John Banville - The Blue Guitar

“I fell in love with you on the spot,” she said, with a happy sigh, her breath running like warm fingers through the coppery fur on my bare chest.

By the way, why do I keep speaking of her as little? She’s taller than I am, though that doesn’t make her tall, her shoulders are as broad as mine, and she could probably floor me with a belt of one of her hard little — there I go again — fists if she were sufficiently provoked, as surely she must have been, repeatedly.

Last night I had a strange dream, strange and compelling, which won’t disperse, the tatters of it lingering in the corners of my mind like broken shadows. I was here, in the house, but the house wasn’t here, where it is, but on the seashore somewhere, overlooking a broad beach. A storm was under way, and from the downstairs window I could see an impossibly high tide rolling in, the enormous waves, sluggish with the weight of churned sand, tumbling over each other in their eagerness to gain the shore and dash themselves explosively against the low sea wall. The waves were topped with soiled white spray and their deeply scooped, smooth undersides had a glassy and malignant shine. It was like watching successive packs of maddened hounds, their jaws agape, rushing upon the land in a frenzy and being violently repulsed. And in fact there was a dog, a black and dark-brown alsatian, muzzled, its haunches very low to the ground, which the eldest of my three brothers, become a young man again, was setting off with on a walk. I tried to attract his attention through the window, since I was concerned at his being out in such weather, without even an overcoat, but either he didn’t see me or he pretended not to notice my urgent signalling. I wonder what it all meant, or why it has been haunting me since I woke from it, with a fearful start, at dawn. I don’t like that kind of dream, tumultuous, minatory, fraught with inexplicable significance. What have I to do with the sea, or with dogs, or they with me? And, besides, my brother Oswald, poor Ossie, will be a decade dead come Christmas.

Polly was, and no doubt still is, a great dreamer, or at any rate a great talker about her dreams. “Isn’t it strange,” she used to say, “how much goes on inside our heads while we’re asleep?”

I recall another day, in the first weeks of the new year, when we were again lying together languidly inert on the lumpy sofa with the studio’s big sky-filled window slanting over us, and she told me of a recurring dream she had about Frederick Hyland. This didn’t surprise me, though I did feel a touch dispirited. It seems that every woman — with the exception of Gloria, and I can’t even be sure of her — who has so much as caught a glimpse of him dreams about Freddie, otherwise known as the Prince, which is what the town calls him, in a spirit of irony: we are great mockers of men, especially of land-rich ones who until recently were our lords and masters around here. Freddie is the sole and, as seems inevitable, last male representative of the House of Hyland. Neurasthenic, infinitely hesitant, a figure of unfathomable melancholy, he rarely appears in the town, but keeps to the seclusion of Hyland Heights, as his house is ponderously called — in fact it’s a small, ordinary and rather shabby country mansion built on a hill, with a blurred coat of arms emblazoned on a weathered stone escutcheon above the front door and an inner courtyard where long ago Otto Hohengrund-cum-Hyland, the daddy of the dynasty, to whose design the place was built, used to put his imported Lipizzaners through their fancy paces. Freddie’s two unmarried sisters keep house for him. They also are rarely seen. There is a man attached to the place, one Matty Myler, who drives into town at the start of each month in the family’s big black Daimler to purchase provisions and to pick up, discreetly, from the back door of Harker’s Hotel, two crates of stout and a case of Cork Dry Gin. The spinster sisters must be the tipplers, for Freddie is known to be a man of temperate habits. Maybe it’s his very limpness that women love him for.

I’ve met him many times, old Freddie, but he keeps forgetting who I am. I had a curious and distinctly unnerving encounter with him one day shortly after I had returned to the town and settled in my fine house on Fairmount Hill — far finer, I may say, than Hyland Heights. The yearly fête was being held, and a big marquee had been put up in a field lent for the occasion by Freddie himself. There was to be a raffle in aid of the squadrons of technological workers who in recent years have been laid off — how pleasant in these times the world is without the incessant false-teeth clatter of those now obsolete little communication machines it required so many drones to manufacture in their so many millions — and in a burst of public-spiritedness I had contributed a set of sketches as first prize in the draw. Freddie had consented to open the event. He stood on a makeshift dais in the way he does, with one shoulder up and his head inclined at a pained angle, and spoke, or sighed, rather, a few barely audible phrases into a microphone that squeaked and whistled piercingly, like a bat. When he had finished he surveyed the crowd with a strained, uncertain gaze, then stepped down to a scattering of manifestly sarcastic applause. Shortly afterwards, making my way to the temporary jakes at the back of the tent — I had drunk three glasses of vinegary wine — I encountered him emerging from one of the cabins, buttoning his flies. He wore a three-piece tweed suit with a watch chain across his midriff, and brown brogues the toecaps of which glowed like freshly shelled chestnuts — he’s a great admirer of the sartorial style of our gentlemen cousins across the sea, and when he was young used to sport a monocle and even for a time a handlebar moustache, until his mother, who had the carriage of a Prussian general and was known as Iron Mag, made him shave it off. At his throat was that floppy article of dark-blue silk, a cross between a cravat and a necktie, which it seems he invented for himself and which the more epicene young men of the town, I notice, have discreetly adopted as a badge of their confederacy. We stopped, the two of us, and confronted each other somewhat helplessly. An exchange of words seemed called for. Freddie cleared his throat and fingered his watch chain in a vague and agitated fashion. From a distance he looks much younger than his years, but up close one makes out the dry, greyish pallor of his skin and the fine fan of wrinkles radiating from the outer corner of each eye. I made to pass by, but noticed him giving me a closer look, as a gleam of recognition dawned in his ascetic’s long, coffin-shaped face. “You’re the painter chap, aren’t you?” he said. That stopped me. His voice is thin, like a wisp of wind rustling in the blue pine-tops of a snow-clad forest, and he has a slight stammer, which Polly fairly swoons over, of course. He said he had taken a look at my drawings while he was waiting for things to be set up for his speech. I replied politely that I was pleased he had noticed them, thinking the while with a guilty pang of my poor dead father, glaring down at me from one of the lesser halls of Valhalla. “Yes yes,” Freddie said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I thought they were very interesting, very interesting indeed.” There was a tense pause as he cast about for a more telling formulation, then he smiled — beamed, even — and shot up an index finger and arched an eyebrow. “Very inward, I should say,” he said, with an almost roguish twinkle. “You have a very inward view of things — would you agree?” Startled, I mumbled some reply, but again he wasn’t listening, and with a curt but not unfriendly nod he stepped past me and walked off, looking pleased with himself and whistling, faintly, tunelessly.