John Banville - The Infinities

But she was my favourite. By the time she arrived the boy was a big fellow already, cautious, secretive, solitary. He was frightened of me, just as I was frightened of him. In the girl I could see from the start there was something wrong, something missing, a link to the world where the rest of us carry on with varying degrees of success the pretence of being at home. This, I should be ashamed to say, I found more gratifying than troubling. Here at last was a soul I could share with, one that was damaged, as damaged as I believed my own soul to be.

Did I, do I, love them? It is a simple question but extremely ticklish. I shielded them from what dangers I could, did not stint or spoil, taught them such virtues as I knew and as I judged they would benefit from. I worried they would suffer falls, cut themselves, catch a cold, contract leprosy. I think it safe to say that in certain dire circumstances if called upon I would have given up my life to save theirs. But all that, it seems, was not enough: a further effort was required, no, not an effort but an effect, an affect, whatever to say — a state of being, let us call it, a stance in relation to the world, which is what they mean by love. When they speak of it, this love of theirs, they speak as of a kind of grand mal brought on catastrophically by a bacillus unknown to science but everywhere present in the air about us, like the tuberculosis spore, and to which all but the coldest constitutions are susceptible. For me, however, if I understand the concept, to love properly and in earnest one would have to do it anonymously, or at least in an undeclared fashion, so as not to seem to ask anything in return, since asking and getting are the antithesis of love — if, as I say, I have the concept aright, which from all I have said and all that has been said to me so far it appears I do not. It is very puzzling. Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods — well. Perhaps that is my trouble, perhaps my standards are too high. Perhaps human love is simple, and therefore beyond me, due to my incurable complicating bent. That might be it, that might be the answer. But I do not think so.

And yet perhaps I do love, without knowing it; could such a thing be possible, an unwilled, and unconscious, loving? On occasion, when I think of this or that person, my wife, say, my son or daughter — let us leave my daughter-in-law out of this — my heart is filled, what we call the heart, with an involuntary surge of something, glutinous and hot, like grief, but a happy grief, and so strong that I stagger inwardly and my throat thickens and tears, yes, real tears, press into my eyes. This is not like me, I am not given to swoons and vapourings in the normal run of things. So maybe there is a vast, hidden reservoir of love within me and these wellings-up are the overflow of it, the splashes over the side of the cistern when something weighty is thrown in.

I always thought dying would be a great and saving confusion, like a drunkard’s dreaming, but look at me, on my last legs or rather on no legs at all, yet in my mind as clear as a bell, though certainly, I grant you, not as sound. I am weakening; I mean my resolve is weakening. If things go on in this vein I shall end up sending for the priest to shrive me.

But Ursula, let us return to the topic of Ursula. I worry about her. I have not been fortunate in my wives — no, what am I saying? I mean my wives have not been fortunate in me. One I drove to drown herself, the other I drove to drink. This is not a good record, for a husband. I have not been fair to Ursula, have not given her the regard and respect that I should have, I know that. I treated my children as adults and my wife as a child. Is it that I was afraid of losing her, as I lost Dottie, and therefore must preserve her in a state of permanent girlhood? As if only grownups die. I do not know when she began to drink in earnest. After Petra was born, I suspect. The giddiness then, the temper fits, the morning lentors and the evening sobbings, which I took for the effects of post-partum trauma, I now think had a simpler cause. She is discreet, none more so; she is an artist of discretion. In this as in so much else she spares me pain, embarrassment, disturbance. And what do I give her in return?

My mind is tired, I cannot think any more, for now. When I got like this in the old days I would leap up and pace the floor, pace and pace, packed tight around myself and my distress like a panther, until equilibrium was re-established. How I loved the ordering of thought, the iron way of computation, the fixing of one term after another in the linked chain of reasoning. No such joy to be had elsewhere, or elsewhen, the quiet joy of a man alone, doing brain-work. Did Ursula envy my solitary calling, did she resent it? Did the children? Petra when she was little would creep into the room where I was working and sit on the floor curled up, hugging her knees, watching me as a cat does, blinking now and then, slowly. It was soothing, her being there, as the boy’s presence would not have been. How unfair I was to him, unfairer than I was to Ursula, even, and now it is too late to make amends. Spilt milk, spilt milk — the dairy floor is awash and the dairyman and his missus are weeping buckets. And would I make amends, anyway, even if I had the time and means?

There was a rhythm, somehow, to the girl, silent as she was, that seemed to beat in unison with something inside me. It was as if she were connected to me, as if I and not her mother had given birth to her and the vestigial umbilical cord was still unbroken. Yet Adam is the one who will care for Ursula when I am gone, I can be confident of that much. He is kind to her and always patient. He does not chide her, or try to persuade her to go the dry; far from it, for he is sweetly forbearing of her sad vice. I forbore, too, but that was not the same: my forbearing, I suspect, was a form of indifference. Yes, he will be good to her, for her. Look at him now, following her into the kitchen with a stack of plates in his hands, being helpful and solicitous. How the sun strikes into this big stone room on days like this, shyly, one might say, at a sharp slant downwards through the big window behind the sink. Faint putrescent smell of gas from the stove as always, and three summer flies cruising lazily in circular formation under the light bulb above the table. She has a delightfully scurrying way, has Ursula, when she is excited, or upset, waddling a little on those knock-knees of hers. She favours shapeless soft wool dresses in shades of grey or lavender or mauve. In our early days together I used to call her my pigeon, and would chase her about the house, my tail-feathers all erect. How she would run from me, cooing frantically and laughing—“No no no no no!”—until I caught up with her and held her under me, my panting bird. Ah, yes. Imagine me, as I imagine myself, striking my brow with clenched fist, again and again, thump, thump, without mercy, bemoaning over the lost years, the lost time. The opportunities not taken.

“—coming here like this,” she is saying, “without a word of warning.” She pokes crossly at something in the sink, narrowing her eyes. She is short-sighted, like her daughter-in-law, and like her will not wear spectacles, out of vanity. “And talking about your father dying.”

My son puts the lunch plates he has been carrying down on the draining-board in the sun. He has scraped all the scraps together on the top one, as his grandmother long ago taught him to do. Like me he wishes for an ordered world. I feel such a rush of tenderness for him suddenly. What is it in particular that has affected me? Something in his setting down of those plates, the disparity between this big, slow-moving man — my son! — and the dainty carrying out of the commonplace chore. When he and the girl were small I used to pray that I would live to see them grown; now I am thankful I shall not see them old.