The Infinities Read online

  I understand your scepticism. Why in such times as these would the gods come back to be among men? But the fact is we never left—you only stopped entertaining us. For how should we leave, we who cannot but be everywhere? We merely made it seem that we had withdrawn, for a decent interval, as if to say we know when we are not wanted. All the same, we cannot resist revealing ourselves to you once in a while, out of our incurable boredom, or love of mischief, or that lingering nostalgia we harbour for this rough world of our making—I mean this particular one, for of course there is an infinity of others just like it that we made and must keep ever vigilantly in our care. When on a summer’s day a sudden gale tears through the treetops, or when out of the blue a soft rain falls like the fall of grace upon a painted saint, there one of us is passing by; when the earth buckles and opens its maw to eat cities whole, when the sea rises up and swallows an entire archipelago with its palms and straw huts and a myriad ululating natives, be assured that one of our number is seriously annoyed.

  But what attention we lavished on the making of this poor place! The lengths we went to, the pains we took, that it should be plausible in every detail—planting in the rocks the fossils of outlandish creatures that never existed, distributing fake dark matter throughout the universe, even setting up in the cosmos the faintest of faint hums to mimic the reverberations of the initiating shot that is supposed to have set the whole shooting-match going. And to what end was all this craft, this labour, this scrupulous dissembling—to what end? So that the mud men that Prometheus and Athene between them made might think themselves the lords of creation. We have been good to you, giving you what you thought you wanted—yes, and look what you have done with it.

  All this, of course, I cast in the language of humankind, necessarily. Were I to speak in my own voice, that is, the voice of a divinity, you would be baffled at the sound—in fact, you would not be able to hear me at all, so rarefied is our heavenly speech, compared to your barely articulate gruntings. Why, the music of the spheres has nothing on us. And these names—Zeus, Prometheus, grey-eyed Athene, Hermes, even—these are your constructions. We address each other, as it were, only as air, as light, as something like the quality of that deep, transparent blue you see when you peer into the highest vault of the empyrean. And Heaven—what is that? For us, the deathless ones, there is no Heaven, or Hell, either, no up, no down, only the infinite here, which is a kind of not-here. Think of that.

  This moment past, in the blinking of your eye, I girdled the earth’s full compass thrice. Why these aerial acrobatics? For diversion, and to cool my heels. And because I could and you cannot. Oh, yes, we too are petty and vindictive, just like you, when we are put to it.

  Adam, this Adam, has suffered a stroke. By the way, I pause to remark how oddly innocuous, even pretty, a term this is for something so unpleasant and, in this case, surely final—as if one of us had absent-mindedly laid a too-heavy hand upon his brow. Which is perfectly possible, since we are notorious for not knowing our own strength. Anyway, for some time prior to this stroke that he suffered old Adam had been subject, all unbeknownst, to a steady softening of the brain due to a gradual extravasation of blood in the area of the parietal lobe—yes, yes, I have also some expertise in matters medical, to meliorate the more obstreperous of my attributes—which means in other words he was already a goner before that catastrophic moment when, enthroned at morning within the necessary place—to put it as delicately as I may—he crouched too low and strained too strenuously in the effort of extruding a stool as hard as mahogany, and felt, actually felt, a blood vessel bursting in his brain, and toppled forward on to the floor, his face to the tiles and his scrawny bare bum in the air, and passed at once, with what in happier circumstances would have been a delicious smoothness, into death’s vast and vaulted antechamber, where still he bides, in a state of conscious but incommunicate ataraxia, poised upon the point of oblivion.

  He is not alone—as one of your most darkly glowing luminants has observed, the living being is only a species of the dead, and a rare species at that. He senses the multitude of his fellows all about, uneasy and murmurous in their state of life-in-death. And I am here as well, of course. When our time comes we shall go together, he and I, into what is next, which I may not speak of.

  His wife has entered the room, making hardly a sound, as is increasingly her wont these days. She feels she is becoming more and more a wraith, as if Adam in his last illness were siphoning something vital from her, drop by glistening drop. She closes the bedroom door softly behind her and stands motionless a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. A teeming sword of early sunlight is falling through a parting in the heavy curtains of the middle window, breaking its blade across the foot of the bed. The Sky Room is a most capricious touch added on to the house by the man who built it, the famously eccentric St. John Blount, a timber eyrie set into the north-west—or is it southeast?—corner of the main edifice, glazed on three sides and surmounted by a conical roof with a metal weathervane in the shape of a fleeting, short-cloaked figure, wearing a pudding hat with a circular brim and bearing a staff, who can only be—well, me, I suppose. How disconcerting. I did not expect to encounter myself here, in such surroundings, at this elevation, especially in the form of a two-dimensional tin representation of a godling. My staff must double as a lightning rod—that is something, I suppose, flash and fire and the reek of brimstone; that will liven things up.

  Ursula with a qualm acknowledges to herself how restful she finds it being here. There is a dense, intent quality to the silence in the sickroom; it is like the silence that reigns deep down inside her and soothes her heart, even in the midst of so much inward tumult. She can make out his form now, supine in the big bed, but although she listens breathlessly she cannot hear him breathing. Perhaps—? At the unthought thought something stirs in her, a yearning something that she tries to deny but cannot. Yet why should she reprove herself? Everyone says the end will be a blessèd release. Those are the words they use, a blessèd release. Yes, she reflects bitterly, a release—but for whom? All except, perhaps, the one being released. For who can know but that Adam in some part of his mind might not be awake in a way and experiencing wonders? People who are deeply asleep seem unconscious but still may be dreaming the most fantastic things. Anyway, even if she cannot hear him she knows he has not gone. The elastic link between them has not been broken yet: she can feel still the old twanging tug. She is sure he is thinking, thinking away, she is sure of it.

  She closes the chink in the curtains and at once the dark seems total, as if the world had been suddenly switched off. Feeling her way through the black and therefore somehow heavier air she advances to the bed soundlessly on slippered feet. In their early days together he used to call her his geisha girl for her pattering, rapidly stepping gait. She recalls the antique kimono he brought back for her from one of his trips—“A kimono from Kyoto for my geisha!”—cut from heavy, jade-green silk, a garment so exquisite she could not bring herself to wear it but folded it away in tissue paper in a drawer, from where subsequently it somehow disappeared. He had threatened to take the thing back—perhaps he did?—and give it to one of his girls, all those girls he said he was well aware she imagined that he had, hidden away. Then he looked at her, with his head back, fiercely smiling and showing his teeth, daring her to call his bluff. For it was a bluff, about the girls, about there not being any, she knew it, and he knew she knew it. That was a way of lying that amused him, saying a version of the truth in tones of high, mocking irony so that to challenge him would be to seem a hapless dolt.

  Her eyes are growing used to the blinded dimness. She can see more than she wants to see. Uncanny, to enter this room each morning and find him just as she left him the night before, the blanket moulded smoothly to his form, the sheet uncreased, the cockscomb of silky hair—still black!—rising unruffled above the high, white dome of his forehead. His beard too is dark still, the spade-shaped, pointed beard that gives him the look of a
faintly diabolical saint. She has always loved his skin, the moist cool translucent paleness of it that the years have not sullied. She hates, knowing how he would hate them, the plastic tubes that are threaded into his nostrils and held in place with strips of clear sticking-plaster. There are other tubes, farther down, hidden from sight by the bedclothes. What a trouble there was settling him here, Dr. Fortune fidgeting and the nurses cross. But she insisted, and so determinedly it surprised everyone, herself included. “He must be at home,” she kept on saying, ignoring all their objections. “If he is to die, he must die here.” She hated the cottage hospital he had been rushed to, a caricature off the lid of a chocolate box, grotesquely pretty with ivy and rambling roses and a glassed-in porch; imagine if Adam died there and along with her grief she had to put up with all that flummery. Old Fortune, who looks like Albert Schweitzer and has been the family’s physician since Granny Godley’s day, squeezed her hand and mumbled a mollifying word through the yellowed fringes of his moustache, but the two young nurses narrowed their eyes at her and stalked off, their backsides wagging professional disapproval.

  By now her ears have become accustomed to the acoustics of the sickroom and she can hear her husband breathing, the faint rustle of air in the passages of his throat and chest. At the end of each indrawn breath comes a tiny flutter, like an impatient twiddling of fingers. She realises what it is that is familiar about this sound. It is just how he used to sigh when she did something that exasperated him, with just that same little fluttering flourish. She misses him, as though he were already gone. She feels a pain such as she thought only those who are still young can feel, new and sharply surprising, enough to take her breath away.

  Something brushes past her in the air, less than a draught, more than a thought. She has sensed it before, in recent days. Whatever it is she is convinced it is not benign; she has the impression of haughtiness and a bridling resentment, as if something were bent on jostling her out of position. There are other strange phenomena too, other haunting effects. She has glimpses of figures that cease to be there when she tries to look at them directly, like floaters in the eye. She wakes in the night with a start, her heart pounding, as if there had been a tremendous noise, an explosion or a clap of thunder, which shook her out of sleep but of which there is not even an echo remaining. When she speaks to people on the telephone she is convinced there is a third party on the line, listening intently. She wonders fancifully if perhaps this angry revenant might not be the ghost of Adam’s first wife, or of his long-dead mother, Granny Godley the old hag, come back to claim her son and carry him off with her to the land of the shades. You see?—they think it is the dead that haunt them, while the simple fact is, as her husband could tell her and has often tried to, they live amidst interpenetrant worlds and are themselves the sprites that throng the commingling air. For all she knows it might be one of her countless selves that she is meeting, drifting from another plane into this one all unawares.

  Or perhaps it is merely my ever-attentive presence that she senses, the whirring of dainty wings on my hat and at my heels that she almost hears. But I ask—am I haughty? Do I bridle? A little, I suppose. A little.

  She dislikes her name. Adam was able to tell her of St. Ursula of Dumnonia, martyred at Cologne along with her eleven thousand virgins—“What a day that must have been, eh,” he said teasingly, lifting an eyebrow, “im alten Köln?”—although this Ursula was recently removed from the calendar of saints, in a fit of anti-German pique, by one of the more reform-minded English pontiffs. When the children were small they called her La, and still do. Adam is Pa and she is La. She wonders if there is ill-intent in their keeping on with these pet-names. She fears she has not been a good mother. She did her best with Adam but poor Petra was too much for her. Having Petra was the start of all her troubles. For nine months she was sick, vomiting all day and not able to keep anything down, until in the end she could not swallow even her own spit; with a shudder she recalls the nurse taking the glinting nickel dish of slime and floating froth out of her trembling hands and emptying it into the washbasin. Then at last the pallid little fish that was her daughter slithered out of her and lay gasping on her breast, so wearied already that no one expected she would live. But live she did, and was called Petra, another stone dropped into Ursula’s already heavy heart.

  She touches her husband’s hand where it lies on the blanket. It has an unsettling feel, the skin brittle as greaseproof paper and the flesh pulpy underneath; it is like a package of scrap meat from the butcher’s, chill and sinewy; it is not the hand that she remembers, so delicate and fine. That invisible presence barges past her again, or through her, rather, and she feels it is she that is without substance, as if she and not this other were the ghost. Her husband’s eyelids spring open and his eyes after a moment of agitated searching find her face. She smiles with an effort and speaks his name softly. It is hard to make out his features in the dimness but she is loath to switch on the light. Dr. Fortune assures her that it is her loving care that is keeping her husband alive and nothing else—why then does he look at her now with such seeming fury?

  Her head is very bad today, very bad, she must take something soon to soothe it.

  In the well of the kitchen the morning light has a sharply metallic sheen and the square of sunlit garden in the window behind the sink is garish and implausible, like a primitive painting of a jungle scene. Adam and his sister are seated at one end of the long deal table, hunched over cereal bowls. When their mother appears at the top of the three wooden steps that lead up to or down from the rest of the house they sense rather than hear her—Rex the elderly labrador, lying on his blanket in the corner, gives a few listless thumps of his tail but makes no effort to get up—and they stop eating and lift their faces and look at her. She sees again with a faint start how alike they are, despite Adam’s great size and Petra’s diminutiveness, each with the same broad brow and little sharp chin and ash-blue eyes so pale they are almost colourless. Perhaps because she had no siblings herself she finds family resemblance always a little eerie, even in her own offspring. Both of them take after her, for it was from her they inherited the wide forehead and sharp chin and azury eyes.

  “How is he, today?” her son asks. His skin is mottled from the sun and he has a scorched, raw look. For some reason just now she finds well-nigh intolerable his palely candid gaze. “Much the same,” she says, answering him, and Petra laughs, who knows why, making a nasty sound. Yes, sometimes she thinks her children dislike and resent her, as if she were not their mother at all but a person brought in to be in intimate charge of them, a heartless guardian, say, or a bitterly resented stepmother. But surely she is mistaken. These are the creatures she carried inside her and gave birth to and fed from her own breast, phoenix-like. She recalls Adam just now glaring at her with that vengeful fire in his eyes. “He seems peaceful,” she says.

  Her son considers her as she hovers on the stair at the far end of the long, high-ceilinged room. He seems unable to focus on her properly. She has a new quality, of being not entirely present, of seeming to hesitate on an invisible threshold that is there under her feet wherever she steps. She has become blurred, as if under a fine layer of dust. This must be the effect on her of the catastrophe that has befallen old Adam; she has lost the sense of herself. She is wearing a cotton dress like a smock and a baggy grey cardigan the hem of which sags below the level of her hips. Her hair, the colour of a knife-blade, is pulled back in two flattened wings and pinned at the nape of her neck. She descends the steps and comes forward and stands by the table, absently kneading the worn wood with the fingertips of one hand, as if to test its solidity. “You’re up early,” she says to both of them. “Did the train wake you?”

  Neither will answer. “Roddy will be here later,” Petra says, looking aside frowningly. Her tone is truculent, as if to forestall disparaging comment. Roddy Wagstaff, dubbed the Dead Horse by her brother, is Petra’s young man, or so convention has it, although everybody kno
ws it is not she but her famous father that Roddy comes to visit.

  “Oh,” her mother murmurs, and a pained frown passes over her already frowning face, “then there’ll have to be lunch!” Since Adam fell ill the household has been content to shift for itself, but a visitor must be fed a proper, sit-down meal; Adam would insist on it, for in such small matters he is a strict observer of the conventions.

  “We could take him into town,” her son says, without conviction. “Doesn’t that place what’s-it-called serve lunches?”

  “Oh, yes,” Petra says archly, with a sneer, “let us all go into town and have a lovely time—we can bring Pa and prop him up at the head of the table and feed him soup through his tubes.”

  She glares at her cereal bowl. Under the table her left leg is going like a sewing-machine. Adam and his mother exchange an expressionless look. Her father’s collapse has been for Petra a great excitement, being at last a calamity commensurate with the calamitous state of her mind. The question of lunch is let hang. In the corner Rex the dog gives a contented, shivery sigh. He can see me plainly, lolling at my ease in mid-air, with folded arms, in the midst of these sad souls, but it is nothing to him, whose world is already rife with harmless spectres.

  Petra has her subject now and will not let go of it. In a thick, tense voice, goitrous with sarcasm, she embroiders upon the notion of a family lunch in town to which her father would be brought—“in a hammock maybe or a sling slung between us or one of those things with two poles that red indians drag the wounded along behind them in”—and at which they would all celebrate his achievements and make speeches and raise toasts to him as man, as father and as savant. When she gets going like this she has a way of speaking not directly to the others in the room but to the air beside her, as if there were present an invisible twin version of herself off whom she is bouncing her taunts and who will give to them, thus relayed, an added extension of sarcasm. Adam and her mother say nothing, for they know there will be no stopping her until she has exhausted herself. The dog, lying with his muzzle between his paws, eyes her with wary speculation. The table-top vibrates rapidly along with the girl’s bobbing knee. Adam tries to eat his cereal, which has gone gluey; he sees himself yet again as a boy, sitting at this table, listening to his father talking, in that coolly vehement, uninterruptible way that he did, and recalls how he would feel his throat thicken and his eyes scald with inexplicable tears he dare not shed, shaming tears, heavy and unmanageable like big drops of mercury. He glances sidelong at his sister now and sees the dab of sallow light shaking in the spoon-shaped hollow above her clavicle as she tries not to choke on the torrent of words that wells up out of her unstaunchably.