John Banville - The Infinities

The tree-lined path without her noticing has taken them in a broad curve, and the garden is no longer in view, though she has a prickly sensation between her shoulder-blades, as if Benny Grace’s eye is still on her, somehow. From here there is a view of the house she has not had before. At this angle the place looks crazier than ever, all slopes and recesses and peculiarly shaped windows; it is, she sees, more like a church than a house, but a church in some backward, primitive place where religion has decayed into a cult and the priests have had to allow the churchgoers to worship the old gods alongside the new one.

Roddy is worrying about his shoes again, and keeps stopping to peer at them, clicking his tongue in annoyance. They are narrow and sharp-toed, and a sickly shade of pale tan, like sucked toffee. He complains that the leather is bound to bubble up where the lawn has dampened it above the seams. “They haven’t seen grass since they were still part of a cow,” he says with a scowl. Helen laughs shortly and puts a hand quickly over her mouth — she is conscious of her raucous laugh: it always comes out before she can stop it and gives her an embarrassing shock. Roddy turns his head and stares at her, uncertain, faintly alarmed. He had not intended to be humorous. He does not care for jokes, does not understand them or what they are for.

The path ahead veers abruptly and leads into a dark little wood. This must be, Helen thinks, the wood she saw this morning from the bathroom window, the one she has never been able to find before, not that she has ever made such effort to find it. She does not hesitate but goes on without comment, and although Roddy falls back a step or two he soon strides forward again and catches her up, and they pass side by side under a sort of arch woven of brambles and ivy that is like a doorway into a church. Within the wood the day is suddenly different: it is dimmer, naturally, because of the shade, but it feels different, too, feels attentive, almost, watchful. There is a mushroomy smell, and the air that surely should be green, given all this greenery, instead has a bluish tinge, as if there had been a bonfire that had gone out and left its smoke thinly dispersed all around. When she makes a closer inspection, however, she sees there is not so much green, except high up where the leaves are, for down here it is mostly brown: wood-brown, thorn-brown, clay-brown. A bird breaks out of a bush and flies off rapidly, whistling shrilly. The path peters out and the ground becomes spongy underfoot, like a trampoline that has gone slack. She thinks of Hansel and Gretel — were they the babes in the wood or is that another story? They left a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back through the forest but the birds ate them and they got lost. And then what happened? She tries to remember but cannot. There was a witch, probably, there is always a witch, waiting in the wood.

Nature, though, how impassive it is, how indifferent. The trees, this lilac air, the leaning briars and the clinging vines, none of these register her and Roddy moving in their midst; even the moss on which she treads does not care that her foot crushes it. The cries of lost children would be lost on this place; even their blood would not stain the ground, or not for long, but would be absorbed like anything else, like dew, like rain. Yes, she marvels at how it all just goes on, not needing to notice anything or respond to anything. But then it comes to her that there is nothing going on, really, and that what these things are is not indifferent because that would mean they could be otherwise, that the trees could turn and look at them, that the creepers could reach out like hands and clutch at their ankles, that the briars could sweep down and lash them across their backs like scourges, and nothing like that ever happens. For nature, my dear, has no purpose, except perhaps that of not being us, I mean you.

Now they have reached the heart of the wood and here is a little — what should she call it? — a little bower, under a low, vaulted roof of ivy and brambles and sweet woodbine and other things all tangled together. “Oh,” Roddy Wagstaff says, “it must be the famous holy well,” and for some reason gives what seems an embarrassed laugh. A well? At first she sees no well but then she does. There is nothing built, no bricks or stones piled up, just the pool of water, brimming and still, like a polished dark metal disc set on the ground, with vivid wet green moss all around it. Now too she sees the rosaries, dozens of them, hanging among the ivy and the woodbine blossoms, and there are scraps of holy pictures propped between twigs or hanging from thorns, of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart, and photographs of people as well, smudged and creased: a little girl in her First Communion dress with plaits, a toothless old woman squinting in sunlight, a cocky young fellow in an army uniform, holding his cap in his hand. Such a hush reigns here, at once tense and dreamy, as if some sound that had been expected long ago, some call or cry, had not come, and would not, now. All feels liquid under this densely matted canopy. The air is damply cool, and among the moss there are black rocks flecked with mica that gleam wetly, and something somewhere is making a steady, reverberant drip. In front of the well a place to sit has been provided, a narrow little bench with metal legs set crookedly in cement. It takes her a moment to recognise it as the seat from an old-fashioned school desk. Roddy is telling her how people from the farms and villages round about still come here to the well to pray—“There’s even a May procession, I believe,” he says archly, with a smirk — and how her father-in-law had tried and failed to close off the right of way through the wood. She is hardly listening, watching the dust tumbling lazily in a narrow shaft of sunlight through the leaves.

They sit down on the narrow bench. She sees that despite the seeming stillness of its surface a little of the water is constantly spilling over from the well; it moves through the moss at her feet, a stealthy, swarming flow. Where does it go to? The beam of sunlight is fading, like a sword blade being stealthily withdrawn, and yet somehow leaves the air faintly glowing in its wake. Roddy is offering her the flame of his lighter. She does not remember accepting a cigarette from him but there it is in her fingers, a slim white thing, untipped, the tobacco smelling of somewhere foreign. She pictures a crag, a crooked tree and golden, dusty distances, faint voices singing, hands linked in a ring, a round-dance on a summer day in a green glade. The heavy flab of smoke when she draws it in scratches the back of her throat. The feeling of being watched is so much stronger now.

“Your husband does not like me,” Roddy says, in a strange voice, not his own, and as if from a long way off. She watches the water brimming in the well.

“Why do you think that?” she asks.

“Because he is jealous.”

“Adam?” She laughs, then falters, shivers, and her voice falls to a whisper. “Who is he jealous of?”

She does not look at him. Although he does not move he seems to draw himself closer to her, tensed and somehow as if suffering.

“How still the air is in this place,” he says. “Do you not feel the presence of the god?”

“What god? What do you mean?”

She peers, squinting, into the foliage behind the well, fancying she sees a face there, then it is gone. She has finished her cigarette, though its perfumed, acrid aftertaste persists. Roddy’s voice when he speaks is large yet makes a soft, a tremulous sound.

“You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.”