John Banville: The Infinities

He makes his way into the big central hallway. The aqueous light here is oyster-grey and glimmers on polished tiles and picture-glass. A leaning mirror gapes in mute amazement at all it sees. The rain is a steady, monotonous drumming now, as if the summer day had got a serious, grim new task, and the glass roof high above streams and shimmers, the glass panels darkened to a lambent shade of sea-green, and everything underneath it is adrizzle. He senses another creature nearby, and looks about him alertly. Rex the dog is crouching under an old striped sofa that stands against the wall beside a potted palm. He pants and shivers, big drops splashing off the end of his tongue, for he is terrified of thunder. Benny goes and squats down and talks to him, but the dog only bares his teeth and growls. “All right, then,” Benny says indulgently, rising. “All right.” He goes to the foot of the stairs and listens upwards, straining to hear; is it the sound of the rain or is someone speaking above, a feebly fretful drone that rises and falls? He ascends three steps of the staircase, stops, listens again. It is definitely a voice, murmurmurmur, a sigh, a softly plaining cry, murmur again. This is what Benny loves, what all the gods love, to eavesdrop on the secret lives of others. See him stealthily climbing there, face lifted eagerly and a dab of rain-light gleaming on his stub of nose, his fleshy fist mounting the banister-rail beside him in little hops, like a hunched and pallid toad. I could trip him up, wrap his trousers round his knees and send him tumbling arse over tip to bang his big fat head on those black-and-white tiles. But I will not.

He has to cross three sides of the landing before he finds where the voice is coming from. A door stands conveniently ajar. It is dim inside the room where the curtains are closed. She lies on a couch against the wall with a brown blanket pulled to her throat. Her arms are free of the blanket and she clutches something to her breast, a shapeless something, red and soft. Her son is seated beside her on a little chair and strokes her forehead with one of his huge hands, so gently, strokes and strokes. Ursula’s eyes are closed. She murmurs a gabble of words, with frequent sighs, frequent moans. The rain rattles furiously against the unseen window, booms upon the glazed roof above. Benny presses himself to the wall, all eyes and ears. Is it not a quaint scene? — a moment out of Watteau, it might be, these figures about their ambiguous business, in uncertain light, as the day wanes. Let us leave them there, the three of them, for now, the languishing lady and attendant man, and the listener by the doorway, a meddling jester.

My heavens, what a downpour! Helen is drenched, to the very skin, her dress in big patches darkened to navy-blue and clinging to her knees, her thighs, her breasts. She arrives in a flurry, blinking the rain from her eyelashes and laughing, the kitchen door banging behind her. Even the band of her pants is shiver-makingly wet against her belly. “Look at me!” she cries in happy dismay, and holds up her hands and flutters her fingers, sprinkling the flagstones with drops the size of pennies. Ivy Blount, who has been sitting at the table shelling peas, regards her for a moment without moving, her face reflecting the bedraggled young woman’s undiminished light, for the rain has only made her more radiant, pinking her skin all over and turning her hair to polished wheat. She kicks off her muddied sandals and reaches behind her and with an effort undoes the top three buttons at the back of her dress — goodness, is she going to take it off? My father will faint if she does. But wait, Ivy is not alone. Who is it loitering there by the bog-oak dresser? Duffy, is that you? Aha, my bold spalpeen. He has a sheepish air and seems bemused. He does look like a man who has been accepted in a proposal he cannot remember having made. Ivy too is not herself: there is a hectic flush to her cheeks and her eyes are quick and bright. Have the words been spoken, has the deal been closed? I think so, I think I foresee strewn rose petals and the chanting of epithalamia. What a wily matchmaker I have proved, after all. “I’ll get a towel,” Ivy says.

She rises from the lyre-backed kitchen chair but hesitates a moment, looking hard into the bowl half full of sinisterly glistening peas, which is a way of not looking at Duffy, then turns and goes quickly from the room. Duffy too does not know where to look — I think he thought Helen might indeed be about to unsheathe herself from her wet dress, which I am sure would have called for another application of the smelling-salts. She crosses to the sink and leans forward and with her palms presses her hair hard against her skull, and a few squeezed drops spatter on the porcelain. The rain-light sinuates in the window, brightening, phosphorescent. Duffy averts his gaze from her invitingly elevated rump; he is something of a gentleman, after all, in his rough way. I have mocked him, usurped him, spuriously enthused him, yet I do not wish him ill. I hope that he will marry Ivy. I hope they will have a happy time of it, in the time that is left to them — though he is younger than his putative bride he is no spring chicken either, as his Ma would sourly say. Yes, I wish them happiness, in so far as mortals are capable of being happy. Duffy’s life, like Ivy’s, has not been easy, a long and joyless bachelorhood in that ugly house behind the hill, wriggling in restive impotence under the thumb of his jealous mother, who in her turn was beaten by her mother and abused by her father, who in their turn were similarly used by their respective sires and dams, and so on all the way back to Adam and Eve who no doubt mistreated their misbegotten brood, compelling them into an orgy of incest so that the race of men might flourish and fill all the earth. But Duffy’s expectations are modest and so are Ivy’s; they have that advantage as they set out on their adventure together, for the inevitable disappointments of married life will not hit them so hard as they would if they were young and starry-eyed. Have I mentioned that Duffy is illiterate? His mother — by the way, I thought we were to hear no more of that harridan? — did not hold with schooling, being little schooled herself. He hides his lack of letters by means of various stratagems, the devising of which took more effort than he would have expended in learning to read, but which are so subtle and convincing that even Ivy does not know his shaming secret. He is worrying already as to how he will manage to sign the marriage register. But it will be all right. I shall intercede with my stepmother Hera, whose bailiwick encompasses all matters conjugal, and have her arrange for Duffy to confide his secret to Ivy on the night before the wedding, and together they will spend a happy hour seated side by side at the oilcloth-covered table in Ivy’s kitchen, their heads inclined and foreheads almost touching in the lamplight, while Ivy’s tender hand guides Duffy’s as he traces out laboriously, in pencil, over and over until he has them off pat, the magic letters of his name. More than the wedding itself, that little ceremony there under the lamp, all silent save for the soft scratching of graphite on paper, will mark the true beginning of their life together. Yes, yes, I have it all planned.

Helen turns from the sink and asks Duffy for a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” she says, “which is why I never buy them.”

Duffy’s look turns leporine and he moves the tip of his tongue along his lower lip — is she making a joke?

“I only have roll-ups,” he says, showing her the tobacco tin from his pocket and quickly palming it again.

She shrugs. “Roll me one, then.”

All the more alarmed by this he turns a quarter way away from her and remains motionless, staring at nothing. “Oh, it’s all right,” she says. “Someone will give me a real one.”