John Banville - The Infinities

My peers? Did I say my peers? My peers are all dead.

I did not like the look of Benny Grace. He had a distinctly adhesive aspect. At dinner he again weaseled his way into the seat beside me. Inge should have been sitting there, but was in the ladies’ room, crouched in a cubicle, sick and shaking after her public ordeal. However, not the most attentive lover could have been as irresistibly insinuating as Benny. Each time I chanced to look up from my plate those gleaming black eyes of his were fixed on me merrily, meaningly. Benny’s mode is that of a conductor bending and swaying with hooped arms out-thrust in the effort of scooping up from his orchestra greater and still greater surges of magnificent noise. Beyond the plate-glass wall a breeze silvered the grass and set the birch leaves madly fluttering. How melancholy, this evening that refused to end but kept drawing itself out, thinner and thinner, in the pale, northern light. Benny was leaning forward and over the voices of the others at the table was introducing himself, a hand held out at the end of an arm that would not fully straighten, so plumply packed was it into its sleeve. “I, of course,” he said, “know who you are.”

Now he goes back to join my daughter at the window, overlooking the garden, and begins to explain to her my theory of infinities. Benny loves to explain. Petra is silent; she has heard it all before, but is too polite and well brought up not to give at least the impression of being entranced by novelty. I who now from this angle can no longer see her picture her instead, eyes lowered, arms tightly folded as if to prevent herself from flying apart in fragments, nodding and nodding like a child’s mechanical toy. When she makes herself attend like this, such seemingly is the intensity of her concentration that she takes on the appearance of being thoroughly frightened, of being frozen in fright— of being, in a word, petrified. All the same, it occurs to me that it is she of all the household who will suffer the least agitation at Benny’s coming, I am not sure why — why I think it so, I mean, though I do, or hope so, anyway. That must be the reason the rest of them left it to her to bring Benny up here, to view the remains: they too must have seen that she is not the one to be overwhelmed by him. She is a dear girl, but troubled, troubled. Did I do wrong by making her my confidante, my familiar, my misused muse, when the whim took me? From the day she was born I favoured her over my son, that poor epigone — he was here earlier, blubbering at my bedside — yet now I think I was perhaps as unfair to her as I was to him, in singling her out as I did. Ursula used to assure me, in her kindly way, that by my attentions to the girl I gave her confidence, strength, tenacity of purpose, and perhaps I did foster in her a smidgen of these qualities, which, heaven knows, she is so much in need of. But I am not persuaded. I have done many wrongs, to many people, and I fear that if — But ha! is this where I embark on the famous deathbed confession? With not a soul to hear it, save the gods, who do not have it in their power to absolve me? Let us eschew the unbosoming and quietly proceed, unforgiven.

Over at the window Benny is telling Petra how her father as a young man at his sums succeeded in turning so-called reality on its head. “What he did is not fully grasped or appreciated even yet,” he says, with large disdain — I picture him doing that circling motion he does with his right hand, winding the ratchet of his contempt. “There is only a few of us that understand.” I am impressed by the trill of earnestness in his tone. He is putting it on for Petra’s sake, to urge on her the glory of her pa’s greatest days, the light of which glory, she is to understand, reflects on him, my mentor and my pal. Yet in those days of glory it was always Benny who was the one who was least impressed. When the rest of the academy were struggling with the disgraceful strangeness of this or that of my hypotheses, adjusting their frock coats about them and gravely tugging at their beards, Benny, sitting way up in the middle of the farthest row of the lecture hall, would lean back slowly and hook his thumbs in his belt and stick out his little round belly and smile. Oh, that shiny-faced smile. Whatever I did, whatever I achieved, Benny gave it to be understood that he had long since anticipated it. Nothing of mine was novel to him, and never enough. And he was always there, when I stepped down from the lectern and the scribbled-on blackboard, always there but always content to hang back while the others pressed forward in murmurous admiration or, as often as not, in consternation and outrage, even fury. Benny could wait. He had another gesture of the hand that I remember: he would hold it out before him, palm forward, one finger lifted, like that conductor again, commanding a pianissimo, tilting his head to one side with eyelids lightly shut and his lips pursed, the man whom nothing could surprise, nothing daunt, nothing confound. Even when I laid my ladder against the mighty Christmas tree that all the others before me had put up over ages and popped the fairy on the topmost spike, whereupon her little wand lit up in what before had been the outer dark an endless forest of firs, hung with all manner of baubles, a densely wooded region the existence of which no one hitherto, including myself, had suspected — even then Benny was there to tell me with gently patronising scorn how foolish I had been to imagine that anything could be completed, I of all people, who knew far better than anyone that in the welter of realities that I had posited everything endlessly extends and unravels, world upon world. And it is true, of course — how could there be any finish to what I and a few others, a very few others, started? Was it that I thought to be the last man? he would enquire, and gaze at me in head-shaking, compassionate reproof, smiling. And he was right — look at me now, the last of myself, no more than that.

Gulls, seagulls, their raucous noise, I hear them suddenly. They fly in all the way from the sea and nest in the disused chimneys of the house and rise up and wheel about the roof in great broken chains, their wingbeats crumpling the air, their voices raised in wild, lilting cries. I have always welcomed this annual pandemonium; it is one of the markers of my year. The young have a tendency to fall down the chimneys into the rooms here, dauntingly big brutes though they are, and more than once I have come upon one of them standing in front of a fireplace on its ridiculous grey legs, its plumage sooted and ruffled, a filmed eye skewed towards me in blank surmise. Other worlds, other worlds, where we are not, and yet are.

“You see,” Benny is saying to Petra in the self-swallowing gabble that is his explaining voice, “you see, the infinities, the infinities that cropped up in everyone else’s equations and made them null, and which cropped up in his, too, he saw as exactly what—”

Exactly what is it that keeps the two of them there at the window? Are they looking out at the gulls, craning to see them wheel and screech above the chimney-pots? Or is there someone in the garden, doing something interesting, that ruffian Duffy, perhaps, aware of being watched and pretending to work? But what would be the interest in that, for them? Perhaps they are not looking out at all, perhaps they are standing face-to-face, engrossed in each other, Benny on one side of the embrasure, leaning against the folded-back shutter, talking and jabbing a fat finger, and Petra on the other side staring at the front of his soiled shirt in that seemingly terror-stricken way of hers. God! not to know, not to be able to know the least of things! Doing, doing , is living, as my mother, my poor failed unhappy mother, among others, tried her best to din into me. I see it now, while all along I thought thinking was the thing.