John Banville - The Infinities

The room seems to be swelling around her, as if it were indeed a tent, billowing and burgeoning as it fills up with more and more thickening, unbreathable air. The shadows seem deeper, too, a denser greyish-brown.

“He used to insist there are no great men,” she says, in a rapid murmur, “only men who occasionally do a great thing.” She is not sure why she said it. Was she replying to something, a question, a contention? She cannot remember what he said last. She feels all the more irritated. What she wanted to do was ask him about the woman: is she, was she, beautiful, clever, worldly, all those things that she herself is not? “I don’t know why we’re sitting in the gloom,” she says, with an unsteady, small laugh. “Would you mind opening the curtains, Mr. Grace?”

She looks after him as he pads across the room, his fat arms hooped and his big head bobbing. When he draws the curtains back she is surprised at how light the evening is. It will hardly get dark at all this night, for a few hours only. The thought for some reason makes her feel tired again.

He comes back and sits down on the stool. The light from the window makes a shining aureole all about him and sets a gleam on his bald pate. She draws the dressing-gown close about her. “I don’t know exactly why you’ve come,” she says tentatively, shrinking into herself. “Is there something you want from us?” She feels small suddenly, small and crouched and wizened, as she knows she will be when she is old. Did they do something to Adam, this fellow and the woman between them, did they damage him, as she always suspected they did? But no, she thinks — whatever damage there was to do he would have done himself. Only the young can work, he always said, only they have the ruthlessness for it, the savagery. “He always said,” she says, fingering the blanket, “that by the age of thirty he had finished all he had to do, that he had given everything.” She looks at him pleadingly. “Is it true?”

He shakes his head, impatiently, it seems, not answering her question but dismissing it. He has matters far more momentous to address. He leans forward, all confidential, and lays a hand on both of hers. She sees the scene as from above, the couch just so, the blanket covering her, the discarded cushion on the floor, red and swollen like a broken heart, and the fat man’s head inclined, its monkish tonsure gleaming. From far off in the fields she hears the lowing of Duffy’s cows; it must be the milking hour. The oval mirror in the wardrobe door seems a mouth wide open, getting ready to cry out. Something brushes against her, not a ghost but, as it were, the world itself, giving her a nudge.

“I spoke to him,” Benny Grace says. “—He spoke to me!”

Great consternation and commotion now, of course, voices calling from room to room, running footsteps in the hall, the telephone fairly dancing on its doilied table beside the potted palm, and Ursula’s dressing-gown ballooning about her as she comes flying down the stairs like Hera herself alighting out of air intent on burning the daidala and claiming back her aberrant spouse. What shall I say? Yes, it is true, I felt something. First there was Petra, then the dog. The girl was upset, certainly I could feel that — no mistaking my daughter in her darker modes. How I wished I were able to reach out a hand to touch her, to offer her reassurance, as she cowered there on the bed beside me, trembling as she does. That young scoundrel Wagstaff must have said something hurtful to her, or else said nothing at all, which I imagine would have been more hurtful still. For this we shall give him cramps, side stitches, pinch him thick as honeycomb. Or will we? Perhaps not. We have not been kind to him, we have not been fair. He is not such a terrible fellow, after all, only disappointed, unsure, untried. Perhaps Ursula will let him write his book about me; that would be recompense. As well him as some other scribbler. Yes, he shall limn my life, in delicatest washes of blue and gold, and make a great success of it — this is my wish.

When Petra was gone the dog pawed open the door and came nosing through the shadows in search of me. What a racket his claws make on the floorboards when he is preparing his leap. As often as not he fails in the first and even second attempt, and slithers backwards off the bed, scrabbling and groaning, and collapses on the floor in a heap of fur and bones. Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense — have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes? Yet when he succeeded in getting aloft at last and flopped down beside me with a grunt and a sigh, I did feel his brute warmth. At first I did not recognise the feeling, I mean the feeling of feeling, and thought I was only imagining with an intenser acuity than heretofore. It would not have been the first such misapprehension I have suffered these past days. In my form of paresis, if I am using the term correctly — Petra would know — it is distressingly easy to mistake an imagined sensation for an actual one. This raises a number of interesting questions in the sphere of idealism, I mean philosophical idealism, and I would address them had I the time and wherewithal.

What was I saying? The general panic in the house, yes, and my experiences leading to it, and whether they were indeed experiences in the full and accepted sense.

So. The dog on the bed, his haunch against mine, its spreading warmth. This was more than my having felt Petra’s trembling; this was a sensation in my very flesh, the suffusion in me of another creature’s blood heat. Nothing had touched me like this in all the time I had lain here apparently dead to the world after being so curtly knocked off my pedestal. Yet my first impulse was panic, a sort of panic, or fluster, at least. How can I explain this curious and, as it surely seems, ungrateful, not to say churlish, response to the resurgence of feeling, faint as it was? When one is at death’s door and waiting for it to be summarily opened, one does not care to be distracted by a tap on the shoulder from someone coming up casually at one’s back in the street. It is no small thing to have got oneself properly aligned there, facing in the right direction, with one’s exit or I should say entrance visa clutched in an already rigoring fist. I am not saying I was not glad at seeming to be recalled — being prepared to go is not the same as being eager to go — however faint the summons and however humble the summoner. It was just that everything had seemed prepared and ready, and now I would have to turn back, fizzing still with travel fever, and trudgingly retrace my steps at least some way along that weary road already travelled.

Did I speak to Benny, as he says I did? He came into the room, alone this time, and drew open the curtains again — I had been attending enraptured to the rain as it stopped, it is a sound I have always loved, the whispered ceasing of summer rain — and again leaned over me, surrounding us both in a breathy bubble of intimacy, and spoke my name. But did I really respond? I did want to say something, not to him in particular, but to someone, anyone, who would listen. I was upset, I was more than upset. It must have been the sound of the rain that had set me brooding bitterly on all that I will shortly lose, all that I shall be parted from, this frightful and exquisite world and everything in it, light, days, certain faces, the limpid air of summer, and rain itself, a thing I have never become accustomed to, this miracle of water falling out of the sky, a free and absurdly lavish, indiscriminate benison. One last time among the living: those were the words that formed themselves in my mind, and so perhaps in my mouth, also. One last sweet time among the living. I did not think it so much to ask, or would not have thought it so, if I did ask it — but did I?