The Infinities Read Free Page B

these days. She feels she is becoming more and more a wraith, as if Adam in his last illness were siphoning something vital from her, drop by glistening drop. She closes the bedroom door softly behind her and stands motionless a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. A teeming sword of early sunlight is falling through a parting in the heavy curtains of the middle window, breaking its blade across the foot of the bed. The Sky Room is a most capricious touch added on to the house by the man who built it, the famously eccentric St. John Blount, a timber eyrie set into the north-west—or is it southeast?—corner of the main edifice, glazed on three sides and surmounted by a conical roof with a metal weathervane in the shape of a fleeting, short-cloaked figure, wearing a pudding hat with a circular brim and bearing a staff, who can only be—well, me, I suppose. How disconcerting. I did not expect to encounter myself here, in such surroundings, at this elevation, especially in the form of a two-dimensional tin representation of a godling. My staff must double as a lightning rod—that is something, I suppose, flash and fire and the reek of brimstone; that will liven things up.
    Ursula with a qualm acknowledges to herself how restful she finds it being here. There is a dense, intent quality to the silence in the sickroom; it is like the silence that reigns deep down inside her and soothes her heart, even in the midst of so much inward tumult. She can make out his form now, supine in the big bed, but although she listens breathlessly she cannot hear him breathing. Perhaps—? At the unthought thought somethingstirs in her, a yearning something that she tries to deny but cannot. Yet why should she reprove herself? Everyone says the end will be a blessèd release. Those are the words they use, a blessèd release . Yes, she reflects bitterly, a release—but for whom? All except, perhaps, the one being released. For who can know but that Adam in some part of his mind might not be awake in a way and experiencing wonders? People who are deeply asleep seem unconscious but still may be dreaming the most fantastic things. Anyway, even if she cannot hear him she knows he has not gone. The elastic link between them has not been broken yet: she can feel still the old twanging tug. She is sure he is thinking, thinking away, she is sure of it.
    She closes the chink in the curtains and at once the dark seems total, as if the world had been suddenly switched off. Feeling her way through the black and therefore somehow heavier air she advances to the bed soundlessly on slippered feet. In their early days together he used to call her his geisha girl for her pattering, rapidly stepping gait. She recalls the antique kimono he brought back for her from one of his trips—“A kimono from Kyoto for my geisha!”—cut from heavy, jade-green silk, a garment so exquisite she could not bring herself to wear it but folded it away in tissue paper in a drawer, from where subsequently it somehow disappeared. He had threatened to take the thing back—perhaps he did?—and give it to one of his girls, all those girls he said he was well aware she imagined that he had, hidden away. Then he looked at her, with his head back, fiercely smiling and showing his teeth, daring her to call his bluff. For it was a bluff, about the girls, about there not being any, she knew it, and he knew she knew it. That was a way of lying that amusedhim, saying a version of the truth in tones of high, mocking irony so that to challenge him would be to seem a hapless dolt.
    Her eyes are growing used to the blinded dimness. She can see more than she wants to see. Uncanny, to enter this room each morning and find him just as she left him the night before, the blanket moulded smoothly to his form, the sheet uncreased, the cockscomb of silky hair—still black!—rising unruffled above the high, white dome of his forehead. His beard too is dark still, the spade-shaped, pointed