John Banville - The Blue Guitar

The hushed place I’m speaking of, the place I’m in now, is Fairmount, my noble-fronted dog-house on Hangman’s Hill, also known, by me, in secret, with unconsoling humour, as Château Désespoir. I must say, being home again is strange, despite the short time I was gone — can I really have been away only a matter of days? There’s the silence, as I say, but also my wife’s glacial calm, though the former is largely an effect of the latter. Of my precipitate departure and hangdog return she makes no mention. She doesn’t appear to be angry with me for having run off, and not a word is spoken of Polly and all that. How much does she know? Has she spoken to Marcus — has he spoken to her? I’d dearly like to know but daren’t ask. And so I am on tenterhooks. Her manner is distracted, dreamily remote; in this new version of her she reminds me, disconcertingly, of my feyly affectless mother. As we go about our day here in the house she hardly looks at me, and when she does, a slight crease forms between her eyebrows, not a frown, exactly, but a sort of ripple of perplexity, as if she can’t quite recall who I am — an echo of Polly and me in the studio mirror that day, in fact. I would say this distant demeanour is a tacit rebuke, only I don’t think it is. Maybe she has given up on me, maybe I have been banished from the forefront of her mind altogether. She is, it appears, concentrating on the future. She talks of returning to the south, to the Camargue, erstwhile home of the godless, war-loving and triumphant Cathars, where we lived for a time, more or less tranquilly. She says she misses the salt marshes down there, the enormous skies and limitless, sun-struck perspectives. There’s a house for rent in Aigues-Mortes that she’s looking into — that’s what she says, that she’s looking into it. I don’t know how seriously to take this. Does it mean she’s bent on leaving me, or is it just a taunt, intended, like her silence, to wound and worry? It was in Aigues-Mortes that we plighted our troth, sitting outside a café one sunny autumn afternoon long ago. There was a hot wind blowing, scraping the sky to a dry whitish-blue and making the sunshades in the little square crack like whips. I extended an open palm across the table and Gloria gave me her strong cool big-boned hand to hold, and there we were, plighted.

I’ve known Fairmount House since I was a child, though in those days I knew it only from the outside. A well-to-do doctor and his family lived here then, or maybe he was a dentist, I can’t remember. It was built in the middle of the eighteenth century, on the hill from where a hundred years previously my namesake Oliver Cromwell directed his forces in their infamous and vain assault upon the town. After the rout of the New Model Army and the lifting of the siege the victorious Catholic garrison hanged half a dozen russet-coated captains up here, from a makeshift gibbet erected for the purpose, on the very spot, so it’s said, where lately had been pitched the Lord Protector’s tent, before he cut and ran for home and an ignominious end. The house is foursquare and solid, and its tall front windows gaze down upon the town with a blank disregard worthy of Old Ironsides himself. I used to imagine that the life lived within these walls must surely be commensurate with such a grand exterior, that those inside must have a sense of themselves as equally grand and imposing. A childish fancy, I know, but I clung to it. I bought the place three decades later as a form of revenge, I wasn’t sure for what — perhaps for all the times I had passed by and looked up with envy and longing at those unseeing windows and dreamed of being behind them myself, in velvet smoking-jacket and silk cravat, sipping a cut-glass beaker of burgundy, thick and spicy as the blood of his ancestors, and following with a sardonic eye the progress of that small boy laboriously traversing the foot of the hill, with his satchel on his back, humped and snail-like in his grey school coat.

I hardly sleep, these days, these nights. Or, rather, I go to sleep, put under by jorums of drink and fistfuls of jumbo knock-out pills. Then at three or four in the morning my eyelids snap open like faulty window blinds and I find myself in a state of lucid alertness the equal of which I never seem to achieve in daytime. The darkness at that hour is of a special variety too, more than merely the absence of light but a medium to itself, a kind of motionless black glair in which I am held fast, a felled beast prowled about by the jackals of doubt and worry and mortal dread. Above me there is no ceiling, only a yielding, depthless void into which at any moment I might be pitched headlong. I listen to the muffled labourings of my heart and try in vain not to think of death, of failure, of the loss of all that is dear, the world with its things and creatures. The curtained window stands beside the bed like an indistinct dark giant, monitoring me with fixed, maniacal attention. At times the stillness in which I lie comes to seem a paralysis, and I’m compelled to get up and prowl in a state of jittery panic through the empty rooms, upstairs and down, not bothering to switch on the lights. The house around me hums faintly, so that I seem to be inside a large machine, a generator, say, on stand-by, or the engine of a steam train shunted into a siding for the night and still trembling with memories of the day’s fire and speed and noise. I will stop at a landing window and press my forehead to the glass and look out over the sleeping town and think what a Byronic figure I must cut, perched up here, solitary and tragic-seeming, no more to go a-roving. This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.

I suspect Gloria hates this house, I suspect she has always hated it. She consented to come back with me and settle in the town only to indulge me and my whim to be again where I was before. “You want to live among the dead, is that it?” she said. “Watch out you don’t die yourself.” Which I did, in a way, I mean as a painter, so serves me right. Rigor artis.

I wish I understood my wife a little better than I do, I mean I wish I knew her better. Despite the time that we have been together I still feel like an old-style bridegroom on his wedding night, waiting with burning impatience and not a little trepidation for his brand-new bride to let fall her chemise and loose her stays and at last reveal herself in all her blushing bareness. Can the disparity in age between us account for these blank patches? But perhaps, after all, she is not the enigma I take her to be. Perhaps behind her smooth exterior there are no seething passions, no storms of the heart, no plunging cataracts in the blood, or not ones that are unique to her. I can’t believe it. I think it’s just that sorrow for our lost child hardened about her into a carapace as impenetrable as porcelain. Sometimes, at night especially, when in the dark we lie sleepless side by side — she, too, suffers from insomnia — I seem to sense, to hear, almost, from deep, deep within her, a kind of dry, soundless sobbing.

She blames me for our daughter’s death. How do I know? Because she told me so. But wait, no, wait — what she said was that she couldn’t forgive me for it, which is quite a different thing. I hasten to say that the child died of a rare and catastrophic condition of the liver — they told me the name for it but I made myself forget it on the spot — no one could have saved her. Hard to think of such a little thing having a liver at all, really. It was years later that Gloria turned to me and said out of the blue — what blue? black, more like—“You know I can’t forgive you, don’t you?” She spoke in a mild, conversational tone, seemingly without rancour, indeed without emotion of any kind that I could register; it was simply a fact she was stating, a circumstance she was apprising me of. When I made to protest she cut me off, gently but firmly. “I know,” she said. “I know what you’ll say, only there has to be someone for me not to forgive, and it’s you. Do you mind?” I thought about it, and said only that minding hardly came into it. She, too, reflected for a moment, then nodded curtly and spoke no more, and we walked on. Very peculiar, you’ll think, a very peculiar exchange, and so it was; yet it didn’t seem so at the time. Grieving has the oddest effects, I can tell you; guilt, too, but that’s another matter, kept in another chamber of the over-full and suffering heart.