John Banville - The Infinities

Petra is upstairs in what is grandly called the morning room. It is a gloomy and inhospitable place and people rarely come up here, at morning or at any other time of day — the house has many such unused rooms — and she can work undisturbed. She has spread out her textbooks and medical dictionaries on the half-moon table with the spindly legs that stands against the wall opposite the windows. The table, which is old, has a wonderfully rich patina, and there are many deep and blackened scars in the surface of it, though the edges of them have been smoothed by age. How many others before her over the years have sat here like this, at this table, working, in the silence of a summer day? She pictures herself as someone looking on would see her, bent over her papers, pen in hand, like an engraving in an old book of a scholar at work on some legendary, abstruse concordance. Although she is right-handed she holds the pen as a left-hander does, her fist curled in on itself and the sharp knuckles white where the bones gleam under the stretched skin.

This is a marked day in the progress of her encyclopaedia of human morbidity, to which she has given the title Florilegium Moribundus Humanae —she is not sure if the Latin is correct but she is pleased with the sound of it — for she has just finished her entry on azotaemia, the last of the As, and tomorrow will make a start on the Bs, with bacillaemia, or possibly Babinski reflex, although strictly the latter is a symptom not a disease. She is writing in the quarto-sized blank manuscript book with the repeated fleur-de-lis design on the cover that her father brought home to her one year, from Florence, she thinks, it was, for her birthday. She writes with a steel pen, in lavender ink, with vigilance and concentration, always anxious not to make a blot. She likes the scratchy sound the nib makes on the heavy, cream-laid paper. To ensure the lines are straight she uses a ruler and a special implement with a toothed metal wheel to trace a ghostly track along which to write. She hears faintly, all the way from town, the Angelus bell. A trapped fly buzzes in a corner of the window behind her; the sound is like that of a tiny electric motor with an intermittent fault. She is not thinking of anything, especially not of Roddy Wagstaff, resting in his room after the rigours of his two-hour train journey. She is calm. Her mind floats like a hair on water. She writes along the ghostly dotted line: an abnormal concentration of urea and other nitrogenous bodies in the blood—

She had heard Rex barking down at the gate and at first paid no heed, but now something, some registering nerve between her shoulder-blades, alerts her that someone is approaching the house. She rises from the desk and goes to the window, still with the pen in her hand. She sees the man coming up the drive, with Rex at his heels. She draws back a pace, for fear of being seen herself. She hears the harsh sound of the man’s tread on the gritted surface of the driveway. Watching him, she feels a sharp leap of misgiving, like the needle of mercury shooting up the barrel of a thermometer. She wonders who he can be, and how he got here, and what he might want. She does not like strangers coming to the house, especially like this, on foot, seemingly out of nowhere. It is her father being ill that has upset everything, and it is this that has brought this man now, too, she is sure of it. She is not sure what to do. Someone will answer his knock and let him in, but maybe he should be refused entry — maybe he should be sent on his way at once, without delay.

Abruptly she turns and flies from the room and across the landing and down the stairs two at a time, three at a time, and hauls open the heavy front door just as the man is lifting his hand to the knocker. He rears back in startlement, and Petra starts, too, so that they are both equally surprised, he at her and she at herself. There is the sense not of a door having opened but of a panel being slid aside between two worlds, and the outdoors seems to her unnaturally bright, as if lit from above not by the sun but by unseen giant lamps. She is breathing hard, and her cheeks are flushed. The man smiles. He says something she does not catch, his name, it must be. Rex, behind, puts out his head at the side of the man’s knees and looks at her, questioning, uncertain. She moves back, jerking her arm out stiffly from her side in a curt invitation to the man to enter. He steps forward, stumbling a little on the raised stone threshold, and moves past her into the hall with his teetering, wincing gait — he is like a comically overweight ballet dancer whose shoes are too small and pinching him terribly. “Do you mind if I sit?” he says, although he has already plumped himself down in the tall, forbidding black armchair with wings that stands beside the hall-stand; she has never known anyone to sit in it before. “Pouf!” the man says, ballooning his cheeks. He takes out his handkerchief and mops his face again. His pasty skin gleams as if covered all over with a fine film of oil. His fat lower lip hangs loose, and she can see the tip of his tongue, pointed and greyly wet. “Sorry,” he says, with a desperate smile, panting harder to show her how out of breath he is. “Hot.” He glances questioningly downwards — she is still holding the pen, poised as if to write, on air. She puts her hand quickly behind her back. She remembers the sound of the fly against the window-pane, its buzzing wings; to be trapped like that, she thinks, sealed off inexplicably from all that day and air and light outside, how terrible. “Your name,” he says, and taps a finger to his forehead. “I know I should know it.”

Rex stands in the doorway watching them with keen alertness, swishing his tail warily from side to side.

“Petra,” she says. Why should he have known her name? — how would he have known it?

“Petra. That’s right.” He casts about him absently. Seated, he has sunk into himself, and seems to have no neck, and his head moves like a large, heavy ball set in a shallow socket.

“My father can’t see anyone,” Petra says, more stridently than she had intended. “I mean, he’s not well.”

The man continues his vacant interrogation of the hall as if he had not heard her. “I could do with a drink,” he says. “Do you think there might be a drink? A glass of water would do.”

She looks to the open doorway, a tall box of light, where Rex still stands, with his tail still going, swish, swish. She is the only one, apart from the dog, who has seen this man, the only one who knows he is here. She could tell him to go now, could order him to leave, and no one in the house would be the wiser. If she shuts the door he will stay. But would he go, even if she told him to? From the ugly, throne-like chair he is looking up at her fatly from under his eyelashes, his small moist valve-like mouth twisted up to one side in a smile of friendly amusement.

Whoever, whatever, he claims to be, I, Hermes the messenger, I know who he is. Et in Arcadia ille —They told Thamouz the great god Pan is dead, but they were wrong. If he misbehaves, as I know he will, I shall box his ears, the scamp.

“Really thirsty,” he says, prompting. “The road? — the dust?”

“Yes,” Petra answers, swaying a little where she stands, as if in a trance. “The dust.”

So now there are three of us haunting the house, my father, me, and this rascal who has just arrived. This is a pretty pass. Yet I should not speak of this or that personage when speaking of the immortal gods — we are all one even in our separateness — and when I use the word “father,” say, or “him,” or, for that matter, “me,” I do so only for convenience. These denotations are so loose, in the context, so crude, as to be almost meaningless. Almost, but not quite, yes. They shed a certain light, feeble as it is. They are a kind of penumbra, one might say, surrounding and testifying to the presence of an ineffable entity. But what a darkling chasm there lies between that glimmer and the speck it would illuminate. Adam used to find himself groping through a similarly frustrating gulf of indefiniteness whenever he was called upon to step outside the safe confines of the grand consistory and address the more fanciful of his notions to a larger world. He always deplored the humble objects out of which his predecessors — so many of whom he helped to discredit — forged their metaphors, all those colliding billiard balls and rolling dice, the lifts going up and coming down, ships passing each other in the benighted night. Yet how else were they to speak that which cannot be spoken, at least not in the common tongue? He sought to cleave exclusively to numbers, figures, concrete symbols. He knew, of course, the peril of confusing the expression of something with the something itself, and even he sometimes went astray in the uncertain zone between the concept and the thing conceptualised; even he, like me, mistook sometimes the manifestation for the essence. Because for both of us this essence is essentially inessential, when it comes to the business of making manifest. For me, the gods; for him, the infinities. You see the fix we are in.