John Banville - The Infinities

Still he hesitates, unwilling to climb. It was not just his father’s presence at the top of it that made this unlit narrow stairway so alarming a prospect to him as a child. Something definite seemed to lurk here, where the darkness was darker than anywhere else in the house, something unseen yet clammily palpable, of which even yet, in broadest of broad daylight, he seems to detect a lingering, cobwebby wisp. He recalls his dream again, the cries of battle, the bronze helmets flashing, the bloodied dust. And what was it he was bearing in his arms, what? — a wounded comrade, a corpse, perhaps? He shuts his eyes, opens them again.

He cannot recall his father ever addressing him by his name. He does not resent this or think it a spurning, only he wonders at it. Did his father find it awkward that they were both called Adam? Hardly. Anyway, his father rarely addresses anyone by name; names are something he does not think it necessary to take regard of or remember.

He takes a breath and ascends the stairs as he always does, at a soft run, head down, knees working like elbows. The stairs groan under him as if in outrage.

In the room he wonders why the curtains are shut. At first he can make out nothing but a jumble of standing shapes, vague, dust-coloured, which give the impression of hooded sentinels keeping silent vigil. After a purblind moment he locates the bed. It is the ugly four-poster from his parents’ room that his mother had Duffy take apart and haul up here and reassemble when his father was being brought back from the hospital. No one knows why she moved him out of their bedroom; perhaps she does not know herself. The bed is not exactly too big for the room, but disproportionate, somehow, out of place, with its suggestion of the world of drowsy intimacies, sleep, and dream, that world into which his parents would withdraw to spend together their mysterious married nights. His father would not have a couch, not even an armchair, in the room where he worked. A plain steel desk and a bentwood chair, a block of graph paper in loose sheets, and a plentiful supply of pencils, of course, his famous Ticonderogas No. 4, extra hard, yellow with a green band and pink eraser, specially imported by the boxful; these are, were, the tools of his trade, the implements of the arcanum. When he was famous first, caricaturists pictured him as a monk in a windowless bare cell, wild-eyed and hydrocephalic, hunched with his pencil over a gridded page of parchment; also as a spaceman in a globular helmet popping out of a hole in the sky, as a mad professor with electrified hair meeting and merging with himself in a mirror, as an entire crew of identical sailors marooned each one in solitude on his own earth-shaped island afloat in a sea of inky darkness. Young Adam was proud of his father and secretly clipped these cartoons out of newspapers and magazines and hid them in a cigar box at the back of the top shelf of the wardrobe in his room. Perhaps they are still there, mouldering now.

He makes himself draw nearer to the bed, and after some fumbling, finds the lamp switch and turns on the bedside light. At first he cannot bring himself to look directly at his father. The surface of the bed is another field, smooth and grainily grey and uniform except where his father’s form makes a neat, elongated mound down the middle of it. The general arrangement reminds Adam of something though for the moment he cannot think what it is. Standing here like this he feels faintly ridiculous, as he did just now outside the door, and he has the notion that there are people in hiding, behind the curtains and under the bed, with their hands clapped over their mouths, getting ready to spring out at him, whooping and jeering and laughing. He does not know how to behave here. It is strange being in a room with someone who is present and at the same time not. His father’s arms are on top of the sheet, stretched stiff at his sides; it is an oddly hieratic arrangement, as if he had been making a large blessing with arms outstretched over the heads of a kneeling multitude and now had stepped back to conceal himself in the shadows. The hands at the ends of the pyjama sleeves are long and bony and crisscrossed with swollen, greenish-blue veins, the kind of hands pianists are supposed to have, and nothing like young Adam’s, which are short-fingered and blunt.

All at once he remembers what it is that the bed with his father in it reminds him of. One day, at the beach, when they were children, Petra let him bury her in the sand. It was his idea; he was bored, and thought it would pass the time. But no, that was not it, or not all of it. He had seen the look of alarm in his sister’s eyes when he told her what he was going to do and got her to lie down in the sand, and it had excited him. Otherwise he would have tired of the project as soon as he started, for it was not easy: the sand was heavy and sluggish after a morning of rain and the spade that he had to use was Petra’s, a toy plastic thing that was much too small and flimsy for the task. But he kept on until she was covered right up to the neck and all that was left of her was her face, as white as pipeclay, as she lay there in a cocoon of wet sand, with her eyes fixed on him anxiously, trapped and motionless like his father, here, now.

He grins to himself, joylessly, guiltily, leaning in the gloom.

But how shrunken his father seems, so much shorter than in life and pitifully thin — in life, yes, for as he is now he is surely as good as dead; that seems evident. By the time he was twelve young Adam was already impossibly big, with a prizefighter’s rolling shoulders and a weight-lifter’s legs, half a head taller than his tall and sinuously articulated father. The disproportion only made him feel all the more clumsy and slow, and somehow the smaller of the two, a pygmy at the knee of the great, white man. He used to divert himself by fancying that he was not his father’s son at all but the outcome of a desperate adventure entered into by his mother to pay his father back for the many affairs he was said to carry on; it cheered him to think of having been conceived in a flurry of anger and avenging lust. Sometimes he thinks he would like to be like that himself, unforgiving, coldly passionate, a dealer-out of retribution and just deserts. Perhaps, to buck him up, I should plant in his mind the idea that my father Zeus—? But no. Not the most loyal and loving of sons could imagine that Adam’s mother, even in the flower of virginal youth, would have been my heavenly father’s type.

Who else was on the beach that day? Adam tries to recall the wider scene, the tawny dunes behind and the flat slope of sand down to the water’s edge shining like newly poured cement, and people in the water bobbing and squealing, and a sailboat out on the water, and, closer by, someone sitting on a blanket dispensing tea from a Thermos flask and querulously calling his name. The three of them, of course: him, his sister, his mother; always these three, never four, unless Granny Godley came with them, which she seldom did, for she had an aversion to outdoors, and deplored especially the sea and its shore. He thinks of his grandmother with rueful fondness, this fierce old loving woman unable to show her love to anyone.

At last he brings himself to look full at his father’s face, or at his head, rather, that high-domed, ascetic head with its bony brow and axe-head nose and pointed beard and broad-lipped, prehensile mouth. What does he look most like? A high priest at rest after the throes and transports of a religious ritual. A dead pharaoh, mummified and shrunken. Or just Petra, buried to her neck in the sand.

Now he rouses himself from his musings and leans over the bed determined to do he does not know what, and immediately falters. Should he kiss his father? Is that what is expected of him? But if so, does it matter whether he does or not, since there is no one here to see him doing or not doing it, and his father cannot know either way? And when did he kiss his father? When did his father kiss him? If either ever did, it is long beyond remembering. He feels constrained and ill at ease in this crepuscular atmosphere, these dim and somehow churchly surrounds. Does he wish his father gone? The thought comes to him unbidden; he is shocked not to be shocked. He looks at those hands resting motionless on the sheet and all at once, without warning, something gapes open inside him, a vertiginous hollow into which at once he pitches forward helplessly. For a second he cannot make out what is the matter; then he realises that he is weeping. This is more than anything a surprise, for it is a long time since he last wept. He does not know the source of these tears, brimming unstoppably over his scalding lids, so copious and heavy they seem unreal, the fat, hot tears of childhood that in childhood he so furiously forbade himself to shed except when he was alone. But it is simple, surely — he is weeping for his dying father. Why would he not? Yet he is so much taken aback that it seems he might begin to laugh, even as he weeps. The only sound he hears himself produce, however, is a series of little gulps, or gasps, little soft hiccups. Altogether it is a not disagreeable sensation, this sudden extravaganza of grief, if grief is what it is, and he is pleased with himself, proud, almost, as if his tears were a demonstration of something, some task or proof that for long has been required of him without his knowing. And when after a minute or two he regains control of himself he feels almost invigorated, as if he had undergone a religious drenching. Shriven, he thinks — is that the word? Yes, shriven. But also he feels as he felt when he was a child after wetting the bed in his sleep, guilty and gleeful at the same time, and obscurely, shamefully avenged, though on whom, or what, he does not know.