John Banville - The Infinities

Petra starts at a brazen crash from the hall — Ivy in her agitation dropping the tray, of course — and she excuses herself in a mumble and walks swiftly from the room, trying not to seem to be running away, like timid Ivy. She hears herself breathing. Outside the door she catches a glimpse of Ivy’s heels and her bent back as she ducks down the steps to the kitchen. The house around her has a hushed air, as if there are many ears listening for every slightest sound. Why has it been left to her to deal with this fellow? She still does not know who he is or what he is doing here, except what he said, that he has come to see her father. She follows Ivy down the stairway, hearing the hollow knocking her own feet make on the wooden steps; she feels like an actress who has forgotten her lines making a mortified exit through a trapdoor down from the stage. She thinks of her brother’s wife and scowls inwardly.

Her brother is in the kitchen, sitting at the table tinkering with a radio set. He has taken off the back panel and is poking delicately in the innards with a long, slender screwdriver. His shirt sleeves are rolled. His forearms, each one as big as a small ham, are pink and palely furred. The radio is an ancient model with a cloth grille over the speaker and brown bakelite tuning knobs and a rectangular glass window with the names printed on it of places she has never heard of — Hilversum, for instance, where can Hilversum be? La calls it a wireless, even though, as Petra can plainly see, it is packed inside with wires, coils and coils of them, all different colours.

Ivy Blount is nowhere to be seen. She must have scuttled out by the back door.

Adam is frowning heavily in concentration, his upper lip hooked over the lower one like the tip of a little fat pink thumb, and a slick of hair hangs down across his forehead. He is good at fixing things. This is another reason for his sister to admire him, and to envy and resent him, too. When she comes down the steps he goes on working as if she were not there. She watches him for a moment; how deft he is, despite those big hands, their stubby fingers. He plies the screwdriver as if it were a stiletto. “What’s the matter with Ivy?” he asks without looking up. “She ran through here as though she had seen a ghost.”

She tells him about the arrival of the stranger. “He’s come to see Pa,” she says. “I didn’t know what to say to him.”

He leans more intently forward, probing the blade of the screwdriver deeper among the coloured coils. “What’s his name?” She sees how the back of his neck has gone red as it always does when he is uncertain or upset. The stranger’s coming is making everyone uneasy, first Ivy, now Adam; she is reassured by this, knowing she is not alone.

“I don’t know,” she says. “He told me but I didn’t hear — he talks like Popeye.”

“—the sailor man.”

“What?”

“Popeye the sailor man. I yam what I yam.”

He laughs briefly into the back of the radio. She stands at his shoulder and gazes down at the nape of his neck where the redness has not faded yet. His hair at the nape gathers to a point in a little, coiled curl. He turns up his face to look at her. “What does he want with Pa?” She bites her lip and does not answer. “Did he say he knows him?” She does her shrug, jerking her left arm stiffly out from her side and raising her right shoulder and inclining her cheek to meet it. Adam slowly shakes his head. “Didn’t you ask him anything?” Still she will not answer, and only gazes back at him, dull and sullen. “You’re hopeless.” He turns away from her and takes up the back panel — also bakelite, is it? — and fits it into its slot in the rear of the set and begins to screw it home.

“What’s wrong with it?” she asks.

“What?”

“That”—she points—“radio, wireless, whatever you call it — what’s wrong with it?”

He puts aside the screwdriver and rises from the table, kneading a stiffened shoulder with one of those meaty hands. “Honestly, Pete,” he says. But still he avoids her eye. It is plain he is as nervous as she is before the prospect of Benny Grace. But why should he be unnerved? He lives in the world as she does not; he should be used to unexpected occurrences, things going wrong, people turning up out of the blue.

He follows her up the steps and across the central hall into the living room. They find Benny Grace seated again, in one of the chintz-covered armchairs this time, serene as a figure of the Buddha, just as before, with his knees comfortably splayed and his hands in his lap with the fingers clasped; a small triangle of fish-pale belly shows through a gap in his shirt above the straining waistband of his trousers. As the pair approach he scrambles to his feet; he does not seem much higher standing than he did when seated. “Grace,” he says to Adam, holding out a hand. “Benny Grace.”

Adam frowns.

“My father is ill,” he says, “—did my sister tell you?” Petra notices how he speaks over-loudly too, as she did. “Very ill, in fact.”

Benny nods; he is smiling, as if at some happy piece of news. “Yes, I know, I know.” He waits, still with his smile, his large round head cocked to one side — Adam thinks of a blackbird, plump and alert, its polished eye swivelling.

“He’s in a coma,” he says. “He had a stroke.”

“A stroke.” Benny with lips pursed waggles his head from side to side. “That is too bad. That really is too bad.”

A silence follows. Adam is aware of Petra off to the side, breathlessly taking everything in. “How did you get here?” he asks the little man. He also is aware of the volume at which he is speaking but cannot seem to lower it. Why are they all shouting like this at poor Benny? — it almost makes me feel sorry for him.

“Oh, that was easy,” Benny says easily. He, at least, speaks softly. His tone implies a lifetime of obstacles adroitly negotiated.

“I mean,” Adam persists, unable to stop, “did you come by car?”

Benny shakes his head and shrugs. “I don’t drive,” he says. “Never learned.”

Adam nods helplessly. He feels a sort of panic rising inside him; he is afraid that in a moment he will burst out in whinnies of hysterical laughter. He turns to Petra. “Why don’t you,” he fairly shouts at her, “why don’t you take Mr. Grace up to see Pa?”

The girl frowns sideways at her brother’s knees. “What?” she breathes. Her left leg has begun to jiggle. In those old corduroy trousers and baggy blue shirt, thin and frail and almost bald, she looks like a prison inmate, or a refugee, the survivor of some terrible forced march. Benny links his fingers together again in front of his belly and gazes at her, as if lovingly. “Just a peek?” he says, cajoling. He is a sly old sprite. “So I can say I saw him?”

They turn all three and make for the door, where there is a brief scrimmage as they find themselves inadvertently trying all three to get through it at the same time. From the hall Petra leads Benny Grace up the staircase. Light falls down from the glass roof like silent rain, indifferently, a thing absorbed in something else altogether. At the turn of the landing she falters a second and glances back at her brother, who has stopped in the doorway of the living room and stands there looking up at her. His face is blank, he gives no helping sign. She goes on, upwards, and the higher she goes the deeper her heart sinks. By her side, Benny Grace, goat-footed, pants softly as he climbs. What if Pa should wake up from his coma? What will he say to her, appearing before him suddenly with this stranger at her side? And what would she say to him? How would she account for herself?

Now here they are at the door to the stairs of the Sky Room. Petra knocks, and turns the knob. What air is this that flows down from on high, what spirits guard the way?