The Blue Guitar Read online

  We did go up to her bedroom. Once inside the door I set down her suitcase and the cricket bag with the child’s things and stood back awkwardly, feeling suddenly shy. I tried not to look too closely, too interrogatively, at the objects in the room. I felt like an interloper, which is, I know, what I was. Polly glanced about and heaved a sigh, puffing out her cheeks. This had been, she said, her bedroom from when she was a child until she left home to marry Marcus. The bed, high and narrow, seemed too small for a grown-up person, and looking at it I felt a sharp little pang of compassion and sweet sorrow. How cherishable it seemed, how moving, this moveless, inexpectant cradle that had held and sheltered her through so many of her nights. I pictured her asleep there, oblivious of moonrise, bat-flit, dawn’s stealthy creeping, her soft breath barely a stir in the darkness. I felt like shedding a tear, I really did. How confusing everything was.

  The fireplace had tiles down either side of it with a pattern of pink flowers painted on them, under the glaze. A log fire had been lit, but it hadn’t taken—the logs were wet and the kindling’s pale flames lapped at them ineffectually. “It always smoked, that grate,” Polly said. “I’m surprised I wasn’t suffocated.” The small, four-paned square window opposite the bed looked out on a cobbled yard and a line of disused stables. Further on there was a half-hearted hill topped by a stand of trees, oaks, I think, though to me most trees are oaks, their already almost bare branches stark and inky-black against a low sky of chill mauve shot through with silvery streaks. Inside the room the shadows of dusk were gathering fast, congregating in the corners under the ceiling like swathes of cobweb. I heard Janey down in the kitchen doing the washing-up and whistling. I strained to make out the tune. Polly sat on the side of the bed, her hands folded in her lap. She gazed out of the window. A last faint gleam clung to the cobbles in the yard. “The Rakes of Mallow,” that was the tune Janey was whistling. I was absurdly pleased to have identified it, and I turned, smiling, to Polly—what was I going to do, sing to her?—but at that moment, without warning, she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob. I held back, aghast, then went to her, creeping on tiptoe. I should have gathered her in my arms to comfort her, but I didn’t know how to manage it, so amorphous a shape she seemed, crouching there, her shoulders heaving, and all I could do was move my hands helplessly around her, as if I were forming a model of her out of air. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, dear God.” I was frightened by the depth of desolation in her voice, and inevitably I blamed myself for it; I felt as if I had tampered with some small, inert mechanism and made it spring into noisy and unstoppable movement. My fingers by chance brushed the eiderdown where she was sitting and the chill, brittle touch of the satin made me shiver. I, too, called on God, though silently, praying to his inexistence to rescue me from this impossible predicament; I even saw myself jerked by magic backwards into the fireplace and sucked in a whoosh up the flue, my arms pinned to my sides and my eyes elevated in their sockets in a transport of El Greco–esque ecstasy, emerging a second later from the chimney, like a clown shooting out of the mouth of a cannon, and disappearing into the sky’s dragonfly-blue dome. Escape, yes, escape was all I could think of. Where now was all that reinvigorated tenderness for my darling girl that had come over me at the tea-table not half an hour before? Where indeed. I felt paralysed. A weeping woman is a terrible spectacle. I heard myself saying Polly’s name over and over in a low, urgent voice, as if I were calling to her into the depths of a cave, and now I touched her gingerly on the shoulder, getting the same small shock I had got from the eiderdown. She didn’t lift her head, only flapped a hand sideways at me, waving me away. “Leave me alone,” she wailed, with a great racking sob, “there’s nothing you can do!” I lingered a moment, in an agony of irresolution, then turned and sneaked out, shutting the door behind me with appalled, with exquisite, with shaming, care.

  I made my way down through the house. Everything seemed known to me, in an odd, remote sort of way, the smell of must on the air, the faded stair carpet, the muddy ancestral portraits lurking in the shadows, that hat-stand and those mounted antlers in the hall, the grandfather clock hanging back in the shadows. It was as if I had lived there long ago, not in childhood but in a stylised antiquity, in the big frowsty mansion at the back of my mind that is the past, the inevitably imagined past.

  After opening two or three wrong doors I at last found the drawing room. On a rug in front of the fire the child was playing with a set of wooden building bricks. Her grandfather was seated in an armchair, leaning forwards with his elbows on the armrests and his fingers laced before him, smiling down on her bemusedly. Night had fallen, with what seemed remarkable swiftness, and the curtains were drawn, and the shaded lamps with their forty-watt bulbs cast a misty glimmer over the heavily looming furniture and along the striped and faded wallpaper. I noted the vast mirror over the fireplace with its ornate chipped frame, the faded hunting prints, a chintz-covered sofa lolling exhaustedly on its hunkers, worn out it seemed after so many years of being sat on. All this too I knew, somehow.

  “Such a fascinating age,” Mr. Plomer said, twinkling at me and at the child. “All of life before her.” He invited me to sit, indicating an armchair on the opposite side of the fireplace. “You have no motor car of your own with you,” he said, “is that right? We must find a bed for you, or”—his mild gaze did not waver yet I seemed to catch a glint in it, a sharp, bright knowingness—“or is Polly looking after that?” Well, he wasn’t a fool, he must have guessed what Polly was to me, and I to her, despite the obvious disparities between us, age being not the least of them—I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a better idea of our relations than I did. A flaming log subsided in the fireplace, sending up a spray of sparks. I said I should call for a taxi but he shook his head. “Not at all, not at all,” he said. “You must stay, of course. It’s merely a matter of airing a room for you. I shall speak to Janey.” He twinkled again. “You mustn’t mind poor Janey, you know. She’s not as terrible as might seem from her manner.” I nodded. I felt heavy-limbed and slack, sunk in a half-hypnotised trance by the old man’s mild, almost caressing tones. The child at our feet had assembled a tower of bricks, and now she knocked it over, giving a satisfied chuckle. “Surely it must be her bedtime,” the old man murmured, frowning. “Perhaps, after all, you should go up and speak to her mother?” I nodded again but made no move, asprawl and helpless in the armchair’s ample and irresistible embrace. I thought of Polly sitting on the side of the bed, her head bowed and her shoulders shaking. “But I haven’t offered you anything to drink!” Mr. Plomer exclaimed. He rose stiffly, wincing, and shuffled to a sideboard at the far end of the room. “There’s sherry,” he said over his shoulder, his voice emerging hollowly from the dimness. “Or this.” He held up a bottle and read from the label. “Schnapps, it’s called. A gift from my friend the Prince—Mr. Hyland, that is. Do you know him? I’m not sure what schnapps is, but I suspect it’s rather strong.” I said I would prefer sherry, and he came back carrying two glasses hardly bigger than thimbles. He sat down again. I sipped the unctuous sweet syrup. I was so tired, so tired, a wayfarer stalled halfway along an immense and torturous journey. I recalled a dream I had dreamed one night recently, not a dream really, but a fragment. I was at a railway station somewhere abroad, I didn’t know where, and couldn’t tell what the language was that the people around me were speaking. The station resembled a Byzantine church, or perhaps a temple or even a mosque, its domed ceiling plated with gold-leaf and the floor-tiles painted in bright, swirling patterns of blue and silver and ruby-red. I was waiting anxiously for a train that would take me home, although I wasn’t at all sure where home was supposed to be. Through the station’s wide-open doors I could see refulgent sunlight outside, and billows of dust, and milling traffic with vehicles of unfamiliar make, and crowds of olive-skinned people moving everywhere, headscarved women clad in black and men with enormous moustaches and piercing, pale-blue eyes. I looked about for a clock but couldn’t see o
ne, and then it came to me that my train, the only train on which I could have travelled, the only one my ticket was valid for, had departed long ago, leaving me stranded here, among strangers.

  “He was walking on the castle wall in a storm,” Mr. Plomer said. I gazed at him blear-eyed from under leaden lids. In his left hand he was holding a book, a quaint little volume bound in faded crimson cloth, open to an inner page from which it seemed he had been reading, or was about to read. Where had it come from? I hadn’t seen him get up to fetch it. Had I dozed off for a minute? And the dream about the train, had I been remembering it, or dreaming it anew, or for the first time, even? The old man was regarding me with an eye benign and bright. “The poet was lodging at a castle owned by his friend, a princess, and walked out on the battlements one stormy evening and heard the voice of the angel, as he said.” He smiled, then lifted the book close to his eyes and began to read aloud from it in a soft reedy singsong voice. I listened as a child would listen, in rapt incomprehension. The language, since I didn’t know it, sounded to my ear like so many hawkings and slurrings. After reciting a few lines he broke off, looking sheepish, the dabs of pink glowing in the hollows of his cheeks. “Duino was the place,” he said, “a castle on the sea-coast, and so he called the poems after it.” He closed the book and set it on his knee, keeping a finger inside it to mark the page. Thick-tongued, I asked him to tell me the meaning of what he had read. “Well,” he said, “since it is a poem, much of the meaning is in the expressing, you know, the rhythm and the cadence.” He paused, making a faint droning sound at the back of his throat, and looked up to consider the shadows under the ceiling. “He speaks of the earth—Erde—wishing to become absorbed into us.” Here he singsang again a phrase in German. “Is not your dream, he says—says to the earth, that is—to be one day invisible. Invisible in us, he means.” He smiled gently. “The thought is obscure, perhaps. Yet one admires the passion of the lines, I think, yes?”

  I gazed into the white heart of the fire. It seemed to me I could hear the big clock out in the hall ponderously ticking. The old man cleared his throat.

  “The Prince—I know I shouldn’t call him that—will come tomorrow,” he said. “If you are still here perhaps we can have a talk, the three of us.” I nodded, not trusting my voice to work. I was thinking of the dream again, and the departed train. Lost and astray, in an unknown place, alien voices in my ears. Mr. Plomer sighed. “I suppose we shall have to give him lunch. Perhaps Polly will preside. My wife”—he smiled—“doesn’t care for the poets.” He turned and spoke into the shadows beyond the firelight. “What do you say, my dear? Will you stand in for your mother and receive”—he smiled again—“our dear friend Frederick?”

  I really must have been asleep for a time, since there was Polly, as I now saw, sitting on the chintz-covered sofa by the door, with the child in her lap. I struggled to haul myself upright in the armchair, blinking. Polly was wearing the same jumper and skirt as before, but had changed from her shoes into a pair of grey felt slippers with bobbles, or pom-poms, or whatever they’re called, on the toes. Even in the dim lamp-light I could make out her tear-swollen eyelids and delicately pink-rimmed nostrils. “He’s coming here,” she said, “tomorrow? Two visitors in a row—Janey will have a fit.” She laughed wanly, and her father went on smiling. She didn’t look at me. The child was asleep. The toppled tower of bricks was at my feet.

  —

  When I was little—ah, when I was little!—I cleaved to caution, to cosiness. There can have been few small boys as unadventurous as I was in those far-off days. I clung to my mother as a bulwark against a lawless and unpredictable world, a vestigial umbilical cord still strung between us, fine, delicate and durable as a strand of spider’s silk. Caution was my watchword, and outside the shelter of home I would perform no deed without considering its possible perils. I was a regular little regulating machine, tirelessly lining up in neat rows those things I encountered on my way through life that were amenable to my rage for order. Disaster awaited on all sides; every step was a potential pratfall; every path led to the brink of a precipice. I trusted nothing that was not myself. The world’s first task, as I knew well, a task it never relaxed from, was to undo me. I was even afraid of the sky.

  Not that I was a namby-pamby, no indeed, I was known for my sturdiness, my truculence, even, despite my want of physical prowess and my well-known and wonderfully laughable artistic leanings. What I couldn’t do with my fists I aimed to do with words. School-yard bullies soon learned to fear the knout of my sarcasm. Yes, I think I can say I was in my way a tough little tyke, whose fear was all internal, a smoking underground swamp where dead fishes floated belly-up and high-shouldered birds with bills like scimitars scavenged and screamed. And it’s still there, that putrid inner aigues-mortes of mine, still deep enough to drown me. What I find frightening nowadays is not the general malevolence of things, though Heaven knows—and Hell knows even better—I certainly should, but rather their cunning plausibility. The sea at morning, a gorgeous sunset, watches of nightingales, even a mother’s love, all these conspire to assure me that life is flawless good and death no more than a rumour. How persuasive it all can be, but I am not persuaded, and never was. In earliest years, in my father’s shop, among those worthless prints he sold, I could spot in even the most tranquil scene of summer and trees and dappled cows the tittering imp peering out at me from the harmless-seeming greenery. And that was what I determined to paint, the chancre under the velvet bodice, the beast behind the sofa. Even stealing things—it came to me just this minute—even stealing things was an attempt to break through the surface, to pluck out fragments of the world’s wall and put my eye to the holes to see what was hiding behind it.

  Take that strange afternoon at Grange Hall, with Polly and her parents, and the even stranger hours that followed. I should have made my getaway at the end of that gruesome tea-party—at which I felt like Alice, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare all rolled into one—but the atmosphere of Grange Hall held me fast in an unshakeable lassitude. I was given for the night a servant’s room under the eaves. It was small, and peculiarly cramped. The ceiling on one side sloped to the floor, which forced me to hold myself at an angle, even when I was lying down, so that I felt horribly queasy—it was almost as bad as that garret on the rue Molière where I lodged that long-ago Parisian summer. But then, I always seem to be off-kilter, in rooms large and small. There was a camp-bed to sleep in, set low on two sets of crossed wooden legs that groaned bad-temperedly when I made the slightest movement. Janey had lit a coal fire in the tiny grate—she was a great one for the bedroom fire, was Janey—which smouldered on for hours. I, too, like Polly, felt that I might suffocate, especially as the only window in the room was painted shut, and I woke up more than once in the night feeling as if some small malignant creature had been squatting for hours on my chest. Did I dream again? Don’t they say we dream all the time we’re asleep but forget the bulk of what we dreamed about? Anyway, you get the general picture, painted by Fuseli: discomfort, bad air, fitful sleep and frequent wakings, all to the pounding accompaniment of a headache’s horrible gong. It was still muddily dark outside when I woke for what I knew would be the last time that night, with a searing thirst. Sitting up in that low bed, under the ceiling’s leaning cliff, with my head in my hands and my fingers in my hair, I might have been a child again, sleepless and in fear of the dark, waiting for Mama to come with a soothing drink and turn down the sheet at my chin and put her cool hand for a moment on my moist brow.

  I switched on the light. The bulb shed a sallow glimmer over the bed and the balding rug on the floor; there was a cane chair, and that wooden cabinet thing they have in old houses, don’t know what it’s called, with a white bowl and matching jug placed on top of it. How many maids and manservants, long dead now, had crouched here shivering on bleak mornings like this one to perform their meagre ablutions? I got up. I was not only thirsty, I also badly needed to pee; this circumstance, with its skewed sy
mmetry, seemed wholly unfair. I bent down to look under the bed, in the hope there might be a chamber pot, but there wasn’t. I realised I was shivering and that my teeth were clenched—it really was very cold—and I stripped a blanket from the bed and draped it over my shoulders. It smelt of generations of sleepers and their sweat. I went into the corridor, at once groggy and keenly alert. I suspect that at such times one is never as wide awake as one imagines. I couldn’t locate the light switch, and left the bedroom door ajar so as not to lose my bearings. I turned right and shuffled forwards cautiously. As I moved out of the feeble glow from the doorway behind me, the darkness I was advancing into seemed to mould itself clammily around my face, like a close-fitting mask of soft black silk. I reached out and touched the wall with my fingertips, feeling my way along. The wallpaper was that old-fashioned stuff—what do you call it?—anaglypta, strange name, must look it up, heavily embossed and slightly glossy to the touch, the gate-lodge used to be and indeed still is plastered all over with it upstairs and down, between the skirting board and the dado rail, there’s another singular word, dado, my mind is bristling with them today, words, I mean. Here to my left was a door; I turned the knob; no good, the door was locked and there was no key in the keyhole. I moved on. The darkness now was almost complete, and I saw myself being wafted through it as if on air from another world, a substanceless wraith wrapped in a musty blanket. I made out the frame of a spectral window. Why when it’s dark like that do the shapes of things seem to tremble, to waver ever so slightly, as if they were suspended in some liquid medium, viscid and dense, through which weak but super-rapid currents are flowing? I looked out into the night, in vain. Nothing, not the faintest glow from a distant window, not the glint of a single star. How could it be so dark? It seemed unnatural.