John Banville - The Blue Guitar

I am afraid of the dark, as you would expect. It’s another of my childish afflictions that I’m ashamed of, but there seems no cure for it. Even when there are people about me I feel I’m alone in my private stygian chamber of horrors. I pretend to be at ease, stepping stoutly forwards into the sightless void and cracking jokes along with the rest, but all the while I’m desperately holding in check the terrified, thrashing child within. So you can imagine how I felt now, standing there, in my vest and drawers, draped in a blanket, with an essential part of me poking out of the window, goggling in speechless terror at this awful apparition looming before me in the barely penetrable gloom. It didn’t move, it made no sound. Was I imagining it, was I seeing things? I stepped away from the window and drew my blanket protectively around me. Should I approach the ghostly figure, should I challenge it— What art thou that usurp’st this time of night? — or should I take to my heels and flee? Just then on the floor below a door opened and a light came on, faintly illuminating a narrow set of stairs to my right that I hadn’t known was there. “Who’s that?” Polly called up querulously, and the shadow of her head and shoulders appeared on the wall in the stairwell. “Mother, is that you?” It was, it was her mother, there in the dark before me. “Please, come down.” I could tell from the tremor in her voice that she had no intention of venturing up the stairs, for she, too, fears the dark, as I know, bless her heart. “Please, Mummy,” she said again, in a babyish, lisping voice, “please come down.” Mrs. Plomer was watching me with a lively surmise, frowning slightly yet ready to smile, as if I were an exotic and potentially fascinating creature she had chanced upon, amazingly, at dead of night, in the upper reaches of her own house. And I suppose, with the blanket clutched around me and my bare feet and furry little legs on show, I must have had something of the aspect of one of the smaller of the great apes, improbably decked out in drawers and vest and some sort of cape, or else a fallen king, perhaps, witlessly wandering in the night. Why did I not speak — why did I not give Polly a sign that I was there? After some moments her silhouette sank down on the wall, and the light was quenched as she shut the bedroom door.

I know there are no norms, although one speaks, and lives, as if there were, but there are certain rare occasions when even the extremest limits seem to have been exceeded. Standing in a conspiratorial hush in close proximity to one’s lover’s demented mother in a pitch-dark attic corridor in the middle of a freezing late-autumn night, cowering under a blanket in one’s underwear, surely counts as such an instance of exceeded plausibility. Yet despite the unlikeliness of being there, and taking into account my dread of the darkness, a darkness that seemed deeper than ever after Polly had shut her door and the light went out, I felt almost cheerful — yes, cheerful! — and full of mischief, like a schoolboy off on a midnight jape. It was interesting, almost exhilarating, to be in the company of a person who was harmlessly mad. Not that I could be said to be in Mrs. Plomer’s company, exactly; in fact, that was the point, that what was there was someone and no one, simultaneously. I fell to puzzling over this curious state of affairs, and I puzzle over it still. Was it that for a brief interval I was allowed entrance to the charmed if sombre realm of the half-mad? Or was I simply harking back, yet again, to the obscure echo-chamber that is the past? For there was definitely something of childhood in the moment, of childhood’s calmly uncomprehending acceptance of the incommensurability of things, and of the astounding but unremembered discovery, a discovery that I, like everyone else, must have made in my infancy, at the very dawn of consciousness, namely, that in the world there is not just me, but other people as well, uncountable, and unaccountable, numbers of them, a teeming horde of strangers.

Only now, as my eyes adjusted and I began to be able to make her out again, did I take note of what Mrs. Plomer was wearing. She had on her wellingtons, of course, and a long, heavy cardigan with drooping pockets over a man’s old-fashioned collarless striped shirt. What was most remarkable, however, was her skirt, which wasn’t really a skirt but an affair like an upside-down cone, assembled, or constructed, rather, from many overlapping petticoats of stiff gauze, the kind of garment that in my young days girls used to wear under tightly belted summer dresses, and that on the dance-floor would balloon outwards and up, sometimes rising so high, if we spun the girl fast enough, that we would be given a heart-stopping glimpse of her frilly bloomers. Draped thus in her motley, Mrs. Plomer reminded me not so much of the summer girls of my youth as of one of those figures in a medieval clock-tower, biding there in the gloom, waiting for the ratchets to engage and the mechanism to jerk into motion, so that she might be trundled out to enjoy another of her quarter-hourly half-circuits in the light of the great world’s regard. She was still watching me — I could see the glint of her eyes, crafty and vigilant. She had given no sign of having heard Polly when she called to her up the stairs; perhaps she had heard, but suspected it was part of a ruse, in which I was complicit, aimed at ensnaring her and winkling her out of her hiding place, and therefore to be firmly ignored. For I did have the impression that she thought herself to be in hiding here, though from whom or what I couldn’t guess — she probably didn’t know herself. What should I do? What could I do? It began to seem I might be held there all night, in thrall to this deranged and silent apparition in her rubber boots and her improvised tutu. In the end it was she who made the decisive move. She stirred herself and came forwards, with a quick, exasperated sigh — obviously she was of the opinion that even if I was a conspirator I was risibly hesitant and patently inept and not to be feared in the least — and stepped past me with a rustle of tulle, brushing me to one side. I watched her make her way down the stairs, her stooped, cardiganed back seeming to express blank dismissiveness of me and all I might represent. I waited a moment, and heard Polly opening her door again, and again the light from the room behind her fell at an angle along the wall, and there again was the shadow of her head, like one of Arp’s stylised, elongated ovals.

I followed Mrs. Plomer down the stairs. I couldn’t, in all conscience — what a phrase — have remained in hiding any longer. Polly saw me over her mother’s shoulders and her eyes widened. “It’s you!” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You gave me a fright.” I said nothing. It seemed to me that instead of being frightened she was making an effort not to laugh. She had on a thick wool dressing-gown, and was, like me, barefoot. I hitched the blanket more closely about me and gave her what was meant but surely failed to be a lofty glare. I must indeed have looked like Lear, returned from the heath and sheepishly not dead from sorrow. “Come along,” Polly said to her mother, “you must go back to bed now, you’ll catch your death.” She led her away, glancing back at me and indicating with a sideways dip of her head that I was to go into her bedroom and wait for her.

The air inside the room was thick with sleep. The fire in the grate had died and left behind an acrid resinous reek. Under the light of the lamp the bedclothes were thrown back in what seemed an artful way, as if someone like me — someone, that is, like I used to be — had arranged them just so, in preparation for the model who, disrobing now behind a screen, would in a moment appear and drape herself against them in the pose of an overripe Olympia. You see, you see what in my guilty heart I hanker after? — the bad old days of the demi-monde, of silk hats and pearly embonpoint, of rakes and rakesses astray on the boulevards, of faunish afternoons in the atelier and wild nights on the sparkling town. Is that the real, shameful, reason I took up painting, to be the Manet — him again — or the Lautrec, the Sickert, even, of a later age? Polly came back then, no Olympia but a reassuringly mortal creature, and the room was just a room again, and the rumpled bed the place where she had been innocently asleep until two desperate night wanderers had awakened her.