John Banville - The Infinities

He mashes his wet eyes with the heels of his hands, and having no handkerchief he wipes his nose on his sleeve, and is conscious again of his absurd get-up, the too-small pair of pyjamas he has squeezed himself into, and his big bare feet glimmering down there far below him in the gloom. He lets fall a heavy sigh, which in the shrouded silence sounds exaggerated and almost comical, a stage version of a sigh. He feels sheepish — everything he does is overdone. He tries to touch his father’s stirless form but cannot, and that act too, that non-act, seems histrionic and false. He is not used to feeling like this. He thinks of himself, when he thinks of himself, as a simple being. Helen is the complicated one; he stands before the intricacy of her in awed amazement, like an indian watching from the shore the unheard-of, marvellous ships with shining masts bounding towards him out of dream-blue distances.

He lumbers down the narrow stairs and once outside he shuts the door behind him, easing the doorknob on its spring so as to make no sound. When he turns he is surprised to find how bright the day is already, how rich the morning sunlight streaming down upon the landing. The house is built on four sides around a big, square space two storeys deep, at the bottom of which is the black-and-white tiled floor of the central hallway; the roof is made of rectangular sheets of rippled, greenish glass grimed with moss and bird droppings and plastered with last year’s blown and blackened leaves, and by some trick of light the well below it seems always filled to the brim with impossibly still, impossibly clear water. The walls, clad in slotted wooden laths, were painted immemorially with buff distemper that has turned an unpleasantly sulphurous shade, and with the sun on them, as now, give off a dry, not unpleasant, wood-and-paint smell, the smell of family hotels and rickety seaside chalets, though the sea is a good twenty miles off, and who would think of holidaying here at Arden House, except perhaps Roddy Wagstaff, and he does not count? What caprice led Ivy Blount’s great-grandfather, the whimsical St. John Blount, to have half the house’s wall-space covered with this cheap wood battening? The wonder of it is the place has survived so long and not been set fire to by lightning bolt or rebel torch. “Tinder,” his mother says, “this great gazebo — nothing but tinder.”

Adam walks round two sides of the balconied landing, moving under the leaded glass roof through sharp-edged flickers of light and shadow, hearing his bare feet paddling softly, moistly, on the uncarpeted boards. He comes to another door and again stands listening; he fancies he hears from within his sleeping wife softly breathing, and the faint, diaphanous sound stirs his senses.

“What are you doing?” Helen blurredly demands, sitting up quickly. Something in him always vibrates anew to the sound of her voice, its dark, true note, as on an oboe. She looks at the empty place in the bed beside her, feels the cold pillow with her hand. She frowns. “Where did you go?”

As always his wife’s beauty strikes him as if for the first time — strikes him, yes, for he feels the effect of it like a soft blow to the heart. Why was it he that she chose to marry when so many others had pled with her in vain? The question gnaws at him, he broods on it, but finds no answer. Strangely, though, it warms him, too, affords him a bodeful, warming thrill, which he cannot account for. He toys repeatedly with the possibility of losing her; he is like one afflicted with a fear of falling who drags himself back again and again to the very brink of the precipice. Life without her is unimaginable for him. He wonders if this will change, if one day, old and tired and disenchanted, he will look back and ask himself how he could ever have been held in such helpless thrall by her. She is only human, after all, a human being, like himself. But no, no, she is not like him. The beautiful ones, the rare ones as beautiful as she, are different, he is convinced of it: they carry their beauty like a burden that does not weigh down but magically lightens. Theirs is another way of being human, if they are human at all.

Hear my old Dad licking his chops in the background? — she is no goddess of loveliness, but a human girl, all right. If she were not he would not pine after her as achingly as he does. It is their very humanness he covets, the salacious old rip.

Neither of them brought nightwear, and Helen, excitingly to Adam, has on Adam’s shirt that he wore yesterday, pale blue, like his undersized pyjamas, with a faint white stripe. She is still looking at him strangely, with a strange surmise. The small, square room is shoddily furnished with things that over the years since it ceased to be his have migrated to here from elsewhere in the house. There is the old-fashioned high bed, two bedside lockers painted a sickly shade of chocolate brown, a spindle-legged table, ditto, bearing a china basin with matching jug and a speckled oval shaving mirror on a wooden stand; there is a straw-bottomed chair and, on the floor at the foot of the bed, a brassbound mahogany chest with SS Esmerelda inscribed in neat poker-work on the lid. Some old things of his remain, too, a glue-encrusted model aeroplane on a stand, a faded poster of a football team pinned to the wall, a hurley stick standing in a corner like the long leg-bone of some fleet creature. The floor is of rough-hewn pitchpine beams that have driven a splinter into many an unprotected toe. The window opposite the bed is shaded with a muslin blind, and the room is filled with a powdery white effulgence that seems to slow everything down a beat; there is the musty smell of sleep.

“I was awake,” Adam says. “I went downstairs. Did you hear the train?”

Helen’s frown deepens and she tilts her head to one side and looks at him hard, as if she thinks he is teasing her and is cautioning him to stop. What colour are her eyes? They must be blue, yes, dark blue and deep as the Grecian sea itself. Her head is an exquisite, cream-and-gold inverted egg that sits on its pale length of neck as on a plinth of polished stone. She has cut her hair in a new fashion, close to the skull in countless imbricated layers like flakes of gold leaf; he is not sure he likes it in this style but would not dare to say so. In the matter of his wife and the things she does or does not do he feels he is standing astride the hub of a great steel disc that is spinning at an immense speed and that at the tiniest ill-judged action on his part will begin to wobble wildly and a second later fly off its spindle with terrible shrieks and clangs and send him flailing into darkness and irreparable damage. “You were here, not downstairs,” she says, more in puzzlement than contradiction. “You were here, with me.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

She gives an odd, dry laugh. “Is that so?” Her tone too puzzles him; she must still be half in a dream. One naked foot has kicked free the hem of the sheet; he notes the heel’s callused rim and his already smitten chest seems to open and let something fly out, like a bird out of a clock, love’s desperate cuckoo. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says. “I’m sopping.”

When she steps from the bed the tails of the blue shirt open briefly in front and he catches a glimpse of her russet fleece. He wants to touch her, to detain and hold her. There is a grain of sleep at the canthus of her left eye, the one that has a slight and captivating droop. She brushes past him and as she goes to the door he is treated to a brief view under the shirt-tails of two pale half-moons of pendent, glimmering flesh. He imagines licking that fleck of hardened gleet from the corner of her eye with just the very tip of his tongue. Sopping?

He kneels on the side of the bed and leans deeply forward on his hands as if prostrating himself in prayer and buries his face in the still-warm nest in the bedclothes where until a moment ago his wife was sitting.