John Banville

by The Infinities (v5)

  “Really thirsty,” he says, prompting. “The road?—the dust?”

  “Yes,” Petra answers, swaying a little where she stands, as if in a trance. “The dust.”

  So now there are three of us haunting the house, my father, me, and this rascal who has just arrived. This is a pretty pass. Yet I should not speak of this or that personage when speaking of the immortal gods—we are all one even in our separateness—and when I use the word “father,” say, or “him,” or, for that matter, “me,” I do so only for convenience. These denotations are so loose, in the context, so crude, as to be almost meaningless. Almost, but not quite, yes. They shed a certain light, feeble as it is. They are a kind of penumbra, one might say, surrounding and testifying to the presence of an ineffable entity. But what a darkling chasm there lies between that glimmer and the speck it would illuminate. Adam used to find himself groping through a similarly frustrating gulf of indefiniteness whenever he was called upon to step outside the safe confines of the grand consistory and address the more fanciful of his notions to a larger world. He always deplored the humble objects out of which his predecessors—so many of whom he helped to discredit—forged their metaphors, all those colliding billiard balls and rolling dice, the lifts going up and coming down, ships passing each other in the benighted night. Yet how else were they to speak that which cannot be spoken, at least not in the common tongue? He sought to cleave exclusively to numbers, figures, concrete symbols. He knew, of course, the peril of confusing the expression of something with the something itself, and even he sometimes went astray in the uncertain zone between the concept and the thing conceptualised; even he, like me, mistook sometimes the manifestation for the essence. Because for both of us this essence is essentially inessential, when it comes to the business of making manifest. For me, the gods; for him, the infinities. You see the fix we are in.

  Take this fellow whom Petra, despite her misgivings, has let into the house. The name he is going under is Benny Grace. What he is doing here, or thinks to do, I cannot say, although I have my suspicions, oh, indeed, I have. Should I fly down from the roof now—you remember the sad little effigy of me we chanced upon up there atop the Sky Room?—and give him an admonitory skelp of my serpented staff? With the likes of him, if he has a like, it is always well to get in early. I know him and his disruptive ways—how would I not? Look at him, squatting there in that grotesque chair, sunk in the puddle of himself with his fingers laced together in his lap and his fat knees lolling apart and that big, shapeless bag abulge between his thighs. Who does he think he is, who does he think he is pretending to be? Benny Grace, indeed—I shall give him Benny Grace. The dog is seated beside him, leaning a shoulder companionably against his leg. The girl stands with her hands clasped and gazes at the stranger helplessly. The day flags for a moment and all goes still. Benny Grace lifts his eyes to the ceiling, smiling his crooked little smile.

  And upstairs, in the stillness of his darkened room, Adam on his bed has sensed the stranger’s entry into the house as a faint, far-off tremor, a shimmer in the general atmosphere. He too heard Rex’s alerting bark at the gate and then the commotion Petra made when she bounded down the stairs to fling open the front door. Now he is uneasy. Whoever it is that has been allowed entry here is no common caller. Adam has always entertained a lively sense of the numinous. Oh, yes, he has, unlikely though it might seem, for a man of his cast of mind. The gods that oversee his world are not divine, exactly, the demons not exactly devilish, yet gods they are and demons, as palpably present to him as the invisibles he has devoted his life to studying, the particles thronging in boundless space and the iron forces marshalling them. For all the famed subtlety of his speculative faculties, his is a simple faith. Since there are infinities, indeed, an infinity of infinities, as he has shown there to be, there must be eternal entities to inhabit them. Yes, he believes in us, and takes it that the hitherto unimagined realm beyond time that he discovered is where we live.

  —Benny Grace! All at once it comes to him. That is who the newcomer must be. There is no doubt, he is certain of it. Benny—who else? I should have known, he thinks, I think. I should have known.

  For Petra the life of the house, which is the only life she knows, is a process of endless, painstaking filling-in, as if a myriad-pieced jigsaw puzzle, or a vast cryptic crossword, had been thrust in front of her for her to solve. Now she must find the place in the puzzle to fit Benny Grace into, a blank that is exactly Benny-shaped. He tells her he has come to see her father—oh, but of course, why else does anyone ever come here?—but instead she thinks of her mother. Perhaps her mother needs to be protected against him: could that be it? He does not seem malign yet there is something about him that is distinctly unsettling. He reminds her of Mr. Punch. Perhaps he will lay about her mother with a club. Petra does not like her mother but thinks that she must love her, for what else can this inarticulable tangle of pity, remorse and yearning be, if not love? Her mother presses them all down, all of them here in the house, even Pa, though he may not know it. She does not intend to, but she does, blowing aimlessly this way and that, like the wind over a cornfield. Perhaps Benny Grace will do something magical, not ply a cudgel but wave a wand, stilling all agitations, so that they will all, Pa, too, perhaps, they will all rise up, singly and in pairs, trembling with surprise and pleasure, in the calm, soft air.

  She has taken Benny into the downstairs living room, which she feels is as far into the domestic interior as he should be allowed to penetrate, for now. The room is on a corner of the house and has two tall sash windows at right angles to each other, one looking across the gravelled semi-circle in front of the house and the other on to a dense and vaguely menacing confusion of rhododendron bushes with burnished leaves and lurking, arthritic limbs. The ceiling is high and smoked to a soft shade of woodbine, and there is always a pleasantly tarry smell of turf from the fireplace, even now at the heart of summer when the fire has not been lit for months. The sofas and the armchairs are covered with faded chintz, the sofas sagging in their middles like the backs of elderly ponies. There are footstools the worse for wear, a brass coal bucket stands in the grate, and on the walls are hung native weapons, fearsome things, axes, assegais, knobkerries, and immensely long, slender spears adorned with feathers blackened by age, the leaf-shaped bronze blades of which have the shiny look of much-rubbed, ancient leather. Benny’s presence makes her see these things anew, or even as if for the first time. She notices the silvery tarnish along the seams of the chintz where it is most worn, the rich deep shine in the dents in the coal bucket—why does that brassy shine make her think of Alexander the Great?—the mouse-coloured dust laid in neat lines like flocked trimming along the slender shafts of the spears.

  “My father liked this room best,” she says. She does not know if it is true, or why she said it; it is she who likes it, her father does not bother about liking things, not things like rooms, anyway. “It was—is—his favourite,” she says loudly, as if expecting to be contradicted, “his favourite room, this one, in all the house.”

  Benny nods, glancing about, seeming calmly pleased with all that his eye lights on. He has an air of waiting, in calm anticipation, for something of mild interest that he has been assured will take place in due course. He is peculiarly undemanding. He does not seem to mind that she has so little to say to him—he has not much to say to her, either—and all he has asked for is a drink, and although he has had to ask for it more than once he betrays not the slightest hint of impatience. It is Ivy Blount at last who ventures up from the kitchen bearing on a small brass tray a misted glass of water. The water, the surface of which trembles almost imperceptibly, is clouded and looks like recently melted ice—there is always air in the pipes here at Arden—but Benny drinks it off without hesitation and even smacks his lips. Ivy takes the empty glass on to her tray like a nurse receiving a specimen and goes out hurriedly and shuts the door behind her with exaggerated care, making not a sound save for the tiniest click, as of a ton
gue. Benny again looks around the room, nodding to himself. The sun shining in at one of the windows makes a delicate and complicated cage of light that leans at an angle down from the sill. Petra fixes on one of the buttons in the front of Benny’s white shirt; how strange a thing, she thinks, a button, waxy white like bone, with those two tiny gimlet holes punched side by side in the middle. She is sure Ivy is listening outside the door. It is a thing Ivy does. She reads people’s letters, too. No doubt she is dying to know who Benny Grace is and what he has come here for. Duffy also is curious, it seems, for there he goes, sauntering casually past outside on the gravel, but not so casually that he does not manage to take a quick glance in through the window at the interloper. In fact, it is not Duffy but I, in Duffy’s form—I think I may say I have by now perfected the cowman’s defiant slouch. I must find any ruse I can to keep an eye on Benny, fat and full of himself in his shiny suit with the sweat-stains under the armpits, and his filmed-over soiled white skin and that little squiggle of a nose. He shall not disturb the house any more than I can help.

  Petra starts at a brazen crash from the hall—Ivy in her agitation dropping the tray, of course—and she excuses herself in a mumble and walks swiftly from the room, trying not to seem to be running away, like timid Ivy. She hears herself breathing. Outside the door she catches a glimpse of Ivy’s heels and her bent back as she ducks down the steps to the kitchen. The house around her has a hushed air, as if there are many ears listening for every slightest sound. Why has it been left to her to deal with this fellow? She still does not know who he is or what he is doing here, except what he said, that he has come to see her father. She follows Ivy down the stairway, hearing the hollow knocking her own feet make on the wooden steps; she feels like an actress who has forgotten her lines making a mortified exit through a trapdoor down from the stage. She thinks of her brother’s wife and scowls inwardly.

  Her brother is in the kitchen, sitting at the table tinkering with a radio set. He has taken off the back panel and is poking delicately in the innards with a long, slender screwdriver. His shirt sleeves are rolled. His forearms, each one as big as a small ham, are pink and palely furred. The radio is an ancient model with a cloth grille over the speaker and brown bakelite tuning knobs and a rectangular glass window with the names printed on it of places she has never heard of—Hilversum, for instance, where can Hilversum be? La calls it a wireless, even though, as Petra can plainly see, it is packed inside with wires, coils and coils of them, all different colours.

  Ivy Blount is nowhere to be seen. She must have scuttled out by the back door.

  Adam is frowning heavily in concentration, his upper lip hooked over the lower one like the tip of a little fat pink thumb, and a slick of hair hangs down across his forehead. He is good at fixing things. This is another reason for his sister to admire him, and to envy and resent him, too. When she comes down the steps he goes on working as if she were not there. She watches him for a moment; how deft he is, despite those big hands, their stubby fingers. He plies the screwdriver as if it were a stiletto. “What’s the matter with Ivy?” he asks without looking up. “She ran through here as though she had seen a ghost.”

  She tells him about the arrival of the stranger. “He’s come to see Pa,” she says. “I didn’t know what to say to him.”

  He leans more intently forward, probing the blade of the screwdriver deeper among the coloured coils. “What’s his name?” She sees how the back of his neck has gone red as it always does when he is uncertain or upset. The stranger’s coming is making everyone uneasy, first Ivy, now Adam; she is reassured by this, knowing she is not alone.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “He told me but I didn’t hear—he talks like Popeye.”

  “—the sailor man.”

  “What?”

  “Popeye the sailor man. I yam what I yam.”

  He laughs briefly into the back of the radio. She stands at his shoulder and gazes down at the nape of his neck where the redness has not faded yet. His hair at the nape gathers to a point in a little, coiled curl. He turns up his face to look at her. “What does he want with Pa?” She bites her lip and does not answer. “Did he say he knows him?” She does her shrug, jerking her left arm stiffly out from her side and raising her right shoulder and inclining her cheek to meet it. Adam slowly shakes his head. “Didn’t you ask him anything?” Still she will not answer, and only gazes back at him, dull and sullen. “You’re hopeless.” He turns away from her and takes up the back panel—also bakelite, is it?—and fits it into its slot in the rear of the set and begins to screw it home.

  “What’s wrong with it?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “That”—she points—“radio, wireless, whatever you call it—what’s wrong with it?”

  He puts aside the screwdriver and rises from the table, kneading a stiffened shoulder with one of those meaty hands. “Honestly, Pete,” he says. But still he avoids her eye. It is plain he is as nervous as she is before the prospect of Benny Grace. But why should he be unnerved? He lives in the world as she does not; he should be used to unexpected occurrences, things going wrong, people turning up out of the blue.

  He follows her up the steps and across the central hall into the living room. They find Benny Grace seated again, in one of the chintz-covered armchairs this time, serene as a figure of the Buddha, just as before, with his knees comfortably splayed and his hands in his lap with the fingers clasped; a small triangle of fish-pale belly shows through a gap in his shirt above the straining waistband of his trousers. As the pair approach he scrambles to his feet; he does not seem much higher standing than he did when seated. “Grace,” he says to Adam, holding out a hand. “Benny Grace.”

  Adam frowns.

  “My father is ill,” he says, “—did my sister tell you?” Petra notices how he speaks over-loudly too, as she did. “Very ill, in fact.”

  Benny nods; he is smiling, as if at some happy piece of news. “Yes, I know, I know.” He waits, still with his smile, his large round head cocked to one side—Adam thinks of a blackbird, plump and alert, its polished eye swivelling.

  “He’s in a coma,” he says. “He had a stroke.”

  “A stroke.” Benny with lips pursed waggles his head from side to side. “That is too bad. That really is too bad.”

  A silence follows. Adam is aware of Petra off to the side, breathlessly taking everything in. “How did you get here?” he asks the little man. He also is aware of the volume at which he is speaking but cannot seem to lower it. Why are they all shouting like this at poor Benny?—it almost makes me feel sorry for him.

  “Oh, that was easy,” Benny says easily. He, at least, speaks softly. His tone implies a lifetime of obstacles adroitly negotiated.

  “I mean,” Adam persists, unable to stop, “did you come by car?”

  Benny shakes his head and shrugs. “I don’t drive,” he says. “Never learned.”

  Adam nods helplessly. He feels a sort of panic rising inside him; he is afraid that in a moment he will burst out in whinnies of hysterical laughter. He turns to Petra. “Why don’t you,” he fairly shouts at her, “why don’t you take Mr. Grace up to see Pa?”

  The girl frowns sideways at her brother’s knees. “What?” she breathes. Her left leg has begun to jiggle. In those old corduroy trousers and baggy blue shirt, thin and frail and almost bald, she looks like a prison inmate, or a refugee, the survivor of some terrible forced march. Benny links his fingers together again in front of his belly and gazes at her, as if lovingly. “Just a peek?” he says, cajoling. He is a sly old sprite. “So I can say I saw him?”

  They turn all three and make for the door, where there is a brief scrimmage as they find themselves inadvertently trying all three to get through it at the same time. From the hall Petra leads Benny Grace up the staircase. Light falls down from the glass roof like silent rain, indifferently, a thing absorbed in something else altogether. At the turn of the landing she falters a second and glances back at her brother
, who has stopped in the doorway of the living room and stands there looking up at her. His face is blank, he gives no helping sign. She goes on, upwards, and the higher she goes the deeper her heart sinks. By her side, Benny Grace, goat-footed, pants softly as he climbs. What if Pa should wake up from his coma? What will he say to her, appearing before him suddenly with this stranger at her side? And what would she say to him? How would she account for herself?

  Now here they are at the door to the stairs of the Sky Room. Petra knocks, and turns the knob. What air is this that flows down from on high, what spirits guard the way?

  What indeed? Were I able I would rear up in my winding-sheets, my foul tubes wrenched from their sockets and spouting pap and piss, and slam that door shut in their faces. Ah, the sad braggadocio of the dying. It is not that I am afraid of Benny Grace; what I fear is disturbance. I am becalmed, and dread a suddenly filled sail. The history of Benny and me is long and intricate. When I peer into memory’s steadily clouding crystal I see a great throng milling and elbowing and out of its midst Benny’s fat face grinning at me, suggestive, sardonic, oleaginously eager. Has he come to harangue me in my last straits, to tell me I am going about dying in all the wrong way? I have known him, he has known me, for longer than I care to remember, though I will have to remember, I suppose, now that he has popped up like this. Indeed, I feel he has been with me all my life, which is hardly possible, since he is not as old as I am, and will remain so. Yes, Benny surely is of the immortals.

  Suddenly I recall a nightmare I had when I was a child, a very young child, it must have been, a baby, even, I think, still in my cradle, I have never forgotten it. How frightening it was, how fraught with significance, that I have retained such a distinct recollection of it all these years. Although I am not sure it can properly be called a nightmare, so brief it was and bare of incident. I am not certain it was a dream at all but rather a half-waking intimation of something I was too young then and now am too old and too far gone to interpret or understand. Anyway, in this nightmare, or dream, or reverie, whatever it was, I had been set down on a bare rock in the midst of an empty ocean. Yes, set down, for I had not been brought there by boat, or by any earthbound, or sea-bound, means, but had alighted somehow out of the air, a fallen Icarus, it might be, my head in a spin and my wings doused of their fire, dripping and useless. The ocean all around me was of a mauvish shade, utterly still, without a surge or ripple—even where it ringed the rock on which I cowered the water’s fringe showed not the slightest stirring—yet seemed to brim, full of itself to overflowing, and as if at any moment it might tilt wildly and upend, like a great polished disc pressed down upon violently at its edge. As far as I looked in every direction there was nothing to be seen, and no horizon, the featureless distances merging seamlessly into an equally featureless sky. No sound, no cry of bird or moan of wind. A vast void everywhere, and I terrified, clinging to my rock with both hands and barely holding the world from tipping on its end and letting everything slide off into the abyss of emptiness, including, especially including, me. What does it mean? It must mean something, or signify something, at least. Was I, a babe in swaddling, already dipping a toe into the waters of Lethe, paddling, even, in its shallows? Never too early to start dying.