John Banville - The Infinities

“What’s going on?” Helen asks. “What has happened?” Petra descends the last few steps and holds out her hand. Helen stares, frowning. “Ah — where did you find it?”

“In the kitchen. Here, have it.”

Helen takes the ring and turns it in her fingers, gazing at her sister-in-law, half smiling, with a quizzical light. “Who is Z?” Petra asks.

“What?”

“Z — the initial carved on it.”

“No, no,” Helen says, “it’s an A, A for — for Adam.”

“It’s not, it’s Z . Hold it like that, look.”

They bend their heads together over the ring and Helen turns it first this way, then that. “It seems an A to me,” she says doubtfully, “but I suppose—”

Ah, crafty old Dad!

Now a little posse of people comes in from the direction of the front hall, talking. Adam and his mother lead, with Benny Grace and Ivy Blount and Duffy the cowman crowding at their heels. They have the excited air about them of a band of disciples hurrying towards Emmaus. Adam’s colour in particular is high — he is tipsy on love and half a jug of gin gimlet — and he seems both eager and apprehensive. Helen makes to speak to him but it is to Petra that he turns. “Come with me,” he says to her, sternly unsmiling, “the rest of you stay here.” Petra asks no question, but follows meekly after him up the stairs.

“Where are they going?” Helen asks, petulantly; why will no one tell her what is happening? There is a tickle in her nostrils.

“It’s your father,” Ursula says distractedly, not looking at her but gazing after her son and daughter as if they were being taken up in a cloud. “I mean Adam — Adam’s father. Adam.”

“What? Is he—?”

“Ssh.” This is Benny Grace. She turns and stares at him, but he only smiles, pressing a finger as if playfully to his plump and ruby lips. Ivy Blount too is gazing after the disappearing pair — they are shoulders and heads up there, then heads only, then gone — and clasps her hands before her breast. Duffy shuffles awkwardly.

“I wish someone would—” Helen begins, but has to stop, and remains a moment motionless, her mouth slackly open and her eyelids fluttering. “Ah,” she says, “ahh,” then sneezes, a snapping bark, and blinks in the surprise of it.

But look! What beast of burden, burdened beast, is this? Adam and his sister have reappeared at the top of the stairs — they suggest an elephant and its mahout — Petra leading him by what seems a set of reins and he bearing his father in his arms. Old Adam is wrapped in a blanket from his toes to his beard; his eyes are closed; he is not dead. The two embark on a careful descent, as if from somewhere immensely high — the packed trees, the shining river, the dust and blood of ancient battle — Petra still in the lead but turned watchfully sideways and Adam following with stiff and stately, pachydermous tread. Petra is carrying her father’s feeding bottle and his waste jar, attached to him still by their rubber tubes. Rex the dog follows, waddling down the steps with his tongue out and his tail going from side to side like an untended rudder. Duffy advances a pace but stops irresolute, and Benny Grace with unsuspected agility darts past him and swarms up the steps to meet the descending pair.

“Careful!” Ursula calls, addressing at once her son, her daughter and Benny’s back. She puts a hand to her mouth. “Oh, please be careful.”

And Helen sneezes again.

When Dr. Fortune arrives he finds the front door standing open wide and fears the worst. He is tired and out of sorts after a long day in the surgery — a couple of his elderly patients have been particularly trying of late — and he does not relish the prospect now of dealing with the Godleys. It was impossible to make out what Ursula was saying on the telephone, babbling something about grace — surely she has not taken to religion? She seemed to be insisting that her husband had come round, which he considers extremely unlikely, although of course one never knows with such cases, all of them tricky and each one tricky in its own way. But what if Godley has returned to consciousness? By all the indications he should have been dead days ago — indeed, he should not have survived the stroke at all, so severe it was. Could it be that a brain of Godley’s type, exercised constantly throughout a lifetime, is tougher and more durable than the ordinary kind? That would be an interesting line of inquiry, and in his young days he might have taken it up, for he is not just a country quack and used to have a notion of himself as quite the man of science. How did it happen that he got so bogged down, and here, in the middle of nowhere? Sighing, he steps into the hall. His old black bag never feels so heavy as it does on occasions such as this.

If anyone ventures a word of criticism he will remind them all how strongly he advised against their taking the old man out of the hospital and returning him here.

He is well familiar with the house and advances through it confidently, though still with a somewhat quailing heart. Families are impossible when an illness strikes. As if they imagined Grandpa Gaffer and Granny Groat should live forever. There is the faint sound of music coming from somewhere. He crosses the central hall, where for some reason the chequerboard floor tiles always give him the jitters, stops to tap the face of the big, oak-framed barometer there — the thing has not worked in years — then raps a knuckle on the door of the music room, where the voices are coming from, and, getting no response, pushes open the door and steps inside.

So strange and strangely quaint is the scene that greets him that in the first moment he thinks he is the dupe of an elaborately staged prank. Ivy Blount and Duffy the cowman stand each in one of the two tall windows, facing into the room, like figures in a pantomime, a faded Columbine and her rustic Harlequin, gilded both of them down their backs by the evening’s tawny sunlight slanting through the glass. The dog is there, playing the sphinx again; when he sees the doctor he hardly stirs, except for his tail, which gives a languishing thump or two. The french doors are opened, the gauze curtains drawn aside, and a sofa has been brought right up to the doorway, and on it Adam Godley reclines full length, wrapped in a red blanket to his chin, though his pyjamaed arms are free and draped along his chest. His drip stand is by him and the tubes are still in his nose, his waste jar is pushed under the sofa, where it gleams. His eyes are open, and he gazes into the garden, yearningly. His wife is perched awkwardly by his side, and is holding one of his hands and stroking it. One of his feet is visible too, long and slender and pale, like a prehistoric artefact, and this in turn is being stroked by his son, who kneels cumbersomely by the end of the sofa, in a pose that seems designed to illustrate filial subjection, filial love. Hand and foot, hand and foot, as ever. Petra is the most striking figure of this tableau, standing off to the side with her arms folded around herself, each of her hands clutching an opposite flank, and gazing at her father with a look of — of what? Sorrow, anger, pain, all of these, and more? Although her sleeves are buttoned at the wrists the doctor sees at once by her pallor and the leaden shadows under her eyes that she has been cutting herself again. Poor child, poor child. He notices the bandage on young Adam’s thumb; surely he too has not, surely—?

“Oh, Ferdy,” Ursula says, seeing him. She smiles, and blushes. “I — we—”

The doctor says nothing; what is there for him to say? He makes a gesture, helpless and accepting. He looks at the figure on the sofa, waited on hand and foot, as he would wish. As well end here, he thinks, as anywhere.