9. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 235-273

From "Benny Grace hears the thunderclap and smiles. ..." to end. 

_____

The Jovian thunderclap is followed by pouring rain. Hermes watches as Benny crosses the music room, and notes that "not all his fly buttons are done up." And he muses on the nature of the role of the gods among mortals:

Everything is to be put back exactly as it was before us, no stone left unturned, no angle unaligned, all divots replaced. This is the rule the gods must obey. Did I say gods, did I say obey? Fine gods we are, that we must muster to a mortal must. But even our avatar, the triune lord of a later epiphany, forfeits the omnipotence you ascribe to him in the simple fact that the thing he cannot do is will himself out of existence.... It is all a matter of demarcation, the division of labour, one job one god. We too have our hierarchies, our choirs, thrones, all that. Seraphim. Cherumbim. 

And then he pauses, realizing that he is "mixing up the heavenly hosts. My mind is going, going." He rambles on confusedly about this world being "a world of mirrors," which leads him to the observation that mirrors are silvered with mercury. "Mercury! My other name, one of my other names."

And suddenly the I of the novel becomes old Adam again, the phrase about replacing divots having reminded him of the time when he lived near a public golf course and, "on those days when my mind seized up and I could not work," he would walk across it and replace bits of torn-up tuft. He reflects that he was devoted to pure science and didn't care about its applications. "And apply they did, adapting my airy fancies to invent all sorts of surprising and useful gimcrackery, from the conversion of salt water into an endless sources of energy to rocket ships that will fly the net of time." And then Adam merges with Hermes again: "We are all alike, all we Olympians." Adam/Hermes thinks of Benny, who is coming to where Adam lies: "I feel suddenly a sad fondness for him, poor unlovely outcast creature, as I felt earlier for my son -- I must be softening, here at the end." The voices of the two narrators merge.

Benny climbs the stairs and peeps into the room where Ursula is stretched out on a couch, clutching the red satin pillow that Rex chewed up, with young Adam sitting by her, stroking her forehead. And the narrator, whoever he is, suggests, "Let us leave them there, the three of them, for now, the languishing lady and attendant man, and the listener by the doorway, a meddling jester." He turns his attention to Helen, who has arrived at the kitchen, soaking wet from the rainstorm. Duffy and Ivy are there, the former looking "like a man who has been accepted in a proposal he cannot remember having made." Ivy goes to get a towel, leaving Duffy, somewhat embarrassed by the way Helen's wet clothing clings to her. When Ivy returns with the towel and starts to help Helen dry off, Duffy makes his escape.

Petra, it turns out, was in the woods and witnessed what happened between Roddy and Helen. She assumes that the two are lovers, and is upset: "Roddy was the one who was supposed to take her hand and lead her into the sunlit uplands of the future." In her room, she takes a green silk kimono from a drawer, "an ancient piece, brought back from Japan by her father long ago." She puts it on, along with a ring "set with a flat black stone in which an initial letter is carved" -- the ring given to Helen by young Adam with the initial A that we saw earlier. From the window, she watches her brother get into the station wagon with Roddy, who is carrying his suitcase, and drive away. Then she takes a razor out of a hiding place in the chest of drawers and cuts her arm. "The underside of her arm is cicatriced all along its length, the crescents of healed skin brittle and shiny, like candle wax."

Ursula wakes up with a headache and can sense that someone -- she assumes it is her son -- is there beside her. She thinks about how she talked with him earlier but can't remember what she said, and vows, "She must stop drinking, she must give it up altogether, for everyone's sake including her own." And she worries about how she might misbehave at her husband's funeral. Then she realizes that it's not her son sitting there but Benny Grace. He tells her that Adam left to take Roddy to the station. She worries, "'He'll think me rude, not to see him off. He wants to write Adam's biography' -- she laughs softly -- 'imagine!'"

The she apologizes for having been rude to Benny earlier, and reveals that Benny and a woman -- presumably Madame Mac -- have been supporting them.

All that awful money, years and years of it, just appearing in the bank every quarter without explanation, and Adam not saying a word so that she had to be silent too, no mention permitted, no acknowledgement, even though it was what they were living on, since Adam despite all his fame and his great reputation no longer earned anything, since he no longer worked. 

She wonders if Benny and "the woman" did something to Adam, "did they damage him." And she asks if it's true that, as Adam said, "by the age of thirty he had finished all he had to do." Benny remains silent until he finally says, "I spoke to him.... -- He spoke to me!"

He means Adam, of course. Petra had come to his room -- "That young scoundrel Wagstaff must have said something hurtful to her, or else said nothing at all, which I imagine would have been more hurtful still" -- and then Rex had jumped up on the bed and "flopped down beside me with a grunt and a sigh. I did feel his brute warmth. At first I did not recognize the feeling, I mean the feeling of feeling, and thought I was only imagining with an intenser acuity than heretofore." He's not entirely certain, however, that he actually spoke to Benny.



Meanwhile, young Adam returns from the station and finds Helen in the kitchen looking for her ring. They fix a drink and talk about Roddy. She tells him that Roddy tried to kiss her and she slapped him. And Hermes reappears to comment, "So you see, old Dad, she will not love you. We are too much for them; they prefer to settle for their own kind."


Petra is bandaging her wounds when she hears Ursula calling for young Adam and for Ivy, and the telephone ringing. She stows away the kimono and the razor, and checks to see if the room is in order. "She loves herself, a little." She meets Helen on the stairs and gives her the ring, which she says she found in the kitchen. "Who is Z?" she asks. Helen tells her it's an A, but Petra show her that if you turn the ring a certain way it's a Z. "Ah, crafty old Dad!" Hermes interjects.


They are joined by young Adam, Benny, Ivy and Duffy. Adam asks Petra to join him, and they go upstairs, reappearing with old Adam being carried by his son and Petra with the bottles and tubes to which he is attached. Dr. Fortune arrives to find them in the music room, where old Adam is stretched out on a sofa with his eyes open, looking out into the garden. Petra is standing to one side and he "sees at once by her pallor and the leaden shadows under her eyes that she has been cutting herself again." The repaired radio is on the mantelpiece: "From there it issues ancient music of pipes and plucked strings, tiny and far, as from another world." And Hermes sees the "shiny green shutters" again.

Benny has disappeared, however. He "has stepped back into that old rackety machine to be winched up into the flies" -- the machina has carried away the deus.  And Hermes assures us of a happy ending: Adam and Helen move to Arden; Petra stops cutting herself and "we shall find someone else for her to love and be loved by in the short time left to her." Old Adam will find "a final note written by Dorothy his dead wife, exonerating him of any blame for her sad end." And Zeus bids goodbye to Helen, who is pregnant.

It's a "happy ending" written by a novelist who doesn't really believe in happy endings. Mock-sentimentality.

7. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 176-194

From "My father does not like at all the prospect of this late-afternoon lunch ..." through "... but no one has an answer to offer her."

_____

The gods are rather puzzled by the human phenomenon of dining: "How much and how often they eat fascinates and rather appals us, for whom a sip of ambrosia and a prophylactic pinch of moly taken every aeon or so suffice both to quell our peckishness and keep our peckers up." But now Hermes notices that something seems to have happened in the garden -- there is a "feverish atmosphere" in the room, and Benny seems to be the focus of it. He surmises that Ursula, who is not present, "said something to Benny after I left.... She has the inveterate drinker's weakness for blurting out baldly things that are at once consternating and lugubriously comic." And he decides she is off somewhere "administering to her self a steadying drop" from the bottles she hides "in the disused washroom behind the scullery." (This, incidentally, explains young Adam's flashback yesterday to the bottles hidden in the shrubbery.)

Ivy Blount enters with the roast chicken and studiously ignores Benny's attempt to help her bring it to the table. Petra enters, but when she finds herself sitting next to Helen she moves to sit next to Benny, who "gives her a conspiratorial smile, arching an eyebrow." Ivy brings in the rest of the food and Adam sharpens the carving knife before Ursula appears, her manner confirming to Hermes that "there must have been an altercation on the lawn -- I wonder what she said to him?" Ursula protests that Ivy has served cabbage with chicken, and Ivy announces that she has has invited Mr. Duffy to lunch.

Hermes takes Rex's point of view on the scene: He regards himself as watching over them. Old Adam was "unpredictable ... he shouts, and more than once has aimed a kick. The girl Petra is to be wary of, too; she smells of blood. But they all need careful watching. They are not so much dangerous as limited, which is why, he supposes, they are in such need of his support, affection and praise.... There is a thing the matter with them, though, with all of them. It is a great puzzle to him, this mysterious knowledge, unease, foreboding, whatever it is that afflicts them, and try though he may he has never managed to solve it."

Hermes wonders if Rex can "detect the difference between Benny and me.... I being all spirit and Benny, in his present manifestation, all flesh.... Yet surely Rex should know Benny for what he is. The animals are said always to recognize their panic lord and bow down before him." Benny, meanwhile, is

addressing the table at large, telling over yet again the tale of his great friend and colleague Adam Godley's triumph on that day, which seems no longer ago than yesterday, when it came to him as a flash of lightning that in those dark infinities which had been disrupting his sums for so long there lay, in fact, his radiant solutions.

But no one is paying attention to Benny; they are all waiting for Duffy, and Hermes feels uneasy about his posing as Duffy earlier in the day: "I suddenly recollect those shiny green shutters on the windows of Ivy's cottage. Do they presage something, sinister and insistent, like themselves?"

Duffy arrives, having "put on his Sunday best, which is a much washed and faded slate-blue pinstriped suit." Petra, to everyone's surprise, rises and takes his hand and brings him to the table. Ursula greets him, "somewhat thick-tongued," and tells Adam that "Mr. Duffy ... will take a drumstick, I'm sure." Duffy's arrival has been an anticlimax, and even Rex, "abruptly losing interest in everything, Duffy included, flops over on his side with a sigh and closes his eyes."

Adam is feeling that odd euphoria-like sensation again, Helen is talking to Roddy, and Petra watches them "with narrowed eyes." Adam has taken on the role of his father at table, causing Hermes to reflect on fathers and sons:

Not that I know so very much about the subject. I speak of my father and of me as his son, but in truth these terms can be only figurative for us, who are not born and do not die, for birth and death are the sources, it seems, out of which mortal ones derive their sensations of love and loss. The old stories tell of us coupling and begetting, enduring and dying, but they are only stories. Like old Adam in the bosom of his family, we are not here sufficiently to be ever quite gone.... we are, at once eternal and evanescent.

Talk goes on at the table until Benny suddenly says, "Oh, no, he won't die ... no, no." Even Rex raises his head and looks at Benny. The table goes quiet, and Hermes observes, "this must be what is called a panic fright." He also notices that Duffy hasn't eaten his "single slice of chicken, which was all that he got" -- a contradiction of the detail, repeated earlier, that he was given the drumstick.

There is not doubt whom it is that Benny Grace was speaking of, whose demise he was denying, or at least the imminence of it.... My kinsman Thanatos, son of Night, in his black robes, with sword unsheathed, has stepped into their midst out of the shadows where he has been hiding all along. It is his sudden coming that wakened Rex the dog, who rises cautiously now and stands at point, nosing the tensened air.

Hermes is annoyed at Benny's presumption. "Since when has he become the lord of life and death, Mr. Benny so-called Grace?" He thinks that the gods should let the humans "have a taste of immortality, see how they like it. Soon enough they would come to us mewling and puking in their pain, beseeching us to finish them off." And he recalls the story of Alcmene, visited by Zeus in the form of her husband Amphitryon, which led to the double conception of "a pair of twins, Iphicles, who was Amphitryon's son and therefore not much heard of again, and Heracles, whom my Dad was pleased to call his own." And how Hermes and his "sister Athene, that headache," kept Heracles from killing "Pluto, the killer of men." Zeus "wished them all, girls and boys alike, adults in their prime, oldsters and crones, all to know what we know, the torment of eternal life."

Everything at table quiets down again, except Petra, who wants to know "why it is that tumours are always compared to citrus fruits."

3. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 57-80

From "Old Adam plunges, a pearl-diver ..." through "... 'That milk,' I said, 'is gone sour.'"

_____

Old Adam recalls his boyhood "in the humpbacked town above the estuary." It's a beautifully detailed vignette whose verbal finesse evokes Joyce's Dubliners. And while it verges on nostalgia, with memories of blowing soap-bubbles with a clay pipe and his mother's weeping three tears into the flour mixture for the cake she is baking after his father's death, it also provides a vivid contrast between the texture of human life and the disembodied existence of the gods. It also neatly characterizes Adam, whose awakening mathematical passion is reflected in his absorption in precisely mixing the flower, salt and baking soda in the bowl his weeping mother hands him.

Every grain of the ingredients would have to be distributed perfectly, the particles of salt and baking soda spaced just so throughout the flour, each one a fixed distance from all the rest. He tried to picture it, a solid, three-dimensional white field supporting a dense and uniform lattice of particles of other shades of white. And what about the flour itself, no two grains of which were alike -- how could that be completely mixed, even if there were no other ingredients present in it, making their own pattern? And how would he know when that moment of perfect distribution had been achieved? -- how would he know the instant to stop mixing in order not to upset the equilibrium and throw everything back into disorder? 

The gods brought order out of chaos, and now Adam is trying to do the same.

His "lavishly ugly" aunt arrives to help complete the Christmas dinner that Adam's mother has insisted on having despite her husband's death, and she brings him a box of puzzles made out of twisted wire. Adam solves them easily, "which caused his aunt to sniff and frown and make a humming sound." He is able to separate the puzzles because "his mind would become for a moment a limitless blue space, calmly radiant." And he demonstrates a similar facility with magic square puzzles, which make him think, "How could fifteen be different from fifteen? And yet the difference was there, a sort of aura, unseen but felt, like air, like warmth -- yes, yes, we gods were with him even then." He is a boy tormented by the "impossibility of accuracy" and the nature of time:

Does time flow or is it a succession of stillnesses -- instants -- moving so swiftly they seem to us to join in an unbreaking wave? Or is there only one great stillness, stretching everywhere, in all directions, through which we move like swimmers breasting an infinite, listless sea? ... Everything blurs around its edges, everything seeps into everything else. Nothing is separate. 

Meanwhile, Zeus "is in a sulk" because young Adam and Helen are making love. And love, Hermes tells us, "is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death." Love is something the gods "did not intend, foresee or sanction." And their attempts to simulate it are debilitating and exhausting, which is why Zeus is sulking. "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."

The exaltation of sex -- or as Hermes refers to it, "this mess of frottage" -- into love baffles the gods: "how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not." Hermes thinks he knows, and that Zeus fails to recognize, that "They love so they may see their pirouetting selves marvellously reflected in the loved one's eyes. It is immortality they are after." Zeus had left Hermes in charge of making sure that "he was not disturbed at his illicit amours" -- copulating with Helen -- so it is Hermes who made sure that Adam was wakeful and left his wife's bed.

Helen, we learn, has miscarried a year ago, but she has managed to reconcile herself to the loss in part by transferring some of her maternal emotions toward Adam, who "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." Zeus has made her think that he is Adam while at the same time wanting her to think he is her lover and not her husband, so he tries to persuade her to remember him as separate from Adam -- and fails. Hermes observes,

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, hae 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. 

Hermes has played hooky from his duties, however, and visited Ivy Blount in her cottage, disguising himself as Adrian Duffy, the cowman. Ivy is suspicious of Duffy because she suspects he is after her cottage, "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.... Those green window-frames are still troubling me, I wonder why." We learn that although "Ivy's face is long and sharp and her unruly brown hair resembles a rook's nest [and] the first blush of youth has long ago faded from her cheeks, she is possessed of a peculiar, subtle beauty." Moreover, she "has a sweet voice, ... light and mellow" and "used to speak three or four languages, thanks to her time at a Swiss finishing school" that she was forced to leave "when the family's fortunes went wallop."

Hermes/Duffy takes a swig from a mug of milk that turns out to be sour. "I had never tasted sour milk before; I shall not taste it again." We learn that Duffy, too, has a cottage on the other side of the hill that he used to share with his mother, "a rough-edged baggage generally considered to have been a witch" until she died last year. Duffy/Hermes tells her it needs a new roof, which confirms her suspicion that he has his eye on her house. So she thwarts any designs he may have made: "'If you have something to say to me,' she said, in a voice that had a noticeable shake to it, 'come out and say it, then.'" But Hermes "had nothing to say. I was just amusing myself, toying with one of my creatures, as so often is the way."

2. The Infinities, by John Banville, pp. 28-56

From "And look, here he is, old Adam ..." through "... take a gander at what these your little ones are up to."

_____

I have begun to wonder what this novel would be without the ... well, let's call it "the gimmick" for the nonce -- the gimmick of the lurking and narrating Olympians. Would it be anything more than yet another novel about a dysfunctional family?

Hermes is snooping about in old Adam's mind, what's left of it, observing that the ego is what remains:  "What of his work? What of his work. He cares nothing for their so-called immortality if he is not to be here to savour its vaunted consolations." He is also afraid of being buried alive. And Hermes reveals that old Adam was a child, he used to ride the train that passes the house and look out and dream of living in it. And that he is tormented by "the thought of all that he had and did not prize as he should have when he had it." He thinks of his daughter-in-law, Helen, and then of something that the young Adam thought of earlier when he was looking at the boy on the train: the mystery of otherness.

He asks, how can people go on being fully real when they are elsewhere, out of his ken? He is not such a solipsist -- he is a solipsist but not such a one -- that he imagines it is proximity to him that confers their essential realness on  people.... He speculates sometimes if his early espousal of the theory that posits our existing in the midst of multiple, intertwined worlds was prompted by nothing more than the necessity for somewhere for people to be when they are not with him.... Look at him now, unable even to know if his daughter-in-law, like Schrösteinberg's anxiously anticipant cat, is conscious or not, down there in her sealed chamber.

Wait a minute. Schrösteinberg? You mean Schrödinger? Are we getting a hint here that the "reality" depicted by this fiction is not the "reality" of our experience?

And then old Adam thinks of himself as having "re-entered the embryonic state," that dying "will bring him not to the next world but to a state of suspended pre-existence, ready to start all over again from before the beginning."

Hermes goes back downstairs to the kitchen and the ranting Petra, who stops talking when her mother complains of a headache. Ivy Blount, the "unofficial cook, housekeeper and, as Duffy the cowman darkly asserts, taken-for-granted skivvy," arrives. And we learn that the place is called Arden House. Ivy, who "gives off a faint odour of roses and dishwater," brings with her "a recently throttled chicken" and a basket of eggs. Ursula recognizes the chicken as one she was fond of when it was alive, but decides it will do as lunch for "that fellow Wagstaff." The dead chicken prompts Hermes to observe:

The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world's totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas. We have stronger stomachs, stouter lungs, we see it all in all its awfulness at every moment and are not daunted; that is the difference; that is what makes us divine.

Ivy, we now learn, is the former owner of this house. Old Adam bought it from her, "at a knock-down price, twenty years ago." But Hermes tells us more about her:

It is said she is a direct descendant of Charles Blount, eighth Lord Mountjoy and first Earl of Devonshire, that eccentric soldier whom Mary, Queen of Scots, great Gloriana, on her accession to the English throne after the beheading of her cousin, the upstart and treasonous Elizabeth Tudor, sent over at the dawn of the seventeenth century to pacify this most distressful country.

So we're in Ireland? But it was Elizabeth who was Gloriana and the beheader of Mary, Queen of Scots, not the other way around. Now we have to wonder about Hermes's accuracy or veracity. Or whatever.

Meanwhile, young Adam goes upstairs -- reluctantly -- to see his father, reflecting on how "no one would ever dare climb to his father's room without knocking first" and that "the Sky Room was the forbidden place where his father worked." He also remembers the dream that awakened him this morning: "the cries of battle, the bronze helmets flashing, the blooded dust," in which he was carrying something "-- a wounded comrade, a corpse, perhaps?" Evidently Ares is lurking around too. He thinks about the fact that he and his father share the same name, yet his father never called him by it that he can recall.

He finds the curtains shut tight, and wonders why his mother moved old Adam up here, out of the bedroom they shared. And he reflects on his father's fame:

When he was famous first, caricaturists pictured him in a monk in a windowless bare cell, wild-eyed and hydrocephalic, hunched with his pencil over a gridded page of parchment; also as a spaceman in a globular helmet popping out of a hole in the sky, as a mad professor with electrified hair meeting and merging with himself in a mirror, as an entire crew of identical sailors marooned each one in solitude on his own earth-shaped island afloat in a sea of inky darkness.

Evidently identity and otherness is a major theme in this narrative.

He has an eerie sense that there are people hiding in the room, "getting ready to spring out at him, whooping and jeering and laughing." And figure of his father, stretched out in a stiff, hieratic pose beneath the covers, reminds him of when he buried Petra in the sand at the beach. He recalls that by the time he was twelve he was already larger than his father, and how he imagined "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." Hermes thinks of planting in Adam's mind the idea that his father was Zeus, but decides that no one would ever think that Ursula was "my heavenly father's type." (Hermes, like Adam, has an as-yet-unarticulated problem with his father.)

Like Ursula, Adam nurses the unthinkable thought: that he wants his father dead. "The thought comes to him unbidden; he is shocked not to be shocked." And then he realizes that he is crying. Which pleases him -- it's almost as if he has done something he was obliged to do.

As Adam goes downstairs to the room where Helen is sleeping, Hermes gives us a description of the house, "built on four sides around a big, square space two storeys deep." It is twenty miles from the sea. The walls are "clad in slotted wooden laths.... What caprice led Ivy Blount's great-grandfather, the whimsical St John Blount, to have half the house's wall-space covered with this cheap wood battening." It is something of a firetrap: Ursula calls it a "great gazebo -- nothing but tinder." Is this detail planted for a purpose?

His arrival in the room awakens Helen, whose beauty "strikes him as if for the first time." And Hermes notes, "Hear my old Dad licking his chops in the background?" Her eyes are "dark blue and deep as the Grecian sea itself. And her beauty makes Adam feel as if "he is standing astride the hub of a great steel disc that is spinning at an immense speed and that at the tiniest ill-judged action on his part will begin to wobble wildly and a second later fly off its spindle with terrible shrieks and clangs and send him failing into darkness and irreparable damage."

Helen is confused: She thought he had been there making love to her. She gets up to go to the bathroom, saying, "I'm sopping," a word that takes a moment to penetrate Adam's consciousness. Hermes follows her to the bathroom, where he gives a delicate, slightly Joycean account of what she does there -- her embarrassment at "the splashings and ploppings going on underneath her," which she fancies "can be heard all over the house." She looks out of the window at a "field of thistles" and "a circular dark wood that seems to huddle around itself in fear of something" -- a field and a wood that "she can never seem to locate" when she goes outside -- "not that she would spend much time searching for them. It is just another of the place's many small but exasperating mysteries. She is a city girl and finds the country side either dull or worrying, or both." The sounds she hears in the house make her wonder, "Why is it that people heard from afar like this, in distant rooms on other floors, always sound as if they are doing things -- confiding, fighting, striking loud deals -- far more interesting than the mundane things that they are really engaged in?"

She reflects that old Adam "lusts after her -- lusted, now -- she has seen him eyeing her when he thought she was not noticing," and that he "is nothing like his son" -- there is something "uncanny" about old Adam. And then she realizes that there are no traces of the love-making that she believes she has just experienced and wonders if it was a dream: "Surely not. Surely something so intensely felt must have been real. Hermes observes as she washes up: "The water, coiling from the tap like running metal, shatters on her knuckles in silvery streels," and as she begins to reflect on the "remembered pleasure that seems a part of pain," Hermes observes, "She would swoon if I were not there to hold her up with arms of air. This is how it always is when Dad has done what he does with a girl, the old lecher."

Adam has dressed when she returns to the bedroom. She observes that his "eyes are pale too, a limpid blue, like her own, but uncanny, somehow, uncanny, that word again. In her dream he was himself and yet not, a figure of cold fire, burning her; his mouth was gold." We learn that she has played Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie, but now she is playing Alcmene, on whom Zeus fathered Heracles. She also becomes a maenad as she "takes her husband's head between her hands and presses his face to her breast." And Hermes taunts his father, "come put on your horns and take a gander at what these your little ones are up to."