t communicate — she says he opens his eyes, though no one else has seen him do it. You might talk to him. He always did like having a talk with you.”

Roddy glances at him sharply, suspecting irony.

A further thought has struck Adam. Salt — what about salt? The river is fresh water but the sea is saline. That is a definite distinction. He does not know why he did not think of it at once, especially since — thanks to the discovery of cold fusion, the science of it founded, to the surprise of all, on his father’s notorious Brahma equations — the greater part of the world’s energy nowadays is derived from brine. And there is motion, too. All very well to speak of whim, but when the river’s outgoing flow meets the tide’s incoming flood there are two forces in opposition, and two forces mean two separate things doing the forcing. Then after all it is not merely a matter of man — in this case Adam himself — proposing, but of fact disposing. River here, estuary there, not two names only but two discrete entities. Yet where do they merge, exactly? He sighs. He is back to where he started.