John Banville - The Blue Guitar

I pause here to say that I never got the hang of being an exile. I don’t think anyone does, really. There’s always something smug, something complacently self-conscious, about the expat, as he likes to style himself, in his offhand way, with his baggy linen jacket and battered straw hat and his sun-bleached, sinewy wife. And yet once you go away, and stay away for any extended length of time, you never entirely return. That was my experience, at any rate. Even when I left the south and came back here, to the place I started out from and where I should have felt the strongest sense of being myself, something, some flickering yet intrinsic part of me, was lacking. It was as if I had left my shadow behind.

Is Perry a fraud? He certainly looks and sounds like one, but examine any soul closely enough and you’ll soon see the cracks. For all that he may be a bit of a crook, he has an eye. Put him in front of a picture, especially a picture in progress, and he will fix on a line or a patch of colour and shake his head and make a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “There’s the heart of the thing,” he will say, pointing, “and it’s not beating.” He is always right, I find, and many’s the bloodless canvas I stabbed with the sharp end of a brush on the strength of his strictures. Then he would shout at me for wasting all that work, saying pointedly that it wouldn’t have been the first flawed piece of mine that he, or for that matter I, had ever offered for sale. Barbs like that went in deep, and lodged fast, I can tell you. Well: if I’m the pot, he is surely the kettle.

“How is your friend?” Gloria asked him. “I can’t remember his name. Jimmy? Johnny?”

“Jackie,” Perry said. “Jackie the Jockey. Oh, he died. Horrible business.” He rolled a mournful eye. “Don’t ask.” He mused a while. “You know all these nasty new germs are coming from outer space, don’t you?”

Gloria was smiling through the windscreen at the rain. “Who says that, Perry?” she enquired, glancing at me in the driving-mirror.

Perry shrugged, arching his eyebrows and drawing down the corners of his wide mouth, thereby taking on a momentary and startling resemblance to Queen Victoria in her failing years. “Scientists,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “Doctors. All the people who know.” He sniffed. “Anyway, the germs got Jackie, wherever they came from, and he died.”

Poor Jackie, I remembered him. Young, swarth, good-looking in a ravaged sort of way. Huge eyes, always slightly feverish, and a mass of curls, shiny as black-lead, tumbling on his forehead; think of Caravaggio’s sick young Bacchus, though less fleshy. He wasn’t a jockey — I don’t know how he came by the nickname, though I suppose I might hazard a guess. He was a filcher, like me; unlike me, he stole for gain. He and Perry were together for years, the unlikeliest pair. I should say that besides a succession of catamites, of which Jackie had been the latest one that I knew of, Perry also had, and has, a wife. Penelope is her name, though she is known, improbably, as Penny. She is a large, muscular, relentless woman, and I have always been a little afraid of her. Strange thing, though: when we lost the child, it was to Perry and his mighty missus that Gloria fled for shelter and succour. I never got to the bottom of that one. She stayed with them for a month and more, doing who knows what, crying, I suppose, while I solitarily stewed in Cedar Street, reading a vast study of Cézanne and every evening drinking myself into a stupor.

Cézanne, by the way, has always been a bone of contention between Perry and me, though the marrow should have been well sucked out of it by now. Perry thinks the master of Aix unsurpassed, I suspect for all the wrong reasons, while I have always resented him. I see the greatness, it’s just that I don’t like the things it produced. I confess I’m quietly at one with the old codger in certain matters, such as his insistence that emotion and what-have-you cannot be expressed directly in the work but must exude, like a fragrance, from form at its purest. I’m certainly with him there — see my own things, seriatim, through the years. They called me cold because they were too dense to feel the heat.

When we got to the house Perry dropped his leather flying helmet on the hall table, where it subsided slowly like a deflating football, draped his airman’s overalls on the back of a chair, and retired for a lengthy session to the downstairs lavatory, from which there issued upon the air a pulsating, spicy stink that would take a good quarter of an hour to disperse. Then, lightened and refreshed, he came bustling into the kitchen, where Gloria was preparing the pot of herbal tea he had ordered. He drew forwards a chair and sat as close up to the stove as he could get, rubbing together his little neat white hands. “I’m so cold,” he said. “My blood is thin. I’ve started taking regular transfusions, did I tell you? There’s a place in Chur I go to.”

Gloria, pouring water into the teapot, laughed. “Oh, Perry,” she cried delightedly, “you’ve become a vampire!”

“Very amusing,” Perry said stiffly.

Over his tisane he talked of this and that, who was selling, who was buying, how the market was behaving; to my ear, he might have been gossiping of the latest dealings on the Rialto, or assessing the state of the silk trade in Old Cathay. At one point in the tittle-tattle he paused and looked at me sternly. “The world is waiting on you, Oliver,” he said, wagging a finger.

Was it? Well, it could wait.

Gloria made an omelette, discarding the yolk of the eggs, at Perry’s behest, and using only the whites. It was his latest fad to eat only colourless foods, chicken breast, sliced pan, milk puddings, suchlike. Nor would he drink anything other than tea. He really is a wonderful type, as he would say, with a click of the tongue and a smacking of the lips, in the Frenchified manner that he affects. He is for me, now, the very breath of a lost, a relinquished, world, a place distant and quaint, like the background of a Fragonard, or one of Vaublin’s dusky dreamscapes, a place I know well but happily know I shall never return to.

“And how goes the work?” he asked, getting down to business. He was seated at the head of the table with a napkin tucked into the collar of his exquisite, iridescent, dragonfly-blue shirt. He looked at my blank face and sighed. “I presume you are about the making of some grand new masterpiece, hence the long silence.” That’s how he speaks, really, it is. “This is the reason I’m here, after all, to view the state of the edifice.”

Crumbling at the base, Perry, crumbling at the base.

“Olly is still on his sabbatical from work,” Gloria said. “From life, too.”

I threw her an injured look, but wasn’t she right, about me and life and the living of it? The truth is, I think, I never started to live in the first place. Always I was about to begin. As a child I said that when I grew up, that would be life. Next it was the death of my parents I secretly looked forward to, thinking it must be the birth of me, a delivery into my true state of selfhood. After that it was love, love would surely do the trick, when a woman, any woman, would come along and make a man of me. Or success, riches, bags of banknotes, the world’s acclaim, all these would be ways of living, of being vividly alive, at last. And so I waited, year on year, stage after stage, for the great drama to commence. Then the day came when I knew the day wouldn’t come, and I gave up waiting.

Just remembered: last night that dream again, of me as a giant snake trying to swallow the world and choking on it. What can it mean? As if I didn’t know. Always the disingenuous pose.

Perry glanced at his watch again, and frowned: France awaited, France and his dining companion too important to name.