John Banville - The Blue Guitar

Marcus, she said, had taken to ignoring her, or treating her with an icy politeness that stung more sharply than any insult or recrimination he might fling at her. He had a little smile, the faintest flicker, ironical, superior, that she was helpless to protect herself against and that made her furious and want to hit him. When he smiled like that, usually as he was turning away, and turning away was all he seemed to do now, she realised that she could come to hate him, as he seemed to hate her, and this frightened her, this violence she felt inside herself. And he, too, who had always been mild and diffident, he seemed so furious, so vengeful. On the day after I fled she fell coming down the stairs into the workroom, missed the last step and went sprawling, flopping helplessly on her front and hurting her breasts and hitting her nose on the floor and making it bleed. As she was getting herself up, big startling drops of nose-blood splashing on her blouse, she glanced across at her husband where he was sitting at his bench and caught a look of cold satisfaction in his eyes, which shocked her. Could he be so bitter towards her that he would gloat to see her there like that, on her knees, injured and bleeding?

“That terrible wind,” she said to me, “it blew for days after you went, all day and all night.” The house around her had felt like a ship running under full sail against a relentless storm. Windows creaked, fireplaces moaned, doors swung shut with a bang, their keyholes whistling. At times she could hardly distinguish between the storm outside and the sound of her own pain rearing and plunging inside her. She hid herself away in the little room above the workshop, her room, the one that had always been hers by tacit agreement between her and Marcus. She sat for hours in a rocking-chair by the window, while the child played on the floor at her feet. The salt carried in on the wind from the estuary had hazed over the window-panes, and the people in the street below her seemed like ghosts passing soundlessly to and fro.

Then, on the second or third day after I had gone, Marcus surprised her by coming up from the workshop and tapping on the door. His tap was so light she hardly heard it above the tumult of the gale outside. He had brought her a cup of tea, on a tray, with a lace doily. He asked why was she sitting in the dark but she said it was only twilight yet. “You should turn on the lamp,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. She willed him to look at her but he would not. The sight of the doily almost made her cry. He was haggard; he seemed to be as shocked as she was by this terrible thing that had burbled up between them, like foul-smelling waters from a poisoned well. He stood at the window. He had to bend forwards a little to see out, for the window was low-set and deeply recessed. He put an arm against the glass and laid his forehead on his arm and sighed. She caught the familiar smell of the watchmaker’s oil that he used in his work, a smell that was always on his fingers, even in the mornings before he had sat down to his bench. She could feel no warmth in him, no softening, no sympathy. Why had he come up, then? Little Pip was in her cot by the fireplace, lying on her back and playing with her toes, as she liked to do, cooing to herself. Marcus paid her no heed; maybe she, too, was spoilt for him. He sighed again. “I don’t know why he came back here,” he said quietly, sounding almost weary. Still he leaned there, watching the street, or pretending to.

“Who?” she asked, although she knew the answer. He didn’t say anything, didn’t look at her, only smiled his cold little wisp of a smile. So: he knew. For a second her heart lifted. “Had he seen you, I wondered, had he stumbled on you somewhere and you admitted the truth, and that was how he knew?” His knowing didn’t matter, she said, she didn’t care about that. All she cared about was the simple, momentous, overwhelming possibility that if he had seen me, if he had talked to me, it meant he might know where I had fled to, where I was to be found. But, no, she could see it from his expression that he hadn’t met me, hadn’t spoken to me, that he had guessed, that was all, just guessed, the moment I ran off, that I was his wife’s secret lover. Now it was her turn to sigh. Was he waiting for her to deny it, to insist he was mistaken, to say it was all in his imagination? She couldn’t speak, couldn’t bring herself to tell him more lies. He might as well know the truth. Maybe it was best that he should know; maybe things would be easier, that way. But still she couldn’t confess it, not out loud, in words, couldn’t say my name. Anyway, she didn’t have to. She knew he knew.

How fiercely the wind blew, how swiftly the darkness was descending, on the two of them there in that little room.

Things hadn’t got better, she said, hadn’t got easier. She didn’t think they ever would, and so she had told him, had said it straight out, not about me, no no, she would never utter my name to him but only that she was leaving him. He showed no surprise, no dismay, just looked at her in that owlish way he always used to do, in the old days, when she got angry with him, and pressed a fingertip to the bridge of his old-fashioned, round-rimmed spectacles, another of those endearingly defensive little gestures he had, all of which I knew well, as well as she did, I dare say. I wonder if we both, she and I, loved him still, even a little, despite everything. The thought just flitted into my mind, like a small bird flying up into a tree, without a sound.

He must have known already what she had decided, she said, he must have guessed that, too, guessed that she was going to leave him.

And then, she said, the strangest thing happened. Suddenly, in that moment, she sitting in the rocking-chair and Marcus at the window, suddenly she knew where it was I had run off to, where it was that I was in hiding. Of course, it was the obvious place, she said. She couldn’t understand how she had not thought of it before. And now here she was.

“You mean,” I said slowly, “you left him today, just now, before coming here?” She nodded swiftly, smiling with eyes wide and her lips tightly shut, gleeful as a schoolgirl who has run away from school. “What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m going to go home,” she said.

“Home?”

“Yes.” She coloured a little. “Go on, laugh,” she said, looking away. “It’s what wives do when they get in trouble, I know, they run home to their mothers. Not,” she added, with a forlorn little laugh, “that my mother will be of much help to me.” She paused, and took on a look of such deep and serious portent that I felt myself quailing before it; what new trial had she thought up for me, what new hoop would she produce for me to jump through? “I want you to take me there. I mean I want you to go with me. Will you? Will you take me home?”

—

She had come in Marcus’s old Humber. I was surprised, even shocked. Surely Marcus hadn’t agreed to her taking it, for he treasured that car, and tended it like a beloved pet. Had she just got in and driven away? I thought it safest not to ask; in the crater where I lay trapped that unexploded shell was still there, its pointy end lodged in the mud and its all too smooth flank brassily agleam, ready to go off at the slightest stir I might make. I watched Polly at the wheel. This was a new manifestation of her I was seeing, brusque and swift and set of jaw; it takes a full-scale calamity to smarten up a girl as easy-going as she is, or as she had been, until now. Of this unfamiliar Polly I was, I admit, wary, if not downright scared.

She had packed a suitcase for herself and had stuffed the child’s things into an old cricket bag that had belonged to her father; there was the impression of everything having been snatched up and bundled together in anxious and angry haste. She was indeed a woman in flight. I confess it was all in a small way exciting, despite my grim forebodings.