The Blue Guitar

by John Banville

  “You could say,” Gloria said, picking her words, I saw, with slow deliberation, “that we came to an understanding. Neither of us spoke of it, that day, the day of the picnic, and not for a long time afterwards, not for years, and then only when there was due provocation.”

  “Due provocation?” I said, spluttering. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

  The things my fancy forces on me!—it’s Bonaparte’s sudden popping up a couple of paragraphs past that leads me now to see myself, in that momentous confrontation, got up in a cutaway coat and tight white breeches and an even tighter, double-breasted sailcloth waistcoat that bulges over my portly little belly and gives to my cheeks an apoplectic shine, as I strut up and down in front of my preternaturally composed wife, a greasy forelock falling over my bulbous brow and the Grande Armée crowding outside the door, shoving and sniggering. In fact, the door was made of glass, and no one was out there. We were in the Winter Garden, that vast, glorified greenhouse erected for the public’s delight by one of Freddie Hyland’s philanthropic forebears, atop another of the town’s low hills—looking eastwards from up here we could see, across a mile of jumbled roofs, the wintry sun, already getting ready to set, tenaciously ashine in the windows of our own house on Fairmount. The Winter Garden afforded us the solitude so necessary for the kind of wrangle we were having, for the place is always deserted: from the first the town considered it a laughable nonsense, and bad for the health, too, in those tubercular days, because of the dampness and the dank air inside. In the time of the Hylands’ hegemony, news of Friday-night lay-offs at one or other of the family’s mills or factories would sweep through the town, like a wind-driven flame, and when darkness fell, gangs of newly unemployed labourers would tramp in a muttering mob up Haddon’s Hill and surround the defenceless folly and smash half of its panes, which on Saturday morning the Hylands, with characteristic, weary fortitude, would cause to be replaced, by paid squads of the very same workers who had broken them the night before.

  “You’re completely hopeless,” my wife said. She was looking at me, not unkindly, with the barest shadow of a smile. “You do realise that, don’t you? I mean, you must.”

  The day was cold, and here inside, the glass walls were engreyed with mist through which bright rivulets of moisture ran endlessly downwards, so that we seemed to be in a lofty hall hung all round by great swathes of bead curtain, silvery and glistening. There were old gas-jets fixed high up on the struts of the timber frame. Someone long ago had etched the legend Hang the Krauts into one of the panes, with a diamond ring, it must have been, and instantly I pictured Freddie Hyland dangling comically from one of the metal struts above us here, his eyes popping and his blue tongue sticking out.

  I said to Gloria that I didn’t know what she was talking about, and that I suspected she didn’t, either. Was she saying, I demanded, that for years, for years and years, since that day of the picnic in the park, she and Marcus had been—what? Secret lovers? “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” she said, throwing up her chin and laughing. Recently I had begun to notice that new laugh of hers: it is a cool, metallic sound, rather like the chiming of a distant bell coming over the fields on a frosty day, and must be, now that I think of it, the counterpart to that cold small smile of Marcus’s that Polly had described to me so memorably. I was sweating now, and not just because of the steamy warmth in here. I imagined the two of them together, my wife and my erstwhile friend, discussing me, he smiling and she with her new, tinkling laugh, and I felt a stab of the clearest, purest anguish, so pure and clear that for a second it took my breath away. Always there awaits a new way of suffering.

  “And besides,” Gloria said, “you have a nerve, preaching at me about secret lovers.”

  We had progressed into the Palm House, a grand name for what is only one end of the building cordoned off behind glass screens. It is a gloomy, claustral space inhabited by towering growths more like animals than plants, with leathery leaves the size of an elephant’s ears, and wads of thick hairy stuff around their bases that make it seem as if their socks have fallen down. Gloria was seated on a low stone bench, smoking a cigarette, leaning forwards a little with her legs crossed and an elbow propped on one knee. I could not understand how she could be so calm, or seem to be. She was wearing her big white coat, the one that I dislike, with the conical collar. I felt, here in this humid, hot and fetid place, as if I had toppled out of a high window and yet were suspended somehow, on a strong updraught, and would in a moment begin the long plunge earthwards, the air shrieking in my ears and the ground spinning towards me at a dizzying and ever-accelerating rate. Yet I wanted to laugh, too, out of some crazed and suffering urge.

  “You should have told me,” I said. I’m sure I was wringing my hands.

  “Told you what?”

  “About the picnic. About you and’—I thought I would choke on it—“about you and Marcus.”

  At this she did again her little laugh. “There was nothing to tell,” she said, “then. Besides, I saw you ogling Polly that day, that day years ago, trying to see up her dress.”

  “What are you saying?” I expostulated—yes, I did a lot of expostulating that day. “You’re imagining things!”

  I could sense those huge-eared creatures at my back, those elephantine trees; they would forget nothing of what they were hearing, the news of my downfall at last.

  “Look, the only thing that happened,” Gloria said patiently, as if setting out yet again to try to explain something complicated to a simpleton, “is that we realised we were soul-mates, Marcus and I.”

  I felt as if some heavy, soft thing inside me had flopped over with a squelch. “What,” I cried thickly, “you and that long streak of misery?” Name-calling, as you see, was the level I had come to; it hadn’t taken long. “And soul-mates?” I said, with another tremor of disgust. “Do you know how much I despise that kind of thing?”

  “Yes,” she said, giving me a level look, “I do.”

  I stepped past her and with the side of my fist made a spy-hole in the fogged glass wall. Out there, a scoured sky, and a lead-pink fringe of clouds along the horizon that looked like the stuffing squeezing out of something. There always seem to be clouds like that, even on the clearest days; always it must be raining somewhere. I turned to speak again to my wife, where she sat with her back towards me, but found I couldn’t, and stood helpless, gaping at the pale glimmer of her bared, leaning neck. She twisted round and looked at me over her shoulder. “How did you find out?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “About the picnic, so-called.”

  “Which one?”

  She tightened her mouth at me. “I’d hardly mean the one all four of us went on, would I?”

  I said someone must have seen them together, her and Marcus. “Of course,” she said, amused. “That was inevitable, I suppose, given what this place is like.” Now she looked at me more closely, frowning, seeming suddenly concerned. “Come,” she said, patting the empty place on the bench beside her, “come and sit down, you poor man.”

  It’s only in dreams that things are inevitable; in the waking world there is nothing that cannot be avoided, with one celebrated exception. That had always been my experience, up to now. But the way she did that, patting the bench and calling me “poor man,” heralded an inevitability that would not be fudged.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said, slumping down beside her.

  “I’ve told you all there is to tell.” She dropped the stub of her cigarette at her feet and trod on it deftly with the heel of her shoe. “Whoever the someone was who saw us can’t have seen much. I took along a bottle of your wine, and Marcus had some awful sandwiches he had bought somewhere. We went out to Ferry Point, and I parked on that place above the bridge. We talked for hours. I got terribly cold. You should have seen my knuckles, how red they were.”

  I should have seen her knuckles.

  “This was when?” I asked, sinking deeper and almost cosily into my newly hatc
hing misery.

  “Just after you ran off and Marcus realised what had been going on,” she said, in a hardened voice. “I had known for ages, of course.”

  “What do you mean, ages?”

  “From the start, I think.”

  “And you didn’t mind?”

  She thought about this, leaning forwards again and jiggling the toe of one shoe. “Yes, I minded,” she said. “But I shed all the tears I had when the child died, and so there weren’t any left for you. Sorry.”

  I nodded, gazing at my hands. They looked like someone else’s: gnarled, rope-veined, discoloured.

  “If you knew,” I said, “why didn’t you tell him?”

  “Marcus?”

  “Yes, Marcus. Seeing you were such soul-mates.”

  She made a sort of bridling movement inside her coat. “I thought he knew, too. We never spoke about you, or Polly, not until after you had run away.”

  “And then? Did you speak of us then?”

  “Not much.”

  I was looking at a giant palm that towered over us, like a frozen green water-spout, displaying itself in all its baroque and ponderous grandeur. The infolded fronds, as broad at their broadest as native canoes, were thickly burnished, and scarred, where they leaned low, with the hieroglyphs of ancient graffiti. Such a weighty thing it was, held there at what seemed a suffering stance, and yet weightless, too. The tension of things: that was always the most difficult quality to catch, in whatever medium I employed. Everything is braced against the pull of the world, straining to rise but grounded to the earth. A violin is always lighter than it looks, strung so tensely on its strings, and when you pick it up you feel it wanting to rise out of your hand. Think of an archer’s bow in the instant after the arrow has flown, think of the twang of its cord, the spring of its arc, the shudder and thrum all along its curved and tempered length. Did I ever achieve anything of that litheness, that air-aspiring buoyancy? No, I think. My things were always gravid, weighed down with the too-much that I expected of them.

  “Polly doesn’t know, does she?” I asked. I sounded like a bankrupt enquiring mournfully if at least his front door is still on its hinges.

  “About what?”

  “This supposed second picnic that you and Marcus went on.”

  “I don’t know what Polly knows,” she said. She breathed a sort of laugh. “Polly is busy frying other fish.”

  Fish, I didn’t ask, what fish? No, I didn’t ask. I would press no further. There was a limit to the number of whacks I could take from this particular cudgel.

  I said that all that there had been between Polly and me was ended; it hadn’t been much, anyway, when measured against the general scale of things. “Yes,” Gloria said, nodding. “And between Marcus and me, whatever it was or wasn’t, that’s done, too.”

  I got up and went and stood at the glass again, and again looked out over the town. The sun we see setting is not the sun itself but its after-image, refracted by the lens of the earth’s atmosphere. Make some lesson out of that, if you will; I haven’t the heart.

  “What shall we do now?” I asked.

  “We shall do nothing,” my wife answered, drawing her coat tightly about her, despite the damp heat pressing down all round. “There’s nothing for us to do.”

  And she was right. Everything had been done already, though even she didn’t know yet, I think, what all of that everything would entail. Why is it life’s surprises are nearly always nasty, and with a nastily comical edge, just for good measure?

  —

  I walked out one day recently to Ferry Point and scrambled up the steep slope of the hill there, through thickets of gorse, still in blossom, and bristling stands of dead fern stalks, very sharp and treacherous. I fell down repeatedly, tearing my trousers and grazing my knees and ruining my absurdly unsuitable shoes—whatever became of those boots I borrowed from Janey at Grange Hall? By the time I had scaled the height I felt like Billy Bunter, smarting and bruised after yet another of his hapless scrapes. Poor Billy, everyone laughs at him though I cannot understand why: he seems so sad to me. The hill up there is flat, as if the top of it had been sliced clean off, leaving a wide, circular patch of clayey ground where very little grows, even in summer, except scrub grass and thistles and here and there a solitary poppy, self-conscious and blushing. It’s a spot much frequented by what used to be called courting couples—they drive up at night and park in front of the famous view, though scenery is hardly what is on their mind, and anyway it’s unlikely they can make out much of it in the dark. I’ve seen half a dozen cars at a time up there, ranged side by side, like basking seals, their windows steamed up; no sound comes from them, for the most part, though now and then one or other of them will begin to rock on its springs, gently at first but with increasing urgency. Loners come here too, sometimes. They park well away from the others, their cars seeming bathed in a deeper kind of darkness. Their windscreens stare out blackly into the night, in mute desperation, while in the darkness behind the glossy glass the burning tip of a single cigarette flares and fades, flares and fades.

  The view is magnificent, I grant that. The estuary, a broad sheet of stippled silver, stretches off to the horizon, with hazel woods on either side where no one ventures save the odd hunter, and, above, calm hills that fold themselves neatly under the edges of the sky. Over here, on this decapitated height, there is the stump of a ruined tower, like a snapped-off finger pointing in furious recrimination at the sky; in Norman times it must have stood guard over the narrow ford in the river below, spanned now by the old iron bridge that is due to collapse any day, by the rickety look of it. That’s where the farmer in his lorry picked me up that night of storm and flight, how many months ago? Not more than three—I can hardly believe it! Marcus just missed that bridge, on his way down.

  Winded still and panting, I sat on a mossy rock under the side wall of the tower. What had brought me up here? It was a place of singular, no, of manifold significance. This was where Marcus and my missus held their first tryst, on that second picnic, drinking my wine and eating Marcus’s awful sandwiches. Was it by day, or at night? By day, surely: even secret lovers wouldn’t go on a picnic after dark, would they? I imagined Gloria’s knuckles, red from the cold. I imagined her lifting up her face, smiling, with her eyes closed. I imagined a wisp of Marcus’s hair falling forwards, stirred by her breath. I imagined the car rocking on its springs.

  I closed my own eyes, and felt the faint warmth of November sunlight on the lids.

  Things in the great world continue to go awry—talk about the pathetic fallacy! Those solar storms show no signs of abating. Corkscrews of fire and gas shoot out into space from fissures in the star’s flaming crust, a million miles high, some of them, it’s said. The shops are selling a thing through which to view these titanic disturbances, a cardboard mask with some kind of special filter in the slitted eye-holes. One comes upon children, and not just children, standing masked and motionless in the street, staring upwards as if spellbound, which they are, I suppose, the sun being the oldest and most compelling of the gods. There are spectacular showers of meteorites, too, free fireworks displays at nightfall as regular as the universal clockwork used to be. Every other day comes news of a new disaster. Terrible tides race across archipelagos and sweep all before them, drowning small brown folk in their tens of thousands, and chunks of continents break off and topple into the sea, while volcanoes spew out tons of dust that darken skies all round the world. Meanwhile our poor maimed earth lumbers along its eccentric circuit, wobbling like a spinning top at the end of its spin. The old world is coming back, retrograde progression in full swing, in no time all will be as it once was. This is what they say, the scryers and prognosticators. The churches are thronged—one hears the massed voices of the faithful within, lifted in quavering chants, lamenting and beseeching.

  I must have dropped off for a minute, sitting there on my stone in the sun under the blunt tower’s wall. It’s a thing I do with increasing frequen
cy, these days; mild narcolepsy, it would seem, is one of the consequences of a beleagured and battered heart. Hearing myself addressed, I started awake. He was an ancient fellow, stooped and skinny, with a stubbled chin and a rheumy eye. For a second I thought it was the old farmer himself, he of the lorry and the hair-raising and—did I but know it—prophetic tale of death by water. Come to think of it, maybe it was him. One old man, at that stage of decrepitude, will look much like another, I should think. His trousers, extraordinarily filthy, would have been big enough to accommodate two of him, and swirled freely about his haunches and his scrawny shanks, held up by a pair of what I know he would call galluses. His shirt was collarless, his buttonless coat was long, his boots were without laces and, like his trousers, many sizes too big for him. “Got a smoke, pal?” he croaked.

  I said no, that I had no cigarettes, and at once, I don’t know for what reason—unless it was something in the old boy’s milky eye that jogged my memory—I recalled how I used to come up here, years ago, when I was a boy, with a school friend I was in love with. His name, though you won’t believe it, was Oliver. I say love, but of course I’m using the word in its most innocent sense. It would not have occurred to Oliver or to me to so much as touch each other. For the best part of a year we were inseparable. We were the two Ollys, one short and fat, the other tall and thin. I would never let on, but I was fiercely proud to be seen about with him, as if I were an explorer and he some impressively colourful and noble creature, a Red Indian chief, say, or an Aztec prince, whom I had brought back with me after long years of voyaging. In the end, one sad September, he moved with his family to some other town, far away, leaving me bereft. We vowed to keep in touch, and I think we even exchanged a letter or two, but thereafter the connection lapsed.