The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  I asked Polly if her father was expecting her. She didn’t take her eyes off of the road. “Of course he is,” she said, with a dismissive quick lift of her head. “Do you think I’d just turn up without warning, and set my mother off on one of her jags?” Rebuffed, I said no more, and fell to twiddling my thumbs and looking out of the window beside me. The passing trees tossed their tops wildly about in the wind, and leaves flew haphazard, speckling the air, yellow with jade-green patches, burnt umber, floor-polish red. Streaks of rainwater glinted in the flooded fields, and a flock of small dark birds, struggling into the wind, seemed to be flying strenuously backwards against a sky of smudged pewter. I had refrained from asking Polly why she should want me, me of all people, to accompany her on this momentous, indeed this desperate, return to the place of her birth and scene of her youthful days: home, as she said. So far, in fact, I had asked her almost nothing. I always assume everything is perfectly simple and obvious, and that I am the only one who doesn’t understand what’s going on, and so I tend to say nothing, ask nothing, but keep quiet, for fear of being laughed at for a dullard. It’s my essential character to lie low and let the hounds go hullabalooing past. It used to serve me well, that prudent policy; not any more, alas.

  The ancestral seat of the Plomers—Plomer is Polly’s maiden name, another nice soft plosive—is called Grange Hall, or, more commonly, the Grange. This was my first visit to the place, although I had heard Polly speak of it often—as often, I’m sure, as she insisted she had heard me speak of my old home; how the past does cling, raking us lovingly with its tender claws. The iron gates to the narrow drive stood open, as they must have done for decades, and sagged dejectedly on their hinges; rust had made a knobbled filigree of their bars, and the lower ones were overgrown with scutch grass and nettles. As we were turning in from the road something inside me seemed to shift and slide, and for a moment I felt nauseous, and panic sent a hot bead rolling down my spine. Would I, too, be caught here, like these gates, caught and held fast? What was I letting myself in for? What awaited me in the midst of these ragged fields, in an unknown house where an improbable couple, Polly’s doddery father and her poor daft mother, were seeing out their days? Slowly the nausea gave way to a stifling sensation, as if an invisible caul were being pulled down over my head and shoulders. However, a moment later the child woke, and the qualm passed. “Here we are,” Polly said, in what seemed to me a fatuously cheery voice, causing in me a flash of annoyance. What, I demanded of myself again, what was I doing here, along with this desperate young woman and her insupportable tribulations? I would have made a poor knight errant, my lady’s veil a tattered and muddied pennant drooping from my drooping lance.

  The house was built of granite, heavyset and plain to the point of severity, save for the arched, mock-Gothic front door, which lent a vaguely ecclesiastical effect overall. Many tall chimneys stood out against the sky, portly and self-important; rapid white smoke issued from one of them, like a papal proclamation, and was no sooner out than it was snatched up by the wind and torn to shreds. The gravel was thin on the turning-place before the front steps and patches of shiny wet marl showed through. An ancient retriever, which once would have been golden but now was the colour of damp hay, came forwards to greet the car. “Oh, there’s Barney!” Polly said, a wail of sad pleasure. The dog was arthritic and had a floppy, disjointed gait, as if its various parts were strung together on an internal frame of slack wires and hooks and rubber bands. It wagged its heavy tail and gave an effortful, happy-sounding bark, saying distinctly, Woof!

  Polly, grunting from the effort, lifted the child out of the back seat, while I went round and unloaded the boot. She snapped at me for setting the cricket bag on the ground, where the bottom of it would get wet. We might have been, I grimly reflected, a middle-aged, middling couple, inveterately married, by turns testy, disputatious and indifferent in each other’s company. When I shut the lid of the boot and straightened up, I found myself looking about in sudden startlement. The day seemed huge and luridly luminous, as if a lid somewhere had been abruptly lifted. How extraordinary, after all, the perfectly ordinary can sometimes seem, the Humber’s cooling engine ticking, the rooks wheeling above the trees, the dowdy old house with its incongruously churchly door, and Polly, with her daughter clinging to her front, looking distracted and cross and pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes.

  “Oh, God,” she said, under her breath, “here comes Mother.”

  Mrs. Plomer was approaching stumblingly over the gravel. She was tall and bonily thin, with a shock of wild grey hair that made her look as if she had recently suffered a severe electric shock. She wore a mouse-coloured mackintosh, a crooked tweed skirt and a pair of green wellington boots that must have been four or five times too big for her. “Good,” she said briskly, arriving before us and beaming at the child, “you’ve brought little Polly.” She frowned, still smiling. “But who are you, my dear,” she enquired sweetly of her daughter, “and how do you come to have our baby?”

  —

  When I consider the possibility—or perhaps I should say the prospect—of eternal damnation, I envisage my suffering soul not plunged in a burning lake or sunk to the oxters in a limitless plain of permafrost. No, my inferno will be a blamelessly commonplace affair, fitted out with the commonplace accoutrements of life: streets, houses, people going about their usual doings, birds swooping, dogs barking, mice gnawing the wainscot. Despite the quotidian look of everything, however, there is a great mystery here, one that only I am aware of, and that involves me alone. For although my presence goes unremarked, and I seem to be known by all who encounter me, I know no one, recognise nothing, have no knowledge of where I am or how I came to be here. It’s not that I have lost my memory, or that I am undergoing some trauma of displacement and alienation. I’m as ordinary as everyone and everything else, and it’s precisely for this reason that it’s incumbent on me to maintain a blandly untroubled aspect and seem to fit smoothly in. But I do not fit in, not at all. I’m a stranger in this place where I’m trapped, always will be a stranger, although perfectly familiar to everyone, everyone, that is, except myself. And this is how it is to be for eternity: a living, if I can call it living, hell.

  First of all there was high tea. Pots of a peat-brown brew were prepared, slices of bread were laid out like fallen dominoes, cold meats were displayed in sweaty, glistening slabs. There were biscuits and buns, and homemade jam in a sticky dish, and, the pinnacle of all, a mighty plum cake, quite stale, with a glacé cherry on top, which was produced with a conjuror’s flourish from a big japanned tin with shiny dents in it. Janey the cook-cum-housekeeper-cum-maid, ageless and feral, with a tangle of wiry, grizzled hair reminiscent of Mrs. Plomer’s fright-wig, through which her scalp showed pinkly, ferried it all up from the kitchen on a vast tray, in three or four staggering relays, her elbows stuck out at either side and the tip of a moist grey tongue showing. Mrs. Plomer, still in her gumboots, drifted in and out through doorways, smiling on everyone and everything with remote benevolence, while her husband hovered, chafing his hands and humming to himself in happy nervousness. The day was waning, yet a great glare of yellow-gold light was filling the westward-facing windows and casting all indoors into greyish-brown shadow. The china was mismatched, the milk jug was cracked. Janey snatched up Polly’s teaspoon and used it to take a slurp of milk from the jug, testing it for freshness, then dropped the spoon into Polly’s tea with a clatter and a splash. She eyed the child darkly. “Are you feeding that babby at all?” she demanded. “She looks starved to me.”

  Seated at the centre of this parody of rustic domesticity, I felt like a lately hatched cuckoo, huge and absurd, around which the nest’s rightful chicks were doing their best to fit themselves, flapping stubby wings and chirping weakly. Polly had introduced me in the vaguest terms, saying I was a friend of Marcus’s who had come along to help her with the child and the bags; of Marcus himself, of his whereabouts or his state, she said not a word. Janey in her
apron pointedly ignored me, looking through me as if I were perfectly transparent; I’m sure she had the measure of me. So did Polly’s father, I should say, though he was too polite to show it. “Orme, Orme,” he said, putting a finger to his paper-pale brow and frowning at the ceiling. “Aren’t you the painter who’s living in town in Dr. Barragry’s old house?” I said yes, that I did indeed live at Fairmount, but that I did not paint any more. “Ah,” he said, nodding, and gazing at me with blank brightness. He was a small, neat man with a fine, hollow-cheeked profile and pale grey eyes—Polly’s eyes. He had overall a worn, dry aspect, as if he had been left out for a long time to weather under the elements. His sparse hair must once have been, improbably, red, and still had a sandy cast, and his nose, prominent and strong, might have been carved from a piece of bleached driftwood. He wore a three-piece suit of greenish tweed, and a venerable pair of highly polished brown brogues. Though his complexion was in general colourless, there was a ragged pink patch, finely veined, in the hollow of each cheek. He was a little deaf, and when addressed would draw himself quickly forwards, his head tilted to one side and his eyes fixed on the speaker’s lips with bird-like alertness. He had struck me at first as much too old to be Polly’s father. Her mother, as I was to learn, had been peculiar in the head even as a girl, and the family, casting about for someone to marry her off to, had fixed on her cousin Herbert, the last, it had been expected, of the Plomers of Grange Hall. Herbert, the Mr. Plomer seated before me now, was then a bachelor in his middle years, vague, kindly, easily coerced, and in possession of a fine old house and a few hundred acres of decent land. It all sounded much too plausible, in a novelettish, nineteenth-century sort of way, and for a mad minute I thought perhaps the entire thing—the old stone mansion, the aged father and loony mother, the crusty retainer with her groaning trays of grub, even the grass under the gate and the wheeling rooks—had been got up to lull me into thinking I was Ichabod Crane come to seek the hand of fair Katrina and win the riches of Sleepy Hollow. And would there be, I asked myself, a Headless Horseman, too?

  Janey, fuming and muttering, was handing round plates of bread-and-butter and ham and pickles, with indifferent haste, as if it were a pack of greasy playing cards she was dealing out. It was a long time since I had eaten a pickled onion. It had a strongly familiar, metallic taste. Remarkable, how much our mouths remember, with such sharpness, and over aeons.

  Pip, who in my mind will always be Little Pip, sat in a high-chair, itself a relic from Polly’s own infancy. Polly’s mother regarded the child with snatched, sidelong glances, blinking suspiciously. At the outset of the meal her husband had assured her, speaking loudly and slowly, that the young woman seated at the foot of the table was indeed her daughter, Polly, grown up now and a mother herself, as evidenced by the child perched there in the high-chair, but I could see the poor woman wondering how this could be, since here was Polly, still little, banging her spoon on the table and dribbling into her bib. It must all have been very puzzling, to such a scattered mind as hers. Polly, I knew, had been the couple’s only child, her arrival a surprise, if not indeed a shock, to everyone, not least to her mother, who I am sure had hardly known how the thing had come about. The condition that Mrs. Plomer suffered from, as it was explained to me, was an early, mild and for the most part placid form of dementia, although on occasion, when something startled or vexed her, she could become severely agitated, and stay that way for days. Mr. Plomer chose to present his wife’s malaise as if it were merely a form of chronic and endearing eccentricity, and greeted all manifestations of it with elaborate displays of amazement and rueful mirth. “But look, my dear,” he would exclaim, “you’ve put my trousers in the larder! What were you thinking of?” Then he would turn to whoever was present, smiling indulgently and shaking his head, as if this were a unique occurrence, as if boot polish had never appeared in the butter dish before, or a lavatory brush on the dining-room table.

  The child in her chair gave a squeak, surprising herself, and looked about the table quickly to see what the rest of us had made of her sudden intervention. Yes yes, children are uncanny, no doubt of it. Is it because the things that are familiar to us are to them a novelty? That can’t be right. As Adler tells us, in his great essay on the subject, the uncanny arises when a known object presents itself to us in an alien mode. So if children see everything as new, then blah blah blah, etc., etc., etc.—you get my drift. Yet is there a them and an us, and can we make such distinctions? The young and the old, we say, the past and the present, the quick and the dead, as if we ourselves were somehow outside the temporal process, applying an Archimedean lever to it. The living being, so one of the philosophers has it, is only a species of the dead, and a rare species at that; likewise, and obviously, the young are only an early version of the old, and should not be treated as a separate species, and wouldn’t be, if they didn’t seem so strange to us. I looked at Little Pip and wondered what could be going on in her head. She had no words yet, only pictures, presumably, with which to make whatever sense it was she made of things. There seemed to be figured for me here a lesson of some sort, for me the former painter; it rose up out of my vaguely groping thoughts, shimmered a moment tantalisingly, then dispersed. I can’t think in this fashion any more, rubbing concepts against each other to make illuminating sparks. I’ve lost the knack, or the will, or something. Yes, my muse has flown the coop, old hen that she was.

  Polly’s mother frowned and lifted her head as if she had heard something, some far faint sound, a secret summons, and rose from her place and, frowning still, wandered out of the room, taking her napkin with her, forgotten in her hand.

  I turned to Polly, but she wouldn’t meet my eye; it must have been a great strain for her, being here in the withered bosom of her family with me sitting opposite her like something she had brought in by mistake and now couldn’t think how to get rid of. She was transformed yet again, by the way. It was as if in coming here she had taken off a ball-gown and put on instead a house-coat, or even a gymslip. She was all daughter now, plain, dutiful, exasperated, lips pursed in sullen resentment, and quick to anger. I could hardly see in her the wantonly exultant creature who of an afternoon not so long ago on the old green sofa in the studio would cry out in my arms and dig her fingers into my shoulder-blades and burrow with her avid mouth, sweet succubus, into the delightedly flinching hollow of my throat. And as I sat there, contemplating her in her porridge-coloured jumper, with her hair drawn tightly back and her face rubbed clear of make-up and harrowed by this long day’s tensions and travails, there came to me what I can only call a breathtaking revelation—literally, for it was a revelation, and my breath was taken away. What I saw, with jarring clarity, was that there is no such thing as woman. Woman, I realised, is a thing of legend, a phantasm who flies through the world, settling here and there on this or that unsuspecting mortal female, whom she turns, briefly but momentously, into an object of yearning, veneration and terror. I picture myself, assailed by this astounding new knowledge, slumped open-mouthed on my chair with my arms hanging down at either side and my legs splayed out slackly before me—I’m speaking figuratively, of course—in the flabbergasted pose of one suddenly and devastatingly enlightened.

  I know, I know, you’re shaking your head and chuckling, and you’re right: I am a hopeless and feeble-minded chump. The supposedly tremendous discovery that announced itself to me there at the tea-table was really no more than another of those scraps of unremarkable wisdom that have been known to every woman, and probably to most men, too, since Eve ate the apple. Nor did it, I confess, have any grand illuminating effect on me—sadly, the light that accompanies such insights quickly fades, I find. No scales fell from my eyes. I did not look on Polly with a new scepticism, measuring her mere humanness and finding it unworthy of my passion. On the contrary, I felt a sudden renewed tenderness towards her, but of an unimpassioned, mundane sort. Nevertheless, though the magic had evaporated on the spot, I think I treasured her more, that evenin
g, than I ever had before, even in those first, ecstatic weeks when she would come running up those too many steps to the studio and fling herself at me in a flurry of cries and kisses and walk me backwards to the sofa, fumbling at my buttons and laughing and hotly panting into my ear. I now in turn would gladly have taken her in my arms and swept her up the stairs to her bedroom and her bed, still in her woollens and her hockey-girl’s skirt, there to lose myself in her pinky-grey, bread-warm, most cherished, plasticiney flesh. But it would have been Polly, plain Polly herself, that I was caressing, for at last she had broken through the casing that my fantasies had moulded around her and had become, at last, at last had become, for me—what? Her real self? I can’t say that. I’m supposed not to believe in real selves. What, then? A less fantastical fantasy? Yes, let’s agree on that. I think it’s the most that can be hoped for, the most that can be asked. Or wait, wait, let’s put it this way: I forgave her for all the things that she was not. I’ve said that before, somewhere. No matter. Similarly she must have forgiven me, long ago. How does that sound? Does it make sense? It’s no small thing, the pardon that two human beings can extend to each other. I should know.

  And yet, and yet. What I see now, at this moment, and didn’t see then, was that this final stage, for me, of Polly’s pupation, was the beginning of the end, the true beginning of the true end, of my, of my—oh, go on, what else can it be called?—of my love for her.