The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  The imagination! Imagine you hear a hollow laugh.

  Behind me Marcus stirred and muttered something, then sat up, coughing. The light from the window turned the lenses of his spectacles into opaque, watery discs. The brandy bottle tumbled to the floor and rolled in a half-circle, drunkenly. “Christ,” he said thickly, “did we finish it all?”

  He seemed so helpless, so much at a loss, and I was moved, suddenly, and could almost have embraced him, as he sat there, drunk, desolated, heartbroken. After all, he was, or had been, my friend, whatever that might mean. But how would I dare offer him comfort? I felt as if I were standing outside a burning building, with the fierce heat of the flames on my face and the screams of the trapped coming out at every window, knowing it was my carelessly discarded match that had set the conflagration going.

  I suggested we should go out and find something to eat, on the general principle, invented by me at just that moment, that grief always requires to be fed. He nodded, yawning.

  As we were leaving, he paused by the scarred and stained oak table where I used to keep the tools of my trade—tubes of pigment, pots of upended brushes, so on. I still keep them there, along with general odds and ends, all in a jumble, but they’re no longer what they were. The energy has gone out of them, the potential. They’ve become over-heavy, almost monumental. In fact, they’ve come to seem like subjects for a still life, set out just so, waiting to be painted, in all their innocence and lack of workaday intent. Marcus, tarrying there, picked up something and looked at it closely. It was a glass mouse, life-sized, with sharp ears and tiny incised claws, a pretty thing, of no real value. “Funny,” he said, “we used to have one just like this—it even had the same bit missing from the tip of its tail.” I let my eyes go vague and said that was a coincidence. I had forgotten I had left it there. He nodded, frowning, still turning the thing in his fingers. He was welcome to have it, I said quickly and with much too much eagerness. Oh, but no, he replied, he wouldn’t dream of taking it, if it was mine. Then he put it back on the table and we went out.

  If it was mine? If?

  There is a particular shiver that travels down the spine at certain moments of peril and frightful possibility. I know it well.

  —

  Outside, wild gusts of wind swept through the streets, driving scuds of silvery rain before them, and enormous, claw-like sycamore leaves, fallen but still green, some of them, skittered along the pavements, making a scratching sound. Perversely, I felt invigorated and more light of heart than ever—I was turning into a hot-air balloon myself!—even though everything I held or should hold dear was threatened with dissolution. I’ve noticed it before, how in a state of deepest dread, and perhaps because of it—this is a thief talking, remember—I can be brightly alert to the most delicate nuances of weather and light. I love the autumn best, love to be about on blustery September days like this, with the wind pummelling the window-panes and great luminous boilings of cloud ascending a rinsed, immaculate sky. Talk about the world and its things!—no wonder I can’t paint. Poor Marcus shuffled along beside me with the gait of a weary old man. He was producing a different sound now, a faint, breathy, high-pitched whistling. It seemed the sound of his pain itself, the very note of it, issuing from him in these constricted, bagpipe puffs and skirls. And who, I asked myself, who was the secret cause of all that pain? Who indeed.

  We went to the Fisher King, a run-down chop-house with metal tables and stainless-steel chairs and the day’s menu chalked up on a blackboard. When I was a boy it used to be Maggie Mallon’s fish shop. Maggie herself, the original fishwife, was for some long-forgotten reason an object of ridicule in the town. Small boys would chant a song in mockery of her—Maggie Mallon sells fish, three ha’pence a dish!—and throw stones through the open doorway at the customers inside. It’s not true what Gloria says, that I fled here out of fear of the world. The fact is, I’m not really here, or the here that I’m here in is not here, really. I might be a creature from one of that multitude of universes we are assured exists, all of them nested inside each other, like the skins of an infinitely vast onion, who by cosmic accident made a misstep and broke through to this world, where I was once and have become again what I am. Which is? A familiar alien, estranged and at the same time oddly content. I must have known my gift, as I’ll call it, was going to fail me. What creature is it that returns to die in the place where it was born? The elephant, again? Maybe so, I forget. I am undone, a sack of sorrow, regret and guilt. Yet oftentimes, too, I entertain the fancy that somewhere in that infinity of imbricated other creations there’s an entirely other me, a dashing fellow, insolent, devil-may-care and satanically handsome, whom all the men resent and all the women throw themselves at, who lives catch as catch can, getting by no one knows how, and who would scorn to fiddle with colouring-boxes and suchlike childish geegaws. Yes yes, I see him, that Other Oliver, a man of the deed, a kicker out of his way of milksops such as his distant doppelgänger, yours truly, yours churlishly, yours jealously; yours oh, oh, oh, so longingly. Yet would I leave again and try to be him, or something like him, elsewhere? No: this is a fit place to be a failure in.

  Marcus was bent over his plate, working his way through a heaping of fried fish and mashed potato, pausing now and then to give his unstoppably runny nose a wipe with his knuckle. Heartache and distress didn’t seem to have dulled his appetite, I noticed. I watched him, engrossed in him, despite myself and the thunderous sensation of horror rumbling away inside me. I was like a child at a wake covertly studying the chief mourner, wondering how it must be to suffer so and yet still be prey to all the hungers, itches and annoyances of everyday. Then idly my gaze wandered, and I remarked to myself how smeared and scratched the tables were, how dented and stained the stainless-steel chairs, how scuffed the once-polished rubber floor-tiles. Everything is reverting to what it used to be, or so we are assured by the savants who know about these things. Retrograde progression, they call it—apparently something to do with those tempests on the surface of the sun. It won’t be long until again there’ll be wooden settles in here, and rushes on the floor and pelts on the walls, and half an ox roasting on a spit over a fire of faggots and dried cow dung. The future, in other words, will be the past, as time turns on its fulcrum into another cycle of eternal recurrence.

  The past, the past. It was the past that brought me back here, for here, in this townlet of some ten thousand souls, a place that might have been dreamed up by the Brothers Grimm, here it is for ever the past; here I am stalled, stilled here, cocooned; I need never move again until the moment comes for the great and final shift. Yes, I shall stay here, a part of this little world, this little world a part of me. At times the obviousness of it all takes my breath away. The circumstances in which I find myself appal and please me in equal measure, these circumstances of my own devising. I call it life-in-death, and death-in-life. Did I say that?

  Marcus had cleared his plate and now he pushed it aside and leaned forwards with his forearms on the table and his long thin fingers interfolded and, this time in a brusque, matter-of-fact tone that despite myself I found irritating—how dared I be irritated by a man I had so grievously betrayed?—demanded of me that I tell him what he should do about Polly and her faceless fancy-man. I lifted my eyebrows and blew out my cheeks to show him how daunted I was by his needy demands, and how little help there was that I could offer him. He gazed at me for a long moment, thoughtfully, it seemed, nibbling a speck of something hard between his front teeth. I felt like a statue in an earthquake, swaying on my plinth while the ground heaved and buckled. Surely the truth was going to dawn on him, surely he couldn’t keep on not seeing what he was staring in the face. Then he noticed I had hardly touched my food. I said I wasn’t hungry. He reached across and took a flake of mackerel from my plate and put it in his mouth. “Gone cold,” he said, wrinkling his nose and chewing. The act of eating is such a peculiar spectacle, I’m surprised it’s not permitted only in private, behind locked doors. We were
both a little drunk still.

  On holiday at Miss Vandeleur’s I was dawdling one day on the sandy golf course that stretched for a mile or two along the landward side of the dunes, and came upon a golf ball sitting pertly on the neatly barbered grass of the fairway, plain to see and seemingly unowned. I picked it up and put it in the back pocket of my shorts. As I was straightening up, two golfers appeared, emerging head-first from a dip in the fairway like a pair of mermen rising out of a rolling green sea. One of them, fair-haired and florid-faced, wearing yellow corduroy trousers and a sleeveless Fair Isle jumper—how can I remember him so clearly?—fixed on me an accusing eye and asked if I had seen his ball. I said no. It was plain he didn’t believe me. He said I must have seen it, that it had come this way, he had watched it until it went out of sight beyond the rim of the hollow from where he had hit it. I shook my head. His face grew more flushed. He stood and glared at me, hefting a wooden driver menacingly in a gloved right hand, and I gazed back at him, all bland-eyed innocence but shivering inwardly with alarm and guilty glee. His companion, growing impatient, urged him to give it up and come on, yet still he tarried, eyeing me fiercely, his jaw working. Since he wasn’t going to budge I had to. I moved away slowly, stepping slowly backwards so that he shouldn’t see the outline of the ball in my back pocket. I fully expected him to pounce on me and turn me upside down and shake me as a dog would shake a rat. Luckily just then the other one, who had been annoyedly hacking about in the long grass beside the fairway, called out in triumph—he had found someone else’s lost ball—and while my accuser went to look at it I seized the chance and turned on my heel and hared off for the sanctuary of Miss Vandeleur’s rackety villa. That’s how I was now with Marcus, just as I had been that day on the links, in a sweat of fear and shivery turmoil, sitting squarely in front of him, not daring to turn from him in case he should spot a telltale bulge and know at once that I was the one who had brazenly pocketed his goose-fleshed, pale and bouncy little wife.

  By the way, I don’t count the taking of that golf ball as theft, properly speaking. When I saw the ball I assumed it had been forgotten and left there by mistake, and was therefore fair game for anyone who thought to pick it up. The fact that I didn’t give it back to its owner, when he materialised, was due more to accident than intention. I was afraid of him, with his red face and his ridiculous trousers, afraid that if I produced the ball he would accuse me of having stolen it deliberately and might, who knows, do violence to me, cuff me about the ears or hit me with his driver. True, it’s a fine distinction between seizing the opportunity to steal a thing and being led by circumstance to make off with it, but distinctions, fine or otherwise, are not to be gainsaid.

  Now Marcus launched into a new round of reminiscences, in sorrowfully doting tones, turning aside to gaze out of the window. I cleared my throat and lowered my eyes and fingered the cutlery on the table, shuffling my feet and squirming, like a martyr made to sit on a stool of red-hot iron. He spoke of his earliest days with Polly, just after they were married. He used to love just to hang back and watch her, he said, when they were at home together, and she was doing the housework, cooking or cleaning or whatever. She had a way every so often of breaking into brief little runs, he said, little short aimless dashes or sprints here and there, fleet-footed, dancingly. As he was telling me this I pictured her in my mind, seeing her as one of those maidens of ancient Greece, in sandals and cinctured tunic, surging forwards in ecstatic welcome for the return of some warrior god or god-like warrior. I tried to think if I had ever seen her do as he described, tripping blithely about my studio, under that slanting, sky-filled window. No, never. With me she did not dance.

  Outside in the day, a billow of ash-blue smoke swept down from a chimney high above and rolled along the street.

  I looked about the chill and cheerless room. At a dozen tables vague, overcoated lunchers were bent heavily over their plates, resembling sacks of meal stacked more or less upright, in twos and threes. On a small triangular shelf high up in one corner there was a stuffed hawk under a bell-jar, I think it was a hawk, some kind of bird of prey, at any rate, its wings folded and haught head turned sharply to the side with beak downturned. Come, terrible bird, I silently prayed, come, cruel avenger, alight on me and gnaw my liver. And yet, I thought, and yet how fierce—how crested, plumed and fierce!—was the fire I stole.

  I blinked, and gave a sort of shiver. I hadn’t noticed Marcus falling silent. He sat with his stricken gaze still turned to the window and the day’s bright tumult outside. I looked at our plates, haruspicating the leavings of our lunch. They did not bode well, as how should they? “I don’t know Polly, now,” Marcus said, with a sigh that was almost a sob. He fixed me with those poor pale eyes of his, weakened by years of minuscule work and bleared still from the brandy. “I don’t know who she is any more.”

  Some sins, not perhaps the gravest in themselves, are compounded by circumstance. On the night she died, our daughter, Gloria’s and mine, I was in bed not with my wife but with another woman. I say woman although she was hardly more than a girl. Anneliese, her name, very nice, name and girl both. I met her—where? I can’t remember. Yes, I can, she was one of Buster Hogan’s bevy, I met her with him. How is it frauds like Hogan always get the girls? Assuredly he was every inch the artist, impossibly handsome, with those merrily cold blue eyes, the slender fingers always carefully paint-stained, the slight tremor of the hand, the satanically seductive smile. Anneliese only went to bed with me in the hope of making him jealous. What a hope. I may style myself a cad, but Hogan was, and no doubt still is, the nonpareil. That was in the Cedar Street days. Silly, irresponsible time, I look back on it now with a queasy shudder. No good telling myself I was young, that’s no excuse. I should have been devoting myself to work instead of mooning around after the likes of Buster Hogan’s girls. Il faut travailler, toujours travailler. I sometimes wonder if I lack a fundamental seriousness. Yet I did work, I did. Tremendous application, when the fever was on me. Learning my trade, honing my craft. But what happened to me, how did I lose myself? That’s not a question, not even a rhetorical one, only a part, a verse, a canticle, of the ongoing jeremiad. If I don’t lament for myself, who will?

  Olivia, our daughter was called, after me, obviously. Ponderous name for a baby, but she would have grown into it, given time. It was a great shock when she arrived: I had wanted a boy, and hadn’t even considered the possibility of a girl. A hard birth it was, too—Gloria did well to survive it. The child didn’t, not really. She seemed healthy at first, then not. Game little thing, all the same. Lived three years, seven months, two weeks and four days, give or take. And that’s how it was: she was given and, shortly thereafter, taken.

  I didn’t know she was dying. That’s to say, I knew she was going to die, but I didn’t know it would be that night. She went quickly, in the end, surprising us all, giving us all the slip. How did they find me? Through Buster, probably: it would have amused him to tell them where I was and what I was up to. It was the middle of the night, and I was asleep in Anneliese’s bed with one of Anneliese’s amazingly heavy legs, as heavy as a log, thrown across my lap. The telephone had to ring a dozen times before she woke up, groaning, and answered it. I can still see her, sitting on the side of the bed in the lamp-light with the receiver in her hand, pushing away a strand of hair that had caught in something sticky at the corner of her mouth. She was a thick-set girl, with a nice roll of puppy-fat around the waist. Her shoulders gleamed. Let me linger there in that last moment before the fall. I can count, if I wish, each delicate knob of leaning Anneliese’s spine, from top to bottom, one, and, two, and, three, and—

  Every few yards along the seemingly endless corridors of the hospital there were nightlights set into the ceiling, and as I flitted from pool to pool of dim radiance I felt as if I were myself a faulty light-bulb, flickering and flickering and about to go out. The children’s wing was overcrowded—a measles epidemic was in full swing—and they had put our little gir
l in an adult ward, in an adult-sized bed, off in a corner. It was dim there, too, and as I hurried through the room I confusedly imagined that the patients reposing on either side of me were in fact corpses. A lamp had been rigged up where the child was, and Gloria and a person in a white coat were leaning over the bed, while other vague figures, nurses, I suppose, and more doctors, stood back in the shadows, so that the whole thing looked like nothing so much as a nativity scene, lacking only an ox and an ass. The child had died a minute or two before my arrival, had, as Gloria told me afterwards, just drifted away with a long, ragged sigh. Which meant, we both were determined to believe, that she had not suffered, at the end. I stumbled to my knees at the bedside—I wasn’t entirely sober, there’s that to confess to as well—and touched the moist brow, the slightly parted lips, the cheeks on which the bloom of death was already settling. Never knew flesh so composed and unresponsive, never before or since. Gloria stood beside me with her hand resting on the top of my head, as if she were conferring a blessing, though I suppose she was just holding me steady, for I’m sure I was listing badly. Neither of us wept, not then. Tears would have seemed, I don’t know, trivial, let’s say, or excessive, in bad taste, somehow. I felt so odd; it was like suddenly being an adolescent again, awkward and clumsy and cripplingly at a loss. I got to my feet and Gloria and I put our arms around each other, but it was no more than a perfunctory gesture, a grapple rather than an embrace, and brought us no comfort. I looked down at the child in that big bed; with only her head on show, she might have been a tiny perished traveller sunk to the neck in a snowdrift. From now on, all would be aftermath.