The Blue Guitar Page 16

  Oh, Polly. Oh, Gloria.

  Oh, Poloria!

  —

  In the morning there was another round of comic scenes, with no one laughing. For all our sakes I shall pass over breakfast in silence, except to say that the centrepiece of the repast was a big soot-black pot of porridge, and that Barney the dog, who had taken a shine to me, came and flopped down under the table at my feet, or mostly on my feet, in fact, and produced at intervals a series of soundless farts the stench of which made me almost gag on my stirabout. Afterwards I locked myself away for half an hour in the bathroom I had not been able to find the night before, possibly because it was next door to the room I had slept in. It was cramped and wedge-shaped, with a single narrow window at the pointed end. There was a hip bath, the porcelain chipped and yellowed, and an enormous stately lavatory with a wooden seat like a carthorse’s yoke, on which I sat at stool for a long time, with my elbows on my knees, gazing into a vast and torpid emptiness. Then, standing at the sink, I saw that the window looked out on the same view, of stables, hill and trees, that I had seen from Polly’s room on the next floor down. The sky was cloudless and the yard below was awash with watery sunlight. I had brought nothing with me from the gate-lodge, and had to shave as best I could with a pearl-handled cut-throat razor I found at the back of a cabinet beside the bath. There was a diagonal crack in the shaving mirror hanging on a nail over the sink, and as I scraped away the stubble—frustratingly, though probably fortunately, the blade was blunt—I looked to myself disconcertingly like one of the demoiselles of Avignon, the jut-faced odalisque in the middle, with the jaunty top-knot, I should think. How sad is my ridiculousness, how ridiculous my sadness.

  Somewhere nearby, down in the stables, it must have been, a donkey began to bray. I hadn’t heard a donkey braying since—since I don’t know when. What did it think it was saying? Most creatures of this earth, when we raise a solitary voice like that, have only one thing on our minds, but could those glottal bellowings, a truly astonishing noise, be a cry of love and longing? If so, what does the damsel donkey think, hearing it? For all I know, it may sound to her bristling ears like the tenderest lay of the troubadour. What a world, dear Lord, what a world, and I in it, old braying donkey that I am.

  I spent the rest of the morning dodging about the house, anxious to avoid another confrontation, even in daylight, with Polly’s crack-brained mother. Nor did I care to encounter her father, who I feared would manoeuvre me gently but inescapably into a corner and require of me, in his diffident way, an account of what exactly my intentions were towards his daughter, who was a married woman, and on whom, not by the way, I had nearly a good twenty years in age. Intentions, did I have intentions? If so, I certainly had no clear idea any longer of what they were, if I ever had. I thought I had broken free from Polly, thought I had jumped ship and paddled away in the dark at a furious rate, only to find myself, at first light, still wallowing helplessly in her wake, the painter—the painter!—tangled round the tiller of my frail bark, the knots swollen with salt water and tough as a knuckle of bog-oak. Why when she fell asleep didn’t I get up from her bed and go, as I had gone before, a thief, verily a thief, in the night? Why was I still there? What held me? What was that woody knot I couldn’t unpick? For her part, Polly in the course of the morning paid me scant heed, engaged as she was in the tricky task of being at once a mother and a daughter. When on occasion we came unavoidably face to face, she gave me only a harried stare and barged past me, muttering impatiently under her breath. The result of all this was that I began to feel oddly detached, not only from Grange Hall and the people in it, but from myself, too. It was as if I had been pushed somehow off-balance, and had to keep grasping at air to stop myself falling over. Odd sensation. And suddenly, now, I recall another donkey, from long ago, in my lost boyhood. A sweep of concrete-coloured beach, the day overcast with a whitish glare; there is the sharp ricochet of children’s voices along the sand and the happy shrieks of bathers breasting the surf. The donkey’s name is Neddy; it is written on a cardboard sign. He wears a straw hat with holes cut in it for his outlandish ears to stick through. He stands stolidly on his prim little feet, chewing something. His eyes are large and glossy, they fascinate me—I imagine he must be able to see practically all the way around the horizon. His attitude to everything about him is one of vast indifference. I refuse to ride on him, because I’m frightened. They don’t fool me, animals, with their pretence of dullness: I see the look in their eye that they try to hide but can’t; they all know something about me that I don’t. My father, breathing heavily, grasps me roughly by the shoulders and orders me to stand next to Neddy, to do that much, at least, so that he can take my photograph. My mother gives my hand a secret squeeze, we are conspirators together. Then, as my fussy father at last presses the button and the shutter clicks, Neddy shifts heavily on his haunches, and in doing so leans against me, no, leans into me; I feel the solid, tight-packed weight of him and smell the dry, brownish odour of his pelt, and for a moment I am displaced, as if the world, as if Nature, as if the great god Pan himself, has given me a nudge and knocked me out of true. And that’s how it was with me again, that morning at Grange Hall, as I drifted through the house in search of my own displaced self.

  There was another reason, more immediate and prosaic, to feel pushed to the sidelines. Although Polly’s father had been acquainted with the Prince, so-called, for many years, this was the first time His Nibs had paid a personal visit, and the household was agog with nervous anticipation. Already Janey had taken offence over some suggestion as to what she should serve for lunch, and had shut herself away in the kitchen to sulk. Pa Plomer, though outwardly vague and absent as usual, seemed to emit a continuous high-pitched hum, and his hands must have been raw from the constant rubbings he was giving them. His wife, alone of all the household, floated above the general excitement, serene behind a smile of secret knowing.

  The princely arrival was announced by the sound of tyres on gravel and a volley of Barney’s deep-throated barks. Polly and her father went to the front door to greet their noble visitor, while I hung back in the hallway, feeling like an assassin sullenly in wait with a fizzing bomb under his coat. Freddie was driving, I saw, what used to be called a shooting-brake, a high-set antiquated vehicle that looked more like a well-appointed tractor than a car. He climbed down from the driving seat and advanced across the gravel, removing his leather gauntlets and smiling his sad, strained smile. He wore a woollen coat of seaweed-green and a short tweed cape, a cap with a peak, and rubber galoshes over a pair of patent-leather shoes as dainty as dancing-pumps. He does dress the princely part, I’ll say that much for him. “Ah, good day, good day,” he murmured, removing his cap and gravely taking Polly’s hand and then her father’s, bending towards them each in turn his long, narrow face and showing his slightly tarnished teeth in an equine grimace. Glancing beyond them he spotted me, Gavrilo Princip himself, lurking in the shadows. We hadn’t met since our encounter outside the jakes that long-ago day of the fête at Hyland Heights when he delivered his unwittingly acute criticism of my drawings, and I could see that once more he had forgotten who I was. Polly introduced us. Barney padded about among our legs, grinning and panting. We walked along the hall, the four of us, followed by the dog. No words to be spoken, and all aware of panic in face of the social abyss. How peculiar a contraption it is, the human concourse.

  Lunch was served in the high brown vault of the dining room, at a long brown table. The table was scarred and pitted with age, and I kept running my fingers lightly over the wood to get the burnished, silky feel of it. I like things when they are smoothed and softened by time like that. All we have are surfaces, surfaces and the self’s puny interiority; that’s a fact too often and too easily forgotten, by me as well as by everyone else. Through two high windows I could see the sky, where the wind was bunching up the fleecy, new-born clouds and driving them before it in a flock. Strange to have the eye and the urge to paint and not be able to do
it. I stand stooped before the world like an agued old man in impotent contemplation of a naked and shamelessly willing girl. Rue and rheum, that’s my lot, poor pained painster that I am.

  Conversation, I think I may fairly say, did not flow. The weather and its vagaries sustained us for a while—or sustained them, I should say, since I was for the most part a silent presence at the table. I am a sulker, as you will have gathered by now; it’s another of my unappealing traits. Polly’s father and the Prince spoke desultorily of poets obscure and long dead—obscure to me, anyway. Pip in her high-chair banged and burbled—amazing how much clamour so small a creature can make—beaming about her in delight, charmed that we should all have gathered here to attend her musical recital. Yes, it would not be long now until her consciousness stubbed itself against the hard fact that she is not the fulcrum of the world. The new science teaches, if I understand it rightly, that every tiniest particle behaves as if it were—as in a sense it is—the central point upon which all creation turns. Welcome, runner, to the human race.

  What a type he is, dear old Freddie. I could hardly take my eyes off him, his exquisite suit, tailored surely by captive dwarfs in one of the subterranean workshops of high Alpinia, his silken neckwear of royal blue, the discreet little pin in his lapel that is the sign of his membership of the Knights of the Rosy Cross, or the Brotherhood of Wotan, or some-such elect and secret consistory. Add to all that his bloodless cheeks and phthisic frame, the weary stoop and the infinite sadness of his eye, and what have you but the very figure of a dying lineage. How would I portray him, if I were asked to? A listing iron helmet on a painted stick. He suffers from dandruff, I notice—there is always a scatter of powdery flakes on his collar; it is as if he were shedding himself, steadily, stealthily, in this unceasing fall of wax-white scurf. Though all his attention was directed towards the Plomers, Vater und Tochter, his glance on occasion drifted in my direction with hesitant surmise. Polly’s mother, too, was showing a keener interest in me than heretofore, and watched me with a considering eye, like a visitor to a museum circling some particularly enigmatic piece in order to get the look of it from every angle. No doubt somewhere in the labyrinthine caverns of what passed in her for consciousness there lingered still the recent image of a dim shape draped in a blanket doing something highly suspect at a pitch-dark window. Polly seemed as remote from me now as her mother, and for the first time in a long time I found myself pining for Gloria. Well, not Gloria, exactly, or not her alone, but all she represented, hearth and home, in other words the old ground, which, after all, if not a bower of bliss, had for many years suited me well enough, in its way. When I was a surly schoolboy I spent many a day on the mitch, little recking every time that a moment would come, usually around noon, when the attractions of being at large while others were held captive would pall, and despite myself I would fall into yearning for the fusty classroom with motes of chalk in the air and the pitiless face of the big clock on the wall and even the teacher’s dreary drone, and eventually I would straggle home, where my mother, knowing full well what I had been about, would consent to be lied to. That’s me all over, no fortitude, no sticking-power; no grit.

  Gloria. Once more I wondered, as I wonder yet, why she had not come for me when I was at the gate-lodge. Even she would not be able to guess where I had landed up now, here with the Plomers and their Prince.

  “Ah!” Freddie suddenly said, making the rest of us start, even Polly’s mother, who raised her eyebrows and blinked. He was looking at me, with what in him passed for animation. “I know who you are,” he said. “Forgive me, I’ve been trying to remember. You’re that painter, Oliver.”

  “Orme,” I murmured. “Oliver is my first—”

  “Yes yes, Orme, of course.”

  He was tremendously pleased with himself to have remembered me at last, and slapped his hands flat on the table before him and leaned back, beaming.

  Mr. Plomer cleared his throat, making a sort of extended rolling bass trill. “Mr. Orme,” he said, a trifle over-loudly, as if it were we who were hard of hearing, “is a great admirer of the poets.” He turned to me invitingly, as though to give me the floor. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Orme?”

  What was I to say?—picture a helpless fish-mouth and a wildly swivelling eye. Pip, perhaps mistaking the slight tension of the moment for a wordless rebuke directed at her, began to wail.

  “Polly needs changing,” Mrs. Plomer announced, gazing complacently at the red-faced infant.

  “Oh, there there,” Mr. Plomer said, leaning across the table towards his granddaughter, baring his dentures in a desperate smile.

  Extraordinary what a crying child can do to a room. It was like that moment in the ape-house when one of the big males sets up a howl, leaning forwards on his knuckles and turning his lips inside out, and all the animals in their cages round about begin to gibber and shriek. As Pip screamed on, we all, except Polly’s mother, did something, moved, or spoke, or lifted hands in helpless alarm. Even Janey appeared, popping into the doorway with a wooden spoon in her fist, like the goddess of chastisement made balefully manifest. Polly rose exasperatedly from her chair, surging up like some great fish, and fairly flung herself at the child and plucked her from the high-chair and dashed with her from the room. I, stumbling, trotted after, Jack to her Jill.

  It has just struck me, who knows why, that old Freddie is probably younger than I am. This is a bit of a shock, I can tell you. The fact is, I keep forgetting how old I am; I’m not old-old, but neither am I the blithe youth I so often mistake myself for. What was I thinking of, at my age, to fall in love with Polly and make such a ruinous hash of everything? As well ask why I steal—stole, I mean—or why I stopped painting, or why, for that matter, I started in the first place. One does what one does, and blunders bleeding out of the china shop.

  When I got into the hall Polly was nowhere to be seen. I tracked her, guided by the sound of the child’s wails, to a curious little cubby-hole connecting two much larger rooms. The tiny space was dominated by a pair of opposing white doors and, between them, a tall sash window looking out on to the lawn and the drive winding away in the direction of the front gates and the road. Under the window there was a padded bench seat, and here Polly sat, holding the babe on her knee. Mother and child were by now equally distressed, both of them crying, more or less forcefully, their faces flushed and swollen. Polly glared at me and gave a muffled cry of anguish and anger, her eyes shiny and awash and her mouth an open rectangle sagging at the side. One sees why Pablo, the brute, so often went out of his way to make them cry.

  Polly, before I could get in a word, began to rail at me with a violence that even in the circumstances seemed to me uncalled-for. She started off by demanding why I had come here. I thought she meant here to Grange Hall, but when I protested that it was she who had insisted I take her home—her very words, remember?— she cut me off impatiently. “Not here!” she cried. “To the town, I mean! You could have lived anywhere, you could have stayed in that place, Aigues-whatever-it’s-called, with the flamingos and the white horses and all the rest of it, but no, you had to come back to us and ruin everything.”

  In her agitation she was bouncing the child violently up and down on her knee, like a giant salt-cellar, so that the poor mite’s eyes were rolling in her head and her sobs were compressed into a series of gargles and burps. The sudden shadow of a cloud swooped across the window, but a moment later the pallid sunlight crept out again. No matter what else is going on, one of my eyes is forever turning towards the world beyond.

  “Polly,” I began, holding out suppliant hands to her, “dearest Polly—”

  “Oh, shut up!” she almost shouted. “Don’t call me that, don’t call me dearest! It makes me sick.”

  Little Pip, who had stopped crying, was fixed on me with moony intentness. All children have the artist’s dispassionate gaze; either that, or vice versa.

  Now abruptly Polly’s tone changed. “What do you think of him?” she asked, in almost
a chatty tone. I frowned; I was baffled. Who? “Mr. Hyland!” she snapped, with a toss of her head. “The Prince, as you call him!” I took a step backwards. I didn’t know what to say. Was there a catch in the question, was it a test of some kind? I progress through the world like a tightrope walker, though I seem always to be in the middle of the rope, where it’s at its slackest, its most elastic. “He’s very shy,” she said, “isn’t he?” Is he? “Yes,” she said, “he is,” glaring at me, as if I had contradicted her.

  Outside, once more, the sunlight was doused with a soundless click, and yet again cautiously reasserted itself; far off, a line of bare, gesticulating trees leaned their branches slantwise in the wind.

  Polly sighed. “What are we going to do?” she said, sounding not angry now but only vexed and impatient.

  The child pressed her head against her mother’s breast and snuggled there possessively, casting back at me a spiteful, drowsy-eyed glance. I say it again, children know more than they know.

  I asked Polly if she intended to go back to Marcus. The question was no sooner out than I knew I shouldn’t have asked it. Indeed, more than that: I knew before I asked it that I shouldn’t ask it. There is something or someone in me, a reckless sort of hobbledehoy, lurking in the interstices of what passes for my personality—what am I but a gatherum of will-less affects?—that must always poke a finger into the wasps’ nest. “Will I go back to him?” Polly said archly, as if it were a novel notion, one that had never occurred to her until now. She looked aside then, seeming more uncertain than anything else, and said she didn’t know; that she might; that anyway she doubted he would have her, and that even if he would, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be taken back, like damaged goods being returned to the shop where they had been bought. Evidently I figured nowhere in these considerations of hers. And why should I?