John Banville - The Blue Guitar

“About what?”

“About the picnic, so-called.”

“Which one?”

She tightened her mouth at me. “I’d hardly mean the one all four of us went on, would I?”

I said someone must have seen them together, her and Marcus. “Of course,” she said, amused. “That was inevitable, I suppose, given what this place is like.” Now she looked at me more closely, frowning, seeming suddenly concerned. “Come,” she said, patting the empty place on the bench beside her, “come and sit down, you poor man.”

It’s only in dreams that things are inevitable; in the waking world there is nothing that cannot be avoided, with one celebrated exception. That had always been my experience, up to now. But the way she did that, patting the bench and calling me “poor man,” heralded an inevitability that would not be fudged.

“Tell me the truth,” I said, slumping down beside her.

“I’ve told you all there is to tell.” She dropped the stub of her cigarette at her feet and trod on it deftly with the heel of her shoe. “Whoever the someone was who saw us can’t have seen much. I took along a bottle of your wine, and Marcus had some awful sandwiches he had bought somewhere. We went out to Ferry Point, and I parked on that place above the bridge. We talked for hours. I got terribly cold. You should have seen my knuckles, how red they were.”

I should have seen her knuckles.

“This was when?” I asked, sinking deeper and almost cosily into my newly hatching misery.

“Just after you ran off and Marcus realised what had been going on,” she said, in a hardened voice. “I had known for ages, of course.”

“What do you mean, ages?”

“From the start, I think.”

“And you didn’t mind?”

She thought about this, leaning forwards again and jiggling the toe of one shoe. “Yes, I minded,” she said. “But I shed all the tears I had when the child died, and so there weren’t any left for you. Sorry.”

I nodded, gazing at my hands. They looked like someone else’s: gnarled, rope-veined, discoloured.

“If you knew,” I said, “why didn’t you tell him?”

“Marcus?”

“Yes, Marcus. Seeing you were such soul-mates.”

She made a sort of bridling movement inside her coat. “I thought he knew, too. We never spoke about you, or Polly, not until after you had run away.”

“And then? Did you speak of us then?”

“Not much.”

I was looking at a giant palm that towered over us, like a frozen green water-spout, displaying itself in all its baroque and ponderous grandeur. The infolded fronds, as broad at their broadest as native canoes, were thickly burnished, and scarred, where they leaned low, with the hieroglyphs of ancient graffiti. Such a weighty thing it was, held there at what seemed a suffering stance, and yet weightless, too. The tension of things: that was always the most difficult quality to catch, in whatever medium I employed. Everything is braced against the pull of the world, straining to rise but grounded to the earth. A violin is always lighter than it looks, strung so tensely on its strings, and when you pick it up you feel it wanting to rise out of your hand. Think of an archer’s bow in the instant after the arrow has flown, think of the twang of its cord, the spring of its arc, the shudder and thrum all along its curved and tempered length. Did I ever achieve anything of that litheness, that air-aspiring buoyancy? No, I think. My things were always gravid, weighed down with the too-much that I expected of them.

“Polly doesn’t know, does she?” I asked. I sounded like a bankrupt enquiring mournfully if at least his front door is still on its hinges.

“About what?”

“This supposed second picnic that you and Marcus went on.”

“I don’t know what Polly knows,” she said. She breathed a sort of laugh. “Polly is busy frying other fish.”

Fish, I didn’t ask, what fish? No, I didn’t ask. I would press no further. There was a limit to the number of whacks I could take from this particular cudgel.

I said that all that there had been between Polly and me was ended; it hadn’t been much, anyway, when measured against the general scale of things. “Yes,” Gloria said, nodding. “And between Marcus and me, whatever it was or wasn’t, that’s done, too.”

I got up and went and stood at the glass again, and again looked out over the town. The sun we see setting is not the sun itself but its after-image, refracted by the lens of the earth’s atmosphere. Make some lesson out of that, if you will; I haven’t the heart.

“What shall we do now?” I asked.

“We shall do nothing,” my wife answered, drawing her coat tightly about her, despite the damp heat pressing down all round. “There’s nothing for us to do.”

And she was right. Everything had been done already, though even she didn’t know yet, I think, what all of that everything would entail. Why is it life’s surprises are nearly always nasty, and with a nastily comical edge, just for good measure?

—

I walked out one day recently to Ferry Point and scrambled up the steep slope of the hill there, through thickets of gorse, still in blossom, and bristling stands of dead fern stalks, very sharp and treacherous. I fell down repeatedly, tearing my trousers and grazing my knees and ruining my absurdly unsuitable shoes — whatever became of those boots I borrowed from Janey at Grange Hall? By the time I had scaled the height I felt like Billy Bunter, smarting and bruised after yet another of his hapless scrapes. Poor Billy, everyone laughs at him though I cannot understand why: he seems so sad to me. The hill up there is flat, as if the top of it had been sliced clean off, leaving a wide, circular patch of clayey ground where very little grows, even in summer, except scrub grass and thistles and here and there a solitary poppy, self-conscious and blushing. It’s a spot much frequented by what used to be called courting couples — they drive up at night and park in front of the famous view, though scenery is hardly what is on their mind, and anyway it’s unlikely they can make out much of it in the dark. I’ve seen half a dozen cars at a time up there, ranged side by side, like basking seals, their windows steamed up; no sound comes from them, for the most part, though now and then one or other of them will begin to rock on its springs, gently at first but with increasing urgency. Loners come here too, sometimes. They park well away from the others, their cars seeming bathed in a deeper kind of darkness. Their windscreens stare out blackly into the night, in mute desperation, while in the darkness behind the glossy glass the burning tip of a single cigarette flares and fades, flares and fades.

The view is magnificent, I grant that. The estuary, a broad sheet of stippled silver, stretches off to the horizon, with hazel woods on either side where no one ventures save the odd hunter, and, above, calm hills that fold themselves neatly under the edges of the sky. Over here, on this decapitated height, there is the stump of a ruined tower, like a snapped-off finger pointing in furious recrimination at the sky; in Norman times it must have stood guard over the narrow ford in the river below, spanned now by the old iron bridge that is due to collapse any day, by the rickety look of it. That’s where the farmer in his lorry picked me up that night of storm and flight, how many months ago? Not more than three — I can hardly believe it! Marcus just missed that bridge, on his way down.

Winded still and panting, I sat on a mossy rock under the side wall of the tower. What had brought me up here? It was a place of singular, no, of manifold significance. This was where Marcus and my missus held their first tryst, on that second picnic, drinking my wine and eating Marcus’s awful sandwiches. Was it by day, or at night? By day, surely: even secret lovers wouldn’t go on a picnic after dark, would they? I imagined Gloria’s knuckles, red from the cold. I imagined her lifting up her face, smiling, with her eyes closed. I imagined a wisp of Marcus’s hair falling forwards, stirred by her breath. I imagined the car rocking on its springs.