The Infinities (28 page)

She could betray his secret, his and Helen’s. She could tell her brother what she saw at the holy well, before the thunder came. What would he do? Would he break Roddy’s neck, would he strangle Helen? No. He would be decent and stoical as always; he would bear his pain and forgive his wife, probably he would even forgive Roddy, too. She thinks of him as she saw him a moment ago, stumping over the gravel like a bow-legged sailor in those too-tight, ridiculous trousers he has been wearing all day, as if they were a penance, her big awkward blundering brother, and she knows that she will say nothing, will never let him know how he has been cheated.

She goes and takes the razor in its velvet case from behind
the chest of drawers, where she keeps it hidden in the shallow gap there above the wainscot, and carries it to the window and sets it on the sill. The brushed black velvet seems to bend the light to itself from all directions and drink it in. She lifts the little brass catch. It pleases her how snugly the razor fits into its bed of scarlet satin. The ivory handle is cool and smooth, like cold cream made solid, and the round-headed blade is the colour of water. She takes the lovely thing and balances it lightly on her palm. There are raked shadows on the lawn, and birds, restless at the day’s lapsing, whistle plaintively in the trees. She shrugs back the kimono’s great loose sleeve. The underside of her arm is cica-triced all along its length, the crescents of healed skin brittle and shiny, like candle wax. She leans against the window-sill in a sort of anxious trance, all her flesh yearning for the kiss of the chill, steel blade. She draws in a breath, hissingly. When she cuts, the world suddenly has a centre, everything on the instant realigns itself and points to this edge, where the skin draws back its thin white lips and the first beads of blood make their shy début. She unties the belt and lets the kimono fall open and clasps her arm to her breast, and feels the ooze of blood against her skin; it is warm, and her own, and it comforts her. She waits a moment, then bares her other arm.

Ursula slowly wakes
, rising from level to level, from dark to lesser dark, as if through successive shallowings of the sea. She feels herself heavy yet buoyant, a corpse somehow coming back to life. It always does her so much good, a little sleep at evening, disperses so many fogs and fumes in her head. For a minute or two she does not open her eyes, basking in the blanket’s warmth, the pillow’s softness. As soon as she does open them, she knows, the usual headache will start beating its unbearable drum at the back of her skull, but for now her mind drifts contentedly, weightless as a bubble, touching on random things and caroming off them lightly. She has so many matters to worry about but lately, she has noticed, her consciousness on first waking affords
her a blank interval of grace before getting down to the grim business at hand.

Someone was here with her—her son—is he still—? Yes, she can sense him there, beside her.

She is fond of this room, where she and Adam shared so much of their lives together. He was always at his most manageable here, his most playful and forgiving, of himself as well as of her. She feels his absence, of course, feels it painfully, yet she has to confess to herself that this new solitude of the bedroom to which his illness has abandoned her is a surprising and a welcome luxury. Not that the room is in any way remarkable or particularly well appointed. It is large, indeed much too large, impossible to heat in winter and in summer forbiddingly stark, but all the same it has by day a reassuringly stolid aspect; it is like a room remembered from long ago, from the fixed antiquity of childhood, while at night, or in daytime with the curtains drawn, as now, it might be a great brown tent set down on the steppes of Muscovy or on the Arabian sands, ringed on all sides by a protecting vastness. She mocks herself for this fancy yet she clings to it, like a child clinging to a favourite toy. She does not regret moving the big double bed up to the Sky Room for Adam to lie in—to lie in in state, she almost thought—though its absence adds to the gauntness of the room. She felt he would want to be alone, as he always did when he was ill, hating to be fussed over. Even if the bed were still here she would not sleep in it, where she is sure the absence of her husband from it would pierce her all the more sharply. This old couch, or chaise-longue, really, is good enough for her, though it is hard and lumpy and when she lies down on it exudes a mildewy odour that she suspects is a vestige of all the bottoms that have sat on it over the many years
since it was first carried in and set down here, at the behest of who knows what Blount ancestor.

She hears the late train going past on the up line.

Her moments of drowsy calm are coming to an end, and the needle of dread and doubt prepares to insert itself again. She remembers talking to young Adam before she fell asleep, remembers saying things, but not what things they were. She should not talk at all when she is in that state, though being in that state is what frees her tongue and lets her speak of all the things that concern and frighten and infuriate her. She must stop drinking, she must give it up altogether, for everyone’s sake including her own. She thinks of the spectacle she might make of herself at the funeral, for instance, the drunken widow keening and caterwauling and trying to fling herself into the grave—She catches herself up. The funeral. The grave. The widow. How seamlessly she has accepted it all, the imminence of it, the inevitability. She opens her eyes at last and turns her head on the pillow to look at her son, to plead with him for something, some large gesture of exoneration, absolution, or perhaps only a word of solace. But with a jolt she sees that it is not her son who is there. It is Benny Grace. He has carried the chintz-covered stool from in front of her dressing-table and set it down beside the couch, and sits on it facing her in the pose of a Chinese sage, with his belly hanging over his belt and his fingers laced together in his lap. His shoes are by the stool, and his bare feet loll on their sides, turned inwards with the ankles almost flat against the floor, and she can see the calluses on his soles. He smiles at her in friendly fashion, and twiddles his toes. How long has he been here? “I didn’t want to wake you,” he says, as if she had asked the question aloud. “You were having such a sleep.”

She struggles to sit up, the blanket getting into a tangle and sullenly resisting her. She is holding something—what is it?—a cushion? Yes, it is the old red satin cushion that Rex chewed up and Ivy rescued. How did it come to be here, and why is she clutching it to her so fiercely, as if it were a shield to protect her? “My son,” she says, “where did he—?”

“He had to go. His pal needed a lift to the station.”

“His pal?”

“The tall thin one. Wagstaff?”

“Has he gone? Oh dear. He was meant to stay.” What has happened now, what offence has been given, what umbrage taken? Yet she is glad that Roddy has gone. He did not even ask to visit Adam. She supposes it is the last that they will hear of him. “He’ll think me rude, not to see him off. He wants to write Adam’s biography”—she laughs softly—“imagine!” He does not respond. She sighs, casting about her, fretful suddenly. Lying here like this, with this man watching every move she makes, is like being in one of those shameful social compromises that happen in dreams. She is wearing her dressing-gown, she notices; she does not remember putting it on. So many things these days get lost in the increasing confusion of her mind. She looks at Benny Grace again, his fatness, squatting there. What is she to do with him, what say to him? He has an unavoidable solidity, yet at the same time there is something fantastic about him. Yes, it is like being in a dream, so real it seems not a dream at all, and he is one of the figures looming in it. He gives no account of himself, that is what it is. He simply appeared amongst them, as if he knew them all and they must all know him. But no one knows him, except she, and what she knows of him is next to nothing, really. She throws the satin cushion on the floor and struggles
again to sit up straight. She sets one hand on her thigh and folds the other over it, as her mother used to do when she was preparing to deal with something difficult.

“I’m sorry I spoke to you like that, in the garden, earlier,” she says. “I was—harsh.”

He shrugs. “Harsh is nothing. Harsh I’m used to.”

“Especially when”—she takes a deep breath—“especially when there is so much that I—that we—so much we must be grateful to you for.”

“Not me, Ursula,” he says softly, with a shake of the head, modest and smiling, “you know that.”

“Well, you, and her.” Ursula, he called her—how dare he? “Where is she, by the way?” He says nothing, only goes on smiling. “Adam said she died but I did not know whether to believe him.” Still he will not answer. She intended to be direct, so as to shock him, but of course he is unshockable. She sighs again, irritably this time. He is just like Adam in that way he has of keeping silent and causing the other person to babble on and on, blurting out all sorts of fatuous and self-incriminating things. “You mustn’t think we weren’t grateful for your—your kindness. And hers, I mean. Both of you.” All that awful money, years and years of it, just appearing in the bank every quarter without explanation, and Adam not saying a word so that she had to be silent too, no mention permitted, no acknowledgement, even though it was what they were living on, since Adam despite all his fame and his great reputation no longer earned anything, since he no longer worked. What did he think she would think? It had to be a woman, naturally.

The room seems to be swelling around her, as if it were indeed a tent, billowing and burgeoning as it fills up with more
and more thickening, unbreathable air. The shadows seem deeper, too, a denser greyish-brown.

“He used to insist there are no great men,” she says, in a rapid murmur, “only men who occasionally do a great thing.” She is not sure why she said it. Was she replying to something, a question, a contention? She cannot remember what he said last. She feels all the more irritated. What she wanted to do was ask him about the woman: is she, was she, beautiful, clever, worldly, all those things that she herself is not? “I don’t know why we’re sitting in the gloom,” she says, with an unsteady, small laugh. “Would you mind opening the curtains, Mr. Grace?”

She looks after him as he pads across the room, his fat arms hooped and his big head bobbing. When he draws the curtains back she is surprised at how light the evening is. It will hardly get dark at all this night, for a few hours only. The thought for some reason makes her feel tired again.

He comes back and sits down on the stool. The light from the window makes a shining aureole all about him and sets a gleam on his bald pate. She draws the dressing-gown close about her. “I don’t know exactly why you’ve come,” she says tentatively, shrinking into herself. “Is there something you want from us?” She feels small suddenly, small and crouched and wizened, as she knows she will be when she is old. Did they do something to Adam, this fellow and the woman between them, did they damage him, as she always suspected they did? But no, she thinks—whatever damage there was to do he would have done himself. Only the young can work, he always said, only they have the ruthlessness for it, the savagery. “He always said,” she says, fingering the blanket, “that by the age of thirty he had finished
all he had to do, that he had given everything.” She looks at him pleadingly. “Is it true?”

He shakes his head, impatiently, it seems, not answering her question but dismissing it. He has matters far more momentous to address. He leans forward, all confidential, and lays a hand on both of hers. She sees the scene as from above, the couch just so, the blanket covering her, the discarded cushion on the floor, red and swollen like a broken heart, and the fat man’s head inclined, its monkish tonsure gleaming. From far off in the fields she hears the lowing of Duffy’s cows; it must be the milking hour. The oval mirror in the wardrobe door seems a mouth wide open, getting ready to cry out. Something brushes against her, not a ghost but, as it were, the world itself, giving her a nudge.

“I spoke to him,” Benny Grace says. “—He spoke to me!”

Great consternation and commotion now, of course, voices calling from room to room, running footsteps in the hall, the telephone fairly dancing on its doilied table beside the potted palm, and Ursula’s dressing-gown ballooning about her as she comes flying down the stairs like Hera herself alighting out of air intent on burning the daidala and claiming back her aberrant spouse. What shall I say? Yes, it is true, I felt something. First there was Petra, then the dog. The girl was upset, certainly I could feel that—no mistaking my daughter in her darker modes. How I wished I were able to reach out a hand to touch her, to offer her reassurance, as she cowered there on the bed beside me, trembling as she does. That young scoundrel Wagstaff must have said something hurtful to her, or else said nothing at all, which I
imagine would have been more hurtful still. For this we shall give him cramps, side stitches, pinch him thick as honeycomb. Or will we? Perhaps not. We have not been kind to him, we have not been fair. He is not such a terrible fellow, after all, only disappointed, unsure, untried. Perhaps Ursula will let him write his book about me; that would be recompense. As well him as some other scribbler. Yes, he shall limn my life, in delicatest washes of blue and gold, and make a great success of it—this is my wish.

When Petra was gone the dog pawed open the door and came nosing through the shadows in search of me. What a racket his claws make on the floorboards when he is preparing his leap. As often as not he fails in the first and even second attempt, and slithers backwards off the bed, scrabbling and groaning, and collapses on the floor in a heap of fur and bones. Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense—have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes? Yet when he succeeded in getting aloft at last and flopped down beside me with a grunt and a sigh, I did feel his brute warmth. At first I did not recognise the feeling, I mean the feeling of feeling, and thought I was only imagining with an intenser acuity than heretofore. It would not have been the first such misapprehension I have suffered these past days. In my form of paresis, if I am using the term correctly—Petra would know—it is distressingly easy to mistake an imagined sensation for an actual one. This raises a number of interesting questions in the sphere of idealism, I mean philosophical idealism, and I would address them had I the time and wherewithal.