John Banville - The Infinities

He wonders for how long she had been planning to go. Would she have made a plan, she who seemed to live as if each moment were discontinuous from all others? His mother was furious, at Dorothy and at him, insisting at first it must have been an accident, then accusing him and saying it was his fault, that by his neglect of her he had driven Dottie to her death.

When they took her body from the water there were stones in the pockets of her dress. How could she have thought a few stones would weigh her down and carry her to the bottom? Yet something had.

He accepted all his mother’s charges, and blamed himself — they always do, as if they were the lords of life and death — and blames himself still, when he remembers to. The nights are especially hard. He tosses on his bed, sweating and moaning and muttering imprecations, like a martyr being roasted on a grid. He must not have loved her enough, that must be it. When he was young, the lesson he learned from his mother, as much by cuffs as caresses, was that love is action — what you do, not what you feel — but perhaps, he thinks now, it was a false lesson, and that love is something else altogether, something he knows nothing of. He sees it, this love, hovering like the Paraclete above the heads of a fig-leafed Cranach couple, streaming divine grace down upon them in burning rays. Where was his soul when this pentecostal fire was falling from the sky?

And the girl, now, the girl in Venice, Alba, was she Dottie’s ghost, come back to comfort him? Perhaps she was. Sometimes a soul will be permitted a brief return from Pluto’s domain by that taciturn gate-keeper and his polycephalic hound, but I do not know if she was one of them — I only conduct them thither not thence, for Pluto is a jealous god and fiercely guards his dread domain. Yes, yes, I know, I tried to do Orpheus a favour, he was so heartsore, but look at the consequences. Poor Eurydice, and poorer Orpheus, first losing his wife, then losing her a second time, then losing himself and ending up a severed head bobbing on Hebrus’s little waves, singing still. I often think that for all our powers, or precisely because of them, we should not be allowed to meddle in mortal affairs, considering the catastrophes that our meddlings result in more often than not.

Once, many years later, Adam saw her again — Alba, I mean, not Dorothy, for he sees her every day, in a manner of speaking. This second sighting took place not in Venice but some small landlocked Italian city, he cannot remember which one. He was sure it was she, although it was the merest glimpse he had of her, in the street, in the midst of shuffling crowds. She looked no older than she had that afternoon in the house under the Salute, but she was changed, greatly changed. She was in a wheelchair, being pushed by another young woman, short and round and of a resentful aspect, with a frizz of red hair like so many filaments of copper wire bristling with electricity. This person also Adam was convinced he recognised. Was she not there, in the background, that day in Venice, when he was trying to leave and got into a wrangle over money with the Count? The Count, though firm about his fee, remained amusedly forbearing, showing the faintly rueful, patient smile of an adult being haggled with by a clamorous child over sweets, while, yes, there behind him this red-headed, fat young woman prowled the room in seeming anger, smoking a long cigarette and ejecting smoke in thin quick jets, like squirts of venom. How strange, the way they come and go, memory’s figments. The wheelchair in which Alba sat, or better say was held fast, was of the old-fashioned kind, black, with a wooden hoop, worn smooth by long use, attached to the wheels on either side for the occupant to grasp and propel herself onwards, or backwards, for that matter, and two handles behind should she need to be pushed, which evidently, today, she did. She was clutching the padded arms of the chair and leaning forward urgently, her upper body twisted tensely off to one side, as if her helper had started off pushing her without warning while she was in the act of trying to pull herself up forcibly out of the seat. Her feet, with those slightly splayed, blunt toes that he surprised himself by remembering so clearly, were braced on the foot-rests, as if she might be about to make another desperate and doomed attempt at leaping up and effecting an escape. She wore a childish pair of transparent, cheap pink plastic sandals. The look of thrilled expectancy that he had remarked that afternoon in front of the god had become one of furious distraction; the marvellous thing she had been waiting for would not come, now. She was talking to herself, her lips moving in a slack, rapid mumbling, like a penitent in the confessional gabbling out a litany of sins and urgently demanding forgiveness. He might have hailed her, might have followed after the two of them and accosted them, but what would he have said, what done? Instead, he went on standing there in the lemony sunlight of the Italian noon, and saw again Venice in winter, the grimy air and the wheeling gulls, and gnarled old Charon the boatman crooning for his coin.

Rex the dog is the first to spy the stranger toiling over the crest of the hill from the direction of the railway line. It’s long past noon and a hazy stillness has settled over the fields. The trees stand seething in the heat. The air is grey-blue and lax. Everything shimmers. The man is short and fat and rather than walk he seems to roll along wobblingly, like a floppy tyre come loose from its wheel. He wears a black suit and a white shirt open at the collar. He keeps to the shaded side of the road. He seems to be in some distress — he must be sweating, in that suit. He is an unlikely apparition, on foot, on this leafy hillside. Rex is not surprised, however, for he has lived among people long enough to be accustomed by now to their frequently inexplicable ways. His sight is not what it was but his other senses are as keen as ever, his sense of smell in particular. He lifts his nose, which is the size and texture of a wet truffle, and sniffs the air, scanning for any hint of the man that a straying breeze might bring him. There is a tiny gland high up inside his muzzle, almost between his eyes, that can detect a single molecule of scent — and they boast of their opposable thumb! He is standing in the gateway at the end of the drive. Despite his age he cuts a commanding figure, with his square brow and thick-set shoulders. His tail has the elegant sweep of a frond of palm moving in a breeze. He strains his old eyes to make out the man’s face but it remains a whitish blob. He produces one of his deep, far-carrying barks, which starts out in his belly and makes him give a little hop on his front paws. He turns his head to look back at the house. No door has opened, no one has appeared on the steps, not even a curtain twitches. Should he allow the stranger to enter, if he means to enter?

Which, as it turns out, he does. He arrives at the gate, gasping a little and dishevelled. Man and dog regard each other, then the man clicks his tongue and extends a hand and pats the dog’s head, and the dog wags his tail. The stranger has a strong dark juicy smell, very pungent, a foreign smell, redolent of far away. “Hello, Rex,” he says affably. Rex is astonished. How does the man know his name? He is smiling, too. “Anyone home?” he asks, and shades his eyes with his hand and peers up the drive in the direction of the house. He has a bald pate ringed by a laurel-wreath of shiny black curls, an unhealthy-looking, bulbous face, white as a plate, and a nose like a broken little finger; his chubby, babyish hands seem pushed like corks into the ends of his fat arms. From the breast pocket of his suit he takes out a large white handkerchief and mops his brow and the pendulous bag of grey, froggy flesh under his chin. He steps past Rex on to the drive, and an ancient instinct urges the dog to sink his teeth into the fellow’s ankle, but instead he sets off ambling in his wake, letting his hot tongue loll in the blissfully cool though dusty air.