The Blue Guitar Page 15

  I tried the lower sash of the window. It let itself be raised an inch and, resistingly, another, and then stuck fast. I hesitated, thinking of what, in raucous novels of a previous century, so often happens to gentlemen when they foolhardily expose themselves in such hazardous circumstances, but my need was great—why does a bursting bladder make one’s back teeth ache?—and casting caution aside I stepped forwards and began to urinate copiously into the fastnesses of the night. As I stood there, micturating and musing, and enjoying in a childish, shivery sort of way the feel of the sharp night air on my tenderest flesh—how strangely we are made!—I came to realise that I was not alone. It wasn’t that I heard anything—the crashing as of a distant cataract coming up from the cobbled yard below would have drowned out all save the loudest noise—but I felt a presence. A spasm of fright went through me, shutting off on the instant the releasing flow. I turned my head to the right and squinnied into the darkness, making slits of my eyes. Yes, someone was there, standing motionless off at the end of the corridor. I would have yelped in fright had not my mouth gone instantly dry.

  I am afraid of the dark, as you would expect. It’s another of my childish afflictions that I’m ashamed of, but there seems no cure for it. Even when there are people about me I feel I’m alone in my private stygian chamber of horrors. I pretend to be at ease, stepping stoutly forwards into the sightless void and cracking jokes along with the rest, but all the while I’m desperately holding in check the terrified, thrashing child within. So you can imagine how I felt now, standing there, in my vest and drawers, draped in a blanket, with an essential part of me poking out of the window, goggling in speechless terror at this awful apparition looming before me in the barely penetrable gloom. It didn’t move, it made no sound. Was I imagining it, was I seeing things? I stepped away from the window and drew my blanket protectively around me. Should I approach the ghostly figure, should I challenge it—What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?—or should I take to my heels and flee? Just then on the floor below a door opened and a light came on, faintly illuminating a narrow set of stairs to my right that I hadn’t known was there. “Who’s that?” Polly called up querulously, and the shadow of her head and shoulders appeared on the wall in the stairwell. “Mother, is that you?” It was, it was her mother, there in the dark before me. “Please, come down.” I could tell from the tremor in her voice that she had no intention of venturing up the stairs, for she, too, fears the dark, as I know, bless her heart. “Please, Mummy,” she said again, in a babyish, lisping voice, “please come down.” Mrs. Plomer was watching me with a lively surmise, frowning slightly yet ready to smile, as if I were an exotic and potentially fascinating creature she had chanced upon, amazingly, at dead of night, in the upper reaches of her own house. And I suppose, with the blanket clutched around me and my bare feet and furry little legs on show, I must have had something of the aspect of one of the smaller of the great apes, improbably decked out in drawers and vest and some sort of cape, or else a fallen king, perhaps, witlessly wandering in the night. Why did I not speak—why did I not give Polly a sign that I was there? After some moments her silhouette sank down on the wall, and the light was quenched as she shut the bedroom door.

  I know there are no norms, although one speaks, and lives, as if there were, but there are certain rare occasions when even the extremest limits seem to have been exceeded. Standing in a conspiratorial hush in close proximity to one’s lover’s demented mother in a pitch-dark attic corridor in the middle of a freezing late-autumn night, cowering under a blanket in one’s underwear, surely counts as such an instance of exceeded plausibility. Yet despite the unlikeliness of being there, and taking into account my dread of the darkness, a darkness that seemed deeper than ever after Polly had shut her door and the light went out, I felt almost cheerful—yes, cheerful!—and full of mischief, like a schoolboy off on a midnight jape. It was interesting, almost exhilarating, to be in the company of a person who was harmlessly mad. Not that I could be said to be in Mrs. Plomer’s company, exactly; in fact, that was the point, that what was there was someone and no one, simultaneously. I fell to puzzling over this curious state of affairs, and I puzzle over it still. Was it that for a brief interval I was allowed entrance to the charmed if sombre realm of the half-mad? Or was I simply harking back, yet again, to the obscure echo-chamber that is the past? For there was definitely something of childhood in the moment, of childhood’s calmly uncomprehending acceptance of the incommensurability of things, and of the astounding but unremembered discovery, a discovery that I, like everyone else, must have made in my infancy, at the very dawn of consciousness, namely, that in the world there is not just me, but other people as well, uncountable, and unaccountable, numbers of them, a teeming horde of strangers.

  Only now, as my eyes adjusted and I began to be able to make her out again, did I take note of what Mrs. Plomer was wearing. She had on her wellingtons, of course, and a long, heavy cardigan with drooping pockets over a man’s old-fashioned collarless striped shirt. What was most remarkable, however, was her skirt, which wasn’t really a skirt but an affair like an upside-down cone, assembled, or constructed, rather, from many overlapping petticoats of stiff gauze, the kind of garment that in my young days girls used to wear under tightly belted summer dresses, and that on the dance-floor would balloon outwards and up, sometimes rising so high, if we spun the girl fast enough, that we would be given a heart-stopping glimpse of her frilly bloomers. Draped thus in her motley, Mrs. Plomer reminded me not so much of the summer girls of my youth as of one of those figures in a medieval clock-tower, biding there in the gloom, waiting for the ratchets to engage and the mechanism to jerk into motion, so that she might be trundled out to enjoy another of her quarter-hourly half-circuits in the light of the great world’s regard. She was still watching me—I could see the glint of her eyes, crafty and vigilant. She had given no sign of having heard Polly when she called to her up the stairs; perhaps she had heard, but suspected it was part of a ruse, in which I was complicit, aimed at ensnaring her and winkling her out of her hiding place, and therefore to be firmly ignored. For I did have the impression that she thought herself to be in hiding here, though from whom or what I couldn’t guess—she probably didn’t know herself. What should I do? What could I do? It began to seem I might be held there all night, in thrall to this deranged and silent apparition in her rubber boots and her improvised tutu. In the end it was she who made the decisive move. She stirred herself and came forwards, with a quick, exasperated sigh—obviously she was of the opinion that even if I was a conspirator I was risibly hesitant and patently inept and not to be feared in the least—and stepped past me with a rustle of tulle, brushing me to one side. I watched her make her way down the stairs, her stooped, cardiganed back seeming to express blank dismissiveness of me and all I might represent. I waited a moment, and heard Polly opening her door again, and again the light from the room behind her fell at an angle along the wall, and there again was the shadow of her head, like one of Arp’s stylised, elongated ovals.

  I followed Mrs. Plomer down the stairs. I couldn’t, in all conscience—what a phrase—have remained in hiding any longer. Polly saw me over her mother’s shoulders and her eyes widened. “It’s you!” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You gave me a fright.” I said nothing. It seemed to me that instead of being frightened she was making an effort not to laugh. She had on a thick wool dressing-gown, and was, like me, barefoot. I hitched the blanket more closely about me and gave her what was meant but surely failed to be a lofty glare. I must indeed have looked like Lear, returned from the heath and sheepishly not dead from sorrow. “Come along,” Polly said to her mother, “you must go back to bed now, you’ll catch your death.” She led her away, glancing back at me and indicating with a sideways dip of her head that I was to go into her bedroom and wait for her.

  The air inside the room was thick with sleep. The fire in the grate had died and left behind an acrid resinous reek. Under the light of the lam
p the bedclothes were thrown back in what seemed an artful way, as if someone like me—someone, that is, like I used to be—had arranged them just so, in preparation for the model who, disrobing now behind a screen, would in a moment appear and drape herself against them in the pose of an overripe Olympia. You see, you see what in my guilty heart I hanker after?—the bad old days of the demi-monde, of silk hats and pearly embonpoint, of rakes and rakesses astray on the boulevards, of faunish afternoons in the atelier and wild nights on the sparkling town. Is that the real, shameful, reason I took up painting, to be the Manet—him again—or the Lautrec, the Sickert, even, of a later age? Polly came back then, no Olympia but a reassuringly mortal creature, and the room was just a room again, and the rumpled bed the place where she had been innocently asleep until two desperate night wanderers had awakened her.

  Now she shed her dressing-gown with a vexed shrug and, chilled from wherever she had taken her mother to, clambered hurriedly into bed in her pyjamas—winceyette, I believe that stuff is called, another notable word—and pulled the bedclothes to her chin and lay on her side with her legs drawn up and her knees pressed to her chest, shivering a little, and ignoring me as thoroughly as her mother had when she turned away from me on the stairs. I wonder if women realise how alarming they are when they go tight-lipped and mute like that? I suspect they do, I suspect they’re very well aware of it, although if they are, why don’t they use it more, as a weapon? I sat down beside her carefully, as if the bed were a boat and I were afraid of capsizing it, and adjusted the blanket around my shoulders. Have I said how cold I was by now, despite the woolly warmth there in the room? I gazed at Polly’s cheek, which used to glow so hotly when she lay with me on the sofa in the studio of old. The lamp-light gave to her skin a rough-grained, papery texture. Her eyes were closed but I could tell she was far from sleep. I groped around on the eiderdown—that crackly satin giving me the creeps again—until I found the outline of one of her feet, and pressed it in my hand. She said something that I didn’t catch, still with her eyes closed, then cleared her throat and said it again. “Such a get-up! My mother. I don’t know what goes through her head.” No comment seemed required of me and so I said nothing; as far as I was concerned, Mrs. Plomer was beyond discussion. I could feel the warmth returning to Polly’s foot. Was a time I would have grovelled in the dust before this young woman just for the privilege of taking one of her little pink toes in my mouth and sucking it—oh, yes, I had my moments of adoration and abjection. And now? And now the old desire had been replaced by a different kind of ache, one that would not be assuaged in her arms, if it could be assuaged at all. What was it, this thing gnawing at my heart, as in former times quite other things had gnawed at quite other of my organs? As I sat there turning over this question there came to me, to my great consternation, the thought that the person lying beside me under the bedclothes with her knees clutched to her breast might be—I hesitate to say it—might be my daughter. Yes, my lost daughter, brought back by some bright magic from the land of the dead and given all the attributes, commonplace and precious, of a lived life. This was a very strange notion, even by the standards of the extraordinary and turbulent times I was passing through. I let go of her foot and sat back, light-headed and aghast. It sometimes occurs to me that everything I do is a substitute for something else, and that every venture I embark on is a botched attempt at reparation for a thing done or left undone—don’t ask me to explain it. Outside in the night it began to rain again, I heard it, a gathering murmur, like the sound of many voices in the distance speaking together in hushed tones.

  Slightly salty to the taste, those toes of hers were, when I sucked them. Salty like salt tears.

  She stirred now and opened her eyes and put a hand under her cheek and sighed. “Do you know what it was that first attracted me to Marcus?” she said. “His weak eyesight. Isn’t that strange? His eyes were affected by all that close-up work he had to do for so many years when he was an apprentice. You know that’s why he seems so awkward, why he moves so slowly and so carefully? It was sweet to see the way he touched things, getting the feel of them, as if that was the only way he could trust what he was doing. That’s the way he would touch me, too, the barest touch, just with the tips of his fingers.” She sighed again. Her hair always smells a little like musty biscuits; I used to love to bury my face in it and snuffle up that soft fawn odour. She stirred, extending her legs under the covers, and turned over and lay on her back, with her hand behind her head now, looking up at me calmly. The way she was lying made the skin at the outer corners of her eyes became slightly stretched and shiny, which gave to her features a curiously lacquered, Oriental cast. “Tell me why you ran off,” she said. I didn’t attempt to reply, only shrugged and shook my head. She pulled her mouth sideways in a grimace. “You can’t have known how humiliated I would be—at least, I hope you didn’t, or you’re even more of a monster than I thought.” I said I didn’t know what she meant—I did, of course—and she made that moue again with her mouth. “Don’t you? Look at all you were, all you had, all that you’d done, and look at what I was, a watchmaker’s wife whiling away her days in a no-hope backwater.” This was spoken with such a sudden harshness that it took me aback, I who by now was driven so far back it had seemed there was no further I could go. But I nodded, trying to look as if I understood and sympathised. Nodding, it struck me, was an apt way, in this instance, of repeatedly hanging my head. Shame, though, I find, even at its most burningly intense, is always somewhat detached, as if there were a secret escape clause written into it. Or maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m incapable of true shame. After all, I’m incapable of so much. Polly was regarding me now with a sort of rueful scepticism, almost smiling. “I thought you were a god,” she said, and at once, of course, I thought of Dionysus taking pity on poor abandoned Ariadne and plucking her up from Naxos and making her immortal, whether she wanted it or not; the mighty ones of Mount Olympus always had a soft spot for a girl in distress. But they have all departed, those gods, into their twilight. And I was no god, dear Polly; I was hardly a man.

  Now, at this moment, in this late afternoon, as my pen scratches away crabbedly at these futile pages, somewhere outside on Hangman’s Hill a solitary bird is singing, I hear its passionate song, limpid and bright. Do birds sing at this late time of year? Maybe their kind also has its bards, its rhapsodes, its solitary poets of desolation and lament, who know no seasons. The day wanes, the night comes on, soon I’ll have to light my lamp. For now, though, I am content to sit here in the October gloaming, brooding on my loves, my losses, my paltry sins. What’s to become of me, of my dry, my desiccated, heart? Why do I ask, you ask? Don’t you understand yet, even yet, that I don’t understand anything? See how I grope my way along, like a blind man in a house where all the lights are blazing.

  The day wanes.

  —

  As I squat here, vainly flapping my tinsel wing, I feel like putting down the heading A Treatise on Love, and following it with a score or so of blank pages.

  —

  We talked for half of what remained of that night, or Polly talked while I did my best to listen. What did she talk about? The usual, the sad and angry usual. She had pulled herself up to a sitting position, the better to have at me, and since her pyjamas were no match for the cold she wrapped herself in the eiderdown—there in the tepee of lamp-light we must have looked like a pair of Red Indians engaged in an interminable, rancorous and one-sided powwow. I was tempted to reach out and take her in my arms, winceyetted as she was, but I knew she wouldn’t let me. That is another of my versions of Hell, sitting for all eternity in a freezing bedroom under an inadequate blanket being railed at for my lack of ordinary human sentiment, for my indifference to other people’s pain and my refusal to offer the commonest crumb of comfort, for my callousness, my neglect, my heartless betrayals—in a word, for my simple inability to love. Everything she said was true, I admit it, yet at the same time it was all mistaken, all wrong. But what wou
ld have been the point of arguing with her? The trouble is that in these matters there is no end to the round of dispute, and however deep the disputants go there will always be another un-dived-into depth. When it comes to casuistry there is nothing like a pair of quarrelling and soon to be parted lovers debating on which side lies the greater guilt. Not that there was much in the way of debate that night. And in fact my silence, which I considered forbearing, was only making Polly all the more angry. “Jesus Christ, you’re impossible,” she cried. “I may as well be talking to this pillow!”

  Yet it ended in a not altogether unhappy truce when Polly, exhausted by her own rhetoric and the steadily ravelling tangle of accusations she had been bringing against me, gave in and turned off the lamp and lay down again, and even permitted me to lie beside her, not under the covers, no, but on top of them, wrapped up tight like a caterpillar in the scratchy cocoon of my blanket. And so we rested there, somewhat together on her impossibly narrow bed, listening to the rain falling on the world. I could feel Polly drifting into sleep, and so did I, soon after. It wasn’t long, though, before the cold and the damp wakened me again. The rain had stopped and all was silent save for the rhythmic soughing of Polly’s breathing. She must have been having a bad dream—she would hardly be having a good one, considering all that had gone on that night—for now and then she gave a soft moan at the back of her throat, like a child crying in its sleep. The curtains were open and through the window I could see that the sky had cleared, and the stars were out, sharp and atremble, as if each one were hanging by a fine, invisible thread. I know the dark before dawn is supposed to be the bleakest hour of the day, but I love it, and love to be awake in it. Always it is so still then, with everything holding back, waiting on the sun’s great roar. Polly was lying against me now and even through the thickness of the eiderdown I could feel her heart beating, and her breath was on my cheek, too, slightly stale, familiar, human. I saw a shooting star and, almost immediately, in rapid succession, two more. Zip, zip zip. Then in stately stealth an airship appeared, rising on a slant out of the east, light greyish-blue against the sky’s rich purplish-black, its cabin slung underneath like a lifeboat with lighted windows, sailing steadily at no great height, sausage-shaped, preposterous, yet a thing for me to marvel at, a frail and silent vessel travelling westwards, carrying its cargo of lives.