John Banville - The Infinities

The humans distribute themselves to chairs willy-nilly, and Ivy returns to the kitchen to fetch the vegetables. From this shaded within, all that is without the high awning of glass, the trees, the sunlight, that broad strip of cerulean sky, seems a raucous carnival.

Petra finds herself in a chair beside Helen’s and at once, without a word, she jumps up and crosses to another place, on Benny Grace’s right hand; Benny swivels his head and gives her a conspiratorial smile, arching an eyebrow. Roddy Wagstaff has watched her manoeuvre with grim disdain; he has hardly spoken a word to her since he arrived. Helen reaches for her napkin and her fingertips brush the back of his hand; she does not look at him.

Ivy returns with a great brown wooden tray on which are platters of potatoes, carrots, peas, and a china bowl, unsettlingly suggestive of a chamber pot, with handles on either side, in which is sunk a steaming mess of boiled cabbage. She sets out the dishes and takes her place, to the right of Helen, where Petra was first, and begins to serve. The chair on the other side of her is empty. Meanwhile Adam sharpens the carving knife, wreathing blade and steel about each other at flashing speed, as if he were demonstrating a feat of swordsmanship.

Ursula appears in their midst so quietly, so greyly, that the others have hardly registered her presence before she has seated herself. She smiles about her in vague benevolence, her eyes lowered, looking at no one, and in particular not at Benny Grace, unless I imagine it. Oh, yes, there must have been an altercation on the lawn — I wonder what she said to him?

When Adam cuts into the chicken a sigh of steam escapes from the moist aperture between singed skin and moistly creamy flesh.

“Oh, cabbage, Ivy!” Ursula softly cries, in faintest protest, “—with chicken!”

Ivy ignores her and, still on her feet, brushes a strand of hair from her cheek and fixes her gaze above all their heads.

“I’ve invited Mr. Duffy,” she announces loudly, and has to stop and swallow. “—I’ve invited Mr. Duffy to lunch.”

A hanging silence follows, until Helen suddenly laughs, making a gulping noise, and puts up a hand quickly to cover her mouth.

Rex the dog is a keen observer of the ways of the human beings. He has been attached to this family all his life, or for as long as he has known himself to be alive, the past for him being a doubtful, shapeless place, peopled with shadows and rustling with uncertain intimations, indistinct spectres. These people are in his care. They are not difficult to manage. Obligingly he eats the food it pleases them to put before him, the mush and kibble and the odd ham bone when Ivy Blount remembers to save one for him; he has accustomed himself to this fare, though in his dreams he hunts down quick hot creatures and feasts on their smoking flesh. He has his duties, the guarding of the gate, the routing of itinerants and beggars, the vigilance against foxes, and he attends to them with scruple, despite his increasing years. Before old Adam was carried up to the Sky Room asleep — it was Duffy who did the carrying, by the way — and refused to wake up and come down again, it was Rex’s task to take him for a walk each day, sometimes twice a day, if the weather was particularly fine, and for his sake even pretended to like nothing better than chasing a stick or a tennis ball when it was thrown for him. He is unpredictable, though, old Adam; he shouts, and more than once has aimed a kick. The girl Petra is to be wary of, too; she smells of blood. But they all need careful watching. They are not so much dangerous as limited, which is why, he supposes, they are in such need of his support, affection and praise. It pleases them to see him wag his tail when they come into a room, especially if they are alone — when there are more than one of them together they tend to ignore him. He does not mind. He can always make them take notice, especially the women, by barging his snout into their crotches, as it amuses him to do.

There is a thing the matter with them, though, with all of them. It is a great puzzle to him, this mysterious knowledge, unease, foreboding, whatever it is that afflicts them, and try though he may he has never managed to solve it. They are afraid of something, something that is always there though they pretend it is not. It is the same for all of them, the same huge terrible thing, except for the very young, though even in their eyes, too, he sometimes fancies he detects a momentary widening, a sudden, horrified dawning. He discerns this secret and awful awareness underneath everything they do. Even when they are happy there is a flaw in their happiness. Their laughter has a shrill note, so that they seem to be not only laughing but crying out as well, and when they weep, their sobs and lamentations are disproportionate, as though what is supposed to have upset them is just a pretext and their anguish springs really from this other frightful thing that they know and are trying to ignore. They have an air always of looking behind them — no, of not daring to look, afraid of having to see what is there, the ineluctable presence crowding at their heels. In recent days, since old Adam’s falling asleep, the others seem more sharply conscious of their phantom follower; it seems to have stepped past and whirled about to confront them, almost as this fat stranger has done, just walked in and sat himself down at the table and looked them all in the eye as if he has every right to be here. Yes, the scandalous secret is out — but what can it be?

Does Rex detect the difference between Benny and me? I wonder. Or, rather, I should ask, does he detect the sameness? For in appearance we could hardly be more unalike, I being all spirit and Benny, in his present manifestation, all flesh, deplorably. The significant distinction lies far deeper than in the forms in which we choose to show ourselves. Sprites we both may be, but compared to Benny I am the incarnation of duty, stability and order. He is the boy who dismantles his father’s gold half-hunter to find out how it works. In that arcane science of which old Adam is an adept there are two distinct types of magus. The first sees the world as all a boiling chaos and labours to impose on it a system, of his own devising, which shall marshal the disordered fragments and make of them a whole, while the second finds an ordered world and sets to tinkering in it to discover what principle holds all its rods and cogs in thrumming equilibrium. The latter most often will be plump and satisfied, the former as sleek as the sleekest prelate. There you have Benny, there you have me.

Yet surely Rex should know Benny for what he is. The animals are said always to recognise their panic lord and bow down before him. But what does recognising mean, in Rex’s case, what does it, to coin a phrase, entail? Names and categories are of no more weight in his world than they are in ours — you humans are the relentless taxonomists. He crouches now sphinx-like on the stone flags just inside the door of the conservatory, front paws extended and his big square head lifted, alert and watchful. From here he has the widest possible view of the lunch table, although the light pouring through all those panes of glass is behind the lunchers so that seen from here they are cast somewhat into gloom, some of them faceless while the others, viewed in profile, appear as silhouettes. Being a quadruped, he is most familiar with the lower extremities of the bipeds. Legs are always far busier, down there in the half dark, than their owners realise. Benny, for instance, keeps crossing and uncrossing his, like a baby waggling its fingers. He sits happily asprawl, gripping his knife and fork expectantly in his dimpled fists, his plump thighs overflowing the defenceless chair on which he squats with an already mauled napkin draped over his paunch. He is addressing the table at large, telling over yet again the tale of his great friend and colleague Adam Godley’s triumph on that day, which seems no longer ago than yesterday, when it came to him as a flash of lightning that in those dark infinities which had been disrupting his sums for so long there lay, in fact, his radiant solutions. No one is listening, not even Petra. Rather, all attention is focused breathlessly on the empty place at table which none dares look directly at, awaiting as it is the momentous coming of Duffy the cowman. I confess I am agog myself. What happy consequences have I set in train by my playful subterfuge of the morning? I experience a twinge of misgiving, however, when I suddenly recollect those shiny green shutters on the windows of Ivy’s cottage. Do they presage something, sinister and insistent, like themselves?