The Blue Guitar Page 18

  Ah, yes, nothing like the silken whip of self-reproach to soothe a smarting conscience.

  Where was I, where were we? Rolling along, yes, Freddie and I, through the darkling eve. We got to the town as the shops were shutting. Always a saddish time of day, in autumn especially. Freddie asked where he might set me down. I didn’t know what to say, and said the railway station, which was the first place that came into my head. He looked surprised, and asked if I were going on a journey, if I were going away. I said yes. I don’t know why I lied. Maybe I did mean to go, to be gone, thus removing the fly, the buzzing bluebottle, from everyone’s ointment. He eyed my oilskins and my blackthorn stick, but made no comment. I could see him thinking, though, and even seemed to detect a stir of unwonted animation in his manner. What could it be that was exciting him?

  The station when we pulled up at it was in darkness, and I clambered down from the cab and he drove away, the exhaust pipe at the back of that absurd machine puttering out gasps of night-blue smoke.

  Now what should I do? I walked along the quayside, holding on to my trawler-man’s hat. It was a raw and gusty night, and the heaving sea off to my left was as black and shiny as patent leather, with now and then a white bird swooping in ghostly silence through the darkness. My brain was barely functioning—perhaps this is what walks are for, to dull the mind and still its restless speculations?—and my feet, seemingly of their own will, turned me away from the harbour, and presently, to my mild surprise, I found myself standing in the street in front of the laundry and the door to the steep stairway that led up to the studio. It occurred to me that I could stay there for the night, sleeping on the sofa, old faithful itself. I was searching my pockets for the key when a figure slipped out of the darkness of the laundry doorway. I started back in fright, then saw that it was Polly. She was wearing a beret and a great black overcoat that was too big to have been her father’s and must have been left behind by some mighty yeoman ancestor. I was confused by her appearing so suddenly like that. I asked her how she had got there, noting the high-pitched, panicky warble in my voice. She ignored my question, however, and demanded that I open the door at once, for she was, she said, perishing with the cold. We trudged up the stairs in silence; I thought, as so often, of the gallows.

  In the studio the big window in the ceiling was throwing a complicated cage of starlight across the floor. I switched on a lamp. It seemed colder in here than it had been outside, though my feet, in those borrowed boots, were unpleasantly and damply hot. I looked about at familiar things, that slanting window, the table with its pots and brushes, the canvases stacked with their faces to the wall. I felt more estranged than ever from the place, and curiously ill at ease, too, as if I had burst in crassly on someone else’s private doings. Polly in her giant’s coat stood with her eyes on the floor, clasping herself in her arms. She had taken off her beret and now she threw it on the table. I looked at her hair, and remembered how in the old days I would wind a thick swatch of it around my hand and pull her head far back and sink my vampire’s teeth into her pale, soft, excitingly vulnerable throat. I asked if she would take some brandy, to warm her up, but then I remembered that Marcus and I had finished the bottle. I enquired again, carefully, diffidently, how she had got here. “I drove, of course,” she said, in a tone of haughty contempt. “You didn’t see the car in the street? But of course you didn’t. You never notice anything that’s not yourself.”

  I often think, in puzzlement and vague dismay, of my pictures, the ones that are in galleries, mostly minor ones, all over the world, from Reykjavik to the Republic of New South Wales, from Novy Bug to the Portlands, those sadly separated twins of coastal Oregon and Maine. The pictures have, in my mind, a hovering, liminal existence. They are like things glimpsed in a dream, vivid yet without substance. I know they are connected to me, I know that I produced them, yet I don’t feel for them in any existential way—I don’t register their distant presence. It was the same, now, with Polly. Somehow she had lost something essential, to my outward eye but more so to the inward one. Which was the greater mystery: that she had been for me what she had been once, or that she had ceased to be it now? Yet here she was before me, unavoidably herself. And of course that was it, that she was herself at last, and not what I had made of her. How dull and dulling they can be, these sudden insights. Better not to have them, perhaps, and cleave to a primordial bumpkinhood.

  I started to apologise for having run off yet again, but I had hardly got going before she turned on me in a fury.

  “How could you?” she said, with her chin tucked in and her wounded, furious eyes blazing at me accusingly. “How could you insult us like that?”

  Us? Did she mean the two of us, her and me? It seemed not; it seemed decidedly not. Terror twanged in me like a gut string jerked tight. I said I didn’t know what she meant. I said I had gone for a walk—she had seen me going out at the front door, after all. I told her of my encounter, if encounter it really was, with the strange caravan of dark-skinned folk, and of how Freddie Hyland had come along and in his princely way had offered me a lift, and how I had thought to take the opportunity to pop into the studio here and check that all was—

  She sprang at me. “Where is it?” she demanded, in a very loud voice, almost shouting in my face, and a speck of her saliva landed on my wrist; surprising how quickly spit cools, once it’s out.

  “What?” I responded, a frightened quack. “Where is what?”

  “You know very well what. The book—his book. The book of poems by what’s-his-name. Where is it?”

  I said again that I didn’t know what she meant, that I had no idea of what she was talking about. My voice now had become light and tearful and sort of tottery, the voice in which the guilty always protest their blamelessness. There followed the inevitable back-and-forth music-hall routine of accusation and denial. I blustered and fussed, but in the end she refused to listen to any more of my bleatings, and shook her head and held up a hand to silence me, with her eyes lightly closed and her eyebrows lifted.

  “You took it,” she said. “I know you did. Now give it back.”

  Oh, dear. Oh, double dear. My life, it often seems to me, is a matter not of forward movement, as in time it must be, but of constant retreat. I see myself driven backwards by a throng of furiously shaking fists, my lip bleeding and my coat torn, stumbling over broken paving and whimpering piteously. Yet in this instance what impressed me most, I think, was not Polly’s rage, and outrage, impressive as they were, but the simple, plain dislike she was displaying towards me, the lip-curling distaste she seemingly felt at merely being in my presence. She had a withdrawing look, as of a person shrinking away from something unclean. This was new; this was wholly new.

  “Come on, give it to me,” she said, in the tone of a tough policeman, putting out her hand with palm upturned. “I know you have it.”

  Yes, I could see she did, and I felt something contracting inside me to the size and wrinkly texture of a not quite deflated party balloon.

  “How do you know?” I asked, old rodent that I was, looking for a crack to escape through.

  “Pip told me. She saw you take it.”

  “What do you mean, Pip?” I cried. “She can’t even talk!”

  “She can, to me.”

  I was all in a muddle by now. Had the child really seen me take the book, had she really managed to betray me? If she had, and I must believe it, or accept it, at least, then the game was up. I reached under my oilskin coat and fumbled the book out of my jacket pocket and handed it to her. “I was only borrowing it,” I said, in a whine, sounding like a sulky little boy caught pilfering the gifts at a birthday party.

  “Ha!” she said, with angry disdain. “Like you borrowed all the other things, I suppose?”

  I peered at her. My heart was going now at a syncopated patter. “All what other things?”

  “All the things you’ve taken from all of us!” She snorted, throwing back her head. “You think we don’t know about y
our stealing? You think we’re all blind, and fools, into the bargain?” She opened the book and riffled through the pages. “You don’t even speak German, do you?” she said, shaking her head in bitter sadness.

  So here it was at last, the reckoning, and all so unexpected. As far as I knew, I had never been caught in the act before, never in all my years as a thief. Gloria, I had supposed, would have her suspicions—there’s not much one can keep from a wife—but I believed she had never actually witnessed me pinching something, and even if she had it wouldn’t have counted, somehow. But that I should have been found out by Polly, that indeed she should have known all along about my thieving, that was a great shock and humiliation, though humiliation and shock are inadequate terms in which to describe my state. I seemed to have suffered a physical attack; it was as if a stick had been stuck into my innards and waggled violently about, and I thought for a second I might be sick on the spot. Something had been taken from me; now I was the one who had lost something secret and precious. The little crimson-covered volume, that in my pocket had throbbed with a dark, erotic fullness, had become, as I handed it over to her, inert and exhausted, another sad little leaking balloon.

  One thing I think I can safely say: I shall not steal again.

  And yet there was more—yes, more!—for Polly herself had suffered another, a final, transformation in my eyes. There she stood, in that big rough coat, wearing no make-up, her hair misshapen from the beret, her calves bare and her feet planted flat on the floor, and she might have been, I don’t know, something carven, a figure at the base of a totem pole, a tribal effigy that no one venerated any more. As a deity, the deity of my desiring, she had been perfectly comprehensible, my very own little Venus reclining in the crook of my arm; now, as what she really was, herself and nothing more, a human creature made of flesh and blood and bone, she was terrifying. But what terrified me was not her anger, the recriminations she was hurling at me, the lip curled in contempt. What I felt most strongly from her now was plain indifference. And at that, finally, finally of finallys, I knew she was gone from me for good.

  Gone for good? Gone for bad.

  That, then, was the end, if one may speak of an ending, given the unbreakable continuum that is the world. Oh, inevitably it went on for some time, there in the studio, the redoubled outbursts of anger and the floods of tears, the accusations and denials, the how-could-you’s and how-can-I’s, the don’t-touch-me’s and don’t-you-dare’s, the cries of anguish, the stammered apologies. But underneath it all, I could see, she cared for none of it, and was going through it only for form’s sake, fulfilling the necessary ritual. And to think how lofty was the regard she used to hold me in! She thought I was a god, once, she said so, remember? When she saw me first, in Marcus’s workshop that day when I brought in my father’s watch for repair—it’s here on the table before me now, ticking away accusingly—she went to the library, she told me afterwards, and took out a book on my work—Morden’s monograph, I imagine, a paltry thing, for all its earnest bulk—and sat with it open on her lap by the window in her parlour, running her fingers over the reproductions, imagining that the surface of the cool glossy paper was me, was my skin. “Have you any idea what a fool I feel,” she asked now, mildly, wearily, “admitting such a thing?” I hung my head and said nothing. “And all the time you were just a thief,” she said, “a thief, and you never loved me.” Still I held my peace. Sometimes it’s an indecency to speak, even I acknowledge that.

  The lamp-light shone on the floor at our feet, the star-light shone in the window above our heads. Night and night-wind and flitters of cloud. A very storm, outdoors and in. O world, O worlding world, and so much of it lost to me, now.

  When at length Polly ran out of things to say, and with a last rueful shake of the head turned towards the door, I flew into a belated sort of panic and tried to stop her going. She paused for the briefest moment and looked at my hand on her arm with mild distaste, aloof as a stage heroine, then stepped away from me and walked out. I stood in a dither, my heart aflutter and my blood racing. I felt like one who, strolling along the harbour’s edge at twilight, has taken it into his head to leap at the last moment on to the deck of a departing ship, and stands now in the stern, watching in giddy disbelief as the known country steadily recedes, its roofs and spires, its winding roads, its smooth cliffs and sandy margins, all growing small, and faint, and fainter, in the fading light of evening, while behind him, in the far sky, malignant blue-black clouds roll and roil.

  WONDERFUL WEATHER WE had for the funeral, yes, a positively sumptuous day. How callous the world can be. Foolish to say so, of course. The world feels nothing for us—how many times do I have to remind myself of the fact?—we don’t even enter its ken except perhaps as a stubborn parasite, like the mites that used to infest Gloria’s myrtle tree. It is late November and yet autumn has come back, the days smeared all over with sunlight dense and shiny as apricot jam, heady fragrances of smoke and rich rot in the air and everything tawny or bluely agleam. In the night the temperature plunges and by morning the roses, flourishing still, are laced with hoarfrost; then comes the sun and they hang their heads and weep for an hour. Despite gales earlier in the season the last of the leaves have yet to fall. At the faintest zephyr the trees rustle excitedly, like girls shimmying in their silks. Yet there is a tinge of darkness to things, the world is shadowed, dimmed as it seems by death. Above the cemetery the sky looked more steeply domed than usual, and was of a more than usually intense tint—cerulean? cyan? simple cornflower?—and a transparent wafer of full moon, the sun’s ghost, was set just so atop the spire of a purple pine. I never know where to position myself at funerals, and always seem to end up treading on some poor unfortunate’s last long home. Today I hung well back, hiding among the headstones. Made sure I had a view of the two widows, though—for there are two of them, or as good as—standing on opposite sides of the grave, avoiding each other’s eye. They appeared very stark and dramatic in their swoop-brimmed black hats, Polly, with a markedly bigger Little Pip—how they grow!—who looked self-important and cross—children do hate a funeral—while Gloria stood with a hand pressed under her heart, like I don’t know what: like the Winged Victory of Samothrace or some such grand figure, damaged and magnificent. There was no coffin, just an urn containing the ashes, but still they dug a grave, at Polly’s insistence, so I’m told. The urn made me think of Aladdin’s magic lamp. Someone should have given it a rub; you never know. Still the penchant for tasteless jokes, as you see, nothing will kill that. They buried the urn along with the ashes. It seemed in bad taste, somehow.

  There is a constant ticking in my head. I am my own time bomb.

  It strikes me that what I have always done was to let my eye play over the world like weather, thinking I was making it mine, more, making it me, while in truth I had no more effect than sunlight or rain, the shadow of a cloud. Love, too, of course, working to transform, transfigure, the flesh made form. All in vain. The world, and women, are what they always were and will be, despite my most insistent efforts.

  We have had quite a time of it, quite a time. I move, when I move, in a daze of bafflement. It’s as if I had been standing for all my life in front of a full-length mirror, watching the people passing by, behind and in front of me, and now someone had taken me roughly by the shoulders and spun me about, and behold! There it was, the unreflected world, of people and things, and I nowhere to be seen in it. I might as well have been the one who died.

  Yes, quite a time we’ve had of it. I don’t know if my heart is in good enough shape for me to go back over it all, or all of it that seems to matter. In terms of duration it’s not much, weeks at most, though it might as well have been an age. I suppose I owe it to us, to the four of us, to give some sort of account, to record some sort of testament. When I was young, barely in my twenties though already puffed up with stern ambition, I had a memorable experience late one night, I hardly know how to describe it and perhaps shouldn’t try. I hadn’t been
drinking, though I felt as if I were at least halfway drunk. I had started work at first light and didn’t stop until long after midnight. I worked too hard in those days, driving myself into a state of bleak, bone-aching numbness that at times was hardly distinguishable from despair. It was so difficult, sticking to the rules—I was no iconoclast, whatever anyone says—while at the same time struggling to break out and get beyond them. I didn’t know what I was doing, half the time, and might as well have been painting in the dark. Darkness was the adversary, darkness and death, which are pretty much the same thing, when you think about it, though it’s true I’m speaking of a special kind of darkness. I worked so fast, so feverishly, always terrified I wouldn’t survive to finish what I had started. There were days when the ruffian on the stair came right into the room and stood beside me at the easel, bold and insolent, jogging my elbow and whispering suggestively into my ear. Mind you, it was no symbol but death itself, the actual extinguishing, that I daily anticipated. I was the hypochondriacs’ hypochondriac, forever running to the doctor with a pain here, a lump there, convinced I was a terminal case. I was assured, repeatedly and with increasing exasperation, that I wasn’t dying, that I was as sound as a bell, as a belfryful of bells, but I wasn’t to be fobbed off, and sought second, third, fourth opinions in my doomed pursuit of the death sentence. What was it all about? What did I think was coming to get me? Maybe it wasn’t death but failure I was afraid of. Too simple, that, I think. Yet there must have been something wrong with me, to feed and nurture such a morbid obsession.