The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  Outside, in the overcast yet strangely radiant day, a soft uncertain rain began to fall. I note, by the way, how rain punctuates my narrative with a suspicious regularity. Maybe it’s a substitute for the showers of tears that by rights I should be shedding, at the simple sadness of all this that was transpiring between us, between Polly and me, between Polly and me and Marcus, between Polly and me and Marcus and Gloria, and who knows how many others? Drop a pebble into the sea and the ripples roll out on all sides, bearing their sorrowful tidings.

  I filled the battered kettle and put it on the stove to boil and laid out tea-things, glad of the excuse to be pottering about, just like a real human being, using up time and not having to say anything, or anything Polly could seize on, anyway, and turn against me. At bottom I’m just a cautious old mole. Indeed, I often think I would like to be truly old and at my last, a beslippered shuffler, wearing long johns, and gloves without fingers, and a dirty scarf wrapped round my stringy throat, and have a drip always on the end of my nose, and be forever moaning of the cold, and snarling at people, and phoning the guards to complain of children kicking footballs into my garden. Somehow I’m convinced things would be simpler, then—will be simpler, with only the end in view. Polly sat with a fist pressed to her cheek, gazing starkly before her, like that oddly burly angel in Dürer’s Melencolia. A glinting tear ran over her knuckles but I pretended not to see it. The child was gazing up at her with moon eyes, her wet, shiny-pink bottom lip stuck out. I remarked—having first to do a noisy clearance job on my throat—what a quiet child she was, how biddable, how good in general; it was, of course, no more than a craven attempt to get round the mother by lauding the child. Polly, however, was lost in herself and wasn’t listening. The kettle came to the boil. I made the tea and put the pot on the table, a delicate plume of vapour curling up from the spout like a half-hearted genie trying and failing to materialise. I sat down. The child transferred her—I keep wanting to say its—speculative gaze to me. I did my best to smile. Lifting a fat little hand she inserted an index finger into her right nostril and began luxuriantly to probe inside it. Have I remarked before how eerie children are? To me they seem so, anyway. My own little one, my lost Olivia, comes to me in dreams sometimes, not as she was, but as she would be now, a grown girl. I see her, the dream-she, quite clearly. She has the look of her mother, the same pale, blonde beauty, though she is slighter, of a more delicate make. Delicate, yes; that’s how they used to describe girls like her, when I was young. It meant they would not live long, or that if they did they would be anaemic, and childless themselves. In my dreams she wears a pink dress, very demure, with a crimped, flowered bodice—remember the kind I mean?—and white ankle-socks and patent-leather pumps. She doesn’t do anything, just stands, with a solemn and faintly questioning look, her arms pressed close to her sides, a bright figure at the centre of a vast, dark place. There seems nothing strange or even worthy of remark in her being there, older than she ever got to be in life, and it’s only when I wake that I wonder what these visitations mean, or if they mean anything—after all, why should my dream life have a meaning, when my waking one does not?

  Little Pip took her finger out of her nose and gravely inspected what she had retrieved from the depths of her nostril.

  “Are you not going to say anything at all?” Polly demanded of me. “What’s the use of us being here if we don’t talk?” I was tempted to point out that it was she who had come here, uninvited and, if I were honest, not entirely welcome, either; but I kept my peace. She sighed. “I’ve left Marcus, you know.”

  “Ah.”

  “Is that all you can say?—ah?”

  I made to fill her cup, but she waved the teapot brusquely aside.

  “Was there a fight?” I asked, keeping a steadily neutral tone, I don’t know how. I felt like a soldier trapped in a crater under enemy bombardment at whose feet there is lodged a recently launched, still warm and unexploded shell. Polly gave an angrily dismissive shrug, dipping and twisting her shoulders, like an acrobat in pain. “Why did you turn against me all of a sudden?” she wailed. The child left off studying her fingertip and fixed her eye upon her mother; her gaze, I noticed, took a moment to adjust itself, and I wondered if she, too, was going to have a cast in her eye, just like her mother. Polly had lifted up to me an anguished face; with that look, and the child on her lap, she made me think, disconcertingly, of a classic pietà—it’s what I do, I transform everything into a scene and frame it. I said I hadn’t turned against her—what would make her think such a thing? “You did, you did!” she cried. “I saw it in your face long before you ran off, the way you wouldn’t look at me, the way you kept making excuses and going around mumbling to yourself and sighing.” She paused, and her shoulders sagged. There is indeed, I’ve noted it before, a touch of the operatic to all discourse: there are the arias, the coloratura passages, the recitatives by turns bustling, reflective, or furiously hissed upon the air, in a spray of spittle. “After you went,” she said, “I’d wake up in the morning and tell myself that today you’d call, that today I’d hear your voice, but the hours dragged on until night and still the phone didn’t ring. I couldn’t think of anything but you and why you went away and where you might be. And all the time I was walking around in a fog. Yesterday when I was doing the washing-up a glass broke in the sink. I didn’t see it under the suds and didn’t feel it cutting me until the water started turning red.” She lifted her hand to display the dressing on her thumb, a wad of lint held in place with sticking-plaster and stained with rust-coloured blood, and at once I saw Marcus, in the studio, holding up his hand to show me his ring finger and the ring he had cut her face with. I reached out to her but she snatched her hand away and hid it behind the child’s back. There was a silence. The small rain worried at the window-panes. I said I was sorry, trying to sound humble and heart-sick. I was heart-sick, I was humbled, but I couldn’t seem to make myself sound as if I were. Polly gave an angry laugh. “Oh, yes,” she said archly, “you’re sorry, of course.”

  The child began to cry, weakly and as it were exploratively, making a sound like a rusty hinge being effortfully opened inch by inch. Polly drew her to her breast again and rocked her, and at once she grew quiet. Motherhood. Another conundrum I shall never crack.

  We sat there, at the table, for a long time. The tea, undrunk, went cold, the afternoon light turned leaden, the dreary rain outside drifted down at a slant. I did not feel as upset as by rights I should have felt. I have a knack of finding little pockets of peace and secret quiet even in the most fraught of circumstances—the harried heart must have its rest. Polly, with the child dozing now in her lap, talked and talked, to herself more than to me, it seemed, requiring me only to listen, or perhaps not even that—perhaps she had forgotten I was there. Grief, she had discovered, was a physical sensation, a kind of ailment that affected her all over. This was a surprise, she said; she had thought that kind of suffering was entirely a thing of the emotions. I knew what she meant; I knew exactly what she meant. I, too, was familiar with the soul’s ague, but I didn’t say so, the moment in the limelight being hers. Her fingers under her nails were sore, she said, as if the quicks were exposed—again she waved her hand in front of me, though this time there was nothing to be shown—and her eyes scalded, and even her hair seemed to hurt. Her temperature soared and plummeted; one minute her blood was on fire, the next she felt chilled to the bone. Her skin was hot and puffy to the touch, and slightly sticky, the way that the more delicate parts of her, the backs of her knees, or the plump puckers at her armpits, used to get when she was a child and stayed out too long in the sun. “Can you feel it?” she said, pulling back the sleeve of her jumper and thrusting the underside of her arm at me. “Can you feel the heat?” I could feel it.

  Marcus, she said, had taken to ignoring her, or treating her with an icy politeness that stung more sharply than any insult or recrimination he might fling at her. He had a little smile, the faintest flicker, ironical, superior
, that she was helpless to protect herself against and that made her furious and want to hit him. When he smiled like that, usually as he was turning away, and turning away was all he seemed to do now, she realised that she could come to hate him, as he seemed to hate her, and this frightened her, this violence she felt inside herself. And he, too, who had always been mild and diffident, he seemed so furious, so vengeful. On the day after I fled she fell coming down the stairs into the workroom, missed the last step and went sprawling, flopping helplessly on her front and hurting her breasts and hitting her nose on the floor and making it bleed. As she was getting herself up, big startling drops of nose-blood splashing on her blouse, she glanced across at her husband where he was sitting at his bench and caught a look of cold satisfaction in his eyes, which shocked her. Could he be so bitter towards her that he would gloat to see her there like that, on her knees, injured and bleeding?

  “That terrible wind,” she said to me, “it blew for days after you went, all day and all night.” The house around her had felt like a ship running under full sail against a relentless storm. Windows creaked, fireplaces moaned, doors swung shut with a bang, their keyholes whistling. At times she could hardly distinguish between the storm outside and the sound of her own pain rearing and plunging inside her. She hid herself away in the little room above the workshop, her room, the one that had always been hers by tacit agreement between her and Marcus. She sat for hours in a rocking-chair by the window, while the child played on the floor at her feet. The salt carried in on the wind from the estuary had hazed over the window-panes, and the people in the street below her seemed like ghosts passing soundlessly to and fro.

  Then, on the second or third day after I had gone, Marcus surprised her by coming up from the workshop and tapping on the door. His tap was so light she hardly heard it above the tumult of the gale outside. He had brought her a cup of tea, on a tray, with a lace doily. He asked why was she sitting in the dark but she said it was only twilight yet. “You should turn on the lamp,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. She willed him to look at her but he would not. The sight of the doily almost made her cry. He was haggard; he seemed to be as shocked as she was by this terrible thing that had burbled up between them, like foul-smelling waters from a poisoned well. He stood at the window. He had to bend forwards a little to see out, for the window was low-set and deeply recessed. He put an arm against the glass and laid his forehead on his arm and sighed. She caught the familiar smell of the watchmaker’s oil that he used in his work, a smell that was always on his fingers, even in the mornings before he had sat down to his bench. She could feel no warmth in him, no softening, no sympathy. Why had he come up, then? Little Pip was in her cot by the fireplace, lying on her back and playing with her toes, as she liked to do, cooing to herself. Marcus paid her no heed; maybe she, too, was spoilt for him. He sighed again. “I don’t know why he came back here,” he said quietly, sounding almost weary. Still he leaned there, watching the street, or pretending to.

  “Who?” she asked, although she knew the answer. He didn’t say anything, didn’t look at her, only smiled his cold little wisp of a smile. So: he knew. For a second her heart lifted. “Had he seen you, I wondered, had he stumbled on you somewhere and you admitted the truth, and that was how he knew?” His knowing didn’t matter, she said, she didn’t care about that. All she cared about was the simple, momentous, overwhelming possibility that if he had seen me, if he had talked to me, it meant he might know where I had fled to, where I was to be found. But, no, she could see it from his expression that he hadn’t met me, hadn’t spoken to me, that he had guessed, that was all, just guessed, the moment I ran off, that I was his wife’s secret lover. Now it was her turn to sigh. Was he waiting for her to deny it, to insist he was mistaken, to say it was all in his imagination? She couldn’t speak, couldn’t bring herself to tell him more lies. He might as well know the truth. Maybe it was best that he should know; maybe things would be easier, that way. But still she couldn’t confess it, not out loud, in words, couldn’t say my name. Anyway, she didn’t have to. She knew he knew.

  How fiercely the wind blew, how swiftly the darkness was descending, on the two of them there in that little room.

  Things hadn’t got better, she said, hadn’t got easier. She didn’t think they ever would, and so she had told him, had said it straight out, not about me, no no, she would never utter my name to him but only that she was leaving him. He showed no surprise, no dismay, just looked at her in that owlish way he always used to do, in the old days, when she got angry with him, and pressed a fingertip to the bridge of his old-fashioned, round-rimmed spectacles, another of those endearingly defensive little gestures he had, all of which I knew well, as well as she did, I dare say. I wonder if we both, she and I, loved him still, even a little, despite everything. The thought just flitted into my mind, like a small bird flying up into a tree, without a sound.

  He must have known already what she had decided, she said, he must have guessed that, too, guessed that she was going to leave him.

  And then, she said, the strangest thing happened. Suddenly, in that moment, she sitting in the rocking-chair and Marcus at the window, suddenly she knew where it was I had run off to, where it was that I was in hiding. Of course, it was the obvious place, she said. She couldn’t understand how she had not thought of it before. And now here she was.

  “You mean,” I said slowly, “you left him today, just now, before coming here?” She nodded swiftly, smiling with eyes wide and her lips tightly shut, gleeful as a schoolgirl who has run away from school. “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I’m going to go home,” she said.

  “Home?”

  “Yes.” She coloured a little. “Go on, laugh,” she said, looking away. “It’s what wives do when they get in trouble, I know, they run home to their mothers. Not,” she added, with a forlorn little laugh, “that my mother will be of much help to me.” She paused, and took on a look of such deep and serious portent that I felt myself quailing before it; what new trial had she thought up for me, what new hoop would she produce for me to jump through? “I want you to take me there. I mean I want you to go with me. Will you? Will you take me home?”

  —

  She had come in Marcus’s old Humber. I was surprised, even shocked. Surely Marcus hadn’t agreed to her taking it, for he treasured that car, and tended it like a beloved pet. Had she just got in and driven away? I thought it safest not to ask; in the crater where I lay trapped that unexploded shell was still there, its pointy end lodged in the mud and its all too smooth flank brassily agleam, ready to go off at the slightest stir I might make. I watched Polly at the wheel. This was a new manifestation of her I was seeing, brusque and swift and set of jaw; it takes a full-scale calamity to smarten up a girl as easy-going as she is, or as she had been, until now. Of this unfamiliar Polly I was, I admit, wary, if not downright scared.

  She had packed a suitcase for herself and had stuffed the child’s things into an old cricket bag that had belonged to her father; there was the impression of everything having been snatched up and bundled together in anxious and angry haste. She was indeed a woman in flight. I confess it was all in a small way exciting, despite my grim forebodings.

  Along the narrow roads the big motor yawed and swayed, seeming more ponderous than ever, as if weighted down by the freight of trouble it was carrying. The rain had turned sleety, and swarmed and slithered on the windscreen like blown spit. Trees loomed blackly before us, and rents appeared in the clouds, burning white glares within a dull grey surround, though the wind quickly sealed them up again. Behind the salty fumes of the engine I caught hints coming in from outside of drenched grass and loam and leaf-mould, the smells of autumn and of childhood. I looked at Polly’s hands on the wheel, one of them with its bandaged thumb, and saw with a mild jolt of surprise that she was still wearing her wedding ring. But why was I surprised? I was sure she didn’t believe her marriage to Marcus was at an irreparable end; at least
, it was my strong hope that she didn’t. But what, then, did she think? I shifted in my seat with grave unease. The child was asleep, trussed up in her special seat in the back, her head lolling sideways and a thread of silver drool dangling from her lower lip. I had noticed that Polly no longer referred to her as Little Pip, that she was just Pip, now; another custom gone, another fragment of the old life cast aside. By the way, that can’t be her real name, can it, Pip, it can’t be her full name? Strange, the things one doesn’t know, the things one has never bothered to find out. Is it short for Philippa, perhaps? But who would call a child Philippa, a name I’m not even sure I know how to pronounce? Though there are Philippas, who must once have been infants, just as there are Olivias. These and others like them were the idle thoughts I revolved in my mind, if thoughts they could be called, as we bowled along the rainy road. In my desperation I was, of course, seeking by whatever means to set myself at a remove from all this, mentally at least: from Polly, from the child in the back, from the wallowing car, from myself, even, my uncertain and increasingly apprehensive self. Polly as fugitive was an altogether novel phenomenon, and a far more ample handful than she had been hitherto. The old masters of apologetics were right: the imperative of self-preservation is stronger than the generative urge and all that it dictates and entails. Poor old love, what a frail and tremulous flower it is.