“—coming here like this,” she is saying, “without a word of warning.” She pokes crossly at something in the sink, narrowing her eyes. She is short-sighted, like her daughter-in-law, and like her will not wear spectacles, out of vanity. “And talking about your father dying.”
My son puts the lunch plates he has been carrying down on the draining-board in the sun. He has scraped all the scraps together on the top one, as his grandmother long ago taught him to do. Like me he wishes for an ordered world. I feel such a rush of tenderness for him suddenly. What is it in particular that has affected me? Something in his setting down of those plates, the disparity between this big, slow-moving man—my son!—and the dainty carrying out of the commonplace chore. When he and the girl were small I used to pray that I would live to see them grown; now I am thankful I shall not see them old.
“What he said is that he would not die,” Adam says, not looking at his mother.
He has a way, I have often noticed it, of going suddenly still, just stopping in whatever attitude he happens to be, as if he were playing that game we used to play as children, Statues, was it called? Ursula does it too; he must have got it from her. All these tics and traits that the genes pass on—why do they bother?
She lifts her head and looks at the sunlit window; I know that groping gaze. “What?” she says.
Adam blinks himself out of his stillness and rolls his shoulders, animate again, giving himself a doggy sort of shake. Before he can speak Ivy Blount comes quickly in from the passageway by the stove, bearing more plates. She has tied up her unruly hair with something at the back, but corkscrew tendrils have come loose and weave about her stark, pale face. The two stare at her, this mild Medusa, as if they do not know her. She halts, the crockery in her hands. Her look has a frantic cast. “I have,” she says urgently to Ursula, or breathes, rather, “—I have to speak to you.”
Adam comes forward and takes the plates she is carrying, firmly freeing them from her grasp as if he were relieving her of a weapon, and sets them on the draining-board beside the stack of their fellows he already placed there. Dishes, sink, the sunlight in the window—how precious suddenly they seem, these perfectly commonplace things.
I used to yearn so for Ursula that even when she was in my arms it was not enough, and I would clasp her to me more and more fiercely, octopus-armed, in an ecstasy of need, as if it might be possible to engorge her wholly, to press her in through my very pores. I would have made her be a part of me. If I could I would have had a notch cut in my already ageing side and a slip of her, my young rose, inserted there and lashed to me with twine. Tell me, tell me, was that not enough of love?
I wonder if my son is as abject in his desire of that lovely wife of his. Who could blame him, if he is?
When he leaves the kitchen now, padding soundlessly on those big feet of his, Ursula wishes she could go with him. She does not want to be left alone to deal with Ivy, for Ivy is clearly in a state. She seems to be quivering all over, like a struck tuning fork. What can be the matter? The awful notion occurs that Ivy, impossible woman, is going to quit her place in the house. This is the catastrophe that Ursula has been dreading since she first came to Arden and took on Ivy to help her with the children and be a foil against Adam’s fearsome mother. Her heart or some such organ has swollen up suddenly, suffocatingly, inside her breast, and her mouth has gone dry. How will she manage without Ivy? To be left here alone with a dying husband, a demented daughter—ah! She turns aside and walks quickly to the big bog-oak dresser—hideous thing that Granny Godley brought when she moved in with them, Adam and her, here at Arden, she has always hated it—and takes a white cup down from its hook. Ivy watches her, still with that shivering look of a retriever, moving only her eyes. Ursula comes back to the sink and fills the cup from the tap and drinks, opening her throat and pouring the water straight in, almost without swallowing; it tastes of tin. Through the window she sees the sunlight, the garden, the un-resting mass of trees beyond the lawn; everything is so calm, so careless, and seems to mock her. She fills another cupful of water and drinks it off, the cold sharpness of the stuff hurting her throat and spilling into her stomach as heavy as lead. She feels a remote sort of pity for her body, as if it were something separate from her, some poor suffering thing clenched around its pain and dread. Is it whales that suck in tons of sea-water through their teeth to trap the plankton that they live on? I am like a whale, then, she thinks, with a sad, inward smile, only there is no sustenance, for me, to be sieved out of any of this.
“Mr. Duffy,” Ivy says behind her, “has spoken to me.” The words come up out of her like bubbles, trembling and plosive. “Adrian, that is.”
Ursula frowns, but goes on looking out at the garden, giving herself time to think. So that is it, Ivy and the dreadful Duffy have been fighting. She feels a panicky urge to laugh. It is like something out of one of those old melodramas, the paterfamilias on his deathbed, the family gathered, and below stairs the servants squabbling. She thinks of that big blackened picture in the hall of the booted man in the black coat and high collar, reputed to be one of Ivy’s ancestors. What was the story Ivy told her about him, something to do with the Ribbon Boys, a threatened lynching? She cannot remember; she cannot remember anything, these days.
“Spoken to you?” she says faintly, turning at last. “About what?”
Ivy has done something to herself, has drawn herself up, or has been drawn up, somehow, like a doll on a string, with neck extended and eyes popping and arms dangling stiffly at her sides. Also her face is tinged with palest pink, like milk with a drop of wine in it; it might be from anger, or she might be blushing, it is hard to tell which. “Well,” she says, and swallows, “not spoken, exactly. That’s to say—” She stops, helpless, and her face crumples, seems to crease down its middle, like the spine of a book that has been opened back too far—and are those tears that have sprung into her eyes, and has she clenched her fists, and does her lip tremble? Such distress! O Hecate of the triple way, is it all my fault, for taking on Duffy’s form and giving poor Ivy the notion that she was being significantly spoken to in that moment over the milk jug? If so, I shall have to speak to him, too, and put some mettle into him. I thought it was all fixed—what were they doing at the lunch table, if not fixing it? My name must not be Hermes after all. Oh dear, oh dear, how difficult are these matters of the heart, their hearts, I mean, I am an amateur in this arena. For now, I must manoeuvre Ivy out of here before there is more mischief done. She makes a sound, part a groan and part a grunt, and screwing the heel of a hand first into one moistened eye and then the other she turns away abruptly and hurries from the room.
Ursula blankly stands. She is not certain that what happened really happened, and that she did not imagine it. Latterly she has been having what seem to be hallucinations—she prefers to think of them as waking dreams—brief episodes of intensified reality, as if the flow of ordinary events had been compressed at a certain point and made to speed up and overheat. That is where the phantoms come from, those insubstantial revenants pushing past her, hindering her, haunting her days. She wonders, with a strange detachment, if she has damaged her mind, and if these lurid jumps and hurryings are among the first signs of its decay. Perhaps Ivy Blount was not here at all; perhaps for the past five minutes there has been no one here but herself, standing in this crooked box of sunlight imagining people talking to her, first her son, then Ivy. She stirs herself, and goes to the passage that leads out by the stove and walks through—dark-brown dimness, a dank smell, the lino slightly bubbled underfoot—and comes into the conservatory, where the light is so large and glaring that she falters. This, she thinks, this is what her life is now, a listless, shadowed passing from one hardly bearable patch of brightness to another. She considers the big square table from which the last of the lunch things have not yet been removed—where has Ivy rushed off to?—crumpled napkins, smeared dessert bowls, four empty wine bottles, three green and one clear, the clear one looking self
-conscious and a little shamefaced in its nudity. At first she thinks there is no one here but then she makes out the form of her daughter-in-law, sitting, lying, almost, in a cane armchair in front of the glass wall, smoking a cigarette and looking out into the garden frowningly. The blue silk of her summer frock reflects the light sharply in angled shapes; her legs are crossed and one gold sandal dangles. She has not yet noticed Ursula, and her face, unobserved, as she thinks, appears almost featureless. Ursula leans forward to see what is outside that the young woman is looking at so intently. Benny Grace is out there, sitting as before on the step above the sunken garden with his back to the house. Roddy Wagstaff stands beside him, leaning negligently on one of the stone pillars and gazing off into the trees across the lawn. Whether they are together or have merely drifted by chance into the same vicinity it is impossible to tell. There is a blackbird on the grass, hurrying as if by clockwork first this way and then that, the very one, as I can attest, that young Adam at the window this morning spotted flashing across in the dawn light. How all things hang together, when one has the perspective from which to view them.
“I wish you would not smoke cigarettes in the house,” Ursula says mildly, and is gratified to see the start that Helen gives, the cane seat of the chair under her crackling in protest. “It leaves the air so stuffy.”
Helen makes a series of small adjustments to her pose, leaning her head back and extending her legs in a show of languidness. She does not care to be chanced on unawares, especially by her mother-in-law. The slipper dangling from her toe falls off and makes an unexpectedly loud clatter on the flagged floor. “You don’t protest when he does it,” she says, gesturing with her cigarette towards the pair outside in the garden, “Roddy what’s-his-name.”
“Well,” Ursula answers, looking at her hands folded in front of her and measuring her words, “he is a guest.”
Helen chuckles. “How delicate you are. It’s a wonder you can bear us at all.” As if he had heard his name spoken Roddy Wagstaff turns and peers vaguely over his shoulder, trying to see into the room through the opaque reflections on the glass panes. Helen shifts her weight again, and again the chair crackles, a milder outcry this time. “Who is he,” she says, “that other fellow?”
“Who?”
“Grace—isn’t that what he’s called?” She squints down the length of herself at the toes of her unsandalled foot and wriggles them; the polish on one of the nails is chipped, though she only put it on this morning. “What does he want?”
“He wants Adam,” Ursula says sharply, and frowns. Helen has turned her face and is gazing at her with interest sidewise from her chair. Ursula gives a small laugh, flustered. “I mean my Adam—Adam’s father, that is.”
“Wants him?”
“Oh, I don’t know what I mean. He’s just someone Adam knew.”
Helen finishes her cigarette and leans down to crush the stub of it in the big glass ashtray she has set on the floor beside her chair. The commotion in the cane-work every time she moves, like the sound of a flame sweeping up through a thorn bush, is setting Ursula’s nerves on edge. She comes forward and bends to pick up the ashtray—three crushed butts, two of them lip-sticked, standing at drunken angles in a parched puddle of ash—but Helen snatches it aside and glares at her. Such venom! She is wearing a large, ugly ring on the middle finger of her right hand: some kind of whitish metal set with a flat lozenge of polished black stone in which a curlicued initial A is carved. Ursula, still awkwardly at a tilt and seeking to save face, peers at it with exaggerated interest; the raised bezel brings to her mind an obscure and unpleasant suggestion of ulcers. “That’s new,” she says, straightening. “How nice.”
Helen, sitting up and swinging her legs to the floor—one foot groping for its elusive sandal—glances disparagingly at the ring. “Adam gave it to me.”
Ursula ventures a smile. “So I see.”
“What?” Glaring again.
“A for Adam.”
“No,” with a shake of the head, quick, dismissive. “Amphitryon. The title of the play I’m in. Or it could be A for Alcmene, my part. He said it was for luck but in the theatre you’re never supposed to wish anyone luck.” Sitting on the edge of the chair she stretches herself, lifting her arms in an arch and leaning her lovely gold articulated head to one side and pressing her cheek, cat-like, into the hollow of her shoulder. Ursula catches a whiff of her sweat, sharp and hot; I can almost catch it myself, smell of civet and summer nights. Helen sighs. “He’s such a sap,” she says complacently, suppressing a yawn, “your son.”
She rises and walks to the table and begins to gather the dessert bowls, stacking them with negligent haste and making them rattle. “God,” she says and sighs again, more heavily, “is there anything duller than a summer afternoon?”
“You mean, down here?” Ursula enquires gently.
“Anywhere.”
Ursula now comes forward to the table and begins to collect the napkins, thinking of snow. She glances out at Benny Grace where he sits on the step in a cobbler’s slump and at the sight of him a shadow crosses her mind. “They used to know each other very well,” she says, “Adam’s father and—Mr. Grace.” Benny’s name she pronounces with a sort of grimace in her voice.
Helen has picked up all the bowls and now is gathering the spoons. Her eyes are hooded, she seems far away. She takes the napkins that Ursula has heaped and puts them on top of the stacked plates. In single file, with Ursula leading, they carry the things out to the kitchen and I glide invisibly behind them along the passageway, still sniffing after Helen’s feline scent. Who am I now? Where is my Dad? Enough, enough, I am one, and all—Proteus is not the only protean one amongst us. “They were colleagues, in some way,” Ursula is saying over her shoulder. “Only I think your father thought he was a fraud—I mean Adam’s father—Adam. But then”—a shrug—“I suspect Adam thought—thinks—everyone a fraud, more or less. Even himself.” Helen puts the bowls into the sink and Ursula stands looking down at them, a jumble of shallow, grey-white discs against the greyer white of the porcelain. There is something faintly, comically, endearing about them. They remind her of—what?—circuses. A clown somewhere, a long time ago, spinning half a dozen plates on the tips of a dozen sticks, everything wobbling, the plates, the long slender sticks, the clown’s extended arms. The recollection flickers, fades. Helen takes off the ugly ring and puts it on the window-sill and rinses her hands under the tap. Ursula watches her sidelong. Helen’s hands are the least lovely part of her, boneless-seeming and slightly mottled, the fingers plump above the knuckles and tapered sharply at the tips as if each one were bound there tight with invisible thread. The sun has hardly moved in the window. Is there music playing somewhere? Once, when she was a girl, in some place, she cannot remember where exactly, a splendid park or the grounds of some grand house, Ursula reached up on tiptoe at a little moss-covered wall and saw into an enclosed garden, with masses of flowers and flowering fruit trees, exotic shrubs, climbing vines, all crowding there together in the sun, profligate and gay. Now in rosy retrospect this seems one of the sweetest moments of her life, replete with all the promise of the future, and she keeps it stowed jealously at the back of her memory, like a jewel box in a secret drawer. If she were to return there today she is sure she would not be able to see over the wall, it would have grown higher, somehow, or she would have become smaller, although she would know the garden was there, abundant and glorious as ever, waiting for others to come and glimpse it, and be happy.
“I hope,” she says in a rush, with a terrible feeling of falling over herself, “I hope your play is a success—I hope—I hope you will have a great success in it.”
Helen is drying her hands on a tea-towel. Ursula regards her anxiously, pained and waiting—why, she asks herself, why must I blurt out things like this, like a fool?
“Do you?” Helen says tonelessly, and drops the towel on the draining-board; she is thinking of something else altogether.
Ursula se
es anew how radiant she is, in that sky-blue dress and those gold sandals, with that tight-fitting gleaming helmet of hair.
My Dad is plucking at my sleeve.
“Yes, yes, I do,” Ursula says, feeling herself falling still, as in a dream. “I wish you—I wish you everything.”
Helen turns abstractedly and walks from the room.
I can feel my father’s burgeoning itch as together we rush after her from the kitchen into the music room and out by the french doors where she almost collides with her husband coming in from the lawn. She has never managed to accustom herself to these sudden loomings that he does. He is like, she thinks vexedly, a great large soft eager dog.
“Here you are!” he says breathlessly, grasping her by the upper arms and smiling into her face. “I wanted to say—I wanted to tell you—”
The Infinities Page 19