John Banville - The Blue Guitar

It has always seemed to me that one of the more deplorable aspects of dying, aside from the terror, pain and filth, is the fact that when I’m gone there will be no one here to register the world in just the way that I do. Don’t misunderstand me, I have no illusions about my significance in the torrid scheme of things. Others will register other versions of the world, countless billions of them, a welter of worlds particular each to each, but the one that I shall have made merely by my brief presence in it will be lost for ever. That’s a harrowing thought, I find, more so in a way even than the prospect of the loss of self itself. Consider me there that night, under that strew of gems on their cloth of purple plush, having been set upon out of nowhere by love and gazing all about me with my mouth open, noting how the starlight laid sharp shadows diagonally down the sides of the houses, how the roof of Marcus’s car gleamed as if under a fine skim of oil, how the fox fur of Polly’s collar bristled in burning tips, how the roadway darkly shone with frosted grit and the outlines of everything glimmered — all that, the known and common world made singular by my just looking at it. Polly smiling, Marcus vexed, Gloria with her fag, the parcel of people behind me coming out of the Clockers in a burst of drunken hilarity, their breath forming globes of ectoplasm on the air — they would all see what I saw, but not as I did, with my eyes, from my particular angle, in my own way that is as feeble and imperceptive as everyone else’s but that is mine, all the same: mine, and hence unique.

Marcus finished whatever it was he had been doing to the car’s plumbing and straightened up and shut the bonnet with a bang that seemed to make the night draw back in alarm. Muttering about carburettors and wiping his hands down his long narrow flanks he got behind the wheel and pressed the starter crossly, and with a cough and a wheeze the machine shuddered into life. He sat there with the door open and one foot on the pavement, revving the motor and listening to the poor brute’s arcing wails. I like Marcus, really, I do. He’s a decent fellow. I think he regards himself in somewhat the way that Gloria regards me, as all right in general but fundamentally hapless, susceptible of being put upon, and more or less risible. As he sat there, his ear cocked to the sounds the engine was making, he kept shaking his head in rueful fashion, smiling tightly to himself, as if the breakdown were just the latest in a series of small, sad misfortunes that had been dogging him all his life and that he seemed incapable of avoiding. Ah, Marcus old chap, I’m sorry for everything, truly I am. Odd, how hard it is to say sorry and sound convincing. There should be a special, exclusive mode in which to frame one’s regrets. I might bring out something on the subject, a manual of handy hints, or even a style-book: An Alphabet of Apologies, A Sampler of Sorrys.

Gloria and I got into the back seat, me behind Polly, where she sat in front beside Marcus. I could smell the cigarette smoke on Gloria’s breath. Polly was laughing and complaining of the cold, and indeed, observed from where I sat, with her round dark glossy head sunk in that fur collar, she might have been a plump little Eskimo squaw all bundled up in sealskins. As we glided through the silent streets I watched the brooding houses and shut shops as we passed them smoothly by, trying to keep my mind off Marcus’s maddeningly slow and cautious driving. Pierce’s Seed & Hardware, Cotter’s the Chemist, Prendergast’s the Pie Emporium, the hovel once inhabited by the legendary midwife Granny Colfer, with its squinting bull’s-eye panes — an eyesore! — wedged between the Methodist Hall and the many-windowed meeting rooms of the Ancient Order of Foresters. Miller the Milliner, Hanley the Haberdasher. My father’s print shop, as was, with my studio above, also as was. The Butcher. The Baker. The Candlestick-maker. Why ever did I come back and settle here? When a youth, as I’ve remarked, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. Gloria says it’s because I was afraid of the big world and so retreated to this little one. She may be right, but not wholly so, surely. I feel like an archaeologist of my own past, digging down through layer after layer of schist and glistening shale and never reaching bedrock. There’s the fact, too, the secret fact, that I foresaw myself cutting a new figure in the old place, lording it in my big cream-coloured house up there on Fairmount — Hangman’s Hill, it was previously called, until the Town Council voted, wisely, to change the name — with the world I was supposed to be afraid of making its way in fealty to my door. I would be like Picasso in Vence, or Matisse at the Château de Vauvenargues, though I ended up more like poor Pierre Bonnard, held in hen-pecked captivity in Le Cannet. Instead of honouring me, however, the town thought me a bit of a joke, with my hat and cane and gaudy foulards, my overweening demeanour, my golden, young and utterly undeserved wife. I didn’t mind, so charmed was I to be back among the scenes of childhood, all magically preserved, as if sunk in a vat of waterglass and kept specially for me, in confident and patient expectation of my inevitable homecoming.

Main Street was deserted. The Humber lumbered along in the wake of the twin beams of its headlights, grumbling to itself. A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads. First twinge of jealousy. More than a twinge. What were they talking about? Nothing. Isn’t that what people always talk about when there are others around to overhear them?

Next thing I knew there was something scrabbling at my knee, and I would have given a squeak of fright — it was entirely possible Marcus’s ancient motor would have rats — but when I looked down I saw the glimmer of a hand and realised it was Polly who had got hold of me there. Without giving the slightest sign of movement she had managed to reach her arm through the gap between the door and her seat, on the side where Marcus wouldn’t see, and was fondling my kneecap in a manner that was unmistakable. Now, this was a surprise, not to say a shock, despite all that had gone on between us at the table earlier. The fact is, whenever I made an overture to a woman, which I seldom did, even in my young days, I never really expected it to be entertained, or even noticed, despite certain instances of success, which I tended to regard as flukes, the result of misunderstanding, or dimness on the part of the woman and simple good fortune on mine. I’m not an immediately alluring specimen, having been, for a start, the runt of the litter. I’m short and stout, or better go the whole hog and say fat, with a big head and tiny feet. My hair is of a shade somewhere between wet rust and badly tarnished brass, and in damp weather, or when I’m by the seaside, clenches itself into curls that are as tight and dense as cauliflower florets and stubbornly resistant to the fiercest combings. My skin — oh, my skin! — is a flaccid, moist, off-white integument, so that I look as if I had been blanched in the dark for a long time. Of my freckles I shall not speak. I have stubby arms and legs, thick at the tops and tapering to ankle and wrist, like Indian clubs only shorter and chubbier. I entertain a fancy that as I get older and my girth increases these stubs will steadily retract until they have been absorbed altogether, and my head and thick neck will flatten out too, so that I’ll be perfectly spherical, a big pale puffball to be bowled along at first by kindly Gloria and then, after she has lost heart, by a stern, white-clad person in rubber soles and a starched cap. That anyone, especially a sensible young woman of the likes of Polly Pettit, should take me seriously or give the slightest credence to what I had to say is still to me a matter for amazement. But there I was, with my knee being felt by this very Polly, while her husband, hunched forwards all unknowing at the wheel, with his nose nearly touching the windscreen, drove us slowly homewards, in his old pumpkin of a car, through this lustrous and suddenly transfigured night.