The Infinities (8 page)

Everything blurs around its edges, everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate.

Has the early train gone by yet? Has his wife paid her morning visit?

The waters of time muddy, the figures flicker in silence.

The father of
the gods is in a sulk. It is always thus when one of his girls, all unknowing, goes back to her true, that is, her rightful, mate, as she must. What does he expect? He comes to them in disguise, tricks himself out as a bull, an eagle, a swan, or, as in the present case, a husband, and thinks to make them love him—him, that is, and not what or who he is pretending to be, as if he were a mortal just like them. Ah, yes, love, what they call love, it drives him to distraction, for it is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death. He is convinced the two are intimately linked, to the point, in his case, at least, that one conduces to the other. In this I grant he may be somewhat in the right. Certainly their love takes it out of
him. I do not mean the act itself, which gives no pleasure to us since aeons ago, when the world was young and fecund still and required our constant generative attentions—remember those herds of mares all standing with their hindquarters turned to the north in hope of an inseminating breath from Boreas the amber-winged? Nor is it the effort, the vain effort, of compelling a passionate response from them that drains his strength and leaves him limp and languishing, no, but something in the exchange itself, in the needful shuttling to and fro between her humanness and his divinity, this is what debilitates him so, even as it delights him. Hence he keeps coming back for more. Each time he dips his beak into the essence of a girl he takes, so he believes, another enchanting sip of death, pure and precious. For of course he wants to die, as do all of us immortals, that is well known.

This love, this mortal love, is of their own making, the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us? We gave them that irresistible compulsion in the loins—Eros and Ananke working hand in hand—only so they might overcome their disgust of each other’s flesh and join willingly, more than willingly, in the act of procreation, for having started them up we were loath to let them die out, they being our handiwork, after all, for better or, as so often, worse. But lo! see what they made of this mess of frottage. It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral, complete with baptistry, steeple, weathercock and all. Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable selfobsession.
This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not.

And all the time the entire thing is a self-induced fantasy. What my Dad, lusting after their love, does not see and will not hear said is that that which love loves is precisely representation, for representation is all it knows. Or not even that much. Show me a pair of them at it and I will show you two mirrors, rosetinted, flatteringly distorted, locked in an embrace of mutual incomprehension. They love so they may see their pirouetting selves marvellously reflected in the loved one’s eyes. It is immortality they are after—yes, what we would be shot of they long for, or at least the illusion of it, to seem to live forever in an instant of passion. Hence their ceremonies of surrender and engorgement.
Agape
?—aye, at that feast they eat each other, gobble each other up. And this, this it is that great Zeus covets, their little manufactured transports from which he is excluded.

Those troubadours and their lays have a lot to answer for.

Maddened by prurience, like an old dog by his fleas, my divine father scratches and scratches, until he has exhausted himself. No bull or bird but a mangy old dog, yes, that is what he is. Or, if you prefer, a hapless boy, a shepherd lad, say, hunched in hiding in some Attic grove, spying on a bevy of nymphs at their bath and frantically rubbing himself and stifling yelps of anguished ecstasy. What else can he do, my poor old man? They will not love him—they do not even know it is he, seeing only whatever outlandish disguise it is he presents himself in and lacking the imagination to conceive of a god. And yet he goes on pressing them for a word, a pledge, a plight. It is pathetic. This morning, with young Adam’s wife, he was more abject in his
entreaties than I think I have ever known him. It was shaming, and I would have absented myself from the scene were there not in me, too, sometimes, a panting Daphnis spying on a world of pleasures and passions beyond his savouring.

Besides, I had been working hard and had earned a little diversion. Not only did my Dad set me to monitor the house and ensure he was not disturbed at his illicit amours but I also had to render the lady Helen’s husband sleepless so he would go night-wandering and vacate the bed. Then—and wait till you hear this—then I was commanded to hold back the dawn for fully an hour, to give the old boy extra time in which to work his wiles on the unsuspecting girl. Imagine what effort that little feat of prestidigitation involved: the stars stopped in their courses, the rolling world restrained, all chanticleers choked. And then the readjustments afterwards! You try telling that hotspur Phaeton why he was reined in, or rosy-fingered Aurora why I had to shove her in the face. But an hour of suspended day there must be, and was.

Consider the scene.

Their passion all used up at last, they lie in bed together naked, Dad and his girl, reclining on a strew of pillows in the morning’s plum-blue twilight. Or, rather, Dad reclines, leaning on an elbow and cradling the girl’s gold head and burnished shoulders in his lap. Her left arm is raised behind her and draped with negligent ease about his mighty neck. He gazes before him, seeing nothing. In his ancient eyes there is that look, of weariness, dashed hope, tormented melancholy, which I have seen in them so often—too often—at moments such as this. He is rehearsing in his head the age-old inquisition. When he speaks she hears not his but her husband’s voice, and feels her husband’s
familiar breath waft over her breasts, a lapsing zephyr. Familiar but, it must be mundanely said, unfamiliarly sweet, for this early, sleep-encrusted hour. For, oh dear, they do tend to pong in the mornings.

“Can people who are married be in love?” he asks, in young Adam’s very voice. “I mean, can they still care as deeply, as desperately, for each other as they did when they were lovers?”

Always at the start like this his heart races, as he thinks, Perhaps, this time—?

“Mmm,” she says, and squirms, snuggling closer against him, making the tangle of dry old hair at his lap crackle under her like a nest of thorns. “You ask such things, and at such times.”

His arm is across her belly, his great, rough hand caresses her warm thigh. “You know,” he says, “it is not your husband who is here now.”

She smiles. He sees upside down her mouth, with lips pressed shut, flex like a myrmidon’s small-bow being drawn; her eyes are lightly closed under fluttering lids. “Who, then?” she asks.

He waits a weighty moment. “Why, your lover, of course.”

“Oh, yes,” she says, with a contented, feathery sigh, squirming closer still, “him, too.”

Such far silence, not a sound, in this suspended world. She opens her eyes and vainly seeks for focus in the depthless shadows above her. A blissful ease suffuses her veins. She thinks of the baby she lost last year, not with the all too familiar breath-catching stab of woe, but calmly, remotely, even; it is like looking back across a plain and seeing only a smudge of dust where a
moment before had been fire and ruin and loud lamentation. The baby died inside her after some weeks of a sort of life. Not a baby at all, then, really. She pictures it as a little soft limpet clinging to the wall of the womb, blind and bewildered, washed at by amniotic tides, assailed by the muffled sounds of her innards at work, a frail failing impossible thing.

“But which would you rather,” he persists, and she feels his fingers tensing on her thigh, “the lover, or the husband?”

She might be exasperated but instead is amused. She is accustomed to her husband’s finicking way, his insistence on tracing all lines of enquiry to their logical end, as if things had an end, as if they were logical. He wants to be his father, reducing life to a set of sums. But Adam is softer than his father, and younger than the old man ever could have been, and love, not logic, is his weakness. What need has she of a baby when she has him? This is one of her secretest thoughts, one of the ones she must never utter.

“Husband or lover,” she says, “what is the difference—a ring?”

“A vow.” She puts back her head quickly to squinny up at him. His voice had sounded so strange, so deep and strange, as if it were he, now, who was making a solemn pledge. “Don’t you see,” he goes on in that same, thickened tone, in earnest haste, “—what I feel for you exceeds infinitely what a mere husband could ever be capable of feeling? Didn’t you sense that, here, with me? Have you ever been loved like this before?”

“Oh,” she says, laughing, “it was divine, surely!” She is looking up lazily again into the somehow luminous dark. She feels him nodding.

“Yes,” he says. “And you won’t forget this night, will you? When the sun rises and your husband returns you’ll remember me—won’t you?”

“But you’ll be him!”

“I shall be in him, yes, but he will not be me.”

“Well, whichever. You’re making my head swim.” With the arm that is about his neck she pulls his head forward and kisses him on the mouth the wrong side up. “Oh,” she says with a little shiver, “you feel like you have a beard.”

“Promise,” he whispers, his face suspended featureless above hers, “promise you’ll remember me.”

She grasps his head by the ears as if it were a jug and tries to waggle it. “How could I forget you, you dope?”

When she releases him he leans back on the pillows and she sees that the window behind its thin curtain is engreyed, and there is a gleam on a curtain rail, and the outline of Adam’s football poster appears on the wall, and when she looks along herself she can see her toes. It is all too quick, too much. Her eyelids droop.
“Promise!”
—the whisper comes again but as if from far off now. She tries to say yes, tries to give her pledge, though to what, exactly, she does not know, but sighs instead and draws up the sheet to cover herself and turns on her side and sleeps.

He too is sleeping now, my foolish father, having ranted his fill on the fickleness of girls—
he
, he complains of fickleness!—and their interfering husbands, the poor boobies, who do not even know themselves cuckolded. Young Adam is lucky not to have got a thunderbolt between the shoulder-blades as he blithely ploughed his wife there on that bed my Dad had so lately
vacated, in the light of this day I was at last allowed to let break. And now the great god, all ardency spent, is stretched upon a cloud-bank with his thumb in his mouth, dreaming of who knows what. He is heart-sore, or would be if he had a heart. Do not mistake me, I feel a certain compassion for him. I too have found myself in his predicament, or ones very like it. I am thinking of Acacallis, Minos’s daughter, and fair Chione, mother of my boy Autolycus—oh, yes, Dad is not the only one: I have had my dalliances among the mortals, and afterwards, like him, have gnawed my knuckles in rage and pain when I had to give this or that girl back to the bonehead she was shackled to. But I do not think I suffer the same weakening effects, these droops and desponds, as Dad does from his adventures in the flesh. It seems worse for him each time, which is supposed to be impossible since nothing may change in our changeless world, either for good or ill. Perhaps he really is dying, perhaps the pursuit of love is killing him, and this is why he so fiercely persists, because he longs for it to kill him. A dying god! And the god of gods, at that! Ah, mortals, have a care and look to your souls, for if he goes, everything goes with him, bang, crash and done with at last, his Liebestod become a Götterdämmerung.

I have a confession. I indulged in a little adventure of my own this morning, after I tired of spying on my father at his pleasures with the supposedly dreaming Mrs. Adam and had fixed the clocks and set the morn to rights. Hotly restless, I ranged the house in search of diversion, and chancing on nothing to suit me there—the lady Helen was asleep and anyway offlimits, and the poor child Petra would hardly have been a fit candidate for my purposes—I swooped outside and in a twinkling found myself before Ivy Blount’s cottage. It is a grim, two-storeyed
edifice with a steep-pitched slate roof and narrow, arched window-frames painted a shiny and peculiarly unpleasant, even sinister, shade of blackish green. Ivy when she saw me gave a little bat-squeak—even Ivy’s frights are tentative—and put a hand to her mouth, as maidens are meant to do, even elderly ones.

“God almighty,” she said, “how did you get in?”

“Down the chimney,” I answered, rather overdoing the gruffness, I suspect—it takes a moment to slip fully into character, even for a god. But Duffy the cowman is a fine big chap and his frame fits me well. He is called Adrian, unlikely as it may seem. I note that Ivy does not address him by this name, or by any other, for that matter, out of a reserve natural to her class and vintage—she is a daughter of the demure fifties—along with an inability to take as genuine the attentions he persists in pressing upon her. Mind, she is not indifferent to his rough charms, not at all, only she cannot make herself believe that such a strapping fellow could possibly be romantically drawn to the dry old maid she has reconciled herself to being—he must be a good ten years younger than she is. She darkly suspects it is the house, her little house, that he is after.

Anyway, there I was, incorrigible prankster that I am, got up as a horny-handed son of the soil, Gabriel Oak to the life, in an old torn tweed jacket and corduroy trews, a calico shirt
sans
collar and a red kerchief knotted carelessly at my throat. I fancy a pair of leather gaiters would have rounded off the picture nicely, but at that, prudently, I drew the line, though with regret.