John Banville - The Blue Guitar

She went on examining the mouse. “All what time?”

“All the time we were here.”

“And I never noticed.” She nodded, making a grimace expressive of nothing in particular. Her thoughts were far away, from mouse, me, this room, the moment. She was someone else, now. I of course recalled Marcus saying, in the Fisher King that day, that he no longer knew his wife; what negative lessons love teaches us! She moved away from the table, her hands again in the pockets of her coat. “And Gloria,” she asked, in a sharper, brittler, tone, unless I imagined it, “how is she?”

“Oh, coming along,” I said. “You know.”

I was itching to ask her, of course, why she had brought me here, and what it was she had to say to me; simple curiosity is one of the stronger urges, I believe. She stopped pacing, and stood gazing down at the sofa pensively, not seeing it, I could see. Then she glanced at me sidelong, with a narrowed eye. “And will you keep the child?” she asked. “I mean, will you pretend to be the father?” It seemed to me she might laugh. I said nothing, only held out my hands on either side, helplessly; I must have looked a little like one of Olive’s half-crucified Christs.

She set off pacing again, and began to speak of Marcus’s accident — those were the words she used, his accident. She spoke slowly, keeping time with her slow steps. It was as if she were giving dictation, for the setting down of a statement that later she would have to swear to. I tried to summon up, tried to see again, the afternoons we had spent here together, rolling in each other’s arms, but that pair of lovers was another couple, as unrecognisable to me as this new Polly, taller, graver, unreachably remote, who paced before me here. Marcus had always been careless, she said, or maybe it would be better to say carefree, not taking care, anyway, for all that he loved that useless old car. Poor Marcus, she said, shaking her head. Was this, then, I wondered, why we were here, so that she could dictate her deposition to me and I might enter it into the record and close the book of evidence? When people speak, as they will, of Marcus having plunged by accident down the side of that hill at Ferry Point into the calm sea of an autumn afternoon, I become aware of a hum inside my head, a rapid and monotonous vibration that makes my skull ache and causes my eyelids to narrow painfully. A suppressed scream is what it is, I imagine. Yet as I listened to Polly, and watched her pacing in and out of the parallelogram of pallid sunlight spread across the floor under the window, I felt nothing but a tender sadness, a sympathy, almost.

Presently, I began to realise that she had stopped speaking of Marcus — perhaps she hadn’t spoken of him in the first place, perhaps I had misheard her, or imagined it — and was dealing with someone else, someone altogether other than her late husband. In fact, and amazingly, it was her next husband who was now the subject. “Of course, we won’t stay here,” she was saying, “that would be impossible, given all that’s happened.” She paused, and looked at me directly, with a clear, candidly questioning eye, in which, however, I seemed to detect a faint pleading light. “That’s so, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, we couldn’t.” But where, I enquired, playing, confusedly, for time, where was she thinking of going to? “Oh, Regensburg,” she said, not pronouncing it quite correctly, I noticed — she will have to work at mastering the Teutonic r —“where Frederick still has a family home.” She gave a little laugh. “It’s a castle, really, I think.” Then she frowned. “It will be a great change, from here.”

By now, I could see, she was a long way off, from here, and nothing I could say or do would bring her back. I sat down on the sofa, my hands resting limply, palms upwards, on my thighs. No doubt my mouth, too, was limply open, a glistening red blubber lip hanging slack and my breath coming in big, slow heaves. Regensburg! Somehow I knew that place would one day loom large in the puny catastrophe that is my life. I saw the whole thing clearly, as if laid out on a page from a Book of Hours, Prince Frederick the Great, looking stern and stupid in a fur-trimmed coat and pointed hat, being handed a lily symbolical of something or other by his lady wife in her gown of Limbourg-blue, he with his page, old Matty Myler, and she with the Hyland sisters as her maids-in-waiting, all gambolled about by unicorns, and in the distance a miniature model of the city, with its spires and pennants, its towers and nesting cranes, and high, high above the scene, framed in a golden arch, the sun’s great orb streaming out its benison in all directions.

Freddie Hyland. Oh, Freddie, with your cravat and your dandruff and your st-st-stammer. So all along you were the wolf lurking in that limpid landscape. Why didn’t I sense your bated breath? Didn’t have the wit to take you seriously. It was as simple, and simply commonplace, as that. Well, there’s a lesson I’ve learned, among others: never underestimate anyone, even a Freddie Hyland. I could have pressed Polly for details, the dates, times, places, for surely it was my right to hear them, but I didn’t. I suspect she was dying to tell me, though, not out of cruelty or vengefulness — she was never vengeful, never cruel, not even now, at the end — but simply so she could hear it spoken aloud, this extraordinary fairy-tale thing she had fashioned for herself out of what had seemed so much detritus. I could hardly object — didn’t she deserve to be happy? For she meant to be happy: I could see that in every line of her newly assumed demeanour. But Marcus, so lately dead, what of him? His name above all I would not mention, and hoped she wouldn’t speak of him again, either. I feared being presented with a set of justifications, mild, reasoned, numbered off on her fingers, by this new, tall, unnervingly composed version of the Polly I used to lie with so lovingly on this old and now so sad green sofa.

She was getting ready to go. I could see her trying to make herself feel sorry for me, or at any rate to look as if she did. I must have been a hapless spectacle, slumped there with the wind knocked out of me. But I could no longer be fitted into the world she knew: I was the wrong shape, all blunt corners and slippery sides, cumbersome and unmanageable as a piano stuck in a doorway. Besides, why would she want me, fat frog that I was, when she already had her prince?

She had buttoned her coat and was edging towards the door. She said she had stopped off here on the way to visit her parents. Her father was sick — pneumonia was suspected — and her mother was in one of her states. Leaving them behind, she said, would be the hardest thing for her to bear. She would come back often for visits, of course, but that would not be the same as being here to keep a caring eye on them. I was still splayed out before her, looking up at her dully and saying nothing. She had produced a pair of gloves made of fine dark kid, and was pulling them on, briskly wriggling her fingers into them. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a ring; I guessed she had one, though, a family heirloom, it would be, from the days of Iron Mag, with the Hohengrund arms cut into a diamond, but had slipped it off and hidden it while she was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. I had wanted her to have a ring, in the first flush of our days of love. She had laughed at the idea — how would she explain it to Marcus? I had said there were ways she could wear it without its being seen: she could keep it on a string around her neck, or sewn inside some item of clothing, I said, excited at the thought of the little gold band growing warm in the silvery gloaming between her breasts, or glinting in the shadows beneath her inner thighs. But she would have none of it, and although I didn’t show it I had been greatly disappointed and cast down.