John Banville - The Infinities

She stirs, a start — was she asleep? She feels she might swoon and puts a hand on Roddy’s arm, laughing a little in confusion and blurred dismay. “Sorry,” she says, “I thought — I was thinking — something from the — lines from the—”

He says her name, his mouth is by her cheek; she turns to speak again but he kisses full her open lips, his tongue burning on hers. Surprise floods through her, a sort of whoop, like laughter. Her eyes are open and so are his. Such a stare he has, as if straight into her soul! And his arms, two airy hoops that hold her fast. She tries to draw back, saying something into his mouth, his golden mouth. Something deep inside her stirs, a bud of something, stirring. At last he releases her and she gives a great gasp—“Oh!”—as one who has been drowning but is suddenly saved.

what other you is—

She leans back, at a loss, panting, her arms open, her lips still saying a silent Oh! He seems as surprised as she is, and blinks, and frowns, and touches his fingers to his lips as if to find a trace of her. She puts a hand to her hair, her cheek, her mouth. “What do you think you’re — what?”

“I don’t know—” He shudders and takes out a handkerchief and wipes his lips. What is that medleyed music in the air, of pipe and tabor, bugle and flute, what voices chanting as the radiant cavalcade departs? “I’m sorry.”

She rises from the seat and with a flowing movement, a dancer’s sweep, leans down and slaps him smartly across the cheek. He draws back, stares, and his eyes narrow. He is only himself now, the god having abandoned him. The air is darkening. He makes to speak. A whiplash crack of thunder sounds directly overhead and seemingly at the level of the treetops. Thunder? Yes!

Oh, Dad.

Benny Grace hears that thunderclap and smiles. It catches him stealing across the music room from outer door to inner. For such an ill-made thing he moves daintily when he must. Now he pauses, hearkening. All outside has gone breathlessly silent, from the shock of the god’s great shout of anger. Presently our faithful blackbird will try out a splash of liquid notes in the dimmened and newly oppressive air, and then will come the first and faintest susurrus of rain, like the sound of a blind man’s fingers reading braille. Where did the clouds appear from, how did they creep up all unnoticed? Benny knows a jealous deity ordained. He moves on, still smiling to himself. He is barefoot yet and carries his cracked shoes in his hands, each with a sweat-limp sock stuffed inside it under the tongue. One flap of his shirt has come out of the waistband of his trousers and not all his fly buttons are done up. Where is he going? Whithersoever his fancy takes him, so long as it is in the direction of me. The hushed air is his element.

Strange, how tentative we are when we come into their world, shy amongst the creatures we have made. Is it that we are worrying we might leave the order of things calamitously disturbed? Everything is to be put back exactly as it was before us, no stone left turned, no angle unaligned, all divots replaced. This is the rule the gods must obey. Did I say gods, did I say obey? Fine gods we are, that we must muster to a mortal must. But even our avatar, the triune lord of a later epiphany, forfeits the omnipotence you ascribe to him in the simple fact that the thing he cannot do is will himself out of existence, as one of the desert fathers, for the moment I do not recall which one, inconveniently pointed out and was promptly stoned to death — or crucified, was it? — for his impudence. It is all a matter of demarcation, the division of labour, one job one god. We too have our hierarchies, our choirs, thrones, all that. Seraphim. Cherubim.

What am I saying? I am mixing up the heavenly hosts.

My mind is going, going.

Benny Grace tiptoeing across the music room, his damp soles making unpleasant small smacking sounds on the parquet. His element, yes, this hush after thunder and before rain and the bird’s sudden drench of song. It is so for all of us; this is where we seem to ourselves most really real, in these little lapses, these little creases in the fabric of our creation. For we do not come amongst you, not in the actual fact of being here, whatever I may claim to the contrary. To us your world is what the world in mirrors is to you. A burnished, crystalline place, sparkling and clear, with everything just as it is on this side, only reversed, and infinitely unreachable. A looking-glass world, indeed, and only that. Hence our melancholy, our mischievousness, too — oh, to put a fist to that blank pane and burst through to the other side! But all we would meet is mercury. Mercury! My other name, one of my other names.

Speaking of divots, I used to have a mission of replacing them. Well, not a mission, though I would get into a great rage at those who left them where they lay, wet and knobbled, like fresh-squeezed turds. This was when I lived on the side of that hill on Haggard Head, above the sea, and my garden, such as it was, abutted the seventh green — or do they say hole, the seventh hole? — of a public golf course, where anyone could hire a set of clubs at so much an hour and there were no green fees. The place was for the most part deserted, apart from the odd, solitary retiree stoically practising his swing in the dewy hour at dawn or eve, but on weekends and bank holidays feral youths would come by train and bus from the city’s slums and hack up and down the course like so many wandering and malfunctioning windmills. I was never a golfer myself, need I say, but I had got into the habit of walking the links — links, that is another nice old specialised word, like divot — especially on those days when my mind seized up and I could not work, and increasingly there were many such. It pained me to see the fairways sliced and gouged. The torn-out sods, retrieved and turned right side up, now looked more like green scalps, or merkins, maybe. They made a satisfying squelch when I trod them back into the ground. What did I think I was doing, patching up this bit of the poor earth’s epidermis? But I cherish the world, it is true, have I not made that clear already? Should have been a poet, perhaps, apostrophising skylarks and doting on daffodils. You will have noticed my way with words, supposedly rare in a man of my calling. Words are so friendly, so accommodating, so loosely adaptable, not like numbers, with their tiresome insistence on meaning only what they mean and nothing more. But what they have that words have not is rigour, and rigour was what seduced me from the start, the promise of one firm thing in an infirm world. It all seemed so simple, early on. I loved the process, the slow accumulating of many tiny parts into a vast and gorgeous gewgaw the joy of which was its utter inutility. What did it matter if some other, a mere technician, should extract from the middle of my mesh a bristling filament that fitted perfectly a slot in one of his infernal machines? Apply, apply away! — that was my cry. And apply they did, adapting my airy fancies to invent all sorts of surprising and useful gimcrackery, from the conversion of salt water into an endless source of energy to rocket ships that will fly the net of time. I was resented, of course; my kind always are. Benny used to warn me, but I never listened. Benny pretends to be a man of the people, though he is just like me, in his deepest heart. We are all alike, all we Olympians. We are supposed to be the celebrants of all that is vital and gay and light, and so we are but, oh, we are cold, cold.

I have left Benny stalled there in the middle of that room, with the evening light eclipsed and rain coming. He is on his way to me, and in no hurry. Let him loiter, there is time enough, I am going nowhere, not yet. I feel suddenly a sad fondness for him, poor unlovely outcast creature, as I felt earlier for my son — I must be softening, here at the end. Benny is a solitary, we have that too in common.