John Banville

by The Infinities (v5)

  “What—?”

  She twists free of his hands and falls back a step.

  “Well, just that I’ve decided—”

  —to leave you, she finishes for him in her mind.

  He does not know what he wants to tell her, what he wants to say. He is still all at sea, under that keel, sat at the end of that thrumming plank. He has a brimming sensation, as if he were himself a vessel that he has been given to carry, filled with some marvellous fluid not a drop of which must be allowed to spill.

  “What?” she asks again, more brusquely. “What have you decided?”

  He frowns. How strange her look when she stepped away from him like that, drawing in her chin and glaring up at him, with stony unsurprise, like a child about to hear an announcement from the big world that the adults think momentous but in fact is only dull.

  “I was going to say,” he says, treading over the flaw of doubt and rushing on, “I thought we might—I don’t know—I thought we might move down here, after—afterwards.” His forehead flushes. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think? Of moving, down here, to Arden?” She gives a sour laugh, a sort of snort, and looks past him quickly. It strikes her how like a lighted stage the sunlit garden seems, garish, innocent and faintly mad. “I’m going for a walk,” she says.

  Adam blinks. “A walk?” This little scene between the two of them is already rankling in his mind, as if it were past already and he is recalling it.

  “Yes, a walk—is that all right?”

  “Of course, of course.” He laughs, his brow fairly on fire by now. “Can I come with you?”

  Although he does not move she has the impression of him dodging from side to side in the doorway so as not to let her pass.

  “Your mother is drunk again,” she says. “I think you had better look after her.”

  For a second it seems he will put his hands on her arms again, more roughly this time. Despite his flustered smile and doggy eagerness she is a little frightened of him, so large and unnervingly blond, so sharp-eyed sometimes, as now. Points of stubble glitter on his cheeks and chin as if a pinch of reddish sand had been thrown in his face and stuck there. She imagines him hitting her, the jarring of fist on bone.

  —oh, such a dream!

  We were upon some golden mountain top,

  The two of us, just we, and all around

  The air was blue, and endless, and so soft—

  You see how my Dad does it, putting all sorts of fancies in their heads to distract and confuse them? She begins to recall something from her dawn dream of love and then does not. But she will always remember this day, for as long, that is, as a mortal may remember anything.

  Frowning now and suddenly helpless, her husband steps out of the way to let her pass. As she does, he tries eagerly to take her hand but she brushes him aside and is gone.

  To make her way to the garden from the music room she must cross an enclosed, cobbled yard and go out by an iron gate.

  There is another yard beyond, where the chicken-runs are, and often the chickens escape and get in here through the gate because they like to peck among the cobbles, where there must be worms, or grubs, or something. Helen is nervous of these high-strung, baroque birds with their trembling wattles, the way they look at her with malevolent surmise and make that slow thoughtful gargling sound in their gullets. Their droppings are multicoloured, chalk-white and black—what do they eat?—olive-green and a shiny silk-green and a horrible glistening dark brown. She goes gingerly, careful of her sandals. The gate when she opens it resists her, dragging and shrieking on its rusty hinges.

  The two she had observed from the conservatory are still where they had been, on the step above the sunken lawn, oddly consorting there, the one tall and sleek and the other fat and humped and bald. Benny Grace is eyeing her at an angle, and she sees that he is smiling to himself. He has taken off his shoes and socks again—is there something the matter with his feet? Roddy Wagstaff pointedly pretends not to notice her as she approaches. In her sandals she can feel the grass, it is moist and cool and tickles her toes deliciously. Because of the low level of this part of the lawn the sunlight shining down over the trees seems sharply bent, as if it were water and not air it is striking through. A stray wind, soft and lapsing, rustles through the trees and makes their leaves tinkle; the leaves are darkly polished on top and greeny-grey underneath. Summer seems an immense height, an eminence towering bluely over the day. See how all stops for a moment, here in this dappled grove, where now even the breeze is stilled. This respite is a gift of the god, your less than humble servant.

  Helen is asking Roddy Wagstaff for a cigarette. He bends on her his finical smile and clicks open the slim, silver cigarette case with his thumb and offers it open flat on his palm. The still, bright air pales the flame of his lighter. They both ignore Benny Grace, squatting on the step at the level of their knees, squinting up at them, genial and quizzical. They smoke in silence for a little while, ignoring him—he might be a garden ornament, for all the notice they take of him—and then, together, without a word, they descend the steps and walk away along the lawn.

  “That fellow,” Helen murmurs, “—who is he, do you know?”

  Roddy shrugs. “Mm. When you came along he was in the middle of telling me some rigmarole, about Greece, I think it was, about being up in the mountains there, doing something or other. I could make no sense of it. And that greasy little smile that he has!” He stops and lifts one foot and examines his shoe and frowns. “How can the grass be damp? It hasn’t rained for weeks.”

  “No one seems to know who he is,” Helen is saying. They come to a vertical grassy bank—it must have been a ha-ha once—and pause to finish their cigarettes. When she looks back down the length of the lawn Benny Grace is still sitting where they left him, between the two stone pillars, a blurred homunculus, his bare feet glimmering whitely at the ends of his black trouser-legs, and she thinks of rats and drainpipes. “He gives me the creeps,” she says softly, and makes herself shiver.

  They turn and walk to the corner of the lawn where the bank becomes a ramp that they have to scramble up ungracefully—she thinks Roddy might offer her his hand but he does not—and find themselves on a weedy gravel path that meanders off beside another trail of trees. They are beech trees, someone told her; she likes to know the names of things, even things she does not care about. They have what seems to her a resentful aspect, brooding above her in the sunlight and slowly and haughtily moving their high heads from side to side in what little wind there is. It is pleasantly cool in their shade, though, and suddenly quiet, too, the air muffled by the great dark bundles of foliage. The white jet-stream of an aeroplane high up is unzipping the sky down its middle, swiftly, without a sound. She had not intended to go for a walk, that was only something she had said to get away from her husband, yet here she is, strolling along this path under trees in the middle of a summer afternoon, like one of those women in Chekhov, and with Roddy Wagstaff, too, who seems to her more like a character in a play than a real, living person.

  What did he mean, Adam, about moving here—surely he is not serious? The things he thinks of, the notions he dreams up!

  She always wanted to be an actress, from when she was a little girl and dressed up in her mother’s clothes and mimed in front of the wardrobe mirror, preening and striking attitudes and stamping her foot. Later on she conceived of the stage as a place of self-improvement, of self-fulfilment, and still sees it as such. She is convinced that by an accumulation of influence the parts that she plays, even when the characters are petty or wicked, will gradually mould and transform her into someone else, someone grand and deep and serious. It is like putting on makeup, but makeup of a magically permanent kind, that she will not take off, only continue adding to, layer upon careful layer, until she has achieved her true look, her real face. She knows what people say of her, that she is hard-hearted, relentless, driven by ambition, and they are not wrong, she has to admit it, but what th
ey do not know about—for of course she will tell no one, not even Adam, especially not Adam—is this notion she has cherished since she began, the notion of being destined to become something more than she is. This we must assume is the source of her interest in Roddy Wagstaff. He is like her, not quite achieved yet, not quite the full person that he will be, some day. He has no smell, that is a thing she has noticed. There are smells about him, yes, a smell of cigarette smoke, for instance, and of soap or cologne or something, of other things as well, but of Roddy himself, the flesh-and-blood man, she can detect not a trace, and this adds to her sense of him as hollow, a thing of potential more than actual presence. So there is a sort of affinity, after all, since this is what she is, too—pure potential, in a state of perpetual transformation, on the way steadily to becoming herself, her authentic self.

  The tree-lined path without her noticing has taken them in a broad curve, and the garden is no longer in view, though she has a prickly sensation between her shoulder-blades, as if Benny Grace’s eye is still on her, somehow. From here there is a view of the house she has not had before. At this angle the place looks crazier than ever, all slopes and recesses and peculiarly shaped windows; it is, she sees, more like a church than a house, but a church in some backward, primitive place where religion has decayed into a cult and the priests have had to allow the churchgoers to worship the old gods alongside the new one.

  Roddy is worrying about his shoes again, and keeps stopping to peer at them, clicking his tongue in annoyance. They are narrow and sharp-toed, and a sickly shade of pale tan, like sucked toffee. He complains that the leather is bound to bubble up where the lawn has dampened it above the seams. “They haven’t seen grass since they were still part of a cow,” he says with a scowl. Helen laughs shortly and puts a hand quickly over her mouth—she is conscious of her raucous laugh: it always comes out before she can stop it and gives her an embarrassing shock. Roddy turns his head and stares at her, uncertain, faintly alarmed. He had not intended to be humorous. He does not care for jokes, does not understand them or what they are for.

  The path ahead veers abruptly and leads into a dark little wood. This must be, Helen thinks, the wood she saw this morning from the bathroom window, the one she has never been able to find before, not that she has ever made such effort to find it. She does not hesitate but goes on without comment, and although Roddy falls back a step or two he soon strides forward again and catches her up, and they pass side by side under a sort of arch woven of brambles and ivy that is like a doorway into a church. Within the wood the day is suddenly different: it is dimmer, naturally, because of the shade, but it feels different, too, feels attentive, almost, watchful. There is a mushroomy smell, and the air that surely should be green, given all this greenery, instead has a bluish tinge, as if there had been a bonfire that had gone out and left its smoke thinly dispersed all around. When she makes a closer inspection, however, she sees there is not so much green, except high up where the leaves are, for down here it is mostly brown: wood-brown, thorn-brown, clay-brown. A bird breaks out of a bush and flies off rapidly, whistling shrilly. The path peters out and the ground becomes spongy underfoot, like a trampoline that has gone slack. She thinks of Hansel and Gretel—were they the babes in the wood or is that another story? They left a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back through the forest but the birds ate them and they got lost. And then what happened? She tries to remember but cannot. There was a witch, probably, there is always a witch, waiting in the wood.

  Nature, though, how impassive it is, how indifferent. The trees, this lilac air, the leaning briars and the clinging vines, none of these register her and Roddy moving in their midst; even the moss on which she treads does not care that her foot crushes it. The cries of lost children would be lost on this place; even their blood would not stain the ground, or not for long, but would be absorbed like anything else, like dew, like rain. Yes, she marvels at how it all just goes on, not needing to notice anything or respond to anything. But then it comes to her that there is nothing going on, really, and that what these things are is not indifferent because that would mean they could be otherwise, that the trees could turn and look at them, that the creepers could reach out like hands and clutch at their ankles, that the briars could sweep down and lash them across their backs like scourges, and nothing like that ever happens. For nature, my dear, has no purpose, except perhaps that of not being us, I mean you.

  Now they have reached the heart of the wood and here is a little—what should she call it?—a little bower, under a low, vaulted roof of ivy and brambles and sweet woodbine and other things all tangled together. “Oh,” Roddy Wagstaff says, “it must be the famous holy well,” and for some reason gives what seems an embarrassed laugh. A well? At first she sees no well but then she does. There is nothing built, no bricks or stones piled up, just the pool of water, brimming and still, like a polished dark metal disc set on the ground, with vivid wet green moss all around it. Now too she sees the rosaries, dozens of them, hanging among the ivy and the woodbine blossoms, and there are scraps of holy pictures propped between twigs or hanging from thorns, of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart, and photographs of people as well, smudged and creased: a little girl in her First Communion dress with plaits, a toothless old woman squinting in sunlight, a cocky young fellow in an army uniform, holding his cap in his hand. Such a hush reigns here, at once tense and dreamy, as if some sound that had been expected long ago, some call or cry, had not come, and would not, now. All feels liquid under this densely matted canopy. The air is damply cool, and among the moss there are black rocks flecked with mica that gleam wetly, and something somewhere is making a steady, reverberant drip. In front of the well a place to sit has been provided, a narrow little bench with metal legs set crookedly in cement. It takes her a moment to recognise it as the seat from an old-fashioned school desk. Roddy is telling her how people from the farms and villages round about still come here to the well to pray—“There’s even a May procession, I believe,” he says archly, with a smirk—and how her father-in-law had tried and failed to close off the right of way through the wood. She is hardly listening, watching the dust tumbling lazily in a narrow shaft of sunlight through the leaves.

  They sit down on the narrow bench. She sees that despite the seeming stillness of its surface a little of the water is constantly spilling over from the well; it moves through the moss at her feet, a stealthy, swarming flow. Where does it go to? The beam of sunlight is fading, like a sword blade being stealthily withdrawn, and yet somehow leaves the air faintly glowing in its wake. Roddy is offering her the flame of his lighter. She does not remember accepting a cigarette from him but there it is in her fingers, a slim white thing, untipped, the tobacco smelling of somewhere foreign. She pictures a crag, a crooked tree and golden, dusty distances, faint voices singing, hands linked in a ring, a round-dance on a summer day in a green glade. The heavy flab of smoke when she draws it in scratches the back of her throat. The feeling of being watched is so much stronger now.

  “Your husband does not like me,” Roddy says, in a strange voice, not his own, and as if from a long way off. She watches the water brimming in the well.

  “Why do you think that?” she asks.

  “Because he is jealous.”

  “Adam?” She laughs, then falters, shivers, and her voice falls to a whisper. “Who is he jealous of?”

  She does not look at him. Although he does not move he seems to draw himself closer to her, tensed and somehow as if suffering.

  “How still the air is in this place,” he says. “Do you not feel the presence of the god?”

  “What god? What do you mean?”

  She peers, squinting, into the foliage behind the well, fancying she sees a face there, then it is gone. She has finished her cigarette, though its perfumed, acrid aftertaste persists. Roddy’s voice when he speaks is large yet makes a soft, a tremulous sound.

  “You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together
, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.”

  She stirs, a start—was she asleep? She feels she might swoon and puts a hand on Roddy’s arm, laughing a little in confusion and blurred dismay. “Sorry,” she says, “I thought—I was thinking—something from the—lines from the—”

  He says her name, his mouth is by her cheek; she turns to speak again but he kisses full her open lips, his tongue burning on hers. Surprise floods through her, a sort of whoop, like laughter. Her eyes are open and so are his. Such a stare he has, as if straight into her soul! And his arms, two airy hoops that hold her fast. She tries to draw back, saying something into his mouth, his golden mouth. Something deep inside her stirs, a bud of something, stirring. At last he releases her and she gives a great gasp—“Oh!”—as one who has been drowning but is suddenly saved.

  what other you is—

  She leans back, at a loss, panting, her arms open, her lips still saying a silent Oh! He seems as surprised as she is, and blinks, and frowns, and touches his fingers to his lips as if to find a trace of her. She puts a hand to her hair, her cheek, her mouth. “What do you think you’re—what?”

  “I don’t know—” He shudders and takes out a handkerchief and wipes his lips. What is that medleyed music in the air, of pipe and tabor, bugle and flute, what voices chanting as the radiant cavalcade departs? “I’m sorry.”

  She rises from the seat and with a flowing movement, a dancer’s sweep, leans down and slaps him smartly across the cheek. He draws back, stares, and his eyes narrow. He is only himself now, the god having abandoned him. The air is darkening. He makes to speak. A whiplash crack of thunder sounds directly overhead and seemingly at the level of the treetops. Thunder? Yes!