Where?”
“To see Pa. Upstairs, in the Sky Room.”
“Oh.”
She turns back to the window and the sunlit garden. A part of her is not here. Adam, still with his hands on her shoulders, gives her a grim little shake. Long ago, when he was a boy, one day he saw something glinting in the laurel hedge in front of the disused privy down behind the house, where the rats used to have their underground nests — they fascinated him, those rats, fat and furtive and quick and always somehow with an air of suppressed amusement — and reaching in among the leaves he pulled out an empty whiskey bottle, naggin-sized, and then saw the others, dozens of them, scores, drained to the last drop and pushed in neck-first among the dense, bristling foliage.
“Grace,” his mother says dreamily. “Yes, Benny Grace, he’s called.”
“You know him, then.”
“Oh, I know who he is.”
He supposes that when she is like this there must be a continual buzzing and muttering in her head, the confused noise of herself, that muffles the things that are being said to her. “I think,” he says, loudening his voice, “he’ll be staying for lunch. I told Ivy to set an extra place. And Roddy Wagstaff is here too, you know that — you remember, he came down, earlier?”
She goes on gazing out of the window. “A full house!” she murmurs. There is a wobble in her voice as if she might be about to laugh. “Your father won’t be pleased.”
Speaking of fathers, mine is waking up, at long last.
The two of them turn together as Ivy Blount comes in, carrying something. She enters not by the door at the top of the steps but through a dim and always damp-smelling corridor to the right of the range that leads directly into the conservatory — the house is honeycombed with hidden passages and connecting walkways. Ivy has exchanged her cut-off wellingtons for an old pair of cat-coloured carpet slippers that are absurdly too big for her. Ursula thinks she recognises them as her husband’s. Why, she wonders with a flash of annoyance, has everyone taken to wearing his things, first Petra in his cast-off pyjamas and now Ivy Blount in his slippers? She wishes Ivy would lift her feet when she walks, she is sure she knows how much it grates on her to hear someone shuffling along in that sligging, slovenly way. And to think how well brought-up the woman is, a daughter of the gentry! What she is carrying turns out to be a faded red satin cushion with numerous rips and holes in it through which wads of cotton stuffing protrude. She sees Ursula peering. “Rex was chewing it,” she says. She thinks how like a totem pole they look, standing there, the son close behind the mother and he a head taller than she. “I think it’s had it.”
Ursula clicks her tongue. “Oh, that dog,” she says. “He has been impossible since Adam’s illness.”
Young Adam does not like the look of that cushion: there is something gruesome about it, a suggestion of violence and blood. It reminds him of the chicken that Ivy brought in this morning. He recalls another fragment of last night’s dream. He was high up, on a mountain top, no, in an aeroplane, or on a cloud, yes, a cloud, and flying over a forest, the canopy of trees below packed tight as broccoli and an enormous river meandering through like a dribble of melted tin, a thick-walled fortress on a hill, too, and a tower on fire. He steps from behind his mother and goes and sits down at the table where the wireless is, and takes up the screwdriver and once more unscrews the panel from the back of it.
“I doubt there will be enough stuff for lunch to feed them all,” Ivy says, and looks in vague helplessness at the ruined cushion she is still clutching, as if its destruction will add to the scarcity of the things there are to eat. “Two extra, as well, Mr. Wagstaff and that fellow out there in the garden.”
“Put on more potatoes, then!” Ursula snaps back at her, almost skittishly, and gives a kind of giggle.
Ivy looks at her.
It is not, Adam is thinking, that anyone in the house cares what anyone else does. Not that there is much doing, anyway — nothing gets done. He is sorry he came down, sorry he brought Helen into the midst of all this dithering and disorder. We should have waited, he tells himself savagely, until he was dead! The dusty valves and bundles of cable in the back of the wireless set all swim together in a blur before his eyes. He thought to fix this thing for his father but what good will it be? — his father will not be able to hear it, even if it can be got to work. His father is dying. He will soon be dead. They will never speak again, the two of them, his father will never have another opportunity not to call him by his name. Maybe, he thinks suddenly, he should join the army, become a soldier, go and fight in some foreign war, maybe that is what his dream is telling him. He tries to picture himself, in breastplate and bronze helmet, heaving a huge sword, the sweat in his eyes and a blood mist everywhere, horses screaming and the cries of the dying all around him. He throws down the screwdriver and rises strugglingly, almost stumbling, and the chair rears back, its legs shrieking on the flagged floor, and the two women turn, startled.
“Come on,” he says to his mother, going to her and taking her by the wrist, “come and say something to this fellow.”
He bustles her out through the back door, which catches on the stone threshold and gives a rattling shudder, as it always does; how steadfast in your world are the humblest things, and yet how shamefully little notice you take of them. Ivy stares after the mother and son, pressing the scarlet cushion to her breast like a swollen, tattered heart. O humans!
Outside, Ursula lifts up a hand quickly against the light. “What a glare!” she murmurs feebly. She is trying to free her other wrist from her son’s grasp — his father’s fingers, crushing her bones! — but he holds her all the more tightly and will not let go. He fairly drags her, tottering, across the paved yard to the little wicket gate that lets out into the garden. “Ivy is getting worse, have you noticed?” she says gabblingly, playing for time, trying to hang back without seeming to. “What is the matter with her, do you think? — I’m sure I don’t know.” He does not answer. He feels her trembling, like a horse getting ready to bolt. He wants to shake her again, only harder this time. He wrenches open the wooden gate, and it also shudders on its hinges, as the back door did. They speak, the supposedly inanimate things, they have their voices and they speak, echoing and answering each other.
My father, moving heavily after his long sleep — yes, even the immortals are gross and lumpy at times — has joined me to watch what will come next. He knows Benny Grace for what he is, as do I. We have high hopes of him. We are a jealous and quarrelsome race, the race of gods, but oh my, we do delight in each other’s adventures among men.
Benny has slipped into a doze, his chins sunk on his breast. When he hears the pair approaching behind him he starts awake and looks blearily in the wrong direction, towards the long stand of trees beyond the lawn. Adam lets go of his mother’s wrist and pushes her in front of him. Benny, locating them at last, scrambles up, turning; he is still barefoot. One of his knees has gone stiff and he stoops and clutches at it, wincing and laughing. “Oh! Ow!” he cries softly, ruefully laughing still. He straightens up, as much as he can ever straighten, and hobbles forward with both chubby hands extended. He is still wearing the handkerchief on his head. Ursula says nothing, but allows him to take one of her hands in his; he holds it on his palm and pats it, like a baker patting a loaf. She glances down at his bare feet. He is telling her how eager he has been for them to meet, all these years, and that he cannot understand why they never did. She gazes at him glassily, watching his lips and moving her own in faltering imitation, smiling in a strained way and nodding; it is as if he were speaking in a foreign language of which she has only a smattering and must translate each word laboriously in her head as he utters it. My Dad, already wearying of all this, is muttering plaintively in my ear. He has the itch again and wants to know where his girl has got to. I try to ignore him. How glad I am that only I can see him, in the preposterous get-up he insists on as the father of the gods come to earth, the gold sandals, the ankle-length, cloud-white robe held by a clasp at one shoulder, the brass hair and wavy beard and lips as pink as a nereid’s nipples. Honestly. Benny is lifting Ursula’s hand to his pursed pink lips — oh, the cad! — but she tugs it back in dismay, and he must let go. He steps back, sketching an ironical little bow, and turns and sits down again on the step to put on his socks and his shoes, squatting forward with gasps and grunts. Ursula watches him, slipping her freed hand under its fellow at her waist. How harmless he seems, an obese putto. Adam meanwhile is—