The Infinities

by John Banville

  “I have a great fondness for your father,” Roddy says. Adam has to make an effort not to smile—Roddy has a way of saying things as if they had been written down on prompt-cards and practised many times—but before he can reply Roddy speaks again, quickly, in a muted yet vexedly accusing tone. “I know what you think of me.”

  “Do you?” Adam, surprised, says. “I’m not sure I know myself what I think of you, or of anyone else, for that matter.”

  Adam waits, but Roddy, it appears, has nothing more to add. He sits with his head thrust forward, looking steadily out through the windscreen with a faint, pursed smile, of satisfaction, even of triumph, it might be, as if there had been a hash in need of settling and he had settled it with gratifying finality and dispatch. Adam has the unsettling sensation of having been engaged in a far more extensive, far more rancorous exchange, involving him but carried on somehow without his full participation.

  I am admiring the gorse blossom: it is truly glorious, a froth of buttery gold over the hillsides and along the hedgerows. Aye, this world we gave them appears a pretty place, on occasion.

  “Is this all your father’s land?” Roddy asks.

  “No, no. There’s only the house and the acre or two it stands on, and the wood behind. The rest was sold off long before our time.” Roddy nods. He peers out at the passing spectacle of green and gold and wrinkles his brow as if faintly deploring all he sees. Adam glances down sideways at Roddy’s tan slip-ons. His white linen jacket is folded on his knees as neatly as a parcel. “Everyone is glad you’ve come, you know.” Roddy does not respond to this, but holds himself aloof, pretending he has not heard or is too preoccupied to pay heed. Adam presses on. “It’s strange, the house, since Pa got sick. We feel we’re all”—he sadly smiles—“mourners-in-waiting.”

  Roddy turns his head quickly to look at him. “Is he going to die?” He sounds incredulous.

  They round a bend and the house comes into view. Really it is, Adam sees, not for the first time, an impossible sort of folly, square and mad-looking, with its yellow-painted walls and pale-blue shutters and that winged tin figure—ahem!—atop the single turret. Viewed from this perspective the entire structure seems to lean slightly to one side, drunkenly. Two palm trees, dusty and dejected, stand one each before either pillar of the gate—palms, in this climate, and here, in the heart of the country!—brought from afar, perhaps on the SS Esmerelda, by a Blount forebear of missionary or, more likely, buccaneering bent. When he was a boy Adam used to play with their shed fronds, pretending they were scimitars, duelling two-handed with himself. As he turns the car from the road on to the drive the crunching sound the wheels make in the grit-filled ruts brings back for an instant a confusion of lost, sunstruck summers. Rex has heard their approach and in the distance sets up a deep-throated barking, each bark followed by a measured pause, as he waits in vain for echo or response. They wallow on soft tyres to the end of the avenue of limes and make a half turn around the no longer functioning fountain—a blank-eyed boy on a rampant dolphin, last year’s dead leaves choking the dry basin—and pull up short on the gravel outside the front door and sit unmoving for a moment in the sudden, startled silence.

  “Look, Roddy,” Adam says, and pauses. Roddy has taken out the flat silver case and is judiciously selecting a cigarette, as if they were not all perfectly alike. “I want to ask something of you. I want to ask you to be nice to my sister.”

  Roddy stops with the cigarette half-way to his lips and lifts his eyes and looks straight ahead. The sloping glass of the windscreen with the sun on it is greyly hazed and all beyond is indistinct. “Nice?” he says, seeming to dangle the word aloft by one corner.

  Adam’s bare elbow is hot where it rests in the car’s open window. Five ducks in a skein fly over fast, their wings making a whirring sound—hurry-hurry-hurry—and from far off, out on the slobland, there comes, insequentially with the seemingly fleeing ducks, the miniature muffled thud of an out-of-season shotgun-blast. The front door’s blue paint is peeling; gnarled wisteria wreathes the lintel.

  “Yes,” Adam says shortly, and puffs out his cheeks and lets them deflate again. “Nice. It’s not so much to ask, is it? Think of it as a gesture to Pa. Because he is dying, you know.”

  Roddy, lighting his cigarette, seems about to laugh—at what?—when the front door opens and Rex shoots out, barking again. He dashes menacingly towards the station-wagon with stiff, arthritic gait, not so much running as bounding up and down from back legs to fore like a rocking-horse set jerkily in motion. When he sees Adam his bark breaks and he snaps his jaws shut and looks embarrassed. Adam gets out and Roddy on his side opens his door but holds it close and hangs back behind it until he judges the dog has done capering and the gravel-dust has begun to disperse. The harsh dry salt reek from the car’s exhaust spreads thinly in the dusty air. Petra has appeared in the doorway, in baggy corduroy trousers and a long-sleeved blue shirt buttoned at the wrists, and stands with her left arm pressed stiffly against the peeling frame and frowning hard at a point on the ground half-way between her and the station-wagon, from behind the door of which now Roddy emerges, with his bag held protectively in front of him and his linen jacket folded over his arm, still keeping an eye on the dog, and advances towards her, queasily smiling.

  . . .

  Ursula in the Sky Room has heard Rex’s barking and the sound of tyres on the gravel but goes on clipping her husband’s fingernails. They do not really need to be clipped but she is doing it anyway, to be doing something. The curtains are still closed and the room is dark and she has switched on the reading lamp on the bedside table and angled it to light her task. She does not know why she keeps the curtains pulled against the summer day, or why, indeed, she set a reading lamp beside the bed. She cannot tell if her husband registers light or lack of it in those rare moments when he opens his eyes; she cannot be sure that he registers anything, but she makes herself believe that he does. His hands are cold as water, soft, and clammy. The nails are flattish and finely striated, and the skin beneath them is milky blue and the half-moons at their bases are a ghostly shade of grey. She started off with scissors but they were too fiddly and made her flesh crawl, and so she is using the clippers, which are easier though still it is a shivery business. She has never cut anyone’s fingernails before, except her own, and she would not cut even those if there were someone who would do it for her. When Adam and Petra were small she was too squeamish to do theirs and left the job to their father or to his mother. She seems to remember that Granny Godley used to trim young Adam’s nails with her teeth when he was a baby. Can that have been? Surely not—surely she is imagining it? Yet in her mind she clearly sees the old woman, lanky and white-skinned like her son, leaning over the cradle and baring her long, yellowish horse-teeth, exactly like the witch in a fairy-tale.

  She knows it is not so yet she has the unnerving feeling that her husband, even though his eyes are closed, is watching her from the gloom outside the yellow circle of lamplight in which she leans, watching her along the blanket from under his eyelashes. It is how she often caught him looking at her, askance, smiling to himself, silently amused, especially in their early days together. She might have been his daughter rather than his wife, and even yet there are times when she feels like his child. She is sure this is a terrible notion, and would never confide it to anyone.

  Years ago, he shaved off his beard, without telling her, just appeared at the breakfast table one morning with half his face missing, or so it seemed to her in the first, shocked moment of seeing him. If she had met him in the street she would not have recognised him, except for his eyes. How strange he looked, grotesque, almost, with those indecently naked cheeks and the chin flat and square like the blunt edge of a stone axe. It was as if the top part of his head had been taken off and carved and trimmed and jammed down into the scooped-out jaws of a stranger. She almost wept, but he went on eating his toast as if nothing had happened. He had bought a cut-throat razor with an ivory handle, an an
tique thing from the last century; he showed it to her in its black velvet box lined with scarlet satin. She could not look at it without a shiver. He liked to show off his skill with it, and would leave the bathroom door open so she could admire the deft way he wielded the dangerous, gleaming thing, holding it at an elegant angle between fingertips and thumb, his little finger fastidiously crooked, and sweeping the blade raspingly through the snow-like foam. Harsh light above the bath and the steely shine of the mirror and one dark, humorously cocked eye glancing at her sideways from the glass. Where is it now, she wonders, that razor? In a week or two he got tired of using it and let his beard grow back.

  Disturbing things, these little horny flanges at the ends of everyone’s fingers and toes that never stop growing, even after death, or so she has heard said. What are they, were they, for? Killing, skinning, rending? Too weak and brittle for that. Perhaps they were stronger, long ago; perhaps they were claws. She thinks she read somewhere that they were originally tufts or pads of hair that became fused and hardened, in the same way that thorns on roses are supposed really to be leaves that over aeons coiled themselves tighter and tighter until they were sharp as needles. Yet it all seems highly improbable. She knows so little, and even the things she does know she doubts. Adam would be able to tell her about fingernails and how they came to be as they are. He would look it up for her. He liked looking things up. He would throw himself back on his chair, frowning deeply, his lips pursed as if to whistle, then sprint off to the bookshelves and return a minute later with a big book open on his hands, hurrying along as if on tiptoe, stooped and swift, reading even as he went.

  Her mind has not allowed her yet to grasp the full extent of the calamity that has befallen them, not only Adam and she but the rest of the family, too. There is a saving numbness around her heart, she can almost feel it, like a film of insulating air between the walls of the beating muscle and the soft red pulp inside the rib-cage where it is suspended. For all that the doctors tell her, she will not, she simply will not be persuaded that he is entirely beyond consciousness and not merely asleep in some special, profound sense, and she keeps waiting for him to sit up and clear his throat and start asking for things, his clothes, food, a glass of wine, in that deceptively diffident manner he affects when he is at his most furious, looking aside and frowning, pretending to be thinking of something else. No, he is not unconscious, she is sure of it, only more deeply sunk than ever before in one of his impenetrable reveries. He always had the ability to withdraw from his surroundings, for days on end, wrapping himself up in himself and shutting out everything and everyone. When she sits here alone with him like this, in this peculiar daytime darkness, she seems to hear, or at least to feel, a distant low unwavering hum, which she is convinced is the sound of his mind still at work. When that sound ceases she will accept that he is gone, and not until then.

  I approach and lean over her solicitously, folding my invisible wings about her sad, sloped shoulders. You see how, despite our callous ways, we keep you all in our care? She does not feel my presence, only its soothing effect.

  She has finished trimming her husband’s nails and holds his right hand now at rest on her left palm. Closer to the lamplight his skin loses its softness and takes on the look of marble, pale and moistly agleam. She hears voices outside on the stairs. Her son is showing Roddy Wagstaff to his room. She supposes Petra will be trailing behind them, going along by the wall, hunched and hangdog, as always.

  Before Adam, she had thought herself content. Early on in her life, when she was still quite young, a child still, really, she had decided that the world was not for her. She had even thought of joining an order, entering a convent, but she stayed at home instead. She was the bird who builds its nest behind the waterfall and perches there quite placid, amid the constant crashing, the spume, the flashing iridescence. Adam was the one who drew her, briefly, into the heart of the cataract.

  Water: it was always his element, his emblem, for her. The first time she saw him was on a bridge above a torrential river one winter day, under a scudding sky. She had come to witness the famous tidal bore, and someone had brought him to see it, too. She was anxious, for she was afraid of heights. She had a sensation of constantly falling forward, and kept feeling she was about to topple irresistibly over the rail and plummet down into the moiling river far below. He was standing a little way from her. He too was holding on to the rail, as if he too were afraid. The wind was blowing in his hair and his beard and to her he seemed to have a stricken, desperate look. Before they saw it they heard the sound of the bore, a low rumble that seemed to make the grey light around them shake and the metal of the bridge vibrate under their feet. Then it came surging round the river bend, a smooth, high, almost stately wall of water crumbling in slow-motion against the banks on either side. She was thinking how cold she was, despite her heavy coat and woollen hat. When the huge wave was about to pass under the bridge, for some reason she looked upwards instead of down, and the mass of low-slung, lead-coloured clouds sweeping overhead, like a confused reflection of the river raging below, made her feel dizzier still and for a moment it seemed, thrillingly, that she was going to faint. But she did not faint, and when she lowered her head, blinking, she saw that he was looking at her, and did not stop looking when she looked back at him. He smiled, though it seemed as if he were wincing in pain. She was nineteen.

  They went to a pub set among trees on a grassy rise at the far end of the bridge. They sat in a tobacco-brown snug where the noise from below of the endless traffic rounding a broad bend in the road seemed an echo of her own blood sizzling in her veins. She could see the bridge through the trees, a pale-blue spectral web. When he asked her what she would like to drink the only thing she could think to say was gin, though she had never drunk gin before. And indeed it was like nothing she had ever tasted, cold and insidious and subtly discomposing. She liked the look of it, too, shinily metallic with the faintest tinct of paraffin-blue in its depths. He did not take off his overcoat but sat with one hand moving about inside the lapel, as if he were feeling for the source of an ache; he was always cold, he told her, could never warm up. With his plume of smooth black hair and great bony gleaming nose he looked like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed, distracted, brooding on some other place, some other solitary height. She sat opposite him very straight on the stool and sipped her drink. The mist from the river advanced up the hillside and pressed its flanks shyly against the bottle-glass windows behind them. The gin went straight to her head.

  She cannot remember what they talked about. He was very cool and playful, teasing her a little and watching her with his head held to one side, smiling. She was not fooled. Despite the gin she saw through him straight away, saw through the hairline crack running athwart the carefully fashioned mask that he was holding up to her, saw right down to all the things that were coiled and curled inside him like those unimaginably tiny strings he told her people used to think the world was ultimately made of. She asked for another drink but he said he thought that two were enough. Then he started to tell her about his wife, about Dorothy, who had died. He stared before him intently as he spoke, frowning, as if it were all printed on the air and he had only to read it out to her. His tone was one of dull amazement; grief had amazed him.

  He was older than her father. She did not care. When he asked her to marry him it seemed to her that she had already said yes, a long time ago.

  She places her husband’s hand back at his side on the blanket and watches it intently for the slightest twitch. She believes he would give her a sign if he could. Although she is convinced he is still there in his mind, present and conscious, it occurs to her that maybe it is not she that he is conscious of. Maybe it is not she that he is with, in there, as he was not quite with her that first day, in the pub, for all his teasing smiles and all his talk. Has he ever been a complete presence, for her? She feels a slow heave in the region of her diaphragm, as if some slothful and horribly distressed thing is trying to turn itself
over on its back. What if he is with Dorothy? Who is to say he is not nearer to the dead wife than he is to the living one? There is a world of the living and a world of the dead and he is suspended in a place between the two. In that place, is it not likely the dead have more power than the living, are more distinctly present to the one who is already half-way along the way to join them? Maybe even now his lost wife is reaching out a hand to him, over the dark water, and calling to him softly to come to her.

  She stands up quickly. When she switches off the reading lamp the darkness spreads itself instantly, and she imagines she can feel it against her face, on the backs of her hands, a softly clinging stuff. She moves away from the bedside, pressing a hand to the base of her spine, and softly groans.

  From below she hears faintly the chiming of the clock in the drawing room, calling her back to the world and its wants.

  The things that to Petra seem perfectly ordered are for others all jumbled and strewn. It is as if she were written in a primitive script of straight lines and diagonals, a form of Ogham that no scholar has yet learned how to decipher. Not even her father was able to crack that code. The others do not realise that this is what so tires and vexes her, the endless effort of interpreting herself for their benefit. Everything she thinks and intends must be translated into an approximation of their language before they can understand anything of what she is saying. She knows the world is not as she conceives it; she has known this for a long time, for as long as she can remember. Some parts of it are missing and some that are there are there only because she has put them there. This does not mean the parts that are missing are real and the ones that are present are not. It is a matter of fact. It is, in fact, a matter of matter, as her father would tell her. For what is spirit in this world may be flesh in another. In an infinity of worlds all possibilities are fulfilled; that is one of the things that have been proved by what her father disparagingly calls his sums. Not that he would say it was proved, since all proofs, according to him, are provisional.