John Banville - The Blue Guitar

I wonder if something has happened to the weather, I mean to the climate in general. I don’t pay much heed to the apocalyptic claims about the catastrophic effects those recent spectacular firestorms on the sun are having on the wobble or whatever it is in the earth’s trajectory, yet it seems to me something has changed in the decades since I was a boy. I am well aware how spurious can be the glow that plays over remembrances of childhood. All the same I recall afternoons of sun-struck stillness the like of which we don’t seem to have any more, when the sky of depthless turquoise held a kind of pulsing darkness in its zenith and the light over the felled land seemed dazed by its own weight and intensity. It was on just such a day that I at last got up the courage to penetrate Miss Vandeleur’s cluttered sanctuary, to break into her den.

I felt just now a sudden sweet rush of fondness for the little boy that I was then, in his khaki shorts and his sandals with diamond shapes cut out of the toes, standing there with his heart in his mouth, on the brink of the great adventure that his life would surely be. A mass of raw compulsions, inchoate fears, he hardly knew yet who or what he was. How quietly he closed the door behind him, how softly he trod upon those forbidden floorboards. In the summer silence the wooden walls around him creaked and the roof above him with its blistered coat of tar blubbered softly in the heat. Everything seemed alive, everything seemed to regard him with sharp-eyed attention. There was a smell of sun-bleached timbers and creosote and dust that seemed the evocative whiff of an already lost past.

As I’ve said, Miss Vandeleur was a keen collector, but she had a particular fondness for china statuettes — pink-cheeked shepherdesses and pirouetting ballerinas, blue-coated Cherubinos in powdered wigs, that kind of thing. My eye had fallen at once on a pair of these ornaments, which stood out by being twice as tall as the rest and of a more recent design. They represented a pair of society beauties from the ’twenties, slender as herons, with marcelled waves, clad, and barely clad at that, in clinging, floor-length gowns, one chlorophyll-green and the other a lovely shade of deepest lapis lazuli, the plunging necklines of which had nothing much to plunge into, their wearers being fashionably flat-chested, even to the point of androgyny. They seemed to me, with their wistful, condescending smiles and gloves that came above their boneless elbows, the very acme of elegance and jaded sophistication.

I wanted to steal them both, which just goes to show how young I was and how inexperienced in the light-fingered art, that art of which in time I was to become such an adept. Mere tyro though I was that day, however, I saw, dimly but definitely, that my greedy urge must be resisted. There was a reason, plain and obvious, though assuredly perverse, to take only one of these languid ladies. If the two of them were gone Miss Vandeleur might well not notice the loss, whereas if one remained, alone and palely loitering, the other was bound to be missed, sooner or later. You see how important it was for me, even at that earliest stage, that the theft be registered. This is why I must discount the stealing of that nice fat tube of zinc white: on that occasion I had fretted about Geppetto’s knowing I had taken it and not about the much more distressing possibility of his not knowing. And this is where the deeper, darker aspect of my passion becomes manifest. As surely I’ve said more than once by now, the rightful owner has to know he has been nobbled, though not, assuredly, who it was that did the nobbling.

Which would I take? The beauty in blue or her companion in green? There was nothing to choose between them except the colour of their gowns, for they had been formed out of identical moulds — identical, that is, except that they were mirror images, one inclining to the left while her twin inclined to the right. After much dithering, my palms moist and a trickle of sweat meandering down my spine, I settled on the left-leaning one. The green of her gown was the same shade as the dusting of leaves that tall trees put out in the earliest days of May, there was a delicate peach-pink spot on each of her cheekbones, and the overall lacquering, when I examined it closely, had a webbing of tiny cracks that were as numerous as but much, much finer than the cracks in my dead aunt’s button boots. What age was I that day? Pre-pubertal, surely. Yet the spasm of pleasure that ran along my veins and made the follicles in my scalp twitch and tingle when I folded my fist around that smooth little statue and slipped it into my pocket was as old as Onan. Yes, that was the moment when I discovered the nature of the sensual, in all its hot and swollen, overwhelming, irresistible intensity.

I still have her, my green-gowned flapper. She’s in a fragrant old cigar box tucked away in a corner of the attic here, under the eaves. I could have got in there and searched her out when I was up on the roof investigating the storm damage. Good thing I didn’t: she’d have had me on my knees with my face in my hands, sobbing my heart out in the midst of wrecked deck-chairs and stringless tennis racquets and the scent that lingers even yet of the autumn apples my father used to store up there, most of which every year went to rot before the winter was well under way.

Miss bloody Vandeleur never did miss the statuette, or if she did she never mentioned it, which would not have been like her. Yet how nimbly I had done the deed, how fearlessly — no, not fearlessly, but daringly, with unwonted bravery — I had entered the forbidden sanctuary. Well, no work of performative art is perfect, and none gets the response it believes is its due.

It was nicely appropriate that what I believe now to have been my first creative theft should have taken place at the seaside, that site of eternal childhood, where the primordial slime is still moist. I remember with hallucinatory clarity the day’s stirless heat and the cottony feel of the air in Miss Vandeleur’s secret room. I remember the silence, too. There’s no silence like the silence that attends a theft. When my fingers reach out to seize a coveted trinket, seemingly acting of their own free will and not at all in need of me or of my agency, everything goes still for a beat, as if the world has caught its breath in shock and wonder at the sheer effrontery of the deed. Then comes that surge of soundless glee, rising in me like gorge. It’s a sensation that harks back to infancy, and infantile transgression. A large part of the pleasure of stealing derives from the possibility of being caught. Or no, no, it’s more than that: it’s precisely the desire to be caught. I don’t mean that I want actually to be seized by the scruff by some burly fellow in blue and hauled before the beak to have the book thrown at me and be given three months’ hard. What, then? Oh, I don’t know. Doesn’t a child wet the bed half in hope of getting a good smacking from his mama? These are murky depths and are probably better not plumbed all the way to the bottom.

—

Speaking of depths and of plumbing them, I look back in speculation and ever deepening puzzlement at my love affair, such as it was, with Polly Pettit. Such as it was? Why do I say that? It seemed much when it was happening — there was a time when it seemed well nigh everything. Yet it was never other than unlikely, which was one source of the excitement of it all. We fell into each other’s arms in a state of gasping surprise, and that mutual perplexity never quite abated. She used to say that one of the things that had drawn her to me was the smell of paint I gave off. This was odd, since by that time I had already abandoned painting. She said it was a nice earthy smell and reminded her of being a child and making mud pies. I didn’t know what to think of this, whether to be charmed or ever so slightly offended.