John Banville - The Blue Guitar

Gloria asked where I had been all night, not to accuse or complain, but absently, almost. I can’t remember what lie I told her. Maybe I told her the truth. It would hardly have mattered, if I had, and probably she wouldn’t have heard me, anyway.

What I want to know, and can’t know, is this: Was she aware that she was dying, our daughter? The question haunts me. I tell myself she couldn’t have known — surely at that age a child has no clear idea of what it is to die. Yet sometimes she had a look, distant, preoccupied, gently dismissive of all around her, the look that people have when they are about to set off on a long and arduous journey, their minds already off in that distant elsewhere. She had certain absences, too, certain intermittences, when she would become very still and seem to be trying to listen to something, to make out something immensely far-off and faint. When she was like that there was no talking to her: her face would go slack and vacant, or she would turn aside brusquely, impatient of us and our noisiness, our fake cheerfulness, our soft, useless hectoring. Am I making too much of all this? Am I giving it a spuriously portentous weight? I hope I am. I would wish she had gone blithely unaware into that darkness.

I could have told Marcus, there in the awful place that used to be Maggie Mallon’s, could have told him about the child, about the night she died. I could have told him about Anneliese, too. It would have been some sort of confession, and the idea of me in bed with a girl might have jogged him enough to make him see the immediate thing he wasn’t seeing, the real thing that I should have been confessing to. I would have been relieved, I think, had he guessed what I was keeping from him, though only in the sense of being relieved of an awkward and chafing burden — I mean, it wouldn’t have made me feel better, only less loaded down. I certainly wouldn’t have expected catharsis, much less exoneration. Catharsis, indeed. Anyway, I said nothing. When we left the Fisher King my unconsoled friend muttered a quick goodbye and walked off with his hands plunged in his pockets and his shoulders sloped, the very picture of dejection. I stood a minute and watched him go, then I too turned away. The weather had changed yet again, and the day was clear and sharp now with a quicksilver wind blowing. Season of fall, season of memory. I didn’t know where to go. Home was out of the question — how could I look Gloria in the eye, after all that had passed between Marcus and me? One of the things I’ve learned about illicit love is that it never feels so real, so serious and so gravely precious as at those moments of breathless peril when it seems about to be discovered. If Marcus were to tell Gloria what he had told me, and Gloria were to put two and two together — or one and one, more accurately — and come to a conclusion and confront me with it, I would break down on the spot and confess all. I could lie to Gloria only by omission.

There was something in my pocket, I took it out and looked at it. I had pinched a salt cellar from the restaurant table, without noticing. Without even noticing! That will show you the state I was in.

I set off for the studio, having nowhere else to go. The wind was shivering the puddles, turning them to discs of pitted steel.

Someone, Marcus had said, someone: so I was safe, so far, in my anonymity. I felt as if I had fallen under a train and by the simple expedient of lying motionless in the middle of the track had been able to get up, when the last carriage had hurtled past, and clamber back on to the platform with nothing more to show from the misadventure than a smudge on my forehead and a persistent ringing in my ears.

When I left the town for the first time all those years ago, to seek my fortune — picture me, the classic venturer, my worldly possessions over my shoulder in a handkerchief tied to a stick — I took certain choice things away with me, stored in my head, so that I might revisit them in after years on the wings of memory — the wings of imagination, more like — which I often did, especially when Gloria and I went to live in the far, bleached south, to keep myself from feeling homesick. One of those treasured items was a mental snapshot of a spot that had always been for me a totem, a talisman. It was nowhere remarkable, just a bend in a concrete road on the side of a hill leading up to a little square. It wasn’t what could be called a place, really, only a way between places. No one would have thought to pause there and admire the view, since there wasn’t one, unless you count a glimpse of the Ox River, more a trickle than a river, down at the foot of the hill, meandering along a railed-off culvert. There was a high stone wall, an old well, a leaning tree. The road widened as it rose, and had a tilt to it. In my recollection it’s always not quite twilight there, and a greyish luminance suffuses the air. In this picture I see no people, no moving figures, just the spot itself, silent, guarded, secretive. There is a sense of its being removed, somehow, of its being turned away, with its real aspect facing elsewhere, as if it were the back of a stage set. The water in the well plashes among mossed-over stones, and a bird hidden in the branches of the languishing tree essays a note or two and falls silent. A breeze rises, murmuring under its breath, vague and restless. Something seems about to happen, yet never does. You see? This is the stuff of memory, its very lining. Was that what I was looking for in Polly: the hill road, the well, the breeze, the bird’s faltering song? Can that be what it was all about? I’ll be damned. Polly as the handmaid of Mnemosyne — the notion never occurred to me, until now.

Let me try to tease this out.

Or no, please, no, let me not.

Anyway, it was to that spot I retreated after leaving Marcus, and tarried there a while, listening to the wind in the leaves and the well-water tinkling. I wished that some god would come and transform me into laurel, into liquid, into air itself. I was shaken; I was fearful. The end of my world was nigh.

I went to the studio, my last refuge indoors. Not much of a refuge, though, for I found Polly waiting for me at the top of the steep stairway. She had no key — prudently, I had not let her have one, despite her repeated hints and, as time went on, increasingly resentful demands — but the launderer’s wife had let her in downstairs. She was sitting sideways on the top step, leaning with her shoulder against the door and hugging her knees to her chest. When I had climbed the stairs — scaffold, I nearly wrote — she leaped up and embraced me. She is in general a warm-blooded girl but today she was fairly on fire, and trembling all over and gasping rather than breathing; it might have been a bolting colt that had flung itself into my arms. She had a hot smell, too, fleshy and humid, almost the same smell, it seemed, of teary distress, that I had caught from Marcus earlier. “Oh, Oliver,” she said in a muffled wail, her mouth squashed against the side of my neck, “where were you?” I told her, in an undertaker’s tolling tone, my guts clenching, that I had been to lunch with — wait for it — with Marcus! At once she reared back, holding me at arm’s length, and stared at me horror-struck. I noticed the mark over her cheekbone from Marcus’s wedding ring; it wasn’t much of a cut but the skin around it was livid. “He knows!” she cried. “He knows about us — did he tell you?”

I swerved my eyes away from hers and nodded. “He told me about you, ” I said. “Me, he doesn’t seem to know about.” Ghastly though the moment was, I’m ashamed to say that I could feel a stirring in my blood — how coy we are — what with the sultry smell she was giving off and the pressure of her hips against mine. The first time I got a girl into my arms and rubbed myself against her — never mind who she was, let’s spare ourselves all that — what startled me and excited me deeply, however paradoxical it may sound, was the absence at the apex of her legs of anything except a more or less smooth, bony bump. I can’t think what I had expected to be there. I wasn’t that innocent, after all. Somehow, though, it was the very lack that seemed a promise of hitherto unimagined and delightful explorations, insubstantial transports. How fantastic they were, my dreams and desires. It’s bound to be the same for everyone. Or maybe it’s not. For all I know, the things that go on inside other people may bear no resemblance whatever to what goes on in me. That is a vertiginous prospect, and I perched up there all alone in front of it.