Gulls, seagulls, their raucous noise, I hear them suddenly. They fly in all the way from the sea and nest in the disused chimneys of the house and rise up and wheel about the roof in great broken chains, their wingbeats crumpling the air, their voices raised in wild, lilting cries. I have always welcomed this annual pandemonium; it is one of the markers of my year. The young have a tendency to fall down the chimneys into the rooms here, dauntingly big brutes though they are, and more than once I have come upon one of them standing in front of a fireplace on its ridiculous grey legs, its plumage sooted and ruffled, a filmed eye skewed towards me in blank surmise. Other worlds, other worlds, where we are not, and yet are.
“You see,” Benny is saying to Petra in the self-swallowing gabble that is his explaining voice, “you see, the infinities, the infinities that cropped up in everyone else’s equations and made them null, and which cropped up in his, too, he saw as exactly what—”
Exactly what is it that keeps the two of them there at the window? Are they looking out at the gulls, craning to see them wheel and screech above the chimney-pots? Or is there someone in the garden, doing something interesting, that ruffian Duffy, perhaps, aware of being watched and pretending to work? But what would be the interest in that, for them? Perhaps they are not looking out at all, perhaps they are standing face-to-face, engrossed in each other, Benny on one side of the embrasure, leaning against the folded-back shutter, talking and jabbing a fat finger, and Petra on the other side staring at the front of his soiled shirt in that seemingly terror-stricken way of hers. God! not to know, not to be able to know the least of things! Doing, doing, is living, as my mother, my poor failed unhappy mother, among others, tried her best to din into me. I see it now, while all along I thought thinking was the thing.
“—an infinity of infinities,” Benny is saying, “all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there—well, you can imagine the effect.” At last it seems they have remembered the man in the bed, but once again it is Benny alone who approaches in his creaky shoes and leans over me, and I hear him breathing down his crushed little nose, and feel another waft of his warm and sweetish breath against my face. “Well,” he says again, so softly, almost a whisper, that it must be me once more he is addressing, “well, you can imagine,” and again softly laughs.
Inge the gauge-theorist. Why did I think of her when thinking of him? Oh, yes, because I was with her that first time I met him—I believe it was the first time, that time—but also because poor shivering Inge was so much the opposite of the egregious Benny. Picture me there at that long white table, gazing out at the white birches, my nostrils flared in boredom and disdain, a fist set down before me on the tablecloth like a clenched crab, while Benny sought to woo me. Bereft and melancholy though I was, I was a handsome fellow in those days, no doubt of that. Whom did I resemble? Oppenheimer, say, J. Robert, who failed to build the bomb he boasted so much of, or Hilbert the geometer, who had a nice beard like mine—one of those cold and lofty doctors, anyway, whom the world takes as the very model of a bloodless man of science. Benny beside me is leaning forward in a conspiratorial crouch, murmuring blandishments and breathing into my water glass. He says we should get out of here and go to a place he knows down on the waterfront, a venerable tavern where Tycho Brahe is said to have stopped for a night on his way to Prague to take up the post of assistant to Johannes Kepler, the Emperor Rudolf’s Imperial Mathematician, long ago, and where there are bear paws on the menu. We can sit on the terrace there and look across the water to the palely twinkling lights of distant Heligoland—or Hveen, is it?—and drink the speciality of the house, an aquavit with specks of gold dust, real gold dust, swirling in its depths. He has things to tell me, propositions to put. I do not deign to respond to these hot urgings of his. Aquavit, indeed—bear paws!
Nevertheless, it was the early hours though still not dark when I got back from town, panting, in wild disorder, with a split lip and a sleeve torn half-way out of my jacket. Where now was Benny, my bad companion, my cicerone into occasions of sin? Somewhere among the harbour dives he had abandoned me, or I had given him the slip. I did not want to go back to the hotel room where Inge would be under the bedclothes sobbing into her fist. In a state of fuddled euphoria and still breathing hard I wandered down to the lake—there was a lake—and watched a huge sun roll slowly along its shallow arc and tip the horizon in a splash of gold and promptly begin to ascend again. Behind me, in the lead-blue twilight, a flock of white birds dived and wheeled among the birches. Next day, if one may speak of separate nights and days up there at that time of year, I managed to get two places on a seaplane going south, and together Inge and I made our escape from Ultima Thule, seeing far below us two tiny armies all in white swarming towards each other over the tundra.
So is Benny my bad self, or one that I shed and should not have? Before him I had spent my life in hiding, head well down and the little eyes peering out. He tracked me to my lair then, too. It is not too much to say that everything I have done since that northern midsummer day when he flushed me out has been imbued with the dark wash of his presence. He—I say he when I think I mean I. I did great things, I scaled high peaks—such silken ropes, such gleaming grapnels!—and always he was there, scrambling behind me. That was then. I made a world—worlds!—and afterwards what was there left to do but wile away the day of rest, the interminable, idle Sunday that the remainder of my life has been. So why has he come?
III
What? Um. Must have dropped off for a minute there. I am getting as dopily drowsy as my old Dad. Let me see, what has been happening in my absence? There is a sense in the house of people poking their heads warily above the parapets after an explosion that did not happen. That is the effect of Benny Grace’s disruptive arrival. Yet why so much unease? See him now, quite content and peaceable, sunning himself in the sunken garden behind the conservatory. He is sitting on a stone step between two ornamental low stone pillars, with his jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled. He has taken off his shoes and socks, too, to give his feet an airing, and at last we get a look at those goatish hoofs of his. In fact, disappointingly, they are more like a pig’s trotters, blunt and pink with the toes all bunched together and the nails thick and tough as horn. His braces are bright blue. He is enjoying the heat of the sun on his bare pate. Through a gap between the straining buttons of his shirt he palps with idle fingers the folds of his belly, eyeing lazily, like the happy faun he is at heart, the sweltering bank of stirless trees that edges the garden. A hamadryad is a wood-nymph, also a poisonous snake in India, and an Abyssinian baboon. It takes a god to know a thing like that.
Preparations are under way for a late lunch, late because of Benny’s coming, which has upset and delayed everything. Faintly behind him he hears the sound of plates and silverware being laid out, and now and then in the glass of the conservatory Ivy Blount’s stark features materialise from the shadows as she makes another round of the table in there, for each time that she passes she comes forward and bends a hostile eye on Benny’s fat, sloped back. As to this conservatory, it is really just another room of the house, the front wall of which was knocked out at some forgotten time in Arden’s history and replaced by a large ugly extrusion of iron-framed glass. There must be hundreds of small panes in this structure, some of them original and bearing whorls and stipples from the oil on which the sheets of float-glass were poured out—oh, yes, my knowledge is not confined to flora and fauna, for among my many crafty attributes I am a maker and inventor and know the secrets of every trade and skill; I am, you might say, I might say, a Faust and Mephisto rolled into one. The metal frames fit ill and in the windy seasons let in vents of bitter cold, while at the start of summer the room swelters and only begins to be bearable in these last weeks of June when the sun is in the zenith and its rays do not strike directly through the glazing. The chicken is being cooked, and now and then Benny catches the smell of
it; the savour of roasting flesh sets his saliva glands spurting. He has travelled far, he is hungry.
In the kitchen Ursula in her shapeless cardigan stands motionless. She has to lean forward and squint at an angle through the window above the sink to see Benny where he is sitting outside on the step. She knows who he must be. She recalls the first time Adam told her about him. Deep winter on Haggard Head and the two of them standing side by side in his study. They were not fighting, exactly. The sea far below the window was a bowl of steel shavings and the sky was steely too and there was no horizon visible. He was holding her wrist in the circle of a finger and thumb and squeezing so hard the small bones creaked and tears came into her eyes—how strong his hands were; they always reminded her of the metal claws in those fairground machines that children pay a penny to scrabble in for plastic toys or balls of bubble gum. It was his way to grab at her, distractedly, at the boy, too, young Adam, and give a pinch, a pull, a shove. She can see herself, a quarter of a century ago, standing there, and him holding on to her, and her biting her lip to keep from crying out. He did not mean to hurt, she did not think he did. Outside, the rain had begun to congeal into flakes of wet haphazard snow that spattered against the window-panes and dribbled down the glass like spit. No, he did not mean to hurt. How long had he known Benny Grace before he told her about him, him, and the woman? Oh, years, he said; years.
A loud and angry sizzle comes from the big black range where the chicken is roasting—the fat must have overflowed on to something. She has often considered becoming a vegetarian. Too late now. Too late for everything, now. She has the impression that her life is coming to an end, she feels it strongly. It is not that she imagines she is about to die, but that when Adam is gone, all that she was when he was alive will go with him, and that what of her will be left will be another person, one that she will not know and will have no interest in, and will not want to be. She has known of cases like this, people living on after the death of someone dear and becoming estranged from themselves. But for her there are the children to consider; she will have to take care of them, Adam no less than Petra. She thinks Adam’s wife will leave him; she has that feeling and cannot rid herself of it. She imagines being here with them, her poor distraught daughter and her son come home to her, lost and helpless. Petra would grow increasingly crazed but perhaps more quietly, more secretively, while Adam would pass his days pottering about the house, mending things that do not need to be mended. And so the years will pass and the three of them will drift slowly into the future, sad survivors on their raft. That is what she sees, coming.
She sighs, still keeping her eye on Benny Grace. She only ever half believed that he was real. Until today she suspected he was Adam’s invention, an alibi for his love affairs. That is why his turning up like this has so upset her. Though surely she should be glad to discover that he does exist and is not another one of Adam’s elaborate inventions. His name, just the kind of absurd name that Adam would make up, always sounded to her like a jeer, a mocking reminder of her husband’s deviousness, his cruel playfulness, his deceits. Was she expected to believe that Adam would consort with a creature such as he described Benny Grace to be, a mischief maker and a rogue? But there was that side to Adam, that compulsion to break things. Benny Grace, he said, was the part of himself he had suppressed in order to become what he became. Who was she to say it was not so?
She is aware of a presence at her back. Is it that ghostly antagonist she sensed in the sickroom, come to crowd and bully her again? No, it is her son, standing on the wooden step below the door into the hall. How does he move so quietly, being so large? It is as if he were made not of flesh and bone but some other stuff, heavy yet soft, too.
“Can you see him, from there?” he asks.
She does not reply, and he descends the last two steps and crosses the room and stands behind her and lays his hands lightly on her shoulders. The sunshine must be stronger now, for Benny Grace has made a sun-hat for himself by tying a knot at each corner of his handkerchief, and is adjusting it to cover his bald patch. “Your father used to do the same,” Ursula says, “make a hat out of a hankie, like that. He was always cold, he said, yet he hated being in the sun.”
They contemplate in silence the fat man in his comical headgear. “He looks like someone in a seaside postcard,” Adam says. If the fat man glanced sideways would he see them? Adam thinks of the child in the train. Benny is scratching exploratively under an armpit now.
“Do you know who he is?” Adam asks. Again she does not answer. “His name is Grace,” he says. “He has come to see Pa. Pete took him up.”
She turns up her face and looks at him blankly. “What?
Where?”
“To see Pa. Upstairs, in the Sky Room.”
“Oh.”
She turns back to the window and the sunlit garden. A part of her is not here. Adam, still with his hands on her shoulders, gives her a grim little shake. Long ago, when he was a boy, one day he saw something glinting in the laurel hedge in front of the disused privy down behind the house, where the rats used to have their underground nests—they fascinated him, those rats, fat and furtive and quick and always somehow with an air of suppressed amusement—and reaching in among the leaves he pulled out an empty whiskey bottle, naggin-sized, and then saw the others, dozens of them, scores, drained to the last drop and pushed in neck-first among the dense, bristling foliage.
“Grace,” his mother says dreamily. “Yes, Benny Grace, he’s called.”
“You know him, then.”
“Oh, I know who he is.”
He supposes that when she is like this there must be a continual buzzing and muttering in her head, the confused noise of herself, that muffles the things that are being said to her. “I think,” he says, loudening his voice, “he’ll be staying for lunch. I told Ivy to set an extra place. And Roddy Wagstaff is here too, you know that—you remember, he came down, earlier?”
She goes on gazing out of the window. “A full house!” she murmurs. There is a wobble in her voice as if she might be about to laugh. “Your father won’t be pleased.”
Speaking of fathers, mine is waking up, at long last.
The two of them turn together as Ivy Blount comes in, carrying something. She enters not by the door at the top of the steps but through a dim and always damp-smelling corridor to the right of the range that leads directly into the conservatory—the house is honeycombed with hidden passages and connecting walkways. Ivy has exchanged her cut-off wellingtons for an old pair of cat-coloured carpet slippers that are absurdly too big for her. Ursula thinks she recognises them as her husband’s. Why, she wonders with a flash of annoyance, has everyone taken to wearing his things, first Petra in his cast-off pyjamas and now Ivy Blount in his slippers? She wishes Ivy would lift her feet when she walks, she is sure she knows how much it grates on her to hear someone shuffling along in that sligging, slovenly way. And to think how well brought-up the woman is, a daughter of the gentry! What she is carrying turns out to be a faded red satin cushion with numerous rips and holes in it through which wads of cotton stuffing protrude. She sees Ursula peering. “Rex was chewing it,” she says. She thinks how like a totem pole they look, standing there, the son close behind the mother and he a head taller than she. “I think it’s had it.”
Ursula clicks her tongue. “Oh, that dog,” she says. “He has been impossible since Adam’s illness.”
Young Adam does not like the look of that cushion: there is something gruesome about it, a suggestion of violence and blood. It reminds him of the chicken that Ivy brought in this morning. He recalls another fragment of last night’s dream. He was high up, on a mountain top, no, in an aeroplane, or on a cloud, yes, a cloud, and flying over a forest, the canopy of trees below packed tight as broccoli and an enormous river meandering through like a dribble of melted tin, a thick-walled fortress on a hill, too, and a tower on fire. He steps from behind his mother and goes and sits down at the table where the wireless is, and takes
up the screwdriver and once more unscrews the panel from the back of it.
John Banville Page 14
