John Banville - The Infinities

“I wish you would not smoke cigarettes in the house,” Ursula says mildly, and is gratified to see the start that Helen gives, the cane seat of the chair under her crackling in protest. “It leaves the air so stuffy.”

Helen makes a series of small adjustments to her pose, leaning her head back and extending her legs in a show of languidness. She does not care to be chanced on unawares, especially by her mother-in-law. The slipper dangling from her toe falls off and makes an unexpectedly loud clatter on the flagged floor. “You don’t protest when he does it,” she says, gesturing with her cigarette towards the pair outside in the garden, “Roddy what’s-his-name.”

“Well,” Ursula answers, looking at her hands folded in front of her and measuring her words, “he is a guest.”

Helen chuckles. “How delicate you are. It’s a wonder you can bear us at all.” As if he had heard his name spoken Roddy Wagstaff turns and peers vaguely over his shoulder, trying to see into the room through the opaque reflections on the glass panes. Helen shifts her weight again, and again the chair crackles, a milder outcry this time. “Who is he,” she says, “that other fellow?”

“Who?”

“Grace — isn’t that what he’s called?” She squints down the length of herself at the toes of her unsandalled foot and wriggles them; the polish on one of the nails is chipped, though she only put it on this morning. “What does he want?”

“He wants Adam,” Ursula says sharply, and frowns. Helen has turned her face and is gazing at her with interest sidewise from her chair. Ursula gives a small laugh, flustered. “I mean my Adam — Adam’s father, that is.”

“Wants him?”

“Oh, I don’t know what I mean. He’s just someone Adam knew.”

Helen finishes her cigarette and leans down to crush the stub of it in the big glass ashtray she has set on the floor beside her chair. The commotion in the cane-work every time she moves, like the sound of a flame sweeping up through a thorn bush, is setting Ursula’s nerves on edge. She comes forward and bends to pick up the ashtray — three crushed butts, two of them lip-sticked, standing at drunken angles in a parched puddle of ash — but Helen snatches it aside and glares at her. Such venom! She is wearing a large, ugly ring on the middle finger of her right hand: some kind of whitish metal set with a flat lozenge of polished black stone in which a curlicued initial A is carved. Ursula, still awkwardly at a tilt and seeking to save face, peers at it with exaggerated interest; the raised bezel brings to her mind an obscure and unpleasant suggestion of ulcers. “That’s new,” she says, straightening. “How nice.”

Helen, sitting up and swinging her legs to the floor — one foot groping for its elusive sandal — glances disparagingly at the ring. “Adam gave it to me.”

Ursula ventures a smile. “So I see.”

“What?” Glaring again.

“A for Adam.”

“No,” with a shake of the head, quick, dismissive. “Amphitryon . The title of the play I’m in. Or it could be A for Alcmene, my part. He said it was for luck but in the theatre you’re never supposed to wish anyone luck.” Sitting on the edge of the chair she stretches herself, lifting her arms in an arch and leaning her lovely gold articulated head to one side and pressing her cheek, cat-like, into the hollow of her shoulder. Ursula catches a whiff of her sweat, sharp and hot; I can almost catch it myself, smell of civet and summer nights. Helen sighs. “He’s such a sap,” she says complacently, suppressing a yawn, “your son.”

She rises and walks to the table and begins to gather the dessert bowls, stacking them with negligent haste and making them rattle. “God,” she says and sighs again, more heavily, “is there anything duller than a summer afternoon?”

“You mean, down here?” Ursula enquires gently.

“Anywhere.”

Ursula now comes forward to the table and begins to collect the napkins, thinking of snow. She glances out at Benny Grace where he sits on the step in a cobbler’s slump and at the sight of him a shadow crosses her mind. “They used to know each other very well,” she says, “Adam’s father and — Mr. Grace.” Benny’s name she pronounces with a sort of grimace in her voice.

Helen has picked up all the bowls and now is gathering the spoons. Her eyes are hooded, she seems far away. She takes the napkins that Ursula has heaped and puts them on top of the stacked plates. In single file, with Ursula leading, they carry the things out to the kitchen and I glide invisibly behind them along the passageway, still sniffing after Helen’s feline scent. Who am I now? Where is my Dad? Enough, enough, I am one, and all — Proteus is not the only protean one amongst us. “They were colleagues, in some way,” Ursula is saying over her shoulder. “Only I think your father thought he was a fraud — I mean Adam’s father — Adam. But then”—a shrug—“I suspect Adam thought — thinks — everyone a fraud, more or less. Even himself.” Helen puts the bowls into the sink and Ursula stands looking down at them, a jumble of shallow, grey-white discs against the greyer white of the porcelain. There is something faintly, comically, endearing about them. They remind her of — what? — circuses. A clown somewhere, a long time ago, spinning half a dozen plates on the tips of a dozen sticks, everything wobbling, the plates, the long slender sticks, the clown’s extended arms. The recollection flickers, fades. Helen takes off the ugly ring and puts it on the window-sill and rinses her hands under the tap. Ursula watches her sidelong. Helen’s hands are the least lovely part of her, boneless-seeming and slightly mottled, the fingers plump above the knuckles and tapered sharply at the tips as if each one were bound there tight with invisible thread. The sun has hardly moved in the window. Is there music playing somewhere? Once, when she was a girl, in some place, she cannot remember where exactly, a splendid park or the grounds of some grand house, Ursula reached up on tiptoe at a little moss-covered wall and saw into an enclosed garden, with masses of flowers and flowering fruit trees, exotic shrubs, climbing vines, all crowding there together in the sun, profligate and gay. Now in rosy retrospect this seems one of the sweetest moments of her life, replete with all the promise of the future, and she keeps it stowed jealously at the back of her memory, like a jewel box in a secret drawer. If she were to return there today she is sure she would not be able to see over the wall, it would have grown higher, somehow, or she would have become smaller, although she would know the garden was there, abundant and glorious as ever, waiting for others to come and glimpse it, and be happy.

“I hope,” she says in a rush, with a terrible feeling of falling over herself, “I hope your play is a success — I hope — I hope you will have a great success in it.”

Helen is drying her hands on a tea-towel. Ursula regards her anxiously, pained and waiting — why, she asks herself, why must I blurt out things like this, like a fool?

“Do you?” Helen says tonelessly, and drops the towel on the draining-board; she is thinking of something else altogether.

Ursula sees anew how radiant she is, in that sky-blue dress and those gold sandals, with that tight-fitting gleaming helmet of hair.

My Dad is plucking at my sleeve.

“Yes, yes, I do,” Ursula says, feeling herself falling still, as in a dream. “I wish you — I wish you everything.”

Helen turns abstractedly and walks from the room.

I can feel my father’s burgeoning itch as together we rush after her from the kitchen into the music room and out by the french doors where she almost collides with her husband coming in from the lawn. She has never managed to accustom herself to these sudden loomings that he does. He is like, she thinks vexedly, a great large soft eager dog.