John Banville - The Blue Guitar

I went to him and put a hand on his shoulder, which immediately drooped, as if under an immense weight. I took it as a good sign that he didn’t wrench himself furiously away from my touch. I asked again what was the matter, and he hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side, like a wounded and baffled bull. Behind the smell of his wet clothes and soaked hair I caught a trace of something else, raw and hot, which I recognised as the smell of sorrow itself — a smell, I can tell you, and a state, with which I am not unfamiliar. “Come along, old chap,” I said, “tell me what’s up.” I noted with a quiver of shame how calm and avuncular I sounded. He didn’t reply, but moved away from me and began pacing the floor, grinding the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. Terrible to say, but there’s something almost comic in the spectacle of someone else’s heart-sickness and sorrow. It must be to do with excess, with operatic extravagance, for certainly those old operas always make me want to laugh. Yet what a truly desolated figure he cut, stalking stiff-legged from the window to the door and wheeling tightly on his pivot and coming back, then wheeling round and tormentedly repeating the whole manoeuvre all over again. At last he halted in the middle of the floor, looking about as if in desperate search of something.

“It’s Polly,” he said, in a voice feathery with pain. “She’s in love with someone else.”

He paused to frown, seemingly amazed at what he had heard himself say. I realised I had been holding my breath, and now I let it out in a slow, soundless gasp.

Someone. Someone else.

Marcus once more cast about the room helplessly, then fixed his stricken gaze on me in a kind of mute beseeching, like a sick child looking to a parent for relief from its pain. I licked my lips and swallowed. “Who,” I asked — croaked, rather—“who is it she’s in love with?” He didn’t reply, only shook his head in the same dull, wounded way that he had done a few moments ago. I hoped he wasn’t going to start pacing again. I considered getting out the brandy that I keep in a cupboard behind bottles of turps and tins of linseed oil, but thought better of it: If we started drinking now, who could say what it would lead to, what tormented revelations, what stammered confessions? If ever there was a time for a clear head, this was it.

Drooping again, as if physically as well as emotionally exhausted, Marcus crossed to the sofa, unwound his glasses from behind his ears, and sat down. I winced inwardly, thinking of all the times Polly and I had lain together on those stained green cushions. I was sweating, and kept digging my nails spasmodically into my palms. A faint continuous tremor, like an electrical current, was running through me. When he is excited or upset Marcus has a way of winding his long legs around each other, hooking one foot behind an ankle, and joining his hands as if for prayer and thrusting them between his clenched knees, a pose that always makes me think of that sign outside chemists’ shops showing the Rod of Asclepius coiled about by a serpent. Twisted up like that now he began to talk in a slow, toneless voice, gazing blankly before him. It was as if he had escaped some natural calamity unscathed in limb but numb with shock, which was, come to think of it, the case. I was glad I was standing with the window behind me, since from where he sat he would not be able to make out my face clearly: it would have been quite a sight, I’m sure. He said that for a long time now, for many months — all the way back to last Christmas, in fact — he had suspected that things were not right with Polly. She had been behaving in strange ways. There was nothing definite he could have pointed to, and he had told himself he was imagining things, yet the niggle of doubt would not be stilled. Her voice would trail off in the middle of a sentence and she would stand motionless, with something forgotten in her hand, lost in a secret smile. She had become increasingly impatient with Little Pip. One day, he said, when she was in a hurry to go out she had screamed at the child because she was refusing to lie down for her nap, and in the end she had thrust the mite into his arms and told him he could look after her since she was sick of the sight of her. As for her attitude to him, she swung between barely restrained irritation and overblown, almost cloying, solicitude. She was sleepless, too, and at night would lie beside him in the dark, tossing and sighing for hours, until the bedclothes were knotted around her and the bed was steaming with her sweat. He had wanted to confront her but hadn’t dared to, being too much in fear of what she might tell him.

Above me the rain was whispering against the window-panes with stealthy, lewd suggestiveness.

But what had happened, I asked, again convulsively licking my lips that by now had gone dry and cracked, what was it exactly that had happened to convince him that Polly was betraying him? He gave a despairing shrug, and corkscrewed himself around himself more tightly still, and began rocking backwards and forwards, too, making a soft, crooning sound, limp strands of damp hair hanging down about his face. There had been a fight, he said, he couldn’t remember how it had started or even what it had been about. Polly had shouted at him, and had gone on shouting, as if demented, and he had — here he faltered, aghast at the memory — he had slapped her face, and his wedding ring, of all things, had cut her cheek. He held up a finger and showed me the narrow gold band. I tried to picture the scene but couldn’t; he was talking about people I didn’t know, violent strangers driven by ungovernable passions, like the characters in, yes, in a particularly overblown operatic drama. I was simply unable to imagine Polly, my shy and docile Polly, shrieking in such fury that he had been goaded into hitting her. After the slap she had put a hand to her face and looked at him without a word for what seemed an impossibly long time, in a way that had frightened him, he said, her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together in a thin, crimped line. He had never known such a look from her before, or such a silence. Then above their heads a wailing started up — the fight had taken place in Marcus’s workshop — and Polly, white-faced except for the livid print of his hand on her cheek and the smear of blood where his ring had cut her, went away to tend the child.

I felt as if a hole had opened in the air in front of me and I was falling into it headlong, slowly; it was a not entirely unpleasurable sensation, but only giddy and helpless, like the sensation of flying in a dream. I have known the feeling before: it comes, a moment of illusory rescue, at the most terrible of times.

“What am I going to do?” Marcus pleaded, looking up at me out of eyes that burned with suffering.

Well, old friend, I thought, feeling suddenly very weary, what are any of us going to do? I went and opened the cupboard. Prudence be damned — it was high time to break out the brandy.

—

We sat side by side on the sofa and between us over the space of an hour drained the bottle, passing it back and forth and swigging from the neck; when we started it had been at least half full. I was sunk in silence while Marcus talked, going over the highlights of the story — the legend! — of his life with Polly. He spoke of the days of their courtship, when her father had disapproved of him, though the old boy would never say why; snobbery, Marcus suspected. Polly was not long out of school and was helping on the farm, keeping chickens and in the summer selling strawberries from a stall at the front gate, for the value of land had fallen, or some such, and the family had subsided into a state of genteel penury. Marcus had finished his apprenticeship and was in the employ of an uncle, whose watch-repair business in time he would inherit. Polly, he said, his voice shaking with emotion, was everything he could have hoped for in a wife. When he began to speak of their honeymoon I braced myself, but I needn’t have worried: he’s not a man to share the kind of confidences I feared, even with the friend he thought me to be. He couldn’t have been happier than he was in those early days with Polly, he said, and when Little Pip came along it had seemed his heart would burst from such an excess of bliss. Here he broke off and struggled to sit upright and tears welled in his eyes, and he gave a great hiccupy sob and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. His grief was grief, all right, lavish and unconstrained, yet, as I couldn’t help noticing with interest, it might as well have been a kind of euphoria: all the signs of it were the same.