John Banville - The Blue Guitar

In desperation I thought of returning to the gate-lodge and lying low there again for a while, but there are only so many times one can revisit scenes of childhood; the past gets worn out, worn down, like everything else.

Anyway, after I had been three or four days on the run, Gloria turned up. Don’t know how she knew I was at the studio; wifely instinct, I expect. Or maybe Mrs. Bird told her I was there. Mrs. Bird has some experience in these matters, flighty Mr. Bird being a notorious philanderer and frequent bolter. I was cleaning brushes that didn’t need cleaning when there was a tap at the door. I froze, and caught sight of myself in the big mirror over by the door of the lavatory, round-eyed with fright. I knew it couldn’t be Mrs. Bird: she would not call on me unbidden. Good God, could it be Polly, returning to give me yet another piece of her mind, or the Prince, perhaps, old sad-eyed Freddie, to slap me across the face with his driving gauntlets and call me out for pinching his precious book? I crossed to the door on tiptoe and put my ear against the wood. What did I expect to hear? Someone fuming out there, the cracking of knuckles and the impatient tapping of a foot, or maybe even the repeated slap of a truncheon into a callused palm? Deep down I have always been terrified of authority, especially the kind that comes knocking on my door in the middle of an otherwise uneventful afternoon.

Gloria, when she is not quite at ease and feels called on to show her mettle, adopts a sort of swagger that I have always found endearing, and at the same time a little sad and, I have to confess it, a bit embarrassing, too. Of course, I do not let on that I can see through her pose — that wouldn’t do: we must allow each other our little subterfuges if life is to be lived at all. So into the studio she came sashaying, not quite but almost with a hand propped insouciantly on her hip — that’s how I always see her in my mind, hand-on-hip — and gave me as she passed me by one of her wryest, most knowing, most withering, small smiles. She is at the best of times a woman of few words, a thing in which she differs markedly from me, as you will know by now. That stillness, the air she has of keeping her own counsel and of having a lot of counsel to keep, was one of the traits that attracted me to her in the first place, long ago. I suppose it lent her a certain sibylline quality. Even still I always feel, with her, that I’m in the presence of a large secret studiedly withheld. Have I said that before? Nowadays it all feels like repetition. Think I’ve said that, too. Where will it end, I want to know: the painster in a padded cell, straitjacketed and manacled to the bed, muttering in a monotone the one word over and over, me me me me me me me me me me me.

Gloria stopped in the middle of the floor, turned and stood in her fashion model’s pose, head back, chin up, one foot thrust forwards, and looked about. “So this,” she said, “is where you’re skulking now.”

Skulking? Skulking? She was trying to provoke me. I didn’t mind. I was surprised at how pleased I was to see her, despite everything, including the thick ear I was bound to get at any moment now. There was something almost playful in her manner, however, something even flirtatious. It was very puzzling, but I was glad of the glimmer of warmth, wherever it was coming from.

Yes, I had been staying here, I said, with a sniff, standing on my dignity, what shreds of it were left. Needed time to think, I said, to consider my options, arrive at some decisions. “I thought you’d come for me before now,” I said.

That elicited a dry chuckle. “Like Mummy fetching you home after school?” she said.

I had been gone, in all, for little more than a week, first at the gate-lodge, then briefly at Grange Hall, then here. What had she been doing during that time? Certainly not watching by the window with a candle lit for my return, if her scathing look and brittle manner were anything to go by.

I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times she had been to the studio, and it gave me an odd feeling to see her there now. She was wearing a big coat made of white wool. I dislike that coat: it has a deep collar, like an upside-down lampshade, inside which her head sits very high, as if it had been severed bloodlessly at the neck. She was regarding me coolly, still with a smile of amused reproach that was hardly more than a notch at one corner of her mouth. Well, I must have been a sorry sight.

“Are you growing a beard?” she asked.

“No,” I answered, “I’m growing stubble.” The bristles, I had noticed, with a shiver, in the mirror that morning, were strewn with silver.

“You look like a tramp.”

I said I felt like a tramp. She considered me in silence, rotating one foot in a half-circle on the point of its shoe’s high heel. I recalled the empty brandy bottle Marcus had dropped on the floor. What had become of it? I couldn’t remember having picked it up. What a strange, furtive life it is that random objects lead.

“Perry has been calling again,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at me in merry spite. “He’s threatening to come over.”

Perry Percival, my dealer, former dealer. I am convinced she summoned him, just to annoy me. Though Perry does have a habit of turning up out of the blue — literally, since he flies his own aeroplane, a dinky little craft, nimble and swift, with a silver fuselage and the tips of the propellers painted red. If she did call on him, what did she expect him to do, be a sort of flying stand-in for my wingèd muse? She thinks my inability to paint is a pretence, a piece of irresponsible self-indulgence. I should never have married a younger woman. It didn’t matter, at first, but increasingly it does. That dismissive briskness of hers, it can’t be borne at my age.

Soft rain was falling on the glass above our heads. I’m fond of that kind of rain. I pity it, in my sentimental way; it seems to be trying so hard to say something and always just failing.

Gloria took a slim silver case from the pocket of her coat, thumbed it open with a click, selected a cigarette, and lit it with her little gold lighter. She’s such a wonderfully old-fashioned creature, both chilly and warm, like one of those vamps in the old movies.

I was very much in need of a drink, and thought again with mournful longing of that emptied brandy bottle.

Gloria has a way, when she lights a cigarette, of drawing in the smoke very quickly between her teeth, making a sharp sound that might be a little gasp of pain. The last time we had spoken, though it could hardly be called speaking, was the day when she telephoned me at the gate-lodge. Had she talked to Marcus in the meantime? Of course she had. I didn’t care. Is there in other people too an inner, barren plain, an Empty Quarter, where cold indifference reigns? I sometimes think this region is, in me, the seat of what is popularly called the heart.

Marcus would have told her everything. I could almost hear her saying it, letting it swell in her throat and giving it a histrionic throb. He told me everything.

She turned and strolled across to the table and began picking things up and putting them down again, a brush hardened with old paint, a tube of zinc white, a little glass mouse. Watching her, I saw all at once, distantly but distinctly, as it is said patients sometimes see themselves on the operating table, the true measure of the mayhem I had caused, saw it all in all its awfulness, the operation gone fatally wrong, the surgeon swearing and the nurse in tears, and I floating up there under the ceiling, with my arms folded and my ankles crossed, surveying the shambles below and unable to feel a thing. General anaesthesia, that’s the state I’ve always aimed to live in.