John Banville - The Infinities

She and the young man speak of this and that, desultorily, with intervening silences in which they seem to trail their fingers, as if they were drifting in a skiff on a shining calm grey river. They are conscious of the summer day outside, its soft air and vapoury light. She mentions the play she is to be in, and tells him about her director, who is impossible. He nods; he knows the fellow, he says, and knows him for a fool. She notices his nails, bitten to the quick. The tremor in his hand makes the thin swift vertical trail of smoke from the tip of his cigarette waver as it rises. “Oh, a fool,” he says, “and a fraud along with it, everyone knows that.” To this she says nothing, only lowers her lashes and smiles. A breeze comes in from the garden and the curtain of white gauze before the open half of the french doors bellies into the room like a soundless exclamation and listlessly falls back. The scent of roasting bird penetrates here, too. A hollow rumbling noise comes up out of Roddy’s innards — he too has travelled, he too is hungry — and he clears his throat and shifts quickly his position on the chair and recrosses his legs. “And such a notion of himself,” he adds, widening his eyes.

Helen, I see, is wearing gold sandals, not unlike Dad’s, with gold thongs crossed above the ankles. Her legs are pale, and her knees are bony and splotched a little with red — is this a flaw? My father will have none of it. He knows those knees.

She cannot think, she says, why the play is called after Amphitryon, since Amphitryon’s wife Alceme, her part, is surely the centre of it all. “You could review it, when it opens,” she says. She smiles. “I would expect nothing less than a glowing notice, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” he says, and looks away, somewhat quickly.

He rises and goes to the fireplace and crushes the stub of his cigarette into an ashtray on the mantelpiece. She sees the covert glance he gives to his reflection in the gilt-framed mirror on the wall in front of him.

“It could have been set here,” she says, with a broad and sweeping gesture of her arm, a swan flexing its white wing, “here at this house, when it was first built.”

“Oh? But isn’t it in Greece, in Thebes, or somewhere? I seem to remember—”

“The version we are doing all takes place round Vinegar Hill, at the time of the Rebellion.”

“Ah.” He frowns. He does not approve of the classics being tampered with, he says. “The Greeks knew what they were doing, after all.”

“Oh, but it’s not Greek,” she says before she can stop herself, and then to make it worse continues on. “—It was written only a hundred years ago, I think, or two, in Germany.”

He frowns again, more darkly this time. “Ah, yes,” he says, mumbling, “I forgot.” He walks to the french doors and stands in the open half, holding aside the gauze curtain, and contemplates the garden. She looks at his back, so straight and stiff. “Sorry,” she says in a voice made small, pulling a face that he cannot see. He pretends not to have heard.

She sighs, and puts her feet to the floor — her toenails are painted a shell-pink shade, very fetching — and says that surely lunch must be ready by now.

She walks from the room, feeling the rope sag and sway under her feet, and what she takes to be Roddy’s eyes on her is in fact my Dad shambling eagerly in her warm wake.

My father does not like at all the prospect of this late-afternoon lunch, so late indeed it might be better called high tea — time is all out of kilter today, thanks to you know who. He complains that it will keep him from his girl, and it will. I cannot help that. There is a limit to how far I may interfere with the diurnal springs of their world. Holding back the dawn for an hour was child’s play, mortal child’s play, compared with the likely consequences of cancelling an entire lunchtime. How much and how often they eat fascinates and rather appals us, for whom a sip of ambrosia and a prophylactic pinch of moly taken every aeon or so suffice both to quell our peckishness and keep our peckers up. For them, though, everything is turned into an excuse for feeding, be it joy, grief, success, humiliating failure, even the deepest loss. In the weeks after Dorothy died old Adam, who was not old then, seemed to find himself six or seven times a day staring helplessly at a plate newly heaped. No sooner did he stand up and totter from the table than some kindly soul would seize him by the wrist and lead him back again with smiling solicitude to the groaning board and hand him his knife and fork and refasten his bib and fill up his tankard for him to the foaming brim. Come, he was constantly being urged, come, you must eat something, it will comfort you and give you strength! What choice had he but to sob out his thanks and set to work on yet another helping of mutton stew, another homemade apple tart, another round of cadaverous camembert? And how they would beam, then, standing over him with their hands folded, nodding in encouragement and self-satisfaction. Compassion, he discovered, has a limited repertoire. Yet these kindnesses made him cry, as if he had not already sufficient cause for tears.

— But wait, what is this? Something has happened, in the garden, I bet, I knew it would, with me not there to invigilate. As I enter the conservatory hard, or soft, rather, necessarily, on the heels of Helen and my father and Roddy Wagstaff — what a procession we must make! — I detect at once a feverish atmosphere. There is not noise or agitation, on the contrary, all is subdued, yet it is plain we are in the midst of an aftermath. Benny Grace is there, standing beside the table with his fists thrust in the pockets of his jacket, looking over the place settings with a concentrated air, as if he were counting the spoons. Off in a corner of the glass gazebo young Adam is talking quietly to his sister, who gazes up at him intently, nodding the while, both of them glancing now and then in Benny’s direction. What is it he is telling her? His expression is a giveaway, grave and at the same time almost smiling, as if there is behind it a suppressed hilarity that keeps threatening to break out. Where is Ursula? She said something to Benny after I left, I am sure of it, something inappropriate, perhaps outrageous. She has the inveterate drinker’s weakness for blurting out baldly things that are at once consternating and lugubriously comic. Her husband used greatly to enjoy these rushes of inadvertent candour and accidental insult, though they mortify her, when she is able to remember them, that is, and what she said. I would not be surprised if she is even now cowering for shame in the disused washroom behind the scullery, administering to herself a steadying drop from one of her store of naggin bottles, full ones, that she keeps hidden there, my poor sad dithery darling.

Ivy Blount appears out of the dank passageway from the kitchen, bearing the roast chicken on a big tin dish. She has had to hold open the door with an out-turned elbow, and as she comes forward she releases the door and it swings to and snares one of the old grey carpet slippers she is wearing, and she has no choice but to step out of it, which she does, and blunders on, her feet, the bare and the shod, making an alternating slap and slither on the stone-tiled floor. Benny springs to help her but she bypasses him deftly, essaying a sort of caracole — she will not allow herself to look at him — and plonks the heavy dish down in the middle of the table. The others advance and all stand gazing upon the bird with expressions of doubt and misgiving. It is markedly shrivelled and its skin is of a brownish-yellow shade and seems to seethe slowly all over as the glistening coating of fat on it congeals. Rex the dog — where has he come from? — fetches Ivy’s slipper from under the door and brings it to her in his mouth and deposits it softly at her feet and casts up at her a look of mild, sad reproof.