John Banville - The Infinities

Take this fellow whom Petra, despite her misgivings, has let into the house. The name he is going under is Benny Grace. What he is doing here, or thinks to do, I cannot say, although I have my suspicions, oh, indeed, I have. Should I fly down from the roof now — you remember the sad little effigy of me we chanced upon up there atop the Sky Room? — and give him an admonitory skelp of my serpented staff? With the likes of him, if he has a like, it is always well to get in early. I know him and his disruptive ways — how would I not? Look at him, squatting there in that grotesque chair, sunk in the puddle of himself with his fingers laced together in his lap and his fat knees lolling apart and that big, shapeless bag abulge between his thighs. Who does he think he is, who does he think he is pretending to be? Benny Grace, indeed — I shall give him Benny Grace. The dog is seated beside him, leaning a shoulder companionably against his leg. The girl stands with her hands clasped and gazes at the stranger helplessly. The day flags for a moment and all goes still. Benny Grace lifts his eyes to the ceiling, smiling his crooked little smile.

And upstairs, in the stillness of his darkened room, Adam on his bed has sensed the stranger’s entry into the house as a faint, far-off tremor, a shimmer in the general atmosphere. He too heard Rex’s alerting bark at the gate and then the commotion Petra made when she bounded down the stairs to fling open the front door. Now he is uneasy. Whoever it is that has been allowed entry here is no common caller. Adam has always entertained a lively sense of the numinous. Oh, yes, he has, unlikely though it might seem, for a man of his cast of mind. The gods that oversee his world are not divine, exactly, the demons not exactly devilish, yet gods they are and demons, as palpably present to him as the invisibles he has devoted his life to studying, the particles thronging in boundless space and the iron forces marshalling them. For all the famed subtlety of his speculative faculties, his is a simple faith. Since there are infinities, indeed, an infinity of infinities, as he has shown there to be, there must be eternal entities to inhabit them. Yes, he believes in us, and takes it that the hitherto unimagined realm beyond time that he discovered is where we live.

— Benny Grace! All at once it comes to him. That is who the newcomer must be. There is no doubt, he is certain of it. Benny — who else? I should have known, he thinks, I think. I should have known.

For Petra the life of the house, which is the only life she knows, is a process of endless, painstaking filling-in, as if a myriad-pieced jigsaw puzzle, or a vast cryptic crossword, had been thrust in front of her for her to solve. Now she must find the place in the puzzle to fit Benny Grace into, a blank that is exactly Benny-shaped. He tells her he has come to see her father — oh, but of course, why else does anyone ever come here? — but instead she thinks of her mother. Perhaps her mother needs to be protected against him: could that be it? He does not seem malign yet there is something about him that is distinctly unsettling. He reminds her of Mr. Punch. Perhaps he will lay about her mother with a club. Petra does not like her mother but thinks that she must love her, for what else can this inarticulable tangle of pity, remorse and yearning be, if not love? Her mother presses them all down, all of them here in the house, even Pa, though he may not know it. She does not intend to, but she does, blowing aimlessly this way and that, like the wind over a cornfield. Perhaps Benny Grace will do something magical, not ply a cudgel but wave a wand, stilling all agitations, so that they will all, Pa, too, perhaps, they will all rise up, singly and in pairs, trembling with surprise and pleasure, in the calm, soft air.

She has taken Benny into the downstairs living room, which she feels is as far into the domestic interior as he should be allowed to penetrate, for now. The room is on a corner of the house and has two tall sash windows at right angles to each other, one looking across the gravelled semi-circle in front of the house and the other on to a dense and vaguely menacing confusion of rhododendron bushes with burnished leaves and lurking, arthritic limbs. The ceiling is high and smoked to a soft shade of woodbine, and there is always a pleasantly tarry smell of turf from the fireplace, even now at the heart of summer when the fire has not been lit for months. The sofas and the armchairs are covered with faded chintz, the sofas sagging in their middles like the backs of elderly ponies. There are footstools the worse for wear, a brass coal bucket stands in the grate, and on the walls are hung native weapons, fearsome things, axes, assegais, knobkerries, and immensely long, slender spears adorned with feathers blackened by age, the leaf-shaped bronze blades of which have the shiny look of much-rubbed, ancient leather. Benny’s presence makes her see these things anew, or even as if for the first time. She notices the silvery tarnish along the seams of the chintz where it is most worn, the rich deep shine in the dents in the coal bucket — why does that brassy shine make her think of Alexander the Great? — the mouse-coloured dust laid in neat lines like flocked trimming along the slender shafts of the spears.

“My father liked this room best,” she says. She does not know if it is true, or why she said it; it is she who likes it, her father does not bother about liking things, not things like rooms, anyway. “It was — is — his favourite,” she says loudly, as if expecting to be contradicted, “his favourite room, this one, in all the house.”

Benny nods, glancing about, seeming calmly pleased with all that his eye lights on. He has an air of waiting, in calm anticipation, for something of mild interest that he has been assured will take place in due course. He is peculiarly undemanding. He does not seem to mind that she has so little to say to him — he has not much to say to her, either — and all he has asked for is a drink, and although he has had to ask for it more than once he betrays not the slightest hint of impatience. It is Ivy Blount at last who ventures up from the kitchen bearing on a small brass tray a misted glass of water. The water, the surface of which trembles almost imperceptibly, is clouded and looks like recently melted ice — there is always air in the pipes here at Arden — but Benny drinks it off without hesitation and even smacks his lips. Ivy takes the empty glass on to her tray like a nurse receiving a specimen and goes out hurriedly and shuts the door behind her with exaggerated care, making not a sound save for the tiniest click, as of a tongue. Benny again looks around the room, nodding to himself. The sun shining in at one of the windows makes a delicate and complicated cage of light that leans at an angle down from the sill. Petra fixes on one of the buttons in the front of Benny’s white shirt; how strange a thing, she thinks, a button, waxy white like bone, with those two tiny gimlet holes punched side by side in the middle. She is sure Ivy is listening outside the door. It is a thing Ivy does. She reads people’s letters, too. No doubt she is dying to know who Benny Grace is and what he has come here for. Duffy also is curious, it seems, for there he goes, sauntering casually past outside on the gravel, but not so casually that he does not manage to take a quick glance in through the window at the interloper. In fact, it is not Duffy but I, in Duffy’s form — I think I may say I have by now perfected the cowman’s defiant slouch. I must find any ruse I can to keep an eye on Benny, fat and full of himself in his shiny suit with the sweat-stains under the armpits, and his filmed-over soiled white skin and that little squiggle of a nose. He shall not disturb the house any more than I can help.