The Blue Guitar Page 4

  Miss Vandeleur, the Miss Vandeleur I’m speaking of, not that there could have been so many others by that name, kept a boarding house in a village by the sea. She was related to my family in some way that I never did get to the bottom of. I suspect her relatedness was notional. There was an aunt on my father’s side, an elderly, genteel lady who dressed in muted shades of mauve and grey, and wore—can it be?—button boots, that were delicately craquelured all over with a web of waxy wrinkles. She used to give me sixpences warm from her purse, but could never remember my name, and I’ve returned the compliment now by having forgotten hers. It seems to me Miss Vandeleur had been companion of long standing to this venerable spinster—as to precisely what variety of companion she was I’m not going to speculate—and on the old girl’s death had become attached to us, a replacement, as it were, for the woman who had died, a sort of honorary aunt. At any rate, in the flat weeks towards the end of the season, when she had rooms standing idle, Miss V. would graciously invite us down to stay, at greatly reduced rates, which was the only way we could have afforded such a luxury.

  Miss Vandeleur was a large, fair person with a mass of artificial blonde hair, which she wore loose and flowing. She must have been a beauty when she was young, and even yet, in the days when we knew her, she had the look of a ravaged version of the flower-strewing Flora to the left of the central figure in Sandro Botticelli’s much admired if slightly saccharine Primavera. I suspect she was aware of the resemblance—someone once, a suitor, perhaps, must have drawn her attention to it—given that unlikely mass of carefully kept corn-coloured hair and the high-waisted, diaphanous dresses that she favoured. In temper she was volatile. Her predominant mode was one of stately benevolence, out of which she might erupt at the slightest provocation into slit-eyed, venom-spitting rage. There had been a tragedy long ago—a pair of twins had deliberately drowned a playmate, as I recall—in which Miss Vandeleur had been somehow implicated, wholly unjustly, she insisted, and chance reminders or even the unbidden recollection of this injustice were the underlying cause of many a flare-up. Her dispiritingly unlovely house, which was called for some reason Lebanon, was roomy and rambling, with numerous tacked-on extensions and annexes, so that it seemed not to have been built but rather to have accumulated. Her private quarters were at the back, in what was little more than a lean-to of laths and tarred felt precariously and leakily attached to the kitchen. At the heart of this lair was what she called her den, a small square dim room stuffed with her treasures. Everywhere there were objets, of gilt and glass, of faience and filigree, crowding on sideboards and small tables, standing on the floor, nailed to the walls, suspended from the ceilings. Here was her private place, here she indulged her mysterious, solitary pleasures, and we were given to understand, we children especially, that any violation of its sanctity would bring down upon us immediate and frightful retribution. I hardly need say how much I itched to get in there.

  I wonder if something has happened to the weather, I mean to the climate in general. I don’t pay much heed to the apocalyptic claims about the catastrophic effects those recent spectacular firestorms on the sun are having on the wobble or whatever it is in the earth’s trajectory, yet it seems to me something has changed in the decades since I was a boy. I am well aware how spurious can be the glow that plays over remembrances of childhood. All the same I recall afternoons of sun-struck stillness the like of which we don’t seem to have any more, when the sky of depthless turquoise held a kind of pulsing darkness in its zenith and the light over the felled land seemed dazed by its own weight and intensity. It was on just such a day that I at last got up the courage to penetrate Miss Vandeleur’s cluttered sanctuary, to break into her den.

  I felt just now a sudden sweet rush of fondness for the little boy that I was then, in his khaki shorts and his sandals with diamond shapes cut out of the toes, standing there with his heart in his mouth, on the brink of the great adventure that his life would surely be. A mass of raw compulsions, inchoate fears, he hardly knew yet who or what he was. How quietly he closed the door behind him, how softly he trod upon those forbidden floorboards. In the summer silence the wooden walls around him creaked and the roof above him with its blistered coat of tar blubbered softly in the heat. Everything seemed alive, everything seemed to regard him with sharp-eyed attention. There was a smell of sun-bleached timbers and creosote and dust that seemed the evocative whiff of an already lost past.

  As I’ve said, Miss Vandeleur was a keen collector, but she had a particular fondness for china statuettes—pink-cheeked shepherdesses and pirouetting ballerinas, blue-coated Cherubinos in powdered wigs, that kind of thing. My eye had fallen at once on a pair of these ornaments, which stood out by being twice as tall as the rest and of a more recent design. They represented a pair of society beauties from the ’twenties, slender as herons, with marcelled waves, clad, and barely clad at that, in clinging, floor-length gowns, one chlorophyll-green and the other a lovely shade of deepest lapis lazuli, the plunging necklines of which had nothing much to plunge into, their wearers being fashionably flat-chested, even to the point of androgyny. They seemed to me, with their wistful, condescending smiles and gloves that came above their boneless elbows, the very acme of elegance and jaded sophistication.

  I wanted to steal them both, which just goes to show how young I was and how inexperienced in the light-fingered art, that art of which in time I was to become such an adept. Mere tyro though I was that day, however, I saw, dimly but definitely, that my greedy urge must be resisted. There was a reason, plain and obvious, though assuredly perverse, to take only one of these languid ladies. If the two of them were gone Miss Vandeleur might well not notice the loss, whereas if one remained, alone and palely loitering, the other was bound to be missed, sooner or later. You see how important it was for me, even at that earliest stage, that the theft be registered. This is why I must discount the stealing of that nice fat tube of zinc white: on that occasion I had fretted about Geppetto’s knowing I had taken it and not about the much more distressing possibility of his not knowing. And this is where the deeper, darker aspect of my passion becomes manifest. As surely I’ve said more than once by now, the rightful owner has to know he has been nobbled, though not, assuredly, who it was that did the nobbling.

  Which would I take? The beauty in blue or her companion in green? There was nothing to choose between them except the colour of their gowns, for they had been formed out of identical moulds—identical, that is, except that they were mirror images, one inclining to the left while her twin inclined to the right. After much dithering, my palms moist and a trickle of sweat meandering down my spine, I settled on the left-leaning one. The green of her gown was the same shade as the dusting of leaves that tall trees put out in the earliest days of May, there was a delicate peach-pink spot on each of her cheekbones, and the overall lacquering, when I examined it closely, had a webbing of tiny cracks that were as numerous as but much, much finer than the cracks in my dead aunt’s button boots. What age was I that day? Pre-pubertal, surely. Yet the spasm of pleasure that ran along my veins and made the follicles in my scalp twitch and tingle when I folded my fist around that smooth little statue and slipped it into my pocket was as old as Onan. Yes, that was the moment when I discovered the nature of the sensual, in all its hot and swollen, overwhelming, irresistible intensity.

  I still have her, my green-gowned flapper. She’s in a fragrant old cigar box tucked away in a corner of the attic here, under the eaves. I could have got in there and searched her out when I was up on the roof investigating the storm damage. Good thing I didn’t: she’d have had me on my knees with my face in my hands, sobbing my heart out in the midst of wrecked deck-chairs and stringless tennis racquets and the scent that lingers even yet of the autumn apples my father used to store up there, most of which every year went to rot before the winter was well under way.

  Miss bloody Vandeleur never did miss the statuette, or if she did she never mentioned it, which would not have been li
ke her. Yet how nimbly I had done the deed, how fearlessly—no, not fearlessly, but daringly, with unwonted bravery—I had entered the forbidden sanctuary. Well, no work of performative art is perfect, and none gets the response it believes is its due.

  It was nicely appropriate that what I believe now to have been my first creative theft should have taken place at the seaside, that site of eternal childhood, where the primordial slime is still moist. I remember with hallucinatory clarity the day’s stirless heat and the cottony feel of the air in Miss Vandeleur’s secret room. I remember the silence, too. There’s no silence like the silence that attends a theft. When my fingers reach out to seize a coveted trinket, seemingly acting of their own free will and not at all in need of me or of my agency, everything goes still for a beat, as if the world has caught its breath in shock and wonder at the sheer effrontery of the deed. Then comes that surge of soundless glee, rising in me like gorge. It’s a sensation that harks back to infancy, and infantile transgression. A large part of the pleasure of stealing derives from the possibility of being caught. Or no, no, it’s more than that: it’s precisely the desire to be caught. I don’t mean that I want actually to be seized by the scruff by some burly fellow in blue and hauled before the beak to have the book thrown at me and be given three months’ hard. What, then? Oh, I don’t know. Doesn’t a child wet the bed half in hope of getting a good smacking from his mama? These are murky depths and are probably better not plumbed all the way to the bottom.

  —

  Speaking of depths and of plumbing them, I look back in speculation and ever deepening puzzlement at my love affair, such as it was, with Polly Pettit. Such as it was? Why do I say that? It seemed much when it was happening—there was a time when it seemed well nigh everything. Yet it was never other than unlikely, which was one source of the excitement of it all. We fell into each other’s arms in a state of gasping surprise, and that mutual perplexity never quite abated. She used to say that one of the things that had drawn her to me was the smell of paint I gave off. This was odd, since by that time I had already abandoned painting. She said it was a nice earthy smell and reminded her of being a child and making mud pies. I didn’t know what to think of this, whether to be charmed or ever so slightly offended.

  We used to meet in my studio, what had been my studio when I was still painting. I’ve held on to it, I’m not sure why—maybe in the forlorn hope that the muse will come back and perch again in her old roost. I know what you’ll think, even before you think it, but I didn’t take up with Polly in the expectation that the heat we generated together would fan the embers of inspiration into singing flame again. Ah, no! By then those embers had become ashes, and cold ashes at that. No, the studio that no longer acted as a studio was just a handy and secluded trysting place; what it can be by now I really don’t know, but there it stands, useless, and yet somehow impossible to get rid of.

  It was a big gaunt chilly room over what had been formerly my father’s print shop. In setting up there I had no sense of trampling on his shade. When he retired, the premises were taken over by a launderer, so that, after I stopped painting, the smells of paint and linseed oil and turpentine were quickly overcome and replaced by a heavy miasma of soap suds and the fug of wet, warm wool and a sharp stink of bleach that made my eyes water and gave me crashing headaches. Maybe the pong got into my skin and that was what Polly mistook for the smell of pigments. Certainly this smell, the smell of dirty laundry being washed, is redolent, at least to me it is, of childhood and its mucky dabblings.

  She came to the studio for the first time on a bitterly cold day at the close of the year—this is last year I’m speaking of, more than nine months ago, for it’s September now, do try to keep up. The sky in the tall, north-facing window seemed to be worked in graphite, and the light coming in had a grainy quality that is associated in my memory with the excitingly sandpapery feel of Polly’s goose-bumped flesh. As we lay on the old green sofa, languorously embracing—how tender and tentative they were, those first, exploratory hours we spent together—I saw us as a genre piece, a pencil study by Daumier, say, or even an oil sketch by Courbet, illustrative of the splendours and miseries of the vie de bohème. Polly’s tiny hand was frozen, right enough, as parts of me could attest, instinctively shrinking from her encircling fingers, like a snail touched by a thorn. She wanted to know why I’d given up painting. It’s a question I dread, since I don’t know the answer to it. I do know the reasons, more or less, I suppose, but they’re impossible to put into reasonable terms. I could say that one day I woke up and the world was lost to me, but how would that sound? Anyway, hadn’t I always painted not the world itself but the world as my mind rendered it? A critic once dubbed me the leader of what he was pleased to call the Cerebralist School—if there was such a school it had only one student—but even at my most inward I needed all that was outside, the sky and its clouds, the earth itself and the little figures strutting back and forth upon its crust. Pattern and rhythm, these were the organising principles to which everything must be made subject, the twin iron laws that ruled over the world’s ragbag of effects. Then came that morning, that fateful morning—how long ago?—when I opened my eyes to find it gone, everything gone and lost to me, all my touchstones smashed. Think of that bitter fate, to be a sighted man who cannot see.

  I’ve said I stole Polly, but did I, really? Is that how it would be put in a court of law, the charge laid thus bluntly against me? It’s true, clandestine love is always spoken of in terms of stealing. Now, asportation, say, or even caption, in its rarest usage—yes, I have been rifling the dictionary again—is a term I might accept, but stealing I think too stark a word. The pleasure, no, not pleasure, the gratification that I got from making off with Marcus’s wife wasn’t at all like the dark joy I derive from my other secretmost pilferings. It wasn’t dark at all, in fact, but bathed in balmful light.

  We were happy together, she and I, simply happy, in the beginning, at any rate. A kind of innocence, a kind of artlessness, attaches to covert love, despite the flames of guilt and dread that lick at the lover’s bared and bouncing backside. There was something childlike about Polly, or so I fancied, something she had held on to from her girlhood, a wide-eyed eagerness and vulnerability that I found dismayingly compelling. And when I was with her I, too, seemed to stray again in the midst of my own earliest days. Too little due is given to the gameful aspects of love: we might have been a pair of toddlers, Polly and I, playing at rough-and-tumble. And how open and generous she was, not only in letting me recline my troubled brow on her plump pale breast but in a deeper and even more intimate way. Loving her was like being let into a place she had been hitherto alone in, a place no one else had ever been allowed to enter, not even her husband—mark, all this in the past tense, irretrievably. What’s done is done, what’s gone is gone. But, ah, if she were to appear before me now, as large as life—as large as life!—could I trust my heart not to burst open all over again?

  There were certain reticences between us. For instance, when we were together Polly never mentioned Gloria’s name, not once, in all that time. I, in contrast, talked about Marcus at the least excuse, as if the mere invoking of his name, done often enough, might work a neutralising magic. The guilt I suffered in respect of Polly’s husband loured over me like a miniature thundercloud whipped up exclusively for me and that travelled with me wherever I went. I think the injury I was doing to my friend caused me almost a keener pain than did the no less grave injustice I was committing against my wife and, I suppose, against his wife, too. And Polly herself, how did being unfaithful make her feel? Surely she was conscience-stricken, like me. Every time I started prattling about Marcus she would frown in a sulkily reprehending way, drawing her eyebrows together and making a thin pale line of her otherwise roseate mouth. She was right, of course: it was bad taste on my part to speak of either of our spouses at the very moment that we were busy betraying them. As for Gloria, she and Polly were on the best of terms, as they had always been
, and when the four of us met now, as we did no less frequently than we used to, the over-compensating attentions Polly lavished on my wife should surely have made that sharp-eyed woman suspect something was amiss.

  But let us go back now to Polly and me in the studio, that day at a cold year’s end we worked so hard to warm up. We were lying together on the sofa with our overcoats piled over us, the sweat of our recent exertions turning to a chilly dew on our skin. She had her arms draped around me and was resting her glossy head in the hollow of my shoulder, as she recalled for me in fond detail what she claimed was our first-ever encounter, long ago. I had come in with a watch for Marcus to repair. I can’t have been back in the town for more than a week or two, she said. She was at her desk in the dim rear of the workshop, doing the books, and I glanced in her direction and smiled. I was wearing, she remembered, or claimed to remember, a white shirt with the floppy collar open and an old pair of corduroy trousers and shoes without laces and no socks. She noticed how tanned my insteps were, and straight away she pictured the resplendent south, a bay like a bowl of broken amethysts strewn with flecks of molten silver and a white sail aslant to the horizon and a lavender-blue shutter standing open on it all—yes, yes, you’re right, I’ve added a few touches of colour to her largely monochrome and probably far more accurate sketch. It was summertime, she said, a morning in June, and the sun through the window was setting my white shirt blindingly aglow—she would never forget it, she said, that unearthly radiance. You understand, I’m only reporting her words, or the gist of them, anyway. I explained to Marcus that the watch, an Elgin, had belonged to my late father, and that I hoped it could be got to work again. Marcus frowned and nodded, turning the watch this way and that in his long slender spatulate fingers and making noncommittal noises at the back of his throat. He was pretending not to know who I was, out of shyness—he is a very shy fellow, as so am I, in my peculiar way—which was just plain silly, Polly said, since by now everyone in town had heard of the couple who had moved into the big house out on Fairmount Hill, Oscar Orme’s son Olly, who had become a famous artist, no less, and his drawling, lazy-eyed young wife. He would see what he could do, Marcus said, but warned that parts for a watch like this would be hard to come by. While he was writing out the receipt I glanced at Polly again over his bent head and smiled again, and even winked. All this in her account. I need hardly say I remembered none of it. That is, I remembered bringing in my father’s watch for repair, but as to smiling at Polly, much less winking at her, none of that had stayed with me. Nor could I recognise myself in the portrait she painted of me, in my flamboyant dishevelment. Dishevelled I am, it’s an incurable condition, but I’m sure I’ve never shone with the kind of stark, pure flame she saw that day.