John Banville - The Blue Guitar

I find myself thinking again, for no good reason, of Gloria’s potted myrtle tree, the one that nearly died. I keep calling it a myrtle but I’m sure it’s not. Worried that the parasites might return, one day Gloria decided to clip off all the leaves. She went about the task with an uncharacteristic and what seemed to me almost biblical fierceness, showing no mercy, her jaw set, until even the smallest and most tender shoots were gone. When the task was complete she had a sated air, though after-tremors of wrathful righteousness seemed to be throbbing still within her. I could not but sympathise with the poor shrub, which in its shorn state looked starkly self-conscious and sorry for itself. I have a notion that Gloria holds me in some way responsible for the thing’s plight, as if I had brought the parasites into the house, not just as a carrier of them but as their progenitor, a huge pale grub with a swollen sac that one day had burst and sprayed its countless young all over her defenceless, miniature green pet. Throughout the autumn it stood there, leafless, and seemingly lifeless, too, until a week ago, when it woke up and suddenly began putting out buds at a tremendous rate — one could almost see them sprouting. I’m not sure what to make of this unnatural profusion on the brink of winter. Maybe I shouldn’t make anything of it. Gloria hasn’t mentioned the plant’s resurgence, although I seem to detect a triumphant gleam in her eye, as though she feels herself vindicated, or somehow revenged, even, on something, or someone. She is in a very strange, high-strung mood, one that I can’t make out at all. It’s very unsettling. I keep waiting for the air to begin vibrating, for the ground to shift under my feet, although I would have thought there could be no more earthquakes, there having been so many of them already.

I leaned over the table and finished the tepid, soapy dregs of stout and put the glass down and said that I must be off. Dodo still would not look at me, and glared at the stove instead, hunching her shoulders and uttering a furious word or two now and then under her breath. In fact, they were well matched, she and the stove, and even looked dumpily a little alike, the two of them blazing away internally, muttering to themselves and sending out angry shoots of heat and smoke. I am the original anthropomorphist.

Olive came with me to the front door, and we stood a while together in the thick gold light of the latening afternoon. The wind had died down as suddenly as it had sprung up. Big tawny leaves were scratching at the pavement, and an old crow in a tree somewhere was coughing hoarsely and cursing to itself. What a memory I have, to retain so many things and so clearly; I must be imagining them. I stood with my hands plunged in the pockets of my overcoat and squinted about. Bleak thoughts in a dying season. Then, to my considerable surprise, I heard myself asking if I might come round and call here again; I don’t know what had come over me. Instead of answering, my sister smiled and looked away, doing that sideways chewing movement with her lower jaw that she does when she is amused. “You never knew, did you, how you were loved,” she said, “not in all the years, and now look at you.” I made to question this — how loved, by whom? — but she shook her head, still with that knowing, saddened smile. She put a hand to my elbow and gave me a push, not ungently. “Go home, Olly,” she said. “Go home to your wife.” Or was it life she said? — not wife but life? Anyway, I went.

However, I had gone only a little way when I heard a call and turned to see Olive running after me with something in her hand. Churning along that high pavement in her apron and cardigan and her old felt slippers, she bore with her, I saw with a shock, a whole family of resemblances: my parents were there, mother as well as father, and my dead brother, and I, too, I was there, and so was my lost child, my lost little daughter, and a host of others, whom I knew but only half recognised. This is how the dead come back, borne by the living, to throng us round, pale ghosts of themselves and of us.

“Here,” Olive, panting, said, “here’s a present for you.” She thrust a wooden crucifix into my hand. “It might bring you luck, and it’ll save you pinching one.” And she laughed.

—

The notion of an end, I mean the possibility of there being an end, this has always fascinated me. It must be mortality, our own, that gives us the concept. I shall die, and so shall you, and there’s an end, we say. But even that’s not certain. After all, despite what the priests promise us, no man or phantom has yet returned from that infamous bourne to tell us what delights or otherwise await us there, nor is likely to. In the meantime, in our fallen, finite world, anything one sets out to do or make cannot be finished, only broken off, abandoned. For what would constitute completion? There’s always something more, another step to venture, another word to utter, another brushstroke to be added. The set of all sets is itself a set. Ah, but tarry a moment. There is the loop to be considered. Join up the extremities and the thing can go on for ever, round and round. That, surely, is a sort of end. True, there’s no end-point, as such, no buffers for the train to run up against. All the same, outside the loop there is nothing. Well, there is, of course, there’s a great deal, there’s almost everything, but nothing of consequence to the thing that’s going round, since that is completed in itself, in a swirling infinity all of its own.

Wonderful, how an injection of pure speculation — never mind the questionable logic — icy-cold and colourless as a shot of opium, can deaden briefly even the worst of afflictions. Briefly.

Anyway, the prompt for today’s brief interval of mental gymnastics was the thought that at either end, at either extremity, I should say, of the particular loop I’ve been winding round my fingers, and yours — in truth, it’s less a loop than a cat’s cradle — there should happen to occur a picnic. Yes, a picnic, indeed picnics, not one but two. Cast your mind back to my mentioning, oh, ages ago, that the first encounter I could recall between the four of us, that is, Polly, Marcus, Gloria and me, was a little outing to a park somewhere that we went on together one intermittently rainy summer afternoon. I spoke of it then as a version of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, but time, I mean recent time, has mellowed it to something less boldly done. Instead, picture it, say, as a scene by Vaublin, mon semblable, nay, my twin, not in summer now but some other, more sombre, season, the crepuscular park with its auburn masses of trees under big heapings of evening cloud, dark-apricot, gold, gesso-white, and in a clearing, see, the luminous little group arranged upon the grass, one idly strumming a mandolin, another looking wistfully away with a finger pressed to a dimpled cheek — she did have dimples, Polly did, in those days — and in the foreground a chignoned blonde beauty in burnished silk, while nearby someone else, guess who, is angling for a kiss. I have purposely banished the rain, the midges, that wasp I found desperately paddling in my wine glass. They look as decorous as you like, this little band of picnickers gathered there, don’t they? Yet something about them sounds a faintly dissonant note, as if there were a string out of tune on that pot-bellied mandolin.

Your guess about the would-be covert kisser was wrong, by the way. Honestly, pas moi! — to keep on in the French mode we seem to be favouring today, due to Vaublin’s sudden apparition, I suppose.

Jealousy. Now there’s a fit subject for another of those dissertations of mine I’m sure we’re all thoroughly tired of by now. But jealousy is something I’ve only come to in these past weeks and it’s still a novelty, if that’s the way to put it. The heart’s scandal, the blood on fire, a needle in the bone, choose your formulation according to your taste. As for me, I will a round unvarnished tale deliver. Well, there’s bound to be a lick of varnish, though I’ll try to keep it to the thinnest wash. As always with these affairs— le mot juste! — one never gets to the truth entirely. Something is always elided, passed over, suppressed, a date skilfully falsified, a rendezvous presented as something it was not, a phone call almost overheard that is abruptly suspended in mid-sentence. Anyway, if one were to be offered the whole truth, unvarnished, one wouldn’t accept it, since after the first twitch of suspicion everything becomes tainted with uncertainty, bathed in a bile-green glow. I never knew the meaning of the word “obscene,” never felt the overwhelming, robed-and-mitred majesty of it, till I was forced to entertain the thought of my beloved, one of my beloveds — both of my beloveds! — pressed sweatily flesh to flesh with someone who was not me. Yes, once that losel had reared its ugly head, clamped inside its puce and glossy helmet, there was no avoiding its terrible, gloating eye.