The Infinities Page 16

  Petra finds herself in a chair beside Helen’s and at once, without a word, she jumps up and crosses to another place, on Benny Grace’s right hand; Benny swivels his head and gives her a conspiratorial smile, arching an eyebrow. Roddy Wagstaff has watched her manoeuvre with grim disdain; he has hardly spoken a word to her since he arrived. Helen reaches for her napkin and her fingertips brush the back of his hand; she does not look at him.

  Ivy returns with a great brown wooden tray on which are platters of potatoes, carrots, peas, and a china bowl, unsettlingly suggestive of a chamber pot, with handles on either side, in which is sunk a steaming mess of boiled cabbage. She sets out the dishes and takes her place, to the right of Helen, where Petra was first, and begins to serve. The chair on the other side of her is empty. Meanwhile Adam sharpens the carving knife, wreathing blade and steel about each other at flashing speed, as if he were demonstrating a feat of swordsmanship.

  Ursula appears in their midst so quietly, so greyly, that the others have hardly registered her presence before she has seated herself. She smiles about her in vague benevolence, her eyes lowered, looking at no one, and in particular not at Benny Grace, unless I imagine it. Oh, yes, there must have been an altercation on the lawn—I wonder what she said to him?

  When Adam cuts into the chicken a sigh of steam escapes from the moist aperture between singed skin and moistly creamy flesh.

  “Oh, cabbage, Ivy!” Ursula softly cries, in faintest protest, “—with chicken!”

  Ivy ignores her and, still on her feet, brushes a strand of hair from her cheek and fixes her gaze above all their heads.

  “I’ve invited Mr. Duffy,” she announces loudly, and has to stop and swallow. “—I’ve invited Mr. Duffy to lunch.”

  A hanging silence follows, until Helen suddenly laughs, making a gulping noise, and puts up a hand quickly to cover her mouth.

  Rex the dog is a keen observer of the ways of the human beings. He has been attached to this family all his life, or for as long as he has known himself to be alive, the past for him being a doubtful, shapeless place, peopled with shadows and rustling with uncertain intimations, indistinct spectres. These people are in his care. They are not difficult to manage. Obligingly he eats the food it pleases them to put before him, the mush and kibble and the odd ham bone when Ivy Blount remembers to save one for him; he has accustomed himself to this fare, though in his dreams he hunts down quick hot creatures and feasts on their smoking flesh. He has his duties, the guarding of the gate, the routing of itinerants and beggars, the vigilance against foxes, and he attends to them with scruple, despite his increasing years. Before old Adam was carried up to the Sky Room asleep—it was Duffy who did the carrying, by the way—and refused to wake up and come down again, it was Rex’s task to take him for a walk each day, sometimes twice a day, if the weather was particularly fine, and for his sake even pretended to like nothing better than chasing a stick or a tennis ball when it was thrown for him. He is unpredictable, though, old Adam; he shouts, and more than once has aimed a kick. The girl Petra is to be wary of, too; she smells of blood. But they all need careful watching. They are not so much dangerous as limited, which is why, he supposes, they are in such need of his support, affection and praise. It pleases them to see him wag his tail when they come into a room, especially if they are alone—when there are more than one of them together they tend to ignore him. He does not mind. He can always make them take notice, especially the women, by barging his snout into their crotches, as it amuses him to do.

  There is a thing the matter with them, though, with all of them. It is a great puzzle to him, this mysterious knowledge, unease, foreboding, whatever it is that afflicts them, and try though he may he has never managed to solve it. They are afraid of something, something that is always there though they pretend it is not. It is the same for all of them, the same huge terrible thing, except for the very young, though even in their eyes, too, he sometimes fancies he detects a momentary widening, a sudden, horrified dawning. He discerns this secret and awful awareness underneath everything they do. Even when they are happy there is a flaw in their happiness. Their laughter has a shrill note, so that they seem to be not only laughing but crying out as well, and when they weep, their sobs and lamentations are disproportionate, as though what is supposed to have upset them is just a pretext and their anguish springs really from this other frightful thing that they know and are trying to ignore. They have an air always of looking behind them—no, of not daring to look, afraid of having to see what is there, the ineluctable presence crowding at their heels. In recent days, since old Adam’s falling asleep, the others seem more sharply conscious of their phantom follower; it seems to have stepped past and whirled about to confront them, almost as this fat stranger has done, just walked in and sat himself down at the table and looked them all in the eye as if he has every right to be here. Yes, the scandalous secret is out—but what can it be?

  Does Rex detect the difference between Benny and me? I wonder. Or, rather, I should ask, does he detect the sameness? For in appearance we could hardly be more unalike, I being all spirit and Benny, in his present manifestation, all flesh, deplorably. The significant distinction lies far deeper than in the forms in which we choose to show ourselves. Sprites we both may be, but compared to Benny I am the incarnation of duty, stability and order. He is the boy who dismantles his father’s gold half-hunter to find out how it works. In that arcane science of which old Adam is an adept there are two distinct types of magus. The first sees the world as all a boiling chaos and labours to impose on it a system, of his own devising, which shall marshal the disordered fragments and make of them a whole, while the second finds an ordered world and sets to tinkering in it to discover what principle holds all its rods and cogs in thrumming equilibrium. The latter most often will be plump and satisfied, the former as sleek as the sleekest prelate. There you have Benny, there you have me.

  Yet surely Rex should know Benny for what he is. The animals are said always to recognise their panic lord and bow down before him. But what does recognising mean, in Rex’s case, what does it, to coin a phrase, entail? Names and categories are of no more weight in his world than they are in ours—you humans are the relentless taxonomists. He crouches now sphinx-like on the stone flags just inside the door of the conservatory, front paws extended and his big square head lifted, alert and watchful. From here he has the widest possible view of the lunch table, although the light pouring through all those panes of glass is behind the lunchers so that seen from here they are cast somewhat into gloom, some of them faceless while the others, viewed in profile, appear as silhouettes. Being a quadruped, he is most familiar with the lower extremities of the bipeds. Legs are always far busier, down there in the half dark, than their owners realise. Benny, for instance, keeps crossing and uncrossing his, like a baby waggling its fingers. He sits happily asprawl, gripping his knife and fork expectantly in his dimpled fists, his plump thighs overflowing the defenceless chair on which he squats with an already mauled napkin draped over his paunch. He is addressing the table at large, telling over yet again the tale of his great friend and colleague Adam Godley’s triumph on that day, which seems no longer ago than yesterday, when it came to him as a flash of lightning that in those dark infinities which had been disrupting his sums for so long there lay, in fact, his radiant solutions. No one is listening, not even Petra. Rather, all attention is focused breathlessly on the empty place at table which none dares look directly at, awaiting as it is the momentous coming of Duffy the cowman. I confess I am agog myself. What happy consequences have I set in train by my playful subterfuge of the morning? I experience a twinge of misgiving, however, when I suddenly recollect those shiny green shutters on the windows of Ivy’s cottage. Do they presage something, sinister and insistent, like themselves?

  “—that it should be possible to write equations across the many worlds, incorporating their infinities, see, and therefore all those other dimensions—What?”

  Benny
stops as if someone had said something to interrupt him though no one has. Helen turns to gaze at him and takes on the swollen-faced solemnity of one who is trying not to laugh. Ursula, sitting beside young Adam, peers gropingly into the sudden silence, wondering in alarm if she has said something that she should not have. Often nowadays she catches herself murmuring aloud things that she had thought she was only thinking, while sometimes when she does speak, or thinks she does, the person spoken to seems not to have heard. For instance, she is convinced that a moment ago she asked the Wagstaff fellow beside her to open the wine, but if so, he either did not hear or is ignoring her, for he is sitting with his elbows set delicately side by side on the table and his hands joined together under his chin as if he might be about to offer grace, and does not even glance at her. She shifts her attention to her son and watches as he carves the chicken in his irritatingly slow, methodical way, draping the slices of breast meat over the thighs to keep them warm while Duffy is awaited. Duffy, in the house, for lunch!—or did she only imagine Ivy saying she had invited him? No, she did not imagine it, for here he is.

  Poor Duffy. He is a great anti-climax after all. He has put on his Sunday best, which is a much washed and faded slate-blue pinstriped suit the like of which I have not seen outside the Cyclades, where it seems every male infant is presented at birth with just such a piece of timeless apparel, to be donned ceremonially on his arriving at his majority and never taken off again before the grave and in many cases not even then. The shirt that Duffy wears is very white and open at the collar, and his boots are brown. He has pomaded his hair, with axle-grease, it would seem, and brushed it back fiercely from his forehead, which gives him a slightly wild and staring aspect. He stops in the doorway and swallows, his Adam’s apple bouncing. No one it seems knows what to say and Ivy cannot bring herself to look at him. Then Petra, of all people, rises from her seat and goes to him swiftly and takes him by the hand, yes, by the hand, which to the others, even to Ivy, and to their surprise, seems the most natural thing in the world, and leads him forward wordlessly to his place at the table. He nods his thanks, arranging the broad planes of his face into an unaccustomed and rudimentary smile. Ivy, still not looking at him, moves his napkin a fraction nearer to his plate, touching the cloth only with the tip of a middle finger, and clears her throat. He has a curious way of seating himself, in stages, as it were, putting his left hand to the table and leaning sideways, pressing the other hand to the front of his right thigh, and lowering himself gingerly on to the chair, which gives a frightened squeak. Perhaps he suffers from rheumatism, what his poor old mother before him used to call the old rheumatizz. Benny Grace is regarding him with frank and beaming interest. Helen picks up the corkscrew and hands it to Roddy Wagstaff. Meanwhile Petra goes back to her own place and sits, with eyes downcast, like a communicant returning from the altar.

  “You’re very welcome, Adrian,” Ursula says across the table, somewhat thick-tongued, carefully enunciating the words as if they had been glued together and must be prised apart, one by one. Adam is standing beside her with the carving knife upraised; she touches him lightly on the elbow. “Mr. Duffy,” she says softly, “will take a drumstick, I’m sure.”

  There is a general sense of dissipating tension. Duffy’s coming, everyone sees, is not to fulfil the great things that were expected of it. Rex the dog, abruptly losing interest in everything, Duffy included, flops over on his side with a sigh and closes his eyes.

  Young Adam is in a state of strange elation. It is as if he were suspended aloft, swaying above the room. He sees his hands as from a long way off, laying slices of meat on each plate as Ivy Blount holds it out to him, and when he speaks, his voice reverberates tinnily inside his head. He does not know what is the matter with him—is this happiness again, the same that he felt when he was driving to the station? Not really, but a sort of giddiness only. Yes, he feels giddy, looking down on the table from this height. His mother, beside him, bows her head over her wine glass and he looks at the pale parting in her greying hair and experiences for an instant a pang of what seems the purest sorrow. What is the matter with him, swinging wildly like this from one emotion to another?

  Helen is talking to Roddy and smiling, and Petra is watching her across the table with narrowed eyes.

  The carving done, Adam sits down to his plate, yet that teetering sensation persists. His mother on his right is speaking to him, fretting that there will not be enough meat to go round. He tells her to stop worrying, that no one minds. “Duffy has his drumstick, look,” he says quietly, and makes himself smile, but she only gazes at him in that intently vacant way that she does, wide-eyed, with her head down and her chin tucked in. “Don’t worry,” he says again, more irritably now, more gruffly, “everything is all right, I’m telling you.”

  Is it? He feels acutely the absence of his dying father from this table where so often he noisily presided. But when was that father ever fully present, at this table or anywhere else in the life of the house? It is I who ask the question not young Adam, who is more forgiving than I am, than I would be, were I him. Ah, fathers and sons, fathers and sons. Not that I know so very much about the subject. I speak of my father as my father and of me as his son, but in truth these terms can be only figurative for us, who are not born and do not die, for birth and death are the sources, it seems, out of which mortal ones derive their sensations of love and loss. The old stories tell of us coupling and begetting, enduring and dying, but they are only stories. Like old Adam in the bosom of his family, we are not here sufficiently to be ever quite gone. Think, if you can, of a sea of eternal potential and of us as the shapes the waters make, surging and swaying; think of the air moulded by weather into transparent forms; think of ice; think of flame—so we are, at once eternal and evanescent.

  Where were we? At the lunch table, among these people. All I am doing is passing the time here, flicking these polished playing cards into that upturned silk hat.

  Adam looks round the table in a kind of wonderment, seeming now to be sunk in something and looking up, and all sways and shimmers. He feels as if he were being keel-hauled, in the air one minute, gasping for breath, and plunged in a green airlessness the next. How flat and featureless now everything seems up there, seen from down here, even the figures, the figures especially, his mother and his sister, his wife, the preposterous Benny Grace, too. He recalls Roddy Wagstaff passing under the shadow of the tree outside the railway station and seeming to fade for a second into the starkness of that gloom. How to conceive of a reality sufficiently detailed, sufficiently incoherent, to accommodate all the things that are in the world? He lives in that reality yet cannot fully conceive of it. He stands aghast before the abundance of things, all of them separate, all of them unique. A single blade of grass is made of an unimaginable massing of tiny and still tinier particles—and how many blades of grass are there in this impossible world? This is the trick his father managed for himself, the trick he pulled off, making all the bits seem to cohere in a grand amalgam wrought by the mumbo-jumbo of mere numbers. Or so the son thinks.

  He surfaces from this reverie with a jolt. The table has become animated, and there is a confusion of talk. Helen is telling Roddy Wagstaff about something—that play she is to be in, he supposes, she speaks of little else these days—her gold head thrust forward on its lovely column of neck. Her throat, Adam notices, is delicately flushed, with a rosy porcelain glow like that on the inner surface of a seashell. Roddy has pushed his chair back the better to face her, and sits sideways to the table with one bony knee crossed on the other and one arm folded and an index finger pressed to his chin at the side. He regards her unblinking and now and then nods, though his look is sceptical, with the shadow of a smirk. Adam feels for his wife the same rush of compassion that a moment ago he felt for his mother; why is Helen giving so much of her attention to this fellow, who surely despises her, as he despises, or so Adam believes, all of them here at the table? Petra too is still watching the pair of them, b
ack and forth, back and forth, like a spectator engrossed in a tennis match; at intervals she darts forward to try to say something but is rebuffed by their refusal to notice her and subsides again, mute and rueful. Ivy Blount and Duffy the cowman sit side by side in an atmosphere all of their own, Ivy leaning forward over her plate and plying her knife and fork with concentrated intensity, as if they were a pair of knitting needles, while Duffy, his food ignored, glares unseeing at a salt cellar. They seem to be having an argument, and speak without looking at each other, in an undertone, in rapid bursts between brief intervals of fraught silence. But they are not arguing, not at all. They are, or my name is not Hermes, locked in negotiations towards the plighting of a mutual troth.

  Suddenly Benny Grace’s voice is heard above all others. “Oh, no, he won’t die,” he says, loud and emphatic, “no, no,” and Rex the dog, still lying on his side, quickly lifts his large head from the floor and looks at him.

  Adam’s mother, on Adam’s right, makes a low, choked sound that might almost be, Adam thinks, laughter. The table has fallen silent—this must be what is called a panic fright. Benny smiles at no one in particular and takes a drink of wine, his little black eyes sparkling merrily over the rim of his glass. His avowal has made all at the table uneasy. Nor is it clear to whom his assurance was addressed. Ivy Blount has lifted her head and is gazing at the little man, her lips parted and the jabbings of her busy knife and fork suspended. Duffy, frowning in the new-made silence, bends his attention to his plate, on which the single slice of chicken, which was all he got besides the scrawny drumstick, has begun to curl along the edges, while the cabbage has gone cold and acquired an unpleasant, whitish sheen. Is this Duffy noticing these niceties of detail, or I? Or is there a difference?