Her workshop was a sort of pitch-pine shed propped against the back wall of the garden. It had a sloping roof and a sagging door with a square window to either side of it. There was a wooden work bench, as massive as a butcher’s block, with a huge, oil-blackened iron vice bolted to it. The floor was covered with a thick pile of wood shavings that were pleasantly crunchy underfoot. Her tools hung on a long board fixed to the back wall, ranged neatly according to use and size. On the bench were her mitre-boxes, her miniature saws and hammers, her sanding boards and tubes of glue and sticky pots of varnish.
“This was all your father’s stuff,” she said, gesturing about, “all these tools and things.” She always speaks of our dad as being mine, as if to extract herself from the family equation. I said I hadn’t known he went in for woodwork. She shook her head to show how she despaired of me. “He was always out in the shed, sawing and hammering. That’s how he got away from her.” She meant, I had to assume, my mother, our mother. I took up a mitre-box and fingered it, frowning. “I suppose,” she said, “you’ve forgotten, too, how I made the wooden frames for them canvases you used to paint on?” Stretchers—did she make stretchers for me? If she remembered that, why did she claim to think that I wrote stories? She has an ineradicable streak of slyness, my sister. “Saved our ma a fortune, I did,” she said, “considering there wasn’t anything you couldn’t have, no matter how dear it was.” I examined the mitre-box more closely still. “I used to size the canvas for you, too, with wallpaper paste and a big brush. Is all that gone, all the work I did for you, all forgotten? You’re lucky—I wish I had a memory like yours.”
Slender lengths of hardwood were stacked in a corner, and along the front edge of the bench hung a dozen or more identical Christs, each held in place by a tiny nail driven through the palm of one hand, so that they dangled crookedly there like a line of sinking swimmers frantically signalling for help. They were made of hard plastic, and had the moist, waxy sheen of mothballs. Each one had a crown of plastic thorns and a dab of shiny crimson paint at the left side of the chest just under the rib-cage. Olive doesn’t go in much for religion, so far as I know; in another age she would probably have been burned at the stake. I pictured her here in her witch’s den of an evening, nailing these voodoo dolls to their wooden crosses and cackling softly to herself. “I’ve sent off for luminous paint, to do the eyes,” she said casually, pursing her lips and fingering a stray lock of hair—it was clear she thought this a particularly inspired innovation. I asked what she did with the crucifixes when they were made. Here she turned shifty. “I sell them, of course,” she said, with a dismissive shrug, lifting one bony shoulder and letting it fall again, and busied herself with the selection and lighting of yet another cigarette. I watched her drop the still smouldering match on to the shavings at our feet. I asked to whom did she sell them; I was genuinely curious. She began to cough again, leaning against the bench with her shoulders hunched and softly stamping one foot. When the attack had passed she stood with her head lifted, making a sort of mooing sound and pressing a hand to her chest. “Oh, there’s a shop that buys things like that,” she panted. This was patently a fib. I suspect she throws them away, or uses them for kindling in the kitchen stove. She took a deep drag from her cigarette and blew smoke at the window, where it became a soft billow, like a flattened pumpkin; so much of the world is amorphous, though it seems so solid. I could see Olive casting about hastily for a change of subject.
“How’s your friend?” she asked. “The fellow that fixes watches.”
“Marcus Pettit?”
“ ‘Marcus Pettit?’ ” she squawked, parroting me, and made an idiot face and waggled her head, which made her look like Tenniel’s long-necked Alice after she ate the Caterpillar’s magic mushroom. “How many watchmakers do you think there are in this mighty metropolis?”
I put down the mitre-box and cleared my throat. “I haven’t seen Marcus,” I said, looking at my hands, “for some time.”
“I’d say not.” She laughed huskily. “A nice game you have going, the gang of you.” The back of my neck had gone hot. One is never too old, I find, to feel oneself childishly admonished. “I suppose you haven’t seen his missus, either, for some time.”
I was about to reply, with who knows what kind of riposte, when suddenly she held up a hand and cocked her head to one side on its long stalk of neck, listening to some sound from the house that only she could hear. “Oh, there she goes,” she said, with flat annoyance, and at once was out of the shed and plunging across the garden towards the back door. I followed, at a slower pace. I think I was still blushing.
Dodo in her armchair was in great distress, her little face screwed up, uttering bird-like squeaks and fluttering her hands and her feet, while big, babyish tears rose up in her eyes. Olive, who was leaning down to her and making soothing noises, cast a dark glance at me over her shoulder. “It’s nothing,” she said, in a stage whisper, “only the old waterworks.” She turned back to Dodo. “Isn’t that all it is, Dodie,” she shouted, “only the waterworks, and not the other?” She leaned lower, and sniffed, and turned to me again. “It’s all right,” she said, “just a bit of damp, nothing worse.” She straightened up and took me by the arm. “You go out in the hall,” she said, “and wait.” A wind had sprung up suddenly; it groaned in the chimney and lifted the lid of the stove. Dodo, shamed and shamingly undone, was weeping freely now. “Go on, go on!” Olive growled, shooing me out.
It was cold in the dim hallway. A weak shaft of pink-stained light angling down through the ruby glass of the transom over the front door brought back to my mind the line of crookedly leaning, semi-crucified Christs out in the shed. I always found church statues frightening, when I was a child, the way they just stood there, not quite life-sized, with melancholy eyes cast down and slender hands held out, wearily imploring something of me the nature of which I couldn’t guess and which even they seemed to have forgotten long ago. The sanctuary lamp, too, was worrying, red like the glass in that lunette above the door here and perpetually aglow, keeping an unwavering watch on me and my sinful ways. Sometimes I would wake in the night and shiver to think of it there, that ever-vigilant eye pulsing in the church’s vast and echoing emptiness.
In the hall now a host of things out of the past hovered around me, there and not there, like a word on the tip of my tongue.
Muffled sounds of struggle and stress were coming from the kitchen, where I supposed Dodo’s linen was being changed. I could hear the fat little woman’s tearful cries and Olive’s gruff comfortings. This, I thought, must be love, after all, frail and needful on one side, briskly practical on the other. Not something I could manage, though: too plain and unembellished, for me; too mundane, altogether.
Why didn’t I leave the house, right then? Why didn’t I just slip out at the front door and creep away into the freedom of the afternoon? Olive probably wouldn’t have cared, probably wouldn’t even have noticed I was gone, while I’m sure poor Dodo would have been glad to be rid of a witness to her humiliation. What held me there in that hallway, what fingers reaching out of a lost world, caressing and clutching? Smell of linoleum, of old wallpaper, of dusty cretonne, and that beam of sanctified lurid light shining on me. I was astonished to feel tears prickling at my eyelids. For what or whom would I weep? For myself, of course; for whom else do I ever weep?
Presently I was summoned back into the kitchen. All seemed as before, except for a strong ammoniac smell, and Dodo’s high colour and downcast gaze. I sat again by the table. The wind was pounding at the house now, rattling the windows and setting the rafters creaking and making the stove shoot out spurts of smoke through tiny gaps in the door and along the rim of the red-hot lid. Sitting there, I felt myself being absorbed into the listless rhythm of the room. Olive, making yet another pot of tea, ignored me, and manoeuvred her way around me as if I were no more than a mildly awkward obstacle, one that had always been there.
I find myself thinking again, for no good rea
son, of Gloria’s potted myrtle tree, the one that nearly died. I keep calling it a myrtle but I’m sure it’s not. Worried that the parasites might return, one day Gloria decided to clip off all the leaves. She went about the task with an uncharacteristic and what seemed to me almost biblical fierceness, showing no mercy, her jaw set, until even the smallest and most tender shoots were gone. When the task was complete she had a sated air, though after-tremors of wrathful righteousness seemed to be throbbing still within her. I could not but sympathise with the poor shrub, which in its shorn state looked starkly self-conscious and sorry for itself. I have a notion that Gloria holds me in some way responsible for the thing’s plight, as if I had brought the parasites into the house, not just as a carrier of them but as their progenitor, a huge pale grub with a swollen sac that one day had burst and sprayed its countless young all over her defenceless, miniature green pet. Throughout the autumn it stood there, leafless, and seemingly lifeless, too, until a week ago, when it woke up and suddenly began putting out buds at a tremendous rate—one could almost see them sprouting. I’m not sure what to make of this unnatural profusion on the brink of winter. Maybe I shouldn’t make anything of it. Gloria hasn’t mentioned the plant’s resurgence, although I seem to detect a triumphant gleam in her eye, as though she feels herself vindicated, or somehow revenged, even, on something, or someone. She is in a very strange, high-strung mood, one that I can’t make out at all. It’s very unsettling. I keep waiting for the air to begin vibrating, for the ground to shift under my feet, although I would have thought there could be no more earthquakes, there having been so many of them already.
I leaned over the table and finished the tepid, soapy dregs of stout and put the glass down and said that I must be off. Dodo still would not look at me, and glared at the stove instead, hunching her shoulders and uttering a furious word or two now and then under her breath. In fact, they were well matched, she and the stove, and even looked dumpily a little alike, the two of them blazing away internally, muttering to themselves and sending out angry shoots of heat and smoke. I am the original anthropomorphist.
Olive came with me to the front door, and we stood a while together in the thick gold light of the latening afternoon. The wind had died down as suddenly as it had sprung up. Big tawny leaves were scratching at the pavement, and an old crow in a tree somewhere was coughing hoarsely and cursing to itself. What a memory I have, to retain so many things and so clearly; I must be imagining them. I stood with my hands plunged in the pockets of my overcoat and squinted about. Bleak thoughts in a dying season. Then, to my considerable surprise, I heard myself asking if I might come round and call here again; I don’t know what had come over me. Instead of answering, my sister smiled and looked away, doing that sideways chewing movement with her lower jaw that she does when she is amused. “You never knew, did you, how you were loved,” she said, “not in all the years, and now look at you.” I made to question this—how loved, by whom?—but she shook her head, still with that knowing, saddened smile. She put a hand to my elbow and gave me a push, not ungently. “Go home, Olly,” she said. “Go home to your wife.” Or was it life she said?—not wife but life? Anyway, I went.
However, I had gone only a little way when I heard a call and turned to see Olive running after me with something in her hand. Churning along that high pavement in her apron and cardigan and her old felt slippers, she bore with her, I saw with a shock, a whole family of resemblances: my parents were there, mother as well as father, and my dead brother, and I, too, I was there, and so was my lost child, my lost little daughter, and a host of others, whom I knew but only half recognised. This is how the dead come back, borne by the living, to throng us round, pale ghosts of themselves and of us.
“Here,” Olive, panting, said, “here’s a present for you.” She thrust a wooden crucifix into my hand. “It might bring you luck, and it’ll save you pinching one.” And she laughed.
—
The notion of an end, I mean the possibility of there being an end, this has always fascinated me. It must be mortality, our own, that gives us the concept. I shall die, and so shall you, and there’s an end, we say. But even that’s not certain. After all, despite what the priests promise us, no man or phantom has yet returned from that infamous bourne to tell us what delights or otherwise await us there, nor is likely to. In the meantime, in our fallen, finite world, anything one sets out to do or make cannot be finished, only broken off, abandoned. For what would constitute completion? There’s always something more, another step to venture, another word to utter, another brushstroke to be added. The set of all sets is itself a set. Ah, but tarry a moment. There is the loop to be considered. Join up the extremities and the thing can go on for ever, round and round. That, surely, is a sort of end. True, there’s no end-point, as such, no buffers for the train to run up against. All the same, outside the loop there is nothing. Well, there is, of course, there’s a great deal, there’s almost everything, but nothing of consequence to the thing that’s going round, since that is completed in itself, in a swirling infinity all of its own.
Wonderful, how an injection of pure speculation—never mind the questionable logic—icy-cold and colourless as a shot of opium, can deaden briefly even the worst of afflictions. Briefly.
Anyway, the prompt for today’s brief interval of mental gymnastics was the thought that at either end, at either extremity, I should say, of the particular loop I’ve been winding round my fingers, and yours—in truth, it’s less a loop than a cat’s cradle—there should happen to occur a picnic. Yes, a picnic, indeed picnics, not one but two. Cast your mind back to my mentioning, oh, ages ago, that the first encounter I could recall between the four of us, that is, Polly, Marcus, Gloria and me, was a little outing to a park somewhere that we went on together one intermittently rainy summer afternoon. I spoke of it then as a version of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, but time, I mean recent time, has mellowed it to something less boldly done. Instead, picture it, say, as a scene by Vaublin, mon semblable, nay, my twin, not in summer now but some other, more sombre, season, the crepuscular park with its auburn masses of trees under big heapings of evening cloud, dark-apricot, gold, gesso-white, and in a clearing, see, the luminous little group arranged upon the grass, one idly strumming a mandolin, another looking wistfully away with a finger pressed to a dimpled cheek—she did have dimples, Polly did, in those days—and in the foreground a chignoned blonde beauty in burnished silk, while nearby someone else, guess who, is angling for a kiss. I have purposely banished the rain, the midges, that wasp I found desperately paddling in my wine glass. They look as decorous as you like, this little band of picnickers gathered there, don’t they? Yet something about them sounds a faintly dissonant note, as if there were a string out of tune on that pot-bellied mandolin.
Your guess about the would-be covert kisser was wrong, by the way. Honestly, pas moi!—to keep on in the French mode we seem to be favouring today, due to Vaublin’s sudden apparition, I suppose.
Jealousy. Now there’s a fit subject for another of those dissertations of mine I’m sure we’re all thoroughly tired of by now. But jealousy is something I’ve only come to in these past weeks and it’s still a novelty, if that’s the way to put it. The heart’s scandal, the blood on fire, a needle in the bone, choose your formulation according to your taste. As for me, I will a round unvarnished tale deliver. Well, there’s bound to be a lick of varnish, though I’ll try to keep it to the thinnest wash. As always with these affairs—le mot juste!—one never gets to the truth entirely. Something is always elided, passed over, suppressed, a date skilfully falsified, a rendezvous presented as something it was not, a phone call almost overheard that is abruptly suspended in mid-sentence. Anyway, if one were to be offered the whole truth, unvarnished, one wouldn’t accept it, since after the first twitch of suspicion everything becomes tainted with uncertainty, bathed in a bile-green glow. I never knew the meaning of the word “obscene,” never felt the overwhelming, robed-and-mitred majesty of it, til
l I was forced to entertain the thought of my beloved, one of my beloveds—both of my beloveds!—pressed sweatily flesh to flesh with someone who was not me. Yes, once that losel had reared its ugly head, clamped inside its puce and glossy helmet, there was no avoiding its terrible, gloating eye.
It was Dodo, of all people, who had planted the first faint suspicion. Her mention of a picnic, witlessly uttered, so it seemed at the time, nevertheless lodged in my mind like a small hard sharp seed, one that soon put out a snaking tendril, the first shoot of what would become a luxuriant, rank and noxious flowering. I took to the back roads of the town, stumping along in my long coat, hands clamped behind my back—picture Bonaparte, on Elba—brooding, speculating, calculating, above all picking over my memory for clues on which to feed my hardening conviction that things were going on of which hitherto I had known nothing, or to which at any rate I had blinded myself. What had happened, what really had happened, among the four of us, that long-ago day in the park, in the sunlight and the rain? Had I been so busy registering Polly and storing her away for the future, as a spider—my God!—would parcel up a peacock-green and gorgeously glistening fly, that I hadn’t noticed the selfsame thing going on elsewhere? The trouble with thinking back like that, trying to unravel the ravelled past, was that everything became uncoupled—ha!—and half the effort I had to make was merely to fall into step with myself and get straight to where I did not want to arrive at. Even the threads of my syntax are becoming tangled.
The Blue Guitar Page 22