John Banville - The Blue Guitar

“That reminds me,” Polly said now, though it was plain from her manner — intent yet distracted, wanting to be gone but detained by one last task — that whatever it was she was going to say had been on her mind from the start. “I wonder,” she said, flexing a hand and frowning at the tensed back of her glove, “if you would have the dog. Barney, I mean. They really can’t manage him any more, and I suspect Janey kicks him when no one is looking.” She took a step towards me with a bright little smile of entreaty, a smile such as I would never have thought her capable of. “Oh, don’t say no, Olly,” she said. This, I remember thinking, is the last time I shall ever hear her speak my name. She advanced another step, somehow contriving to soften further the light in her opal-grey eyes and making them glow. “Will you take the poor chap?” she said, putting on a lisping, baby voice. “Please?” I made to rise, flailing about on the sofa’s squashy old springs, and at last got myself up with a great grunt and stood before her slightly asway. I must have nodded, or she must have thought I had, for she clapped her hands happily and thanked me in a breathy rush, and came on yet another pace, fairly beaming now, and even puckering up her lips to give me what no doubt would have been a grateful peck on the cheek. I retreated before her in a panic, until I was stopped by the back of my calves pressing against the edge of the sofa’s cushions. I think if she had so much as touched me, even if only with one of those gloved fingers, I would have broken into a myriad of tiny fragments, like a wine glass shattered by a soprano’s frantic trillings. Then in a second she was gone, and I listened to the flurry of her footsteps descending the stairs, and heard the front door shutting. I imagined her running across the road, in that knock-kneed way that she did, her coat flying. I shuffled forwards, until I was standing in the patch of air where she had stood, and I lifted my head and drew in a slow, deep breath. She could change anything about herself except her smell, that mingled faint fragrance of butter and lilacs. They say an odour can’t be recalled; they are wrong.

I crossed to the table and picked up the little glass mouse and squeezed it so hard in my hand that the broken tail pierced my palm and made it bleed. A stigma! — just the one, but enough to be going on with, for now.

—

So there it is. Gloria will have a child, Polly has her prince, and I get a dying dog. It seems a not inappropriate outcome, you’ll agree. Barney, the poor old fellow, is lying right here at my feet, or on them, as usual. He is heavy, the weight of mortality is upon him. His breathing, rapid and hoarse, is like the sound of a clockwork engine, slightly rusted and with a faulty piston, racing along towards that moment when it will abruptly stop, with a final brief falling sigh. At intervals the engine does pause, but only to facilitate the shedding of one of those deceptively quiet farts the stench of which engreens the air, an awful, stomach-turning and yet endearing memento mori. I’ve trained myself to listen for that ominous caesura, and hurriedly vacate the room before what I know will inevitably follow. As I scramble for the door the dog lifts his big square head and casts after me a glance of weary contempt. Mr. Plomer, Polly’s father, handed him over to me outside the ornate front door of Grange Hall at sunset one January eve, thanking me over and over as he did so, desperately smiling and seeming not to notice the tears that welled up on his eyelids and fell like so many quick drops of mercury through the twilit air, scattering dark stains the size of sixpences on the sleeve of his ancient tweed coat. Of Mrs. P. there was no sign, for which I must say I was thankful.

I had thought Gloria would object to my taking the dog, but on the contrary she finds it richly funny that I should be encumbered with him, and whenever her eye falls on the brute she smiles and bites her lip and shakes her head in wonderment. “Well, at least you can be thankful that she didn’t leave Pip with you,” she said. Her swelling belly is hardly noticeable yet. We still haven’t decided what to do. I suspect we shall do nothing, as we always do, as I suspect everyone does; all decisions are made in retrospect. If Gloria does require me to leave, which she may yet do if I don’t behave myself, I might go and live with Olive and Dodo. I could hew wood, and draw water, and be a perfect Caliban. As for Olive and her friend, I imagine those two would hardly notice me, toiling away there in the garden, or sitting quietly by the stove of an evening, toasting my shins and drinking my stout and pondering the fallen glories of what used to be my life.

I have been doing some calculations. Numbers are always a distraction, even a comfort, in trying times. There was that first picnic, in the park, when without realising it I fixed my spider’s hungry eye on Polly, and Marcus and my wife became, as Gloria would have it, soul-mates, whatever that required and involved. Years passed, four at least, until at the Clockers that glistening December night I tumbled into full-blown love with Polly — let’s call it love, anyway. Then she and I were together for, what, nine months, a little more? Yes, it was the following September when the storm broke, and I fled. It must have been then, just then, that Marcus and Gloria left their souls aside and became mates in the properest, improper, sense of the word, hence my wife’s burgeoning condition. But what I want to know is, when exactly did Freddie Hyland replace me at the centre of the web and get his sticky feelers on my precious Polly? I have no right to ask, I know, and anyway there’s no one who can tell me. I doubt even Olive and Dodo know the answer to that one.

I miss Marcus, a little. It was in the closing days of November that he died, I can’t remember the date, don’t want to remember it. He had lost Polly, he had lost Gloria, he had lost me. I doubt I was a great loss to him, but one never knows. I miss him, so why shouldn’t he have missed me? The day after they hauled the car out of the water, I thought of going out to Ferry Point and throwing my father’s watch in, as a way of marking the sad occasion, but I couldn’t do it.

In my rummagings about the house in preparation for that auto-da-fé of illicitly acquired objects, I chanced upon the burlap folder my father made to contain, like a sacred relic, the portrait I did of my mother when she was dying. The canvas cover was mildewed and the Fabriano paper had gone somewhat sallow and its edges had crinkled, but the drawing itself was, to my eye, as fresh as the day I did it. How lovely she was, even in death, my poor mother. As I squatted there in the attic, musing on her image, with the soft smell of must in my nostrils and thronged around by the wreckage of the past, it occurred to me that perhaps that should be my task now, to burrow back into that past and begin to learn over again all I had thought I knew but didn’t. Yes, I might embark on a great instauration. Hardly an original endeavour, I grant you, but why should I allow that to hinder me? I never aspired to originality, and was always, even in my paltry heyday, content to plough the established and familiar furrows. Who knows, the dogged old painster might even learn to paint again, or just learn, for the first time, and at last. I could sketch out a group portrait of the four of us, linked hand in hand in a round-dance. Or maybe I’ll bow out and let Freddie Hyland complete the quartet, while I stand off to one side, in my Pierrot costume, making melancholy strummings on a blue guitar.

Why did I steal all those things? It seems unreal to me now, what I once was.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that the contemplation of my mother’s image, limned all those years ago by my own young hand, would stir sweet memories exclusively of her, but instead it was my father I found myself thinking of. One winter when I was very young, I can’t have been more than five or six, I contracted one of those mysterious childhood illnesses the effects of which are so vague and general that no one has bothered to give them a name. For days I lay half delirious in a darkened room, tossing and moaning in voluptuous distress. On doctor’s orders my brothers had been banished to sleep somewhere else in the house — I think they may even have been piled in with poor Olive — and I was left in blissful solitude with my fever dreams. The sheets on my bed had to be changed daily, and I remember being fascinated by the smell of my own sweat, a rank, stale, meaty stink, not wholly unpleasant, to my nostrils, at any rate. My mother must have been distraught — polio was rampant at the time — and certainly she was in constant attendance, feeding me on chicken broth and malt extract and mopping my burning brow with a wet face-cloth. It was my father, however, who brought me, each night, a particular and exquisite moment of tender respite when, slipping into my room last thing, he would put his hand under my head and lift it a little way in order to turn up, deftly and with remarkable dispatch, the cool side of my sodden, hot and reeking pillow. I have no doubt he knew I was awake, but it was an unspoken convention between us that I was sound asleep and unaware of the little service he was doing me. I, of course, would not let myself fall asleep until he had been and gone. What a strange thrill, half of happiness and half of happy fright, I would experience when the door opened, spreading a momentary fan of light across the bedroom floor, and the tall, gangling figure crept towards me, like the friendly giant in a fairy tale. How odd his hand felt, too, not like the hand of anyone known to me, not like a hand at all, in fact, but like something reaching through to me from another world, and my head would seem to weigh nothing — all of me, indeed, would seem weightless, and for a moment I would float free, from the bed, from the room, from my self itself, and be as a straw, a leaf, a feather, adrift and at peace on the soft, sustaining darkness.