John Banville - The Blue Guitar

We used to meet in my studio, what had been my studio when I was still painting. I’ve held on to it, I’m not sure why — maybe in the forlorn hope that the muse will come back and perch again in her old roost. I know what you’ll think, even before you think it, but I didn’t take up with Polly in the expectation that the heat we generated together would fan the embers of inspiration into singing flame again. Ah, no! By then those embers had become ashes, and cold ashes at that. No, the studio that no longer acted as a studio was just a handy and secluded trysting place; what it can be by now I really don’t know, but there it stands, useless, and yet somehow impossible to get rid of.

It was a big gaunt chilly room over what had been formerly my father’s print shop. In setting up there I had no sense of trampling on his shade. When he retired, the premises were taken over by a launderer, so that, after I stopped painting, the smells of paint and linseed oil and turpentine were quickly overcome and replaced by a heavy miasma of soap suds and the fug of wet, warm wool and a sharp stink of bleach that made my eyes water and gave me crashing headaches. Maybe the pong got into my skin and that was what Polly mistook for the smell of pigments. Certainly this smell, the smell of dirty laundry being washed, is redolent, at least to me it is, of childhood and its mucky dabblings.

She came to the studio for the first time on a bitterly cold day at the close of the year — this is last year I’m speaking of, more than nine months ago, for it’s September now, do try to keep up. The sky in the tall, north-facing window seemed to be worked in graphite, and the light coming in had a grainy quality that is associated in my memory with the excitingly sandpapery feel of Polly’s goose-bumped flesh. As we lay on the old green sofa, languorously embracing — how tender and tentative they were, those first, exploratory hours we spent together — I saw us as a genre piece, a pencil study by Daumier, say, or even an oil sketch by Courbet, illustrative of the splendours and miseries of the vie de bohème. Polly’s tiny hand was frozen, right enough, as parts of me could attest, instinctively shrinking from her encircling fingers, like a snail touched by a thorn. She wanted to know why I’d given up painting. It’s a question I dread, since I don’t know the answer to it. I do know the reasons, more or less, I suppose, but they’re impossible to put into reasonable terms. I could say that one day I woke up and the world was lost to me, but how would that sound? Anyway, hadn’t I always painted not the world itself but the world as my mind rendered it? A critic once dubbed me the leader of what he was pleased to call the Cerebralist School — if there was such a school it had only one student — but even at my most inward I needed all that was outside, the sky and its clouds, the earth itself and the little figures strutting back and forth upon its crust. Pattern and rhythm, these were the organising principles to which everything must be made subject, the twin iron laws that ruled over the world’s ragbag of effects. Then came that morning, that fateful morning — how long ago? — when I opened my eyes to find it gone, everything gone and lost to me, all my touchstones smashed. Think of that bitter fate, to be a sighted man who cannot see.

I’ve said I stole Polly, but did I, really? Is that how it would be put in a court of law, the charge laid thus bluntly against me? It’s true, clandestine love is always spoken of in terms of stealing. Now, asportation, say, or even caption, in its rarest usage — yes, I have been rifling the dictionary again — is a term I might accept, but stealing I think too stark a word. The pleasure, no, not pleasure, the gratification that I got from making off with Marcus’s wife wasn’t at all like the dark joy I derive from my other secretmost pilferings. It wasn’t dark at all, in fact, but bathed in balmful light.

We were happy together, she and I, simply happy, in the beginning, at any rate. A kind of innocence, a kind of artlessness, attaches to covert love, despite the flames of guilt and dread that lick at the lover’s bared and bouncing backside. There was something childlike about Polly, or so I fancied, something she had held on to from her girlhood, a wide-eyed eagerness and vulnerability that I found dismayingly compelling. And when I was with her I, too, seemed to stray again in the midst of my own earliest days. Too little due is given to the gameful aspects of love: we might have been a pair of toddlers, Polly and I, playing at rough-and-tumble. And how open and generous she was, not only in letting me recline my troubled brow on her plump pale breast but in a deeper and even more intimate way. Loving her was like being let into a place she had been hitherto alone in, a place no one else had ever been allowed to enter, not even her husband — mark, all this in the past tense, irretrievably. What’s done is done, what’s gone is gone. But, ah, if she were to appear before me now, as large as life — as large as life! — could I trust my heart not to burst open all over again?

There were certain reticences between us. For instance, when we were together Polly never mentioned Gloria’s name, not once, in all that time. I, in contrast, talked about Marcus at the least excuse, as if the mere invoking of his name, done often enough, might work a neutralising magic. The guilt I suffered in respect of Polly’s husband loured over me like a miniature thundercloud whipped up exclusively for me and that travelled with me wherever I went. I think the injury I was doing to my friend caused me almost a keener pain than did the no less grave injustice I was committing against my wife and, I suppose, against his wife, too. And Polly herself, how did being unfaithful make her feel? Surely she was conscience-stricken, like me. Every time I started prattling about Marcus she would frown in a sulkily reprehending way, drawing her eyebrows together and making a thin pale line of her otherwise roseate mouth. She was right, of course: it was bad taste on my part to speak of either of our spouses at the very moment that we were busy betraying them. As for Gloria, she and Polly were on the best of terms, as they had always been, and when the four of us met now, as we did no less frequently than we used to, the over-compensating attentions Polly lavished on my wife should surely have made that sharp-eyed woman suspect something was amiss.

But let us go back now to Polly and me in the studio, that day at a cold year’s end we worked so hard to warm up. We were lying together on the sofa with our overcoats piled over us, the sweat of our recent exertions turning to a chilly dew on our skin. She had her arms draped around me and was resting her glossy head in the hollow of my shoulder, as she recalled for me in fond detail what she claimed was our first-ever encounter, long ago. I had come in with a watch for Marcus to repair. I can’t have been back in the town for more than a week or two, she said. She was at her desk in the dim rear of the workshop, doing the books, and I glanced in her direction and smiled. I was wearing, she remembered, or claimed to remember, a white shirt with the floppy collar open and an old pair of corduroy trousers and shoes without laces and no socks. She noticed how tanned my insteps were, and straight away she pictured the resplendent south, a bay like a bowl of broken amethysts strewn with flecks of molten silver and a white sail aslant to the horizon and a lavender-blue shutter standing open on it all — yes, yes, you’re right, I’ve added a few touches of colour to her largely monochrome and probably far more accurate sketch. It was summertime, she said, a morning in June, and the sun through the window was setting my white shirt blindingly aglow — she would never forget it, she said, that unearthly radiance. You understand, I’m only reporting her words, or the gist of them, anyway. I explained to Marcus that the watch, an Elgin, had belonged to my late father, and that I hoped it could be got to work again. Marcus frowned and nodded, turning the watch this way and that in his long slender spatulate fingers and making noncommittal noises at the back of his throat. He was pretending not to know who I was, out of shyness — he is a very shy fellow, as so am I, in my peculiar way — which was just plain silly, Polly said, since by now everyone in town had heard of the couple who had moved into the big house out on Fairmount Hill, Oscar Orme’s son Olly, who had become a famous artist, no less, and his drawling, lazy-eyed young wife. He would see what he could do, Marcus said, but warned that parts for a watch like this would be hard to come by. While he was writing out the receipt I glanced at Polly again over his bent head and smiled again, and even winked. All this in her account. I need hardly say I remembered none of it. That is, I remembered bringing in my father’s watch for repair, but as to smiling at Polly, much less winking at her, none of that had stayed with me. Nor could I recognise myself in the portrait she painted of me, in my flamboyant dishevelment. Dishevelled I am, it’s an incurable condition, but I’m sure I’ve never shone with the kind of stark, pure flame she saw that day.