Read Online The Infinities by John Banville - Free Book Online Page B

stands in a crooked street, wedged narrowly between its taller neighbours as if it had sidled in there one day and stayed put. He slides his hand through the letter box—it gives him a shiver of terror every time—and fishes up the keythat hangs inside on a string. In the hall the familiar smells meet him: floor polish, blacklead, soap, gas from the kitchen stove. He hangs his coat and cap on a hook, throws his satchel on the floor. His mother, in her apron, a strand of hair come loose from its bun, wipes the back of a hand across her cheek; she gives him the look that she always does, suspicious, sceptical, faintly desperate. He walks his fingers along the table edge. His father is in the back room, propped against pillows on a makeshift bed made up for him on the brown leather sofa in the corner, his big hands spread out flat in front of him on the blanket. The boy thinks of the crape bow on the door-knocker, and of himself standing in the parlour here, in his Sunday suit, amid the smell of ashes and lilies. His father stirs, sighs, and makes a slithering sound in his throat. The banked fire in the grate has a frightening glare at its heart, and the coke gives off a hot reek of cat. Low in the window there is a patch of late-afternoon sky, milk-blue, and a bit of the mossed wall on top of which his mother’s hens make illicit nests and hide their eggs. Gooseberry bushes out there, potato drills, cabbages gone to seed and grown as tall as paschal candles. Then the fields, and behind them the rocky hills, and then, beyond that again, elsewhere.
    The first present that he can remember getting is a clay pipe. It must have been his birthday. His sister took him to the tobacconist’s shop and bought it for him with money their mother had given her. It came with a waxed-cardboard pot of soapy stuff for blowing bubbles. In the garden by the hen-house he tried it out. At first he could not get the hang of it then suddenly did. The bubbles hesitated on the rim of the pipe-bowl, wobbling flabbily, then broke free and floated sedately away. They seemed to be rotating inside themselves, as if the top was always too heavy,and the iridescent surplus kept cascading down the sides. Sometimes two of them stuck together and formed a fat, trembling shape something like an hourglass only squatter. They were made of an unearthly substance, a transparent quicksilver, impossibly fine and volatile, rainbow-hued. They popped against his skin like wet, cold kisses. They were another kind of elsewhere.
    His father died at Christmastime. In the back room the bed in the corner was dismantled, leaving the stripped sofa standing in what seemed a gaping hole in the air, and no more fires were lit and as the December days went on the light in the room congealed and grew steadily dimmer. At the end the dying man had suddenly lifted himself up from the pillows with starting eyes and called out something in a voice so strong and deep it shocked everyone. It was not his voice, but as if someone else had spoken through him, and Adam’s sister burst into tears and ran from the room, and his two brothers with their greyish bloated damp-looking faces glanced at each other quickly and their eyes seemed to swell. What their father had shouted had seemed a name but no one had been able to make it out. He had kept on glaring upwards, his head shaking and his lips thrust out like a trumpet player’s, and then he had fallen back and there was a noise as if he were drowning.
    His mother said they must have Christmas as usual. She said his father would want it so, that Christmas was his favourite time of all the year.
    She baked a cake. Adam helped her, measuring out the ingredients on the black iron weighing-scales with the brass weights that were cool and heavy as he imagined doubloons would be. It was night, all outside a frozen stillness, the leaning roofs purplish-grey with hoarfrost and the jagged stars glitteringlike splintered ice and the moon high up in the