The Infinities (27 page)

Helen turns from the sink and asks Duffy for a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” she says, “which is why I never buy them.”

Duffy’s look turns leporine and he moves the tip of his tongue along his lower lip—is she making a joke?

“I only have roll-ups,” he says, showing her the tobacco tin from his pocket and quickly palming it again.

She shrugs. “Roll me one, then.”

All the more alarmed by this he turns a quarter way away from her and remains motionless, staring at nothing. “Oh, it’s all right,” she says. “Someone will give me a real one.”

He nods, relieved. She comes forward and stands by the table, leaning her hip against it and running the fingers of one hand back and forth on the wood as if the raised seams in its worn surface were the strings of a harp. “What’s keeping Ivy?” she murmurs. “I really am soaked.” She seems unaware that the buttons of her dress at the back are still undone, affording Duffy a glimpse of a taut white elastic strap. The rain is ceasing and out in the garden the blackbird is piping again its heedless, piercing song. “Damn,” she says without emphasis, and glances absently about the room. She has never slapped a man’s face before and her insides are jangling still from the thrill of it. She feels as if it were she who had been delivered a tingling smack. Poor Roddy! She is amused, remembering how he reared back on the bench with almost a maidenly quiver, staring wide-eyed at her, a palm pressed to his cheek. She surprised herself by noticing his hands, pale and long and tapered, like her father-in-law’s, their beauty marred only by those bitten nails. She was surprised too at how livid the mark was that she left on his cheek, how quickly it was spreading. She had not meant to hit him quite so hard—in fact,
she had not meant to hit him at all, it had just happened, before she knew it. But what had he been thinking of, kissing her like that? She wonders if she should tell Adam. What would he do? Threaten to horsewhip Roddy, challenge him to a duel? She is sorry now she spoke of the play to Roddy, and regrets especially saying that he might review it. Not that it was entirely a joke, for the production would need all the notices it could get. Now, of course, if he does write something he will be certain to take his revenge on her; she is sure he is that sort, small-minded and vindictive. But then, she reminds herself, I did hit him, after all, and is all the more amused.

From the corner of her eye she can see Duffy begin to edge his way cautiously along the dresser in the direction of the back door. She wonders where Roddy is now. He fled the wood ahead of her, striding off furiously and still wiping at his mouth with his handkerchief, as if there was a foul taste that he could not get rid of. She hopes he is as wet as she is; not much hope for his slip-ons if he is.

Ivy comes back at last, bearing a huge white towel folded in her arms. She pauses for a beat, catching something in the atmosphere, and looks from Helen to Duffy and back again and narrows her eyes.

“Oh, you’re an angel,” Helen says. She takes the towel and begins vigorously rubbing at her hair.

“Here, give me that,” Ivy says, not untenderly, and takes the towel back from her and makes her sit by the table.

Duffy, sidling, has almost reached the door, but pauses now to watch the two women, Helen voluptuously slumped with her hands limp in her lap and the back of her dress folded out at the top like a pair of small blue wings, and Ivy leaning over her, all
bones and bird’s-nest hair, with the white towel draped over her hands like the priest’s communion stole at Mass, stroking slowly that helmet of damp, dark-gold hair. She says that when they are done she will prepare for Helen a nice hot cup of tea, but Helen, her voice muffled, says she would prefer a nice cold drink of something with gin in it. Ivy does not reply but only wields the towel more vigorously. Helen chuckles to herself in the warm tumult where she leans.

The rain has stopped and a weak sun is shining wetly in the window. Duffy moves to the door. Even when he lifts the latch Ivy does not turn her head to look at him. He steps out, and the door grates on the slate threshold. The scent of drenched grass assails him. Which would fetch the better price at auction, he is wondering, Ivy’s house or his own?

Petra too got wet in the rain but was not drenched as Helen and Roddy Wagstaff were. She is afraid of thunder and ran back from the wood, her heart pounding, and did not stop until she reached the house, and she was crossing the lawn before the rain started up in earnest. How silent the house is, holding its breath, as if it too had got a fright. She stands in the hall to listen and hears beyond the noise of the rain the faint maunderings of her mother up in her room; it is a sound she is used to. Then from far off she hears the yard gate creak, and a moment later the back door rattles, and she knows that Helen or Roddy or both together have returned. She hopes they have suffered a good soaking, and that Helen will catch a cold followed rapidly by pneumonia, primary or atypical, pneumo-coccal, interstitial or lobular, she does not mind which variety it is, just so long as the
attack is severe and accompanied by numerous and distressing and, if at all possible, fatal complications. Not to stray beyond the Ps, even pleurisy would do, the effusive form—
pain in the breast is common, of a cutting or stabbing nature, usually in the neighbourhood of the nipple
—and, for Roddy, at least a chronic pleurodynia of the intercostal nerves. That would teach the two of them.

On the landing she sees Benny Grace crouched and listening outside her mother’s bedroom doorway, and through the partway open door sees her mother inside, lying down, and Adam sitting by her. None of them notices her.

In her room she locks the door and kicks off her wet shoes and sits on the bed, hugging her knees, listening to the sound of the rain on the roof. The light is silver-grey and sad, and she would like to cry but cannot; she was never any good at crying. The rain on the window makes everything beyond the glass shimmer and swim, as if she were indeed seeing it all through tears, all those greys and watery greens and undulant browns. She wonders that she can be so calm. Everything is changed, her life is changed. Or, no, it cannot be changed, since what she thinks should be her life has not properly started yet. Roddy was to do that for her; Roddy was the one who was supposed to take her hand and lead her into the sunlit uplands of the future. It surprises her to realise, to admit at last, how high a hope she had of him. Everyone tried to warn her but she would not listen. Now she feels—she feels—She does not know what she feels.

She leaves the bed and goes to the door and opens it cautiously and peers out. Benny Grace is gone, and the door of her mother’s room is shut and her mother has stopped moaning. She flits across the landing on tiptoe—who does she think will see
her, of whom is she afraid?—and opens the door and climbs the seven steps to the Sky Room. Someone has drawn the curtains again and she can hardly see. She gropes her way through the shadows until she finds the bed. She has to listen closely to hear her father breathing. She is getting used to the gloom and can see him now, or his outline, at least. How like a wax figure he seems, a life-sized waxen model of himself. Taking care not to displace any of the tubes or the feeding bottles dangling on their metal stand she crawls on to the bed and lies down by him on her side with her face up close to his. His profile is like a line of mountains, seen from afar, at nightfall. There is an unpleasantly sharp, ammoniac smell; she supposes it is from the jars that she knows are under the bed and that the other, unseen tubes lead down to, but behind that there is his own familiar smell, darkish, warm, a little musty. She puts her arm across his chest. He is so thin, hardly there at all, just a scant arrangement of bones under the blanket.

She is wondering how long Roddy and Helen have been lovers.

How strange the way the shadows all around her when she peers into them seem to move, billowing slowly, like smoke, like distant storm clouds. There is a thing dripping in her head, dripping, or ticking; it is often there, or maybe always there and she only notices it sometimes. She hears the cries of gulls, far off, then suddenly near, then far again.

Kiss me. Kiss
me
.

Oh. A sudden start. She opens her eyes—have they been closed? Did she fall asleep for a moment? She must have, for she has that feeling that she always has when she wakes up of stealthy things having been happening that she is not to know of. Not
that anything has happened: she is still lying beside her silent father as before, here in the gloom of the sickroom. But something has changed—the rain has stopped, that is it. Such enormous silence, as if the two of them were lying deep at the bottom of a huge empty stone vault, stone, or metal, maybe, a huge rusty iron tank emptied of everything, even air. She lifts her arm from her father’s chest and turns on to her back and gazes upwards at the uncertain ceiling. She thinks of her father facing blindly into another world, breathing other, even darker air. Why are the gulls no longer crying? Where have they gone to? Kiss me.

In a little while she goes back to her room. Yes, the rain is over and the sky is clearing to a delicate, breakable blue. She stands by the window looking out on a rinsed and sparkling world. She can see rather than feel the chill that the rain has brought, for the air outside seems polished and shines thinly, and there is a new edge to everything, sharp as glass. Rex the dog is crossing the lawn; he stops, sniffs, lifts a leg, then after a moment of motionless gazing ambles on. The Salsol is parked on the gravel in front of the house, slewed at an angle. Duffy is walking along slowly by the box hedge, examining the hedge as if for damage; he has a furtive and a watchful mien. The limes along the drive are darker than everything else, as if night is gathered already among their foliage, waiting to be released into the air. These things seem to her set out just so, the countless pieces of a vast and mysteriously significant design. She looks downwards, inwards; how the light of evening pales her hands. Across the back of one of them there is a stippled scratch, like a chain of tiny rubies, where she caught herself on a briar. She did not really mean to spy on Helen and Roddy Wagstaff—how was she to
know they would come to the wood? She had gone there, as she often does, to be alone and sit by the holy well and let her mind slow down and soothe itself. When she heard them approaching she hid among the woodbine and the ivy—why, since she did not even know who they would be?—like a child, she thinks, caught at something naughty. And indeed, like a child, she felt a secret, gloating thrill, crouched in her damp and odorous lair, crawled over by invisible mites, her nails digging into her palms and her face on fire. When the pair sat down on the bench before the well she was directly opposite Helen, who she thought would surely see her. As soon as they began to kiss she wriggled backwards through the undergrowth, not caring now if they heard her, but of course they did not: they were so busy, lost in each other. When the thunder crashed directly above her it almost sent her sprawling on her face, so loud it was, so near. And then she ran, stumbling.

She turns from the window. A sense of urgent anticipation is starting up inside her, familiar, guilty, hot. Has she locked the door? She makes sure that she has. From the door she goes to the wardrobe, opens it, kneels. There is a drawer, low down, at the back, hard to notice, an ideal hiding place, almost ideal. She draws it open cautiously, making not a sound, and slips her palms under what is inside and lifts it out and bears it to the bed and sets it down. Within its wrapping of thin tissue paper the green silk shines dimly, like a slab of jade half hidden under a dusting of snow. When she opens the paper she shivers as always at the terrible crackling noise it makes, like the noise of some precious, fragile thing being broken into pieces. She unfolds the kimono and lifts it by its wide, square sleeves. The seams release the faint perfume that she loves, soft and dry, like the scent of
orange blossom or dried rose petals; she likes to think it is a lingering trace of the great lady for whom it was made, for it is an ancient piece, brought back from Japan by her father long ago. She undresses, and puts on the heavy garment over her nakedness; the silk lining is cold against her skin; it is always cold. She ties the broad belt of matt black silk and pauses a moment and bows her head, her eyes closed. The ritual has begun. With tiny, hampered steps she hurries to the door and makes sure yet again that it is locked. On her way back to the bed she touches in strict order with her fingertips these three things: the first stripe in the wallpaper to the right of the light switch, a framed photograph of her father on the mantelpiece above the closed-off fireplace, the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush on the dressing-table.

From her pocket she brings out a ring made of heavy white metal—platinum, is it?—and set with a flat black stone in which an initial letter is carved. She slips it on to her wedding finger and admires it at arm’s length.

Where do they see each other, where do they meet? Have they a room somewhere, a love nest? She pictures it, off a mean, cobbled street, up a dirty stairway at the end of a corridor smelling of cats. Lino on the floor, and the sagging bed shoved into a corner, two straight chairs and a stained table with an empty wine bottle and two glasses in the bottoms of which the purple lees of last week’s wine have gone dry and turned to crystal. A meagre window with a yellow net curtain and a view of back yards and crooked dustbins. Two cigarettes smouldering in a tin ashtray, one smeared with lipstick. A cistern drips, a voice in the street calls out something. In the corner, in the shadows, his pale flanks moving, her stifled cries.

There is the sound of footsteps below the window, harshing
on the gravel. She hides behind the curtain, then risks a quick glance down. Her brother and Roddy Wagstaff are walking towards the station-wagon. Roddy has his linen jacket draped over his shoulders. His hair, still damp, is combed flat across his high, narrow skull, and from this angle she can see that it is thinning on the crown—he will be bald before he is forty. He is carrying his suitcase. So he is not going to stay, after all. Why has he changed his mind—has something happened? Perhaps they saw her, he and Helen, when she was wriggling backwards through the brambles, and they are afraid she will tell what she saw. She supposes he hates her now, for Roddy would hate anyone he has reason to fear. Does he at least feel ashamed, embarrassed? It is true, he never promised her anything. Does he talk about her when he is with Helen—do they lie in bed smoking and laugh at her for being childish, stupid? Adam takes Roddy’s suitcase and puts it on the back seat of the Salsol, they get in, they drive away. Behind the passenger window Roddy is bending to light a cigarette; he does not look back at the house.