John Banville - The Blue Guitar

By the way, I don’t count the taking of that golf ball as theft, properly speaking. When I saw the ball I assumed it had been forgotten and left there by mistake, and was therefore fair game for anyone who thought to pick it up. The fact that I didn’t give it back to its owner, when he materialised, was due more to accident than intention. I was afraid of him, with his red face and his ridiculous trousers, afraid that if I produced the ball he would accuse me of having stolen it deliberately and might, who knows, do violence to me, cuff me about the ears or hit me with his driver. True, it’s a fine distinction between seizing the opportunity to steal a thing and being led by circumstance to make off with it, but distinctions, fine or otherwise, are not to be gainsaid.

Now Marcus launched into a new round of reminiscences, in sorrowfully doting tones, turning aside to gaze out of the window. I cleared my throat and lowered my eyes and fingered the cutlery on the table, shuffling my feet and squirming, like a martyr made to sit on a stool of red-hot iron. He spoke of his earliest days with Polly, just after they were married. He used to love just to hang back and watch her, he said, when they were at home together, and she was doing the housework, cooking or cleaning or whatever. She had a way every so often of breaking into brief little runs, he said, little short aimless dashes or sprints here and there, fleet-footed, dancingly. As he was telling me this I pictured her in my mind, seeing her as one of those maidens of ancient Greece, in sandals and cinctured tunic, surging forwards in ecstatic welcome for the return of some warrior god or god-like warrior. I tried to think if I had ever seen her do as he described, tripping blithely about my studio, under that slanting, sky-filled window. No, never. With me she did not dance.

Outside in the day, a billow of ash-blue smoke swept down from a chimney high above and rolled along the street.

I looked about the chill and cheerless room. At a dozen tables vague, overcoated lunchers were bent heavily over their plates, resembling sacks of meal stacked more or less upright, in twos and threes. On a small triangular shelf high up in one corner there was a stuffed hawk under a bell-jar, I think it was a hawk, some kind of bird of prey, at any rate, its wings folded and haught head turned sharply to the side with beak downturned. Come, terrible bird, I silently prayed, come, cruel avenger, alight on me and gnaw my liver. And yet, I thought, and yet how fierce — how crested, plumed and fierce! — was the fire I stole.

I blinked, and gave a sort of shiver. I hadn’t noticed Marcus falling silent. He sat with his stricken gaze still turned to the window and the day’s bright tumult outside. I looked at our plates, haruspicating the leavings of our lunch. They did not bode well, as how should they? “I don’t know Polly, now,” Marcus said, with a sigh that was almost a sob. He fixed me with those poor pale eyes of his, weakened by years of minuscule work and bleared still from the brandy. “I don’t know who she is any more.”

Some sins, not perhaps the gravest in themselves, are compounded by circumstance. On the night she died, our daughter, Gloria’s and mine, I was in bed not with my wife but with another woman. I say woman although she was hardly more than a girl. Anneliese, her name, very nice, name and girl both. I met her — where? I can’t remember. Yes, I can, she was one of Buster Hogan’s bevy, I met her with him. How is it frauds like Hogan always get the girls? Assuredly he was every inch the artist, impossibly handsome, with those merrily cold blue eyes, the slender fingers always carefully paint-stained, the slight tremor of the hand, the satanically seductive smile. Anneliese only went to bed with me in the hope of making him jealous. What a hope. I may style myself a cad, but Hogan was, and no doubt still is, the nonpareil. That was in the Cedar Street days. Silly, irresponsible time, I look back on it now with a queasy shudder. No good telling myself I was young, that’s no excuse. I should have been devoting myself to work instead of mooning around after the likes of Buster Hogan’s girls. Il faut travailler, toujours travailler. I sometimes wonder if I lack a fundamental seriousness. Yet I did work, I did. Tremendous application, when the fever was on me. Learning my trade, honing my craft. But what happened to me, how did I lose myself? That’s not a question, not even a rhetorical one, only a part, a verse, a canticle, of the ongoing jeremiad. If I don’t lament for myself, who will?

Olivia, our daughter was called, after me, obviously. Ponderous name for a baby, but she would have grown into it, given time. It was a great shock when she arrived: I had wanted a boy, and hadn’t even considered the possibility of a girl. A hard birth it was, too — Gloria did well to survive it. The child didn’t, not really. She seemed healthy at first, then not. Game little thing, all the same. Lived three years, seven months, two weeks and four days, give or take. And that’s how it was: she was given and, shortly thereafter, taken.

I didn’t know she was dying. That’s to say, I knew she was going to die, but I didn’t know it would be that night. She went quickly, in the end, surprising us all, giving us all the slip. How did they find me? Through Buster, probably: it would have amused him to tell them where I was and what I was up to. It was the middle of the night, and I was asleep in Anneliese’s bed with one of Anneliese’s amazingly heavy legs, as heavy as a log, thrown across my lap. The telephone had to ring a dozen times before she woke up, groaning, and answered it. I can still see her, sitting on the side of the bed in the lamp-light with the receiver in her hand, pushing away a strand of hair that had caught in something sticky at the corner of her mouth. She was a thick-set girl, with a nice roll of puppy-fat around the waist. Her shoulders gleamed. Let me linger there in that last moment before the fall. I can count, if I wish, each delicate knob of leaning Anneliese’s spine, from top to bottom, one, and, two, and, three, and—

Every few yards along the seemingly endless corridors of the hospital there were nightlights set into the ceiling, and as I flitted from pool to pool of dim radiance I felt as if I were myself a faulty light-bulb, flickering and flickering and about to go out. The children’s wing was overcrowded — a measles epidemic was in full swing — and they had put our little girl in an adult ward, in an adult-sized bed, off in a corner. It was dim there, too, and as I hurried through the room I confusedly imagined that the patients reposing on either side of me were in fact corpses. A lamp had been rigged up where the child was, and Gloria and a person in a white coat were leaning over the bed, while other vague figures, nurses, I suppose, and more doctors, stood back in the shadows, so that the whole thing looked like nothing so much as a nativity scene, lacking only an ox and an ass. The child had died a minute or two before my arrival, had, as Gloria told me afterwards, just drifted away with a long, ragged sigh. Which meant, we both were determined to believe, that she had not suffered, at the end. I stumbled to my knees at the bedside — I wasn’t entirely sober, there’s that to confess to as well — and touched the moist brow, the slightly parted lips, the cheeks on which the bloom of death was already settling. Never knew flesh so composed and unresponsive, never before or since. Gloria stood beside me with her hand resting on the top of my head, as if she were conferring a blessing, though I suppose she was just holding me steady, for I’m sure I was listing badly. Neither of us wept, not then. Tears would have seemed, I don’t know, trivial, let’s say, or excessive, in bad taste, somehow. I felt so odd; it was like suddenly being an adolescent again, awkward and clumsy and cripplingly at a loss. I got to my feet and Gloria and I put our arms around each other, but it was no more than a perfunctory gesture, a grapple rather than an embrace, and brought us no comfort. I looked down at the child in that big bed; with only her head on show, she might have been a tiny perished traveller sunk to the neck in a snowdrift. From now on, all would be aftermath.