John Banville - The Blue Guitar

I was more than startled: I was shaken. In a handful of words, and in a tone of mild, amused raillery, he had struck to the heart of the artistic crisis in the toils of which I was even then writhing, which was

—

Caught, by God! Or by Gloria, at any rate, which in my present state of guilty dread amounts to much the same thing. She has guessed where I’m fled to. A minute ago the telephone in the front hall rang, the antiquated machine on the wall out there the palsied belling of which I hadn’t heard in years, and which I had thought was surely defunct by now. I started in fright at the sound of it, a ghostly summons from the past. At once I rushed from the kitchen — I’ve been using the old wooden table under the window for a writing desk — and snatched the earpiece from its cradle. She spoke my name and when I didn’t answer she chuckled. “I can hear you breathing,” she said. My heart in its own cradle was joggling madly. I’m sure that even if I had wanted to speak I wouldn’t have been able to. I had thought I was so safe! “You’re such a coward,” Gloria said, still amused, “running home to Mother.” My mother, I might have told her coldly, has been dead for nigh on thirty years, and I’ll thank you not to speak mockingly of her, in however oblique a fashion. But I said nothing. There really wasn’t anything I could say. I had been run to earth; collared; caught. “Your boss telephoned,” she said. “He wondered if you were dead. I told him I didn’t think so.” She meant Perry Percival, Perry short for Peregrine. Some name, isn’t it? Not real, of course, I made it up, like so much else. Calling him my boss is Gloria’s idea of a joke. Perry is — how should I describe him? He runs a gallery. We used to make a lot of money for each other. He was the last person I wanted to see or hear from just now. I made no comment, waiting for something more, but Gloria was silent now, and at last, slowly, with a soundless sigh, I replaced the earpiece — when I was a child it always reminded me of a tiddlywinks cup — clipping it on its hook beside the Bakelite horn, the thing for speaking into. It looked absurd, that little horn, sticking out like that, like a mouth thrust out and pursed in amazement, or shock. You see how for me everything is always like something else? — I’m sure that’s part of why I can’t paint any more, this shiftingness I see in all things. The last one who had used that phone was my father, when he called to tell me he had been to see the doctor, and what the sawbones had said. Probably a trace of him is inside the receiver even yet, a few Godley particles he breathed into it that day, in one of the first of his last breaths, and that lodged there, and linger still, more tenacious than he ever was himself.

Will she come here, Gloria, and beard me in my lair, I whose beard has been tugged so sorely and so often in recent times? The possibility of it leaves me in a trembling funk — what a coward I am — and yet, oddly, I feel a little fizz of excitement, too. At bottom one longs, I say it again, to be seized upon and captured.

—

In Polly’s dream of the Prince, which recurs three or four times a year, so she says, he comes to her for tea. When I heard this I laughed, which was a mistake, of course, and she took offence and sulked for the rest of the afternoon. The dream-tea that she lays on for her illustrious caller, according to her, is really a children’s game, with a toy tea-set and cut-out squares of cardboard for sandwiches and buttons for cakes. I enquired mildly at what point in the proceedings does His Princeliness get round to making a grab at her, and she laughed and crooked a forefinger and struck me on the breastbone with a very hard knuckle and said it wasn’t that kind of dream — yes, I didn’t say, and I suspect he’s not that kind of man, either, not that kind at all. Instead I apologised and at length she grudgingly forgave me. After all, she and I also were at play.

When she told me her dreams — and the one with Freddie the Prince in it was by no means the only one I heard about in detail — her face would take on an expression of somnambulant concentration, which had the effect of intensifying her slight squint. Despite my protestations to the contrary, perhaps I am being unchivalrous in harping on her imperfections, if I am harping on them. But that’s the point: it was precisely for her imperfections that I loved her. And I did love her, honestly. That’s to say, honestly, I did love her, not I did love her honestly. How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint. She has rather short legs, and calves that a person less well-disposed than I am might say were fat. There are, too, her pudgy hands and blunt fingers, and that slight jelly-wobble in the pale flesh on the undersides of her upper arms. Indulge me, I am, was, a painter, I notice such things. But these were, I insist, the very things I treasured in her, just as much as her shapely bottom and cherishably cockeyed breasts, her sweet voice and glossy grey eyes, her geisha’s little delicate feet.

I can tell you, it was a great shock to me when Marcus found out about us — found out half of it, anyway — but, strangely enough, it was the one thing I hadn’t expected, not from that quarter, certainly. For many months I’d lived in terror of Gloria getting wind of what was going on, but Marcus I thought altogether too dreamy and distracted, too deeply enmeshed in his miniaturised world of mainsprings and flywheels and pinhead-sized rubies, to notice that his wife was canoodling with a strange man, who was, however, did he but know it, not strange at all, or not, at least, a stranger.

It was to me that Marcus came, of course, one horrendously memorable rainy autumn day, which seems a very long time ago but isn’t at all. I was in the studio, pottering about, scraping dried paint off palettes, cleaning already clean brushes, that sort of thing. It was all I did there now, by way of work, in my latterly sterile and idle state. Good thing Polly wasn’t with me: I would have had to hide her under the sofa. Marcus came stamping up the stairs — the studio has a separate street entrance beside the laundry — and banged so loudly on the door I thought it might be the police, if not the avenging angel himself. Certainly I didn’t expect it to be Marcus, who is not normally the stamping or the banging type. It was raining outside, and he wore no coat, only the leather jerkin he works in, and he was drenched, his thinning hair dark with wet and plastered to his skull. At first I thought he was drunk, and in fact when he had barged past me into the room the first thing he did was to demand a drink. I ignored this and asked what the matter was. I had difficulty keeping my voice steady, for I was guessing already what the matter must be. “The matter?” he cried. “The matter? Ha!” There were raindrops on the lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. He strode to the window and stood looking out at the rooftops, his arms bent at his sides and his fists clenched and turned inwards, as if he had just come from boxing someone’s ears. Even from the back he looked distraught. By now I was certain he had found out about Polly and me — what else would have him in such distress? — and I had begun desperately to search for something I might say in my defence as soon as he started to accuse me. I wondered if I was going to get hit, and found the prospect oddly gratifying. I pictured it, him taking a swing at me and my grabbing hold of him and the two of us tottering about, grunting and groaning, like a pair of old-style wrestlers, then toppling over slowly in each other’s arms and rolling on the floor, first this way, then that, with Marcus shouting and sobbing and trying to get his hands around my throat or to gouge out my eyes while I pantingly protested my innocence.