John Banville - The Blue Guitar

It was Dodo, of all people, who had planted the first faint suspicion. Her mention of a picnic, witlessly uttered, so it seemed at the time, nevertheless lodged in my mind like a small hard sharp seed, one that soon put out a snaking tendril, the first shoot of what would become a luxuriant, rank and noxious flowering. I took to the back roads of the town, stumping along in my long coat, hands clamped behind my back — picture Bonaparte, on Elba — brooding, speculating, calculating, above all picking over my memory for clues on which to feed my hardening conviction that things were going on of which hitherto I had known nothing, or to which at any rate I had blinded myself. What had happened, what really had happened, among the four of us, that long-ago day in the park, in the sunlight and the rain? Had I been so busy registering Polly and storing her away for the future, as a spider — my God! — would parcel up a peacock-green and gorgeously glistening fly, that I hadn’t noticed the selfsame thing going on elsewhere? The trouble with thinking back like that, trying to unravel the ravelled past, was that everything became uncoupled — ha! — and half the effort I had to make was merely to fall into step with myself and get straight to where I did not want to arrive at. Even the threads of my syntax are becoming tangled.

“You could say,” Gloria said, picking her words, I saw, with slow deliberation, “that we came to an understanding. Neither of us spoke of it, that day, the day of the picnic, and not for a long time afterwards, not for years, and then only when there was due provocation.”

“Due provocation?” I said, spluttering. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

The things my fancy forces on me! — it’s Bonaparte’s sudden popping up a couple of paragraphs past that leads me now to see myself, in that momentous confrontation, got up in a cutaway coat and tight white breeches and an even tighter, double-breasted sailcloth waistcoat that bulges over my portly little belly and gives to my cheeks an apoplectic shine, as I strut up and down in front of my preternaturally composed wife, a greasy forelock falling over my bulbous brow and the Grande Armée crowding outside the door, shoving and sniggering. In fact, the door was made of glass, and no one was out there. We were in the Winter Garden, that vast, glorified greenhouse erected for the public’s delight by one of Freddie Hyland’s philanthropic forebears, atop another of the town’s low hills — looking eastwards from up here we could see, across a mile of jumbled roofs, the wintry sun, already getting ready to set, tenaciously ashine in the windows of our own house on Fairmount. The Winter Garden afforded us the solitude so necessary for the kind of wrangle we were having, for the place is always deserted: from the first the town considered it a laughable nonsense, and bad for the health, too, in those tubercular days, because of the dampness and the dank air inside. In the time of the Hylands’ hegemony, news of Friday-night lay-offs at one or other of the family’s mills or factories would sweep through the town, like a wind-driven flame, and when darkness fell, gangs of newly unemployed labourers would tramp in a muttering mob up Haddon’s Hill and surround the defenceless folly and smash half of its panes, which on Saturday morning the Hylands, with characteristic, weary fortitude, would cause to be replaced, by paid squads of the very same workers who had broken them the night before.

“You’re completely hopeless,” my wife said. She was looking at me, not unkindly, with the barest shadow of a smile. “You do realise that, don’t you? I mean, you must.”

The day was cold, and here inside, the glass walls were engreyed with mist through which bright rivulets of moisture ran endlessly downwards, so that we seemed to be in a lofty hall hung all round by great swathes of bead curtain, silvery and glistening. There were old gas-jets fixed high up on the struts of the timber frame. Someone long ago had etched the legend Hang the Krauts into one of the panes, with a diamond ring, it must have been, and instantly I pictured Freddie Hyland dangling comically from one of the metal struts above us here, his eyes popping and his blue tongue sticking out.

I said to Gloria that I didn’t know what she was talking about, and that I suspected she didn’t, either. Was she saying, I demanded, that for years, for years and years, since that day of the picnic in the park, she and Marcus had been — what? Secret lovers? “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” she said, throwing up her chin and laughing. Recently I had begun to notice that new laugh of hers: it is a cool, metallic sound, rather like the chiming of a distant bell coming over the fields on a frosty day, and must be, now that I think of it, the counterpart to that cold small smile of Marcus’s that Polly had described to me so memorably. I was sweating now, and not just because of the steamy warmth in here. I imagined the two of them together, my wife and my erstwhile friend, discussing me, he smiling and she with her new, tinkling laugh, and I felt a stab of the clearest, purest anguish, so pure and clear that for a second it took my breath away. Always there awaits a new way of suffering.

“And besides,” Gloria said, “you have a nerve, preaching at me about secret lovers.”

We had progressed into the Palm House, a grand name for what is only one end of the building cordoned off behind glass screens. It is a gloomy, claustral space inhabited by towering growths more like animals than plants, with leathery leaves the size of an elephant’s ears, and wads of thick hairy stuff around their bases that make it seem as if their socks have fallen down. Gloria was seated on a low stone bench, smoking a cigarette, leaning forwards a little with her legs crossed and an elbow propped on one knee. I could not understand how she could be so calm, or seem to be. She was wearing her big white coat, the one that I dislike, with the conical collar. I felt, here in this humid, hot and fetid place, as if I had toppled out of a high window and yet were suspended somehow, on a strong updraught, and would in a moment begin the long plunge earthwards, the air shrieking in my ears and the ground spinning towards me at a dizzying and ever-accelerating rate. Yet I wanted to laugh, too, out of some crazed and suffering urge.

“You should have told me,” I said. I’m sure I was wringing my hands.

“Told you what?”

“About the picnic. About you and’—I thought I would choke on it—“about you and Marcus.”

At this she did again her little laugh. “There was nothing to tell,” she said, “then. Besides, I saw you ogling Polly that day, that day years ago, trying to see up her dress.”

“What are you saying?” I expostulated — yes, I did a lot of expostulating that day. “You’re imagining things!”

I could sense those huge-eared creatures at my back, those elephantine trees; they would forget nothing of what they were hearing, the news of my downfall at last.

“Look, the only thing that happened,” Gloria said patiently, as if setting out yet again to try to explain something complicated to a simpleton, “is that we realised we were soul-mates, Marcus and I.”

I felt as if some heavy, soft thing inside me had flopped over with a squelch. “What,” I cried thickly, “you and that long streak of misery?” Name-calling, as you see, was the level I had come to; it hadn’t taken long. “And soul-mates?” I said, with another tremor of disgust. “Do you know how much I despise that kind of thing?”

“Yes,” she said, giving me a level look, “I do.”

I stepped past her and with the side of my fist made a spy-hole in the fogged glass wall. Out there, a scoured sky, and a lead-pink fringe of clouds along the horizon that looked like the stuffing squeezing out of something. There always seem to be clouds like that, even on the clearest days; always it must be raining somewhere. I turned to speak again to my wife, where she sat with her back towards me, but found I couldn’t, and stood helpless, gaping at the pale glimmer of her bared, leaning neck. She twisted round and looked at me over her shoulder. “How did you find out?” she asked.