John Banville - The Infinities

A loud and angry sizzle comes from the big black range where the chicken is roasting — the fat must have overflowed on to something. She has often considered becoming a vegetarian. Too late now. Too late for everything, now. She has the impression that her life is coming to an end, she feels it strongly. It is not that she imagines she is about to die, but that when Adam is gone, all that she was when he was alive will go with him, and that what of her will be left will be another person, one that she will not know and will have no interest in, and will not want to be. She has known of cases like this, people living on after the death of someone dear and becoming estranged from themselves. But for her there are the children to consider; she will have to take care of them, Adam no less than Petra. She thinks Adam’s wife will leave him; she has that feeling and cannot rid herself of it. She imagines being here with them, her poor distraught daughter and her son come home to her, lost and helpless. Petra would grow increasingly crazed but perhaps more quietly, more secretively, while Adam would pass his days pottering about the house, mending things that do not need to be mended. And so the years will pass and the three of them will drift slowly into the future, sad survivors on their raft. That is what she sees, coming.

She sighs, still keeping her eye on Benny Grace. She only ever half believed that he was real. Until today she suspected he was Adam’s invention, an alibi for his love affairs. That is why his turning up like this has so upset her. Though surely she should be glad to discover that he does exist and is not another one of Adam’s elaborate inventions. His name, just the kind of absurd name that Adam would make up, always sounded to her like a jeer, a mocking reminder of her husband’s deviousness, his cruel playfulness, his deceits. Was she expected to believe that Adam would consort with a creature such as he described Benny Grace to be, a mischief maker and a rogue? But there was that side to Adam, that compulsion to break things. Benny Grace, he said, was the part of himself he had suppressed in order to become what he became. Who was she to say it was not so?

She is aware of a presence at her back. Is it that ghostly antagonist she sensed in the sickroom, come to crowd and bully her again? No, it is her son, standing on the wooden step below the door into the hall. How does he move so quietly, being so large? It is as if he were made not of flesh and bone but some other stuff, heavy yet soft, too.

“Can you see him, from there?” he asks.

She does not reply, and he descends the last two steps and crosses the room and stands behind her and lays his hands lightly on her shoulders. The sunshine must be stronger now, for Benny Grace has made a sun-hat for himself by tying a knot at each corner of his handkerchief, and is adjusting it to cover his bald patch. “Your father used to do the same,” Ursula says, “make a hat out of a hankie, like that. He was always cold, he said, yet he hated being in the sun.”

They contemplate in silence the fat man in his comical headgear. “He looks like someone in a seaside postcard,” Adam says. If the fat man glanced sideways would he see them? Adam thinks of the child in the train. Benny is scratching exploratively under an armpit now.

“Do you know who he is?” Adam asks. Again she does not answer. “His name is Grace,” he says. “He has come to see Pa. Pete took him up.”

She turns up her face and looks at him blankly. “What?

Where?”

“To see Pa. Upstairs, in the Sky Room.”

“Oh.”

She turns back to the window and the sunlit garden. A part of her is not here. Adam, still with his hands on her shoulders, gives her a grim little shake. Long ago, when he was a boy, one day he saw something glinting in the laurel hedge in front of the disused privy down behind the house, where the rats used to have their underground nests — they fascinated him, those rats, fat and furtive and quick and always somehow with an air of suppressed amusement — and reaching in among the leaves he pulled out an empty whiskey bottle, naggin-sized, and then saw the others, dozens of them, scores, drained to the last drop and pushed in neck-first among the dense, bristling foliage.

“Grace,” his mother says dreamily. “Yes, Benny Grace, he’s called.”

“You know him, then.”

“Oh, I know who he is.”

He supposes that when she is like this there must be a continual buzzing and muttering in her head, the confused noise of herself, that muffles the things that are being said to her. “I think,” he says, loudening his voice, “he’ll be staying for lunch. I told Ivy to set an extra place. And Roddy Wagstaff is here too, you know that — you remember, he came down, earlier?”

She goes on gazing out of the window. “A full house!” she murmurs. There is a wobble in her voice as if she might be about to laugh. “Your father won’t be pleased.”

Speaking of fathers, mine is waking up, at long last.

The two of them turn together as Ivy Blount comes in, carrying something. She enters not by the door at the top of the steps but through a dim and always damp-smelling corridor to the right of the range that leads directly into the conservatory — the house is honeycombed with hidden passages and connecting walkways. Ivy has exchanged her cut-off wellingtons for an old pair of cat-coloured carpet slippers that are absurdly too big for her. Ursula thinks she recognises them as her husband’s. Why, she wonders with a flash of annoyance, has everyone taken to wearing his things, first Petra in his cast-off pyjamas and now Ivy Blount in his slippers? She wishes Ivy would lift her feet when she walks, she is sure she knows how much it grates on her to hear someone shuffling along in that sligging, slovenly way. And to think how well brought-up the woman is, a daughter of the gentry! What she is carrying turns out to be a faded red satin cushion with numerous rips and holes in it through which wads of cotton stuffing protrude. She sees Ursula peering. “Rex was chewing it,” she says. She thinks how like a totem pole they look, standing there, the son close behind the mother and he a head taller than she. “I think it’s had it.”

Ursula clicks her tongue. “Oh, that dog,” she says. “He has been impossible since Adam’s illness.”

Young Adam does not like the look of that cushion: there is something gruesome about it, a suggestion of violence and blood. It reminds him of the chicken that Ivy brought in this morning. He recalls another fragment of last night’s dream. He was high up, on a mountain top, no, in an aeroplane, or on a cloud, yes, a cloud, and flying over a forest, the canopy of trees below packed tight as broccoli and an enormous river meandering through like a dribble of melted tin, a thick-walled fortress on a hill, too, and a tower on fire. He steps from behind his mother and goes and sits down at the table where the wireless is, and takes up the screwdriver and once more unscrews the panel from the back of it.

“I doubt there will be enough stuff for lunch to feed them all,” Ivy says, and looks in vague helplessness at the ruined cushion she is still clutching, as if its destruction will add to the scarcity of the things there are to eat. “Two extra, as well, Mr. Wagstaff and that fellow out there in the garden.”

“Put on more potatoes, then!” Ursula snaps back at her, almost skittishly, and gives a kind of giggle.

Ivy looks at her.

It is not, Adam is thinking, that anyone in the house cares what anyone else does. Not that there is much doing, anyway — nothing gets done. He is sorry he came down, sorry he brought Helen into the midst of all this dithering and disorder. We should have waited, he tells himself savagely, until he was dead! The dusty valves and bundles of cable in the back of the wireless set all swim together in a blur before his eyes. He thought to fix this thing for his father but what good will it be? — his father will not be able to hear it, even if it can be got to work. His father is dying. He will soon be dead. They will never speak again, the two of them, his father will never have another opportunity not to call him by his name. Maybe, he thinks suddenly, he should join the army, become a soldier, go and fight in some foreign war, maybe that is what his dream is telling him. He tries to picture himself, in breastplate and bronze helmet, heaving a huge sword, the sweat in his eyes and a blood mist everywhere, horses screaming and the cries of the dying all around him. He throws down the screwdriver and rises strugglingly, almost stumbling, and the chair rears back, its legs shrieking on the flagged floor, and the two women turn, startled.