The Blue Guitar Read online

  I felt tired, immeasurably tired, and Polly made room for me beside her on the seat and I sat down, leaning dully forwards with my hands on my knees and my eyes fixed vacantly on the floor. The child was asleep by now, and Polly rocked her back and forth, back and forth. The wind keened to itself in a chink in the window frame, a distant, immemorial voice. When the time arrives for me to die I want it to happen at a stilled moment like that, a fermata in the world’s melody, when everything comes to a pause, forgetting itself. How gently I should go then, dropping without a murmur into the void.

  Why did I come back and ruin everything? she asked. What a question.

  I heard footsteps approaching and sprang guiltily to my feet. Why guiltily? It’s a general condition. Little Pip, still huddled against Polly’s breast, stirred too and awoke. Yet another thing about children: you can fire off a revolver next to their ears and they’ll sleep on without a stir, but pocket the weapon and try tiptoeing out of the nursery and you’ll have them up yelling and waving like shipwrecked sailors. Pip had particularly sharp hearing, as I learned on the one disastrous occasion when Polly brought her to the studio and tried to get her to sleep while we made furtive love on the sofa. She did sleep, curled in a splash of sunlight on a nest of paint-encrusted dust-sheets, until Polly, eyelids aflutter and her throat pulsing, let escape the tiniest, helpless squeak, and I peered over my shoulder to see the child sit up abruptly, as if jerked by a string, to stare in solemn-eyed amazement at the single, naked, monstrously entangled creature into which her mummy and her mummy’s naughty friend had somehow been transformed.

  The footsteps, soft and slurred, were Mr. Plomer’s. He hesitated when he saw us there, me standing guard, like poor old Joseph at a bivouac on the flight to Egypt, and Polly seated, cradling the child, with the window and the wind-blown day at her back. Little Pip held out eager arms to her granddad, wanting to be lifted up. He touched her cheek distractedly. “My dear,” he said to his daughter, “I wonder if you’ve seen the little book I was showing to you last evening—the volume of poems? I want to return it to Mr. Hyland, whose property it is, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.”

  —

  By late afternoon the rain was back with a vengeance, and I went for a walk. Yes yes, I know what I said about walks and going for them, but on this occasion outdoors was more tolerable than in. A great search had been instituted for Freddie’s missing book. To join in it, under Janey’s command, two extra housemaids were summoned. Up to this they must have been confined in some chamber deep in the lower regions of the house, for I hadn’t known of their existence until they popped up, blushing and tittering. Meg and Molly they were called, a mousy pair, with red knuckles and their hair in buns. There was much clattering of heels on stairs and a raucous calling of voices from room to room, and many a red-bound volume was carried hopefully to Mr. Plomer, but over all of them he sadly shook his head. “I can’t think what has become of it,” he kept repeating, in an increasingly agitated tone, “I really can’t.” Impatient with all this fuss, and seeing in it a reason if not an excuse to be off, I waylaid Janey in the hall and asked if there was some rain-gear I could borrow. Polly, cross with me again because I had declined to take part in the search, caught me slipping out at the front door and gave me a wounded glare. “Daddy’s in an awful sweat,” she said accusingly, “and now Mr. Hyland has taken offence and is threatening to leave because we can’t find his blasted book—and you’re going for a walk. Take Pip with you, at least.” I said I would love to take the child, of course, of course I would, except that it was raining, look, and stepping smartly out on to the glistening step I shut the door behind me and made off.

  I walked down the drive, sloshing through the rain happily enough and whistling “The Rakes of Mallow.” I think escape is all I really yearn for, everything being contingent on the simple premise of being at large. Janey had found for me a splendid hat, a sort of sou’wester, with a sloping flap at the back and an elastic string to go under my chin, and an oilskin coat that reached almost to my ankles. Also she produced a pair of stout black boots; they were a perfect fit, which, I thought, could only be a signal of encouragement from the household deities whose task it is to arrange such small, happy congruences. I took a walking-stick, too, from among a bristling bundle of them in an elephant’s foot receptacle in the hall. Come, Olly, I bade myself, step forth and claim the freedom of the road.

  The rain somehow negated whatever utilitarian aspect that being on a walk might have had, and so, as I went along, I was free to look about me with a lively interest. Here was a field of cabbages, each coarse and leathery leaf bestrewn with wobbling jewels of rain. The wet branches of the trees were almost black, though underneath they were of a lighter shade, a darkish grey; when the wind gusted they let fall clatters of big, random drops, and I thought of the priest at my father’s funeral and the short, thick, ornate metal thing with a perforated knob on the end of it that he dunked repeatedly in a silver bucket and scattered holy water from, over the coffin, and over the mourners, too, the ones standing most closely round. Decaying leaves squelched and squirmed under my tramping boots. I felt a cold drop trembling at the tip of my nose, I wiped it away and a minute later another one had formed. All this was curiously pleasant and cheering. At heart I am I think a simple organism, with simple desires that I keep on foolishly elaborating to the point where they get me into impossible fixes.

  I was glad, in the end, that our child turned out to be a daughter. True, I had set my heart on having a boy. However, there is something at once absurd and slightly grotesque in the spectacle of a father and his son, especially when there is a marked resemblance between them. It’s as if the father had set out to make a creature in his own image, an exact scale-model of himself, but through lack of skill and general clumsiness had managed to produce, in this tottering homunculus, only a comic parody. My little girl was very bonny, oh, yes, and looked nothing like her whey-faced, freckled and spheroid papa, or not that I could see, anyway. I was particularly taken by her upper lip, which was perfectly the shape of those stylised seagulls children draw with crayons, and had in the middle of it a little bleb of flesh that was almost colourless, that was almost indeed transparent, and that delighted me, I don’t quite know why. How well I remember her face, which is a foolish claim to make, since any face, especially a child’s, is in a gradual but relentless process of change and development, so that what I carry in my memory can be only a version of her, a generalisation of her, that I have fashioned for myself, as an evanescent keepsake. There are photographs of her, of course, but photographs of children are no good. I think it’s because of the artless way in which they gaze into the lens, without that giveaway flash of vanity, defensiveness, truculence, that in an adult’s portrait reveals so much.

  I never tried to paint her, in life or afterwards. All the same I seem to see a trace of her in this or that of my things—not a likeness, no no, but a certain, what shall I say, a certain echoing softness of tone, a certain tenderness of colour or form, or just the slope of a line, or even a perspective, shading off into infinity. They leave so little trace, our lost ones; a sigh on the air and they’re gone.

  What did my father make of me, I wonder, what did he feel for me, the last of his children? Love? There’s that difficult word again. I’m sure he did cherish me, let’s put it no more strongly than that, but that’s not what I mean. What had he hoped for, from life, overall? Whatever it was I’m sure it can’t have been personified in me, or anyone else, for that matter. Gloria told me, long after he was dead, that one day he had turned to her without warning or cause and had said, forcefully, angrily, even, that he, too, could have been a painter, like me, had there been the means for him to be educated and trained. I was startled. If other people are a puzzle, a parent is an unfathomable mystery. I stepped over both of mine, stepped on them, rather, as if they were stones in a river, the deep and swollen river separating me from that far bank where I imagined real life was being
carried on. How had he said it, I asked Gloria, what had been his tone, his look? Her only answer was one of those smiles of hers, gentle, pitying, not unfond.

  By the time I got to the gates at the end of the drive the rain had stopped, which rather disappointed me. I had fancied the notion of myself braving the elements, an old sea-dog lubbered on land, in my sou’wester and seven-league boots, heedless of rain and gale. After I stopped being a painter I noticed that I had to keep verifying myself, had to keep knocking a knuckle against myself, as it were, to check that I was still a person of at least some substance, and that often, getting back only a hollow sound, I would slip into imagining another role for myself, another identity, even. Polly’s lover, for instance, was something for me to be, as was the ingrate son, the false friend, even the failed artist. The alternatives I conjured up didn’t have to be impressive, didn’t have to be good or decent, didn’t have to feed my self-esteem, so long as they seemed real, so long as they could pass for real, by which I mean authentic, I suppose. Authentic: there’s another word that always worries me. The notable thing in this strategy of setting up new selves was that the results didn’t feel much different from how things had been with me before, in the days when I was still a painter and didn’t doubt, or didn’t realise I doubted, my essential selfness. It’s a rum business, being me. But then it would be rum being anyone, I’m sure that must be so.

  From the gates I turned on to the road and walked along the sodden verge, astray in my thoughts of many things, and nothing. The rained-on tarmac before me gleamed in the failing light. Now and then a bird, disturbed by my passing, would burst from the hedge beside me and go skimming off, calling out a strident warning. They tell us of the welter of other worlds we shall never see, but what of the worlds we do see, the worlds of birds and beasts, what could be more other from us than these? And yet we were of those worlds, once, a long time ago, and frolicked in those happy fields, all the evidence assures us it’s the case, though I find it hard to credit. I am more inclined to think we came about spontaneously, sprung from the roots of the mandrake, perhaps, and were set despite ourselves to wander over the earth, blinking, bewildered autochthons.

  I hadn’t eaten anything at lunch, yet I wasn’t hungry. The belly knows when it’s not going to be fed and, like an old dog, settles down to sleep. That’s how it is, I find, with the creature and its comforts, so that all is not ill, and sometimes the Lord does temper the wind to the shorn lamb.

  Now came the strangest thing—even yet I do not know what to make of it, or if it even happened. I began to hear ahead of me a mingled, musical dinning that grew steadily louder, until presently there appeared from around a bend in the road a little tribe of what I took to be merchants, or peddlers, or the like, got up in eastern apparel. I stopped, and drew close in to the hedge and watched, as slowly they advanced through the gathering dusk, a trundling procession of half a dozen caravans painted blue and bright red, with curved black roofs, drawn by sturdy little horses, like those tin clockwork ones we used to get for Christmas presents, their nostrils flared and the whites of their eyes gleaming. Lean, dark-skinned men in long robes and ornate sandals—sandals, in this weather!—padded along beside the horses at a loose-limbed, swinging stride, holding on to the bridles, while from within the dimness of the caravans their plump, veiled women looked silently out. At the rear came a straggle of ragged children playing a cacophonous, whining music on fifes and bagpipes and little brightly coloured finger drums. I watched them go past, the men with scarred, narrow faces, and the women, what I could glimpse of them, all huge, kohl-rimmed eyes, their hands tattooed with henna in intricate arabesques. None took notice of me, not even the children glanced my way. Perhaps they did not see me, perhaps I only saw them. And so they passed on, the clinking, variegated troupe, along the wet and shadowed road. I followed them with my gaze until I could see them no longer. Who were they, what were they? Or were they, at all? Had I chanced upon some crossing point where universes intersect, had I broken through briefly into another world, far from this one in place and time? Or had I simply imagined it? Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

  Now I walked on, heedless of the encroaching dark, unnerved by that hallucinatory encounter and yet strangely elated, too. Presently all the foliage round about began to be lit up by the headlights of a vehicle approaching behind me. I stopped and stepped back on to the grass verge again, but instead of passing me by the thing slowed and drew to a shuddering halt. It was Freddie Hyland’s absurd, high-backed jalopy, and here was Freddie himself, peering down at me from the cab.

  “I thought it was you,” he said. “May I offer you a lift?”

  How does he do it, how does he manage it, that grave, patrician sonority, so that the simplest things he says convey the weight of generations? After all, he was only Freddie Hyland whom my brothers used to bully in the school-yard, snatching his schoolbag from him and kicking it around for a football. I wonder if he remembers those days.

  My first impulse was to thank him for his kind offer and politely decline it—a lift to where, anyway?—but instead I found myself walking round by the front of the throbbing machine, through the glare of the head-lamps, and climbing up into the passenger seat. Freddie bestowed on me his slow, melancholy smile. He was wearing his cape and his peaked cap. Chug-chug, and off we went. The big steering-wheel was set horizontally, as in an old-fashioned bus, so that Freddie had to lean out over it, like a croupier spinning a roulette wheel, at the same time devoting much intricate footwork to the pedals on the floor. He drove at an unhurried rate, sedately. The road before us seemed an endless tunnel into which we and our lights were being drawn inexorably. Freddie asked if town was where I wanted to go and, without thinking, I said it was. Why not? As well there as anywhere else. I was on the run again.

  I asked Freddie if he had encountered the caravan from the east, as he was coming along the road. He didn’t speak, only shook his head and smiled again, enigmatically, I thought, keeping his eyes on the road.

  “The town is where you were born, yes?” he said, after a little time. In the glow from the dashboard his face was a long, greenish mask, the eye-sockets empty and the mouth a thin black gash. I told him about the gate-lodge, rented to us by his cousin, the well-named bearish Urs. To this, too, he returned no comment. Perhaps there is for him a clear band of reference, demarcated long ago, and all that falls outside it he declines to acknowledge. “I have nowhere that I think of as home,” he said pensively. “Of course, I am here, but I’m not of here. The people laugh at us, I know. And yet it’s a hundred years since my great-uncle first came and purchased land and built his house. I’ve always thought we should not have changed our name.” He braked as a fox sprinted across the road in front of us, its brush low and its sharp black snout lifted. “Do you know Alpinia?” he enquired, glancing sideways at me. “Those countries, those regions—Bavaria, the Engadin, Gorizia—perhaps there is my home.” The engine groaned and rattled as we picked up speed again. I seemed to feel a cold sharp breath, as of a gust of wind blowing down from snowy heights. My hat was on the floor at my feet, my blackthorn stick was between my knees. “Our family were Regensburgers,” the Prince said in his weary way, “from the town of Regensburg, in the old time. I often dream of it, of the river and the stone bridge, of those strange Moorish towers with the cranes’ nests built on the top of them. Perhaps I shall go back there, one day, to my people’s place.”

  I looked out at the trees as they rose up abruptly in the headlights and as abruptly toppled away again into the darkness behind us. Remember how, in the days when we were little, and what was to become Alpinia was still a mess of warring peoples, there used to be free offers on the backs of corn-flakes packets? You cut out so many coupons and sent them off to an address abroad, and days or weeks later your free gift would come in the post. What a thrill it was, the thought of a stranger somewhere, maybe a girl, with scarlet nail polish and her hair in a perm, wielding her paper-knife and taking out your
letter and holding it, actually holding it in her fingers, and reading it, the letter you wrote, and folded, and slid, crackling, as white and crisp as starched linen, into its envelope that smelt so evocatively of wood-pulp and gum. And then there was the thing itself, the gift, a cheap plastic toy that would break after a day or two but that yet was a sacred object, a talisman made magical simply—simply!—by being from elsewhere. No cargo-cultist could have experienced the mystical fervour that I did when my precious parcel came tumbling from the sky. I’ve said it before but I’m going to say it again: that’s the function of stealing, that stolen, the most trivial object is transfigured into something new and numinously precious, something which—

  I knew I’d get on to stealing, the subject is never far from my thoughts.

  But whoa, you’ll cry, dismount for a minute from that fancy hobby-horse of yours and tell us this: How was it that Polly Pettit née Plomer, whom you pinched from her husband and sought to set among the stars, how was it that she so suddenly lost her goddess’s glow? For that’s what you were out to do, we all know that, to make her divine and nothing less. All right, I admit it, I did attempt the task usually allotted to Eros—yes, Eros—the task of conferring divine light upon the commonplace. But no, no, it was more than that I was about: it was nothing less than total transformation, the clay made spirit. Pleasure, delight, the raptures of the flesh, such things mean nothing, next to nothing, to a man like me. Trans-this and trans-that, all the transes, that’s what I was after, the making over of things, of everything, by the force of concentration, which is, and don’t mistake it, the force of forces. The world would be so thoroughly the object of my passionate regard that it would break out and blush madly in a blaze of self-awareness. There were times, I remember, when Polly would shy away from me, covering herself with her hands, like Venus on her half-shell. “Don’t look at me like that!” she would say, smiling but frowning too, nervous of me and my devouring eye. And she was right to be nervous, for I was out to consume her entirely. And what was this urge’s secret spring? Love’s limitless mad demands, the lover’s furious hunger? Surely not, I say, surely not! It was aesthetics: it was all, always, an aesthetic endeavour. That’s right, Olly, go ahead, hold up your hands and pretend you are misunderstood. You don’t like it, do you, when the knife gets near the bone? Poor Polly, was it not the worst thing of all you could have done to her, to try to have her be something she was not, even if only in your eyes? And look at you now, in flight from her yet again, in some sort of queer cahoots with the Prince of the Snowy Shoulders. What a sham, what a self-deluding, shameless sham you are.