The Blue Guitar Page 5

  “I fell in love with you on the spot,” she said, with a happy sigh, her breath running like warm fingers through the coppery fur on my bare chest.

  By the way, why do I keep speaking of her as little? She’s taller than I am, though that doesn’t make her tall, her shoulders are as broad as mine, and she could probably floor me with a belt of one of her hard little—there I go again—fists if she were sufficiently provoked, as surely she must have been, repeatedly.

  Last night I had a strange dream, strange and compelling, which won’t disperse, the tatters of it lingering in the corners of my mind like broken shadows. I was here, in the house, but the house wasn’t here, where it is, but on the seashore somewhere, overlooking a broad beach. A storm was under way, and from the downstairs window I could see an impossibly high tide rolling in, the enormous waves, sluggish with the weight of churned sand, tumbling over each other in their eagerness to gain the shore and dash themselves explosively against the low sea wall. The waves were topped with soiled white spray and their deeply scooped, smooth undersides had a glassy and malignant shine. It was like watching successive packs of maddened hounds, their jaws agape, rushing upon the land in a frenzy and being violently repulsed. And in fact there was a dog, a black and dark-brown alsatian, muzzled, its haunches very low to the ground, which the eldest of my three brothers, become a young man again, was setting off with on a walk. I tried to attract his attention through the window, since I was concerned at his being out in such weather, without even an overcoat, but either he didn’t see me or he pretended not to notice my urgent signalling. I wonder what it all meant, or why it has been haunting me since I woke from it, with a fearful start, at dawn. I don’t like that kind of dream, tumultuous, minatory, fraught with inexplicable significance. What have I to do with the sea, or with dogs, or they with me? And, besides, my brother Oswald, poor Ossie, will be a decade dead come Christmas.

  Polly was, and no doubt still is, a great dreamer, or at any rate a great talker about her dreams. “Isn’t it strange,” she used to say, “how much goes on inside our heads while we’re asleep?”

  I recall another day, in the first weeks of the new year, when we were again lying together languidly inert on the lumpy sofa with the studio’s big sky-filled window slanting over us, and she told me of a recurring dream she had about Frederick Hyland. This didn’t surprise me, though I did feel a touch dispirited. It seems that every woman—with the exception of Gloria, and I can’t even be sure of her—who has so much as caught a glimpse of him dreams about Freddie, otherwise known as the Prince, which is what the town calls him, in a spirit of irony: we are great mockers of men, especially of land-rich ones who until recently were our lords and masters around here. Freddie is the sole and, as seems inevitable, last male representative of the House of Hyland. Neurasthenic, infinitely hesitant, a figure of unfathomable melancholy, he rarely appears in the town, but keeps to the seclusion of Hyland Heights, as his house is ponderously called—in fact it’s a small, ordinary and rather shabby country mansion built on a hill, with a blurred coat of arms emblazoned on a weathered stone escutcheon above the front door and an inner courtyard where long ago Otto Hohengrund-cum-Hyland, the daddy of the dynasty, to whose design the place was built, used to put his imported Lipizzaners through their fancy paces. Freddie’s two unmarried sisters keep house for him. They also are rarely seen. There is a man attached to the place, one Matty Myler, who drives into town at the start of each month in the family’s big black Daimler to purchase provisions and to pick up, discreetly, from the back door of Harker’s Hotel, two crates of stout and a case of Cork Dry Gin. The spinster sisters must be the tipplers, for Freddie is known to be a man of temperate habits. Maybe it’s his very limpness that women love him for.

  I’ve met him many times, old Freddie, but he keeps forgetting who I am. I had a curious and distinctly unnerving encounter with him one day shortly after I had returned to the town and settled in my fine house on Fairmount Hill—far finer, I may say, than Hyland Heights. The yearly fête was being held, and a big marquee had been put up in a field lent for the occasion by Freddie himself. There was to be a raffle in aid of the squadrons of technological workers who in recent years have been laid off—how pleasant in these times the world is without the incessant false-teeth clatter of those now obsolete little communication machines it required so many drones to manufacture in their so many millions—and in a burst of public-spiritedness I had contributed a set of sketches as first prize in the draw. Freddie had consented to open the event. He stood on a makeshift dais in the way he does, with one shoulder up and his head inclined at a pained angle, and spoke, or sighed, rather, a few barely audible phrases into a microphone that squeaked and whistled piercingly, like a bat. When he had finished he surveyed the crowd with a strained, uncertain gaze, then stepped down to a scattering of manifestly sarcastic applause. Shortly afterwards, making my way to the temporary jakes at the back of the tent—I had drunk three glasses of vinegary wine—I encountered him emerging from one of the cabins, buttoning his flies. He wore a three-piece tweed suit with a watch chain across his midriff, and brown brogues the toecaps of which glowed like freshly shelled chestnuts—he’s a great admirer of the sartorial style of our gentlemen cousins across the sea, and when he was young used to sport a monocle and even for a time a handlebar moustache, until his mother, who had the carriage of a Prussian general and was known as Iron Mag, made him shave it off. At his throat was that floppy article of dark-blue silk, a cross between a cravat and a necktie, which it seems he invented for himself and which the more epicene young men of the town, I notice, have discreetly adopted as a badge of their confederacy. We stopped, the two of us, and confronted each other somewhat helplessly. An exchange of words seemed called for. Freddie cleared his throat and fingered his watch chain in a vague and agitated fashion. From a distance he looks much younger than his years, but up close one makes out the dry, greyish pallor of his skin and the fine fan of wrinkles radiating from the outer corner of each eye. I made to pass by, but noticed him giving me a closer look, as a gleam of recognition dawned in his ascetic’s long, coffin-shaped face. “You’re the painter chap, aren’t you?” he said. That stopped me. His voice is thin, like a wisp of wind rustling in the blue pine-tops of a snow-clad forest, and he has a slight stammer, which Polly fairly swoons over, of course. He said he had taken a look at my drawings while he was waiting for things to be set up for his speech. I replied politely that I was pleased he had noticed them, thinking the while with a guilty pang of my poor dead father, glaring down at me from one of the lesser halls of Valhalla. “Yes yes,” Freddie said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I thought they were very interesting, very interesting indeed.” There was a tense pause as he cast about for a more telling formulation, then he smiled—beamed, even—and shot up an index finger and arched an eyebrow. “Very inward, I should say,” he said, with an almost roguish twinkle. “You have a very inward view of things—would you agree?” Startled, I mumbled some reply, but again he wasn’t listening, and with a curt but not unfriendly nod he stepped past me and walked off, looking pleased with himself and whistling, faintly, tunelessly.

  I was more than startled: I was shaken. In a handful of words, and in a tone of mild, amused raillery, he had struck to the heart of the artistic crisis in the toils of which I was even then writhing, which was

  —

  Caught, by God! Or by Gloria, at any rate, which in my present state of guilty dread amounts to much the same thing. She has guessed where I’m fled to. A minute ago the telephone in the front hall rang, the antiquated machine on the wall out there the palsied belling of which I hadn’t heard in years, and which I had thought was surely defunct by now. I started in fright at the sound of it, a ghostly summons from the past. At once I rushed from the kitchen—I’ve been using the old wooden table under the window for a writing desk—and snatched the earpiece from its cradle. She spoke my name and when I didn’t answer she chuckled. “I can hear you breathin
g,” she said. My heart in its own cradle was joggling madly. I’m sure that even if I had wanted to speak I wouldn’t have been able to. I had thought I was so safe! “You’re such a coward,” Gloria said, still amused, “running home to Mother.” My mother, I might have told her coldly, has been dead for nigh on thirty years, and I’ll thank you not to speak mockingly of her, in however oblique a fashion. But I said nothing. There really wasn’t anything I could say. I had been run to earth; collared; caught. “Your boss telephoned,” she said. “He wondered if you were dead. I told him I didn’t think so.” She meant Perry Percival, Perry short for Peregrine. Some name, isn’t it? Not real, of course, I made it up, like so much else. Calling him my boss is Gloria’s idea of a joke. Perry is—how should I describe him? He runs a gallery. We used to make a lot of money for each other. He was the last person I wanted to see or hear from just now. I made no comment, waiting for something more, but Gloria was silent now, and at last, slowly, with a soundless sigh, I replaced the earpiece—when I was a child it always reminded me of a tiddlywinks cup—clipping it on its hook beside the Bakelite horn, the thing for speaking into. It looked absurd, that little horn, sticking out like that, like a mouth thrust out and pursed in amazement, or shock. You see how for me everything is always like something else?—I’m sure that’s part of why I can’t paint any more, this shiftingness I see in all things. The last one who had used that phone was my father, when he called to tell me he had been to see the doctor, and what the sawbones had said. Probably a trace of him is inside the receiver even yet, a few Godley particles he breathed into it that day, in one of the first of his last breaths, and that lodged there, and linger still, more tenacious than he ever was himself.

  Will she come here, Gloria, and beard me in my lair, I whose beard has been tugged so sorely and so often in recent times? The possibility of it leaves me in a trembling funk—what a coward I am—and yet, oddly, I feel a little fizz of excitement, too. At bottom one longs, I say it again, to be seized upon and captured.

  —

  In Polly’s dream of the Prince, which recurs three or four times a year, so she says, he comes to her for tea. When I heard this I laughed, which was a mistake, of course, and she took offence and sulked for the rest of the afternoon. The dream-tea that she lays on for her illustrious caller, according to her, is really a children’s game, with a toy tea-set and cut-out squares of cardboard for sandwiches and buttons for cakes. I enquired mildly at what point in the proceedings does His Princeliness get round to making a grab at her, and she laughed and crooked a forefinger and struck me on the breastbone with a very hard knuckle and said it wasn’t that kind of dream—yes, I didn’t say, and I suspect he’s not that kind of man, either, not that kind at all. Instead I apologised and at length she grudgingly forgave me. After all, she and I also were at play.

  When she told me her dreams—and the one with Freddie the Prince in it was by no means the only one I heard about in detail—her face would take on an expression of somnambulant concentration, which had the effect of intensifying her slight squint. Despite my protestations to the contrary, perhaps I am being unchivalrous in harping on her imperfections, if I am harping on them. But that’s the point: it was precisely for her imperfections that I loved her. And I did love her, honestly. That’s to say, honestly, I did love her, not I did love her honestly. How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint. She has rather short legs, and calves that a person less well-disposed than I am might say were fat. There are, too, her pudgy hands and blunt fingers, and that slight jelly-wobble in the pale flesh on the undersides of her upper arms. Indulge me, I am, was, a painter, I notice such things. But these were, I insist, the very things I treasured in her, just as much as her shapely bottom and cherishably cockeyed breasts, her sweet voice and glossy grey eyes, her geisha’s little delicate feet.

  I can tell you, it was a great shock to me when Marcus found out about us—found out half of it, anyway—but, strangely enough, it was the one thing I hadn’t expected, not from that quarter, certainly. For many months I’d lived in terror of Gloria getting wind of what was going on, but Marcus I thought altogether too dreamy and distracted, too deeply enmeshed in his miniaturised world of mainsprings and flywheels and pinhead-sized rubies, to notice that his wife was canoodling with a strange man, who was, however, did he but know it, not strange at all, or not, at least, a stranger.

  It was to me that Marcus came, of course, one horrendously memorable rainy autumn day, which seems a very long time ago but isn’t at all. I was in the studio, pottering about, scraping dried paint off palettes, cleaning already clean brushes, that sort of thing. It was all I did there now, by way of work, in my latterly sterile and idle state. Good thing Polly wasn’t with me: I would have had to hide her under the sofa. Marcus came stamping up the stairs—the studio has a separate street entrance beside the laundry—and banged so loudly on the door I thought it might be the police, if not the avenging angel himself. Certainly I didn’t expect it to be Marcus, who is not normally the stamping or the banging type. It was raining outside, and he wore no coat, only the leather jerkin he works in, and he was drenched, his thinning hair dark with wet and plastered to his skull. At first I thought he was drunk, and in fact when he had barged past me into the room the first thing he did was to demand a drink. I ignored this and asked what the matter was. I had difficulty keeping my voice steady, for I was guessing already what the matter must be. “The matter?” he cried. “The matter? Ha!” There were raindrops on the lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. He strode to the window and stood looking out at the rooftops, his arms bent at his sides and his fists clenched and turned inwards, as if he had just come from boxing someone’s ears. Even from the back he looked distraught. By now I was certain he had found out about Polly and me—what else would have him in such distress?—and I had begun desperately to search for something I might say in my defence as soon as he started to accuse me. I wondered if I was going to get hit, and found the prospect oddly gratifying. I pictured it, him taking a swing at me and my grabbing hold of him and the two of us tottering about, grunting and groaning, like a pair of old-style wrestlers, then toppling over slowly in each other’s arms and rolling on the floor, first this way, then that, with Marcus shouting and sobbing and trying to get his hands around my throat or to gouge out my eyes while I pantingly protested my innocence.

  I went to him and put a hand on his shoulder, which immediately drooped, as if under an immense weight. I took it as a good sign that he didn’t wrench himself furiously away from my touch. I asked again what was the matter, and he hung his head and shook it slowly from side to side, like a wounded and baffled bull. Behind the smell of his wet clothes and soaked hair I caught a trace of something else, raw and hot, which I recognised as the smell of sorrow itself—a smell, I can tell you, and a state, with which I am not unfamiliar. “Come along, old chap,” I said, “tell me what’s up.” I noted with a quiver of shame how calm and avuncular I sounded. He didn’t reply, but moved away from me and began pacing the floor, grinding the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. Terrible to say, but there’s something almost comic in the spectacle of someone else’s heart-sickness and sorrow. It must be to do with excess, with operatic extravagance, for certainly those old operas always make me want to laugh. Yet what a truly desolated figure he cut, stalking stiff-legged from the window to the door and wheeling tightly on his pivot and coming back, then wheeling round and tormentedly repeating the whole manoeuvre all over again. At last he halted in the middle of the floor, looking about as if in desperate search of something.

  “It’s Polly,” he said, in a voice feathery with pain. “She’s in love with someone else.”

  He paused to frown, seemingly amazed at what he had heard himself say. I realised I had been holding my breath, and now I let it out in a slow, soundless gasp.