The Infinities by John Banville Read Free Book Online

is. Standing here like this he feels faintly ridiculous, as he did just now outside the door, and he has the notion that there are people in hiding, behind the curtains and under the bed, with their hands clapped over their mouths, getting ready to spring out at him, whooping and jeering and laughing. He does not know how to behave here. It is strange being in a room with someone who is present and at the same time not. His father’s arms are on top of the sheet, stretched stiff at his sides; it is an oddly hieratic arrangement, as if he had been making a large blessing with arms outstretched over the heads of a kneeling multitude and now had stepped back to conceal himself in the shadows. The hands at the ends of the pyjama sleeves are long and bony and crisscrossed with swollen, greenish-blue veins, the kind of hands pianists are supposed to have, and nothing like young Adam’s, which are short-fingered and blunt.
    All at once he remembers what it is that the bed with his father in it reminds him of. One day, at the beach, when they were children, Petra let him bury her in the sand. It was his idea; he was bored, and thought it would pass the time. But no, that was not it, or not all of it. He had seen the look of alarm in his sister’s eyes when he told her what he was going to do and got her to lie down in the sand, and it had excited him. Otherwise he would have tired of the project as soon as he started, for it was not easy: the sand was heavy and sluggish after a morning of rain and the spade that he had to use was Petra’s, a toy plastic thing that was much too small and flimsy for the task. But he kept on until she was covered right up to the neck and all that was left of her was her face, as white as pipeclay, as she lay there in a cocoon of wet sand, with her eyes fixed on him anxiously, trapped and motionless like his father, here, now.
    He grins to himself, joylessly, guiltily, leaning in the gloom.
    But how shrunken his father seems, so much shorter than in life and pitifully thin—in life, yes, for as he is now he is surely as good as dead; that seems evident. By the time he was twelve young Adam was already impossibly big, with a prizefighter’s rolling shoulders and a weight-lifter’s legs, half a head taller than his tall and sinuously articulated father. The disproportion only made him feel all the more clumsy and slow, and somehow the smaller of the two, a pygmy at the knee of the great, white man. He used to divert himself by fancying that he was not his father’s son at all but the outcome of a desperate adventure entered into by his mother to pay his father back for the many affairs he was said to carry on; it cheered him to think of having been conceived in a flurry of anger and avenging lust. Sometimes he thinks he would like to be like that himself, unforgiving, coldly passionate, a dealer-out of retribution and just deserts. Perhaps, to buck him up, I should plant in his mind the idea that my father Zeus—? But no. Not the most loyal and loving of sons could imagine that Adam’s mother, even in the flower of virginal youth, would have been my heavenly father’s type.
    Who else was on the beach that day? Adam tries to recall the wider scene, the tawny dunes behind and the flat slope of sand down to the water’s edge shining like newly poured cement, and people in the water bobbing and squealing, and a sailboat out on the water, and, closer by, someone sitting on a blanket dispensing tea from a Thermos flask and querulously calling his name. The three of them, of course: him, his sister, his mother; always these three, never four, unless Granny Godley came with them, which she seldom did, for she had an aversion to outdoors, and deplored especially the sea and its shore. He thinks of his grandmother with rueful fondness, this fierce old loving woman unable to show her love to anyone.
    At last he brings himself to look full at his father’s face, or at his head, rather, that high-domed,