The Blue Guitar Read online

  Not the least of my chum’s attractions was the fact that he had a glass eye. One doesn’t come across glass eyes very often these days, unless the makers have got extremely adept at fashioning them to look like the real thing. Oliver had lost his eye in an accident—though he darkly insisted it was no accident at all—when his brother shot him with an air-rifle. He was very touchy about his disfigurement, and I think had convinced himself that people didn’t notice unless their attention was drawn to it. He was loath to take the eye out, as I dearly wished him to do—who wouldn’t want to see the gadgetry at the back of the eye, all those squiggly purple veins, those tangles of tubelets, those tiny nozzles with suckers on the ends? When one day he gave in—what things a friend will do for a friend, at that age—I was deeply disappointed. He bent forwards and with the bunched fingers of one hand made a quick, rotating movement, and there it was in his palm, bigger than a big marble, shiny, moist all over, and managing to express, somehow, both indignation and astonishment. It was not the eye that most interested me, as I’ve said, but the socket. However, when he raised his head and faced me, with a curious, maidenly shyness, there was not the gaping cavern I had hoped for, but only a wrinkled, pinkish hollow with a black slit where the eyelids did not quite meet. “It’s the getting it back in that’s the tricky bit,” Oliver said, in a slightly injured, slightly accusing, tone.

  The old man had moved away, and was mooching about the hilltop, scratching himself and coughing like a goat. What was he looking for, what did he hope to find? The place is littered with crushed cigarette packets and flattened fag-ends, empty naggin bottles, scraps of paper with uninvestigable stains, french letters smudged into the mud. What did we do up here, the other Olly and I? Sat under the wall of the tower, as I was sitting now, and talked for hours earnestly of life and related matters. Oh, we were a solemn pair. My pal had an uncannily still and, in spite, or because, of his glass eye, particularly penetrating stare. I thought him marvellously sophisticated, and certainly he was cleverer and far more knowledgeable than I ever hoped to be. He knew all about the by now infamous Brahma Postulate, before I had even heard of it, and could expound on the theory of infinities until the cows came home. His father had put his name down, Oliver told me, for a place at the Godley Institute of Technology, that seat of technological wizardry, which Oliver referred to, familiarly and with impressive nonchalance, as the Old GIT. I was much too bashful to tell him about my plans to be a painter. Looking back, I suspect he hadn’t much interest in me, for all that we were supposed to be such friends—even among schoolboys there is always one who is loved, and one who does the loving. I wonder what became of him. Some dull job somewhere, I would guess, an assistant managership, perhaps, in a provincial bank. The really clever types rarely live up to their early promise, while many of the dozy ones eventually shake themselves awake and shine. I did the opposite, shone at first and later on went dull.

  Gloria is going to have a child. Not mine, needless to say. She doesn’t know what to make of it, and neither do I. No point in talking about rage, jealousy again, bitter sorrow; all that’s a given. We feel acutely, she and I, the slightly farcical aspect of our predicament. We are embarrassed and don’t know what to do about it. We could pretend I am the father, nothing easier, but we won’t, I think. Gloria might go away, as in former times ladies used to do, discreetly, when they found themselves inconveniently in an interesting condition. There’s the house in Aigues-Mortes that she’s still looking into; she might retire to there until she comes to term—how I love these gracious, antique euphemisms—but what would be the good of that? She would have to return eventually, with her bouncing, unexplained babe in tow. She has no intention now of leaving me. She hasn’t said so in so many words but I know it is the case. She has good reason to go, and I suppose technically I have good reason to ask her to be gone, but since when has good reason seemed a good reason for doing anything? It’s not a matter of protecting our reputation—I believe Gloria doesn’t even care what Polly thinks of her—but of doing the right thing. This will seem strange, I know, and I’m not sure myself what it means, but it means something. I don’t believe in much, in the way of morals and manners, but I am convinced that disorder can be, not ordered, perhaps, but arranged, in certain, not unharmonious, configurations. It’s a question of aesthetics, once again. In this too I feel I have Gloria’s tacit agreement.

  It’s all confused, of course, all topsy-turvy. I’m thinking of calling a general meeting of interested parties—not Olive, perhaps, and certainly not Dodo, though I know they would be more than interested—to explain that a mistake has been made, that by rights I should not be the one at the receiving end of all this strife and torment. Well, perhaps I shouldn’t speak of rights. I don’t claim to be the sole injured party; we’re all in injury time, here. But I am the stealer—was the stealer—not the stolen from. Indeed, I want to make clear that the things that have been taken from me were not taken but forfeited. I am master of my own misfortune.

  The old fellow came back from his questings, empty-handed, and sat himself down on the rock beside me, arranging the floppy legs of his trousers around his knees, like a woman demurely fixing her skirts. The rock was roomy enough to accommodate the two of us, so that we were both there but not together. I was glad we were outdoors, for he smelt remarkably bad, even for a tramp: rotted animal hide, with an undertone of domestic gas, and ripe cheese notes. “You were a butty of your man’s, were you?” he said. I was watching a small translucent orange cloud making its innocent way along the rim of one of those low hills and setting out across the estuary. I thought of Oliver, I mean Marcus, crouched at his work bench, the jeweller’s glass screwed into his eye socket, tinily tinkering with the innards of my father’s Elgin watch. “I seen him, that day, in that big car, going into the drink. Over there, it was.” He pointed with a filthy fingernail. “The skid marks are still in the grass, if you want to see them.” He gave himself a vigorous scratch, and sighed and shook his head and, for good measure, spat. “You wouldn’t want to be blaming yourself, now, for a thing like that,” he said. Or I think that’s what he said, unless my ears deceived me, which on occasion, on difficult occasion, it pleases them to do. The little cloud was leaving a reflected pinkish smear on the surface of the water far below.

  Tick, tock.

  Tick.

  Tock.

  —

  Christmas and its bells and baubles done with at last. It was a particularly grisly one, this year; hardly surprising, in the circumstances. Gloria and I passed the day in tranquil solitude, from the world and for the most part from each other. We drank a glass of wine together at noon, then retired to our separate quarters, each with a tray, a bottle and a book. Very civilised. We await the new year with a formless sense of trepidation. What will become of us at all? Fateful events, more than one, are due. Gloria will stay here, that seems definite—there is no more mention of Aigues-Mortes—at least until the child arrives. I’m thinking of suggesting to her that we might try making a go of it, the three of us, Daddy, Mummy and Mummy’s Little Surprise. A bizarre fancy, I agree. The child will not be a girl, I think. I hope not, at any rate: our last one didn’t have much luck. No, I fancy it’s another Marcus the Watchmaker in there, biding his time.

  I did a raid on my secret hiding places, here and at the gate-lodge—shivery experience, that visit, I felt like my own ghost—and threw out a goodly number of treasures from the bad old days. Chief among them was Miss Vandeleur’s green-gowned porcelain lady, retrieved from her still-fragrant cigar box and fondly dusted off; also there was a pearl-handled penknife pinched years ago from my beloved friend Oliver, he of the glass eye, and a little crystal dish purloined—sadly, this will be the last appearance of that lovely soft word, which has, for me, so much of Polly in it—from a Venetian palazzo, one day beyond memory, that still seemed to shimmer with reflected water-lights. All gone, in a bag in the bottom of the dustbin. So, you see, I am a reformed character. Hmm, do I h
ear you say?

  How I savour these late days, the last of the year, all dense blue and charcoal and honey hues with long-shadowed backgrounds by de Chirico. The sun is still in turmoil and, thanks to its flares, our sham midwinter summer persists. A great silence reigns, as if the world were crouched in stillness, holding its breath. What is awaited? I feel sequestered, underground, poking out my snout now and then to take a measuring sniff of the air. Yes, see me there, old Brock in his den, waiting too and watching for he knows not what, his pelt prickling, sensing some fearful imminence.

  One day recently Polly summoned me to meet her at the studio. And a summons it was: it had an imperious ring to it. Dutifully I climbed the steep and creaking stairway, and there she was, at the top, waiting for me outside the door, as so often, but so differently, now. She wore a long slim coat and high heels—high heels!—and her hair was cut in a new way, short, and with an elegant severity. A shaft of light falling on her from a small window high above the landing gave her a statuesque appearance, so that she seemed to represent some vaguely resolute quality, Womanly Endurance, or the Spirit of Widowhood, something in that line. She greeted me in a business-like fashion; she had a preoccupied air, as though she had stopped by here on the way to an altogether more pressing engagement; shades of Perry Percival. She did not take her hands out of the pockets of her stylish coat, as if she thought I might imagine she intended to embrace me. I reached past her to unlock the door, and on the instant saw myself, as if depicted identically on a set of cards that my memory was thumbing through, doing the same thing, leaning forwards in just the same way, a little awkwardly, a little off-balance, on countless occasions in the past.

  Inside, the studio had the familiar-unfamiliar look that schoolrooms used to have on the first day back after the summer holidays. Everything seemed over-lit and much too emphatic. The smell, of course, was a jog to the memory, and to the heart; nothing quite does it like a smell. Polly cast an indifferent glance about her, her eye not even pausing as it glided over the sofa. “How have you been?” she asked. She leaned her head to one side and considered me; she might have been giving not me but my portrait a judicious once-over, and not much caring for what she saw. “You don’t look well.”

  I said I was sure she was right, for certainly I didn’t feel well. I said that she, on the other hand, looked, looked—but I couldn’t think of the right word: such a complicated compound doesn’t exist.

  She smiled faintly and arched an eyebrow, and for a second bore a shocking resemblance to my wife. In those heels she was half a head taller than I. She was standing under the light again where it fell from the big slanted window under which we had so often lain together, contentedly watching the sky’s slow changes, the stately processions of cloud, the milk-white gulls swooping and swirling. She unbuttoned her coat. Underneath, she wore a skirt and bodice affair that to my eye looked suspiciously like a dirndl, though probably this is the effect of hindsight. The skirt was fullish and reached to mid-calf, and the bodice seemed as forbiddingly impenetrable as a suit of mail, yet I suddenly found myself surging forwards with my arms held out to her, as if she might, as if I actually thought she might, fall into them. She drew herself back about an inch, her eyebrow making a sharper arch, and that was all it took to stop me in my tracks. I let my arms fall to my sides, and the two of us looked away from each other at the same instant. There was a clearing of throats. Polly moved aside, taking deliberate, slow paces, and stopped, inevitably, at the table, and inevitably picked up the little glass mouse with the tip broken off its tail and turned it in her fingers, frowning.

  “It was here all the time,” I said.

  She went on examining the mouse. “All what time?”

  “All the time we were here.”

  “And I never noticed.” She nodded, making a grimace expressive of nothing in particular. Her thoughts were far away, from mouse, me, this room, the moment. She was someone else, now. I of course recalled Marcus saying, in the Fisher King that day, that he no longer knew his wife; what negative lessons love teaches us! She moved away from the table, her hands again in the pockets of her coat. “And Gloria,” she asked, in a sharper, brittler, tone, unless I imagined it, “how is she?”

  “Oh, coming along,” I said. “You know.”

  I was itching to ask her, of course, why she had brought me here, and what it was she had to say to me; simple curiosity is one of the stronger urges, I believe. She stopped pacing, and stood gazing down at the sofa pensively, not seeing it, I could see. Then she glanced at me sidelong, with a narrowed eye. “And will you keep the child?” she asked. “I mean, will you pretend to be the father?” It seemed to me she might laugh. I said nothing, only held out my hands on either side, helplessly; I must have looked a little like one of Olive’s half-crucified Christs.

  She set off pacing again, and began to speak of Marcus’s accident—those were the words she used, his accident. She spoke slowly, keeping time with her slow steps. It was as if she were giving dictation, for the setting down of a statement that later she would have to swear to. I tried to summon up, tried to see again, the afternoons we had spent here together, rolling in each other’s arms, but that pair of lovers was another couple, as unrecognisable to me as this new Polly, taller, graver, unreachably remote, who paced before me here. Marcus had always been careless, she said, or maybe it would be better to say carefree, not taking care, anyway, for all that he loved that useless old car. Poor Marcus, she said, shaking her head. Was this, then, I wondered, why we were here, so that she could dictate her deposition to me and I might enter it into the record and close the book of evidence? When people speak, as they will, of Marcus having plunged by accident down the side of that hill at Ferry Point into the calm sea of an autumn afternoon, I become aware of a hum inside my head, a rapid and monotonous vibration that makes my skull ache and causes my eyelids to narrow painfully. A suppressed scream is what it is, I imagine. Yet as I listened to Polly, and watched her pacing in and out of the parallelogram of pallid sunlight spread across the floor under the window, I felt nothing but a tender sadness, a sympathy, almost.

  Presently, I began to realise that she had stopped speaking of Marcus—perhaps she hadn’t spoken of him in the first place, perhaps I had misheard her, or imagined it—and was dealing with someone else, someone altogether other than her late husband. In fact, and amazingly, it was her next husband who was now the subject. “Of course, we won’t stay here,” she was saying, “that would be impossible, given all that’s happened.” She paused, and looked at me directly, with a clear, candidly questioning eye, in which, however, I seemed to detect a faint pleading light. “That’s so, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, we couldn’t.” But where, I enquired, playing, confusedly, for time, where was she thinking of going to? “Oh, Regensburg,” she said, not pronouncing it quite correctly, I noticed—she will have to work at mastering the Teutonic r—“where Frederick still has a family home.” She gave a little laugh. “It’s a castle, really, I think.” Then she frowned. “It will be a great change, from here.”

  By now, I could see, she was a long way off, from here, and nothing I could say or do would bring her back. I sat down on the sofa, my hands resting limply, palms upwards, on my thighs. No doubt my mouth, too, was limply open, a glistening red blubber lip hanging slack and my breath coming in big, slow heaves. Regensburg! Somehow I knew that place would one day loom large in the puny catastrophe that is my life. I saw the whole thing clearly, as if laid out on a page from a Book of Hours, Prince Frederick the Great, looking stern and stupid in a fur-trimmed coat and pointed hat, being handed a lily symbolical of something or other by his lady wife in her gown of Limbourg-blue, he with his page, old Matty Myler, and she with the Hyland sisters as her maids-in-waiting, all gambolled about by unicorns, and in the distance a miniature model of the city, with its spires and pennants, its towers and nesting cranes, and high, high above the scene, framed in a golden arch, the sun’s great orb streaming out its benison in
all directions.

  Freddie Hyland. Oh, Freddie, with your cravat and your dandruff and your st-st-stammer. So all along you were the wolf lurking in that limpid landscape. Why didn’t I sense your bated breath? Didn’t have the wit to take you seriously. It was as simple, and simply commonplace, as that. Well, there’s a lesson I’ve learned, among others: never underestimate anyone, even a Freddie Hyland. I could have pressed Polly for details, the dates, times, places, for surely it was my right to hear them, but I didn’t. I suspect she was dying to tell me, though, not out of cruelty or vengefulness—she was never vengeful, never cruel, not even now, at the end—but simply so she could hear it spoken aloud, this extraordinary fairy-tale thing she had fashioned for herself out of what had seemed so much detritus. I could hardly object—didn’t she deserve to be happy? For she meant to be happy: I could see that in every line of her newly assumed demeanour. But Marcus, so lately dead, what of him? His name above all I would not mention, and hoped she wouldn’t speak of him again, either. I feared being presented with a set of justifications, mild, reasoned, numbered off on her fingers, by this new, tall, unnervingly composed version of the Polly I used to lie with so lovingly on this old and now so sad green sofa.

  She was getting ready to go. I could see her trying to make herself feel sorry for me, or at any rate to look as if she did. I must have been a hapless spectacle, slumped there with the wind knocked out of me. But I could no longer be fitted into the world she knew: I was the wrong shape, all blunt corners and slippery sides, cumbersome and unmanageable as a piano stuck in a doorway. Besides, why would she want me, fat frog that I was, when she already had her prince?