The Blue Guitar Page 9
“I suppose I’ll have to leave him,” she said, in an oddly mild, matter-of-fact tone, sitting up straight and squaring her shoulders, as if already preparing herself for the task. “That is, if he doesn’t leave me first.”
I made no comment. I was hardly listening. There had come to my mind, or slithered into it, more like, a fragment of memory from my earliest days with Polly. We were here one afternoon, in the studio, she and I, eating cream crackers and sharing a bottle of bad wine. She wasn’t in the habit of drinking, certainly not in the daytime, but a glass or two always had a calming effect on her and on her conscience—she was still amazed at herself and this thing she was daring to do with me. After the second glass she slipped demurely into the cramped, whitewashed closet in the corner, and I put my fingers resolutely in my ears—why is so little said, so little acknowledged, about the minor awkwardnesses, the squeamish delicacies, but also the courtly forbearances that mark the shared erotic lives of men and women?
Just outside the lavatory, on the wall to the right, there is a big square antique mirror, framed in rococo gilt and flaking round the edges, in which I used to test the composition of a picture in progress; a mirror image offers an entirely new perspective and will always show up the weakness of a line.
After a minute or two I saw the lavatory door opening, and quickly dropped my hands from my ears.
My, how they unnerve me, mirrors. We hear so much these days about the multiplicity of universes we unknowingly move in the midst of, but who remarks the wholly other world that exists in the depths of the looking-glass? It appears so plausible, doesn’t it, that pristine, crystalline version of this tawdry realm where we’re condemned to live out our one-dimensional lives? How still and calm all is in there, how vigilantly that reversed world attends us and our every action, letting us away with nothing, not the faintest gesture, the stealthiest glance.
When Polly stepped out of the lavatory, the door, before she closed it, was behind her, hiding her from my view, but in the mirror, to which she had turned—which of us can resist a glance at ourselves in the glass?—she was facing me, and our eyes met, our reflected eyes, that is. Perhaps it was the intervention of the mirror, or the interpolation of it, I should say, for the faint hint of treachery the word insinuates, that made us seem, just for a second, not to recognise each other, indeed, not to know each other at all. We might have been, in that instant, strangers—no, more than strangers, worse than strangers: we might have been creatures from entirely different worlds. And perhaps, thanks to the transformative sly magic of mirrors, we were. Doesn’t the new science say of mirror symmetry that certain particles seeming to find exact reflections of themselves are in fact the interaction of two separate realities, that indeed they are not particles at all but pinholes in the fabric of invisibly intersecting universes? No, I don’t understand it either, but it sounds compelling, doesn’t it?
Of course, I’m thinking now of Marcus, the last time I saw him, in Maggie Mallon’s shop as was, saying that he didn’t know his wife any more. He too had suffered his estranging moment with her, when she had sat on the side of the bed that morning and looked up at him in furious and unforgiving silence.
Anyway, that passage of unrecognition had left us shaken, Polly and me. We didn’t speak of it—what would we have said?—and continued on together as if it hadn’t occurred. Though unnerving, and deeply so, for the time it lasted, it was hardly unique: life, pinholed life, is punctuated by such glimpses into the unfathomable mysteriousness of being here, all of us together and irreconcilably alone. Yet I can’t help wondering now if Polly and I came back fully from whatever other reality, whatever looking-glass world it was, that we had strayed into, however briefly, in that instant. Early on though it was in our affair, was that the moment when, all unknowing, we began to draw apart? I have the impression, and I credit it, that in certain cases a union is no sooner forged than the seed of separation sprouts.
When she had gone, tearful, anxious, and full of tender concern for me and for herself and for the two of us together, I took to my heels and fled. I didn’t even pack a bag, I just went. It was a wild evening on the roads, the trees lashing their branches together and a full moon flashing through flying clouds like a fat eye blinking at me in stern reproval. But what did I care for the elements? I had my topcoat, my boots, my trusty malacca. I clamped a hand on my hat and lifted my face, in a kind of tearful ecstasy, like Bernini’s swooning St. Teresa, to the wind and the rain, as in other times I used to offer it to the salt-laden sunlight of the south. I saw myself as the wandering hero in some old saga, sore of heart, maddened from loss and longing, and sick with self-doubt. I hardly knew what I was doing, or where I was going. White horses were rearing on the black waters of the estuary. Twilight and storm, in the world and in me both. On the ancient metal bridge at Ferry Point a farmer stopped and offered me a lift in his lorry. He was your genuine old-timer, with a toothless, collapsed mouth and stubble growing every which way on chin and cheeks and a pipe jammed between glistening gums. He smelt of hay and pigs and rank tobacco, and it’s a sound bet his trousers were held up with a belt made of binder twine. The lorry juddered and gasped like a work-horse on its last legs. Old MacDonald drove at high speed and with lunatic abandon, yanking the gear-stick and spinning the steering-wheel as though intent on unscrewing it from its post. As we went along he told me with relish of a suicide committed in this place years ago. “Drownded himself, he did, after his girl jilted him.” He chuckled. I pulled the brim of my hat low over my eyes. Before us the yellow headlights probed the gathering dark. To be no one, to be nothing, astray in tempestuous night! “They found him down there under the bridge,” the old man wheezed, “with his two arms wrapped stiff around one of them wooden piles under the water—would you credit that, now?”
Polly Polly Polly Polly Polly
The house when I arrived was
—
I think that’s Gloria’s car I hear pulling up outside. Dear me.
THE SILENCE WAS the thing that struck me first. It settled on the house like a hard frost and under it everything went frozen and stiff. I thought of winter evenings in childhood—yes, here it comes, the past again—when our country neighbours’ sons from round about, and daughters, too, those raucous tomboys, would gather on the hill outside the gate-lodge and sluice bucketfuls of water down the road to make a slide. I imagined I could see the frost falling as the night came on, a glistening grey mist sifting out of the sky’s dome of gleaming deep-blue darkness. I seemed to hear it, too, a hushed metallic tinkling everywhere around me in the stinging air. And later on, when the slide was hard as polished stone, how blackly the ice would shine in the starlight, as enticing as it was daunting, daring me to take my turn and sprint forwards like the others and let myself go skimming down the hill, my knees braced and trembling and the cold air searing my lungs. But I was timid and didn’t dare, and hung back in the sheltering shadows of the gate-lodge, watching enviously. The voices of the sliders rang sharply in the glossy darkness, and the trees stood motionless, like silent spectators at this wild play, and the countless stars too seemed to be looking on, with a flinty, spiteful glitter. Whenever a motor car approached the children would scatter amid shrieks of laughter, and the driver would roll down his window and hurl curses after them and threaten to call the guards.
The hushed place I’m speaking of, the place I’m in now, is Fairmount, my noble-fronted dog-house on Hangman’s Hill, also known, by me, in secret, with unconsoling humour, as Château Désespoir. I must say, being home again is strange, despite the short time I was gone—can I really have been away only a matter of days? There’s the silence, as I say, but also my wife’s glacial calm, though the former is largely an effect of the latter. Of my precipitate departure and hangdog return she makes no mention. She doesn’t appear to be angry with me for having run off, and not a word is spoken of Polly and all that. How much does she know? Has she spoken to Marcus—has he spoken to her? I’d dearly like
to know but daren’t ask. And so I am on tenterhooks. Her manner is distracted, dreamily remote; in this new version of her she reminds me, disconcertingly, of my feyly affectless mother. As we go about our day here in the house she hardly looks at me, and when she does, a slight crease forms between her eyebrows, not a frown, exactly, but a sort of ripple of perplexity, as if she can’t quite recall who I am—an echo of Polly and me in the studio mirror that day, in fact. I would say this distant demeanour is a tacit rebuke, only I don’t think it is. Maybe she has given up on me, maybe I have been banished from the forefront of her mind altogether. She is, it appears, concentrating on the future. She talks of returning to the south, to the Camargue, erstwhile home of the godless, war-loving and triumphant Cathars, where we lived for a time, more or less tranquilly. She says she misses the salt marshes down there, the enormous skies and limitless, sun-struck perspectives. There’s a house for rent in Aigues-Mortes that she’s looking into—that’s what she says, that she’s looking into it. I don’t know how seriously to take this. Does it mean she’s bent on leaving me, or is it just a taunt, intended, like her silence, to wound and worry? It was in Aigues-Mortes that we plighted our troth, sitting outside a café one sunny autumn afternoon long ago. There was a hot wind blowing, scraping the sky to a dry whitish-blue and making the sunshades in the little square crack like whips. I extended an open palm across the table and Gloria gave me her strong cool big-boned hand to hold, and there we were, plighted.
I’ve known Fairmount House since I was a child, though in those days I knew it only from the outside. A well-to-do doctor and his family lived here then, or maybe he was a dentist, I can’t remember. It was built in the middle of the eighteenth century, on the hill from where a hundred years previously my namesake Oliver Cromwell directed his forces in their infamous and vain assault upon the town. After the rout of the New Model Army and the lifting of the siege the victorious Catholic garrison hanged half a dozen russet-coated captains up here, from a makeshift gibbet erected for the purpose, on the very spot, so it’s said, where lately had been pitched the Lord Protector’s tent, before he cut and ran for home and an ignominious end. The house is foursquare and solid, and its tall front windows gaze down upon the town with a blank disregard worthy of Old Ironsides himself. I used to imagine that the life lived within these walls must surely be commensurate with such a grand exterior, that those inside must have a sense of themselves as equally grand and imposing. A childish fancy, I know, but I clung to it. I bought the place three decades later as a form of revenge, I wasn’t sure for what—perhaps for all the times I had passed by and looked up with envy and longing at those unseeing windows and dreamed of being behind them myself, in velvet smoking-jacket and silk cravat, sipping a cut-glass beaker of burgundy, thick and spicy as the blood of his ancestors, and following with a sardonic eye the progress of that small boy laboriously traversing the foot of the hill, with his satchel on his back, humped and snail-like in his grey school coat.
I hardly sleep, these days, these nights. Or, rather, I go to sleep, put under by jorums of drink and fistfuls of jumbo knock-out pills. Then at three or four in the morning my eyelids snap open like faulty window blinds and I find myself in a state of lucid alertness the equal of which I never seem to achieve in daytime. The darkness at that hour is of a special variety too, more than merely the absence of light but a medium to itself, a kind of motionless black glair in which I am held fast, a felled beast prowled about by the jackals of doubt and worry and mortal dread. Above me there is no ceiling, only a yielding, depthless void into which at any moment I might be pitched headlong. I listen to the muffled labourings of my heart and try in vain not to think of death, of failure, of the loss of all that is dear, the world with its things and creatures. The curtained window stands beside the bed like an indistinct dark giant, monitoring me with fixed, maniacal attention. At times the stillness in which I lie comes to seem a paralysis, and I’m compelled to get up and prowl in a state of jittery panic through the empty rooms, upstairs and down, not bothering to switch on the lights. The house around me hums faintly, so that I seem to be inside a large machine, a generator, say, on stand-by, or the engine of a steam train shunted into a siding for the night and still trembling with memories of the day’s fire and speed and noise. I will stop at a landing window and press my forehead to the glass and look out over the sleeping town and think what a Byronic figure I must cut, perched up here, solitary and tragic-seeming, no more to go a-roving. This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.
I suspect Gloria hates this house, I suspect she has always hated it. She consented to come back with me and settle in the town only to indulge me and my whim to be again where I was before. “You want to live among the dead, is that it?” she said. “Watch out you don’t die yourself.” Which I did, in a way, I mean as a painter, so serves me right. Rigor artis.
I wish I understood my wife a little better than I do, I mean I wish I knew her better. Despite the time that we have been together I still feel like an old-style bridegroom on his wedding night, waiting with burning impatience and not a little trepidation for his brand-new bride to let fall her chemise and loose her stays and at last reveal herself in all her blushing bareness. Can the disparity in age between us account for these blank patches? But perhaps, after all, she is not the enigma I take her to be. Perhaps behind her smooth exterior there are no seething passions, no storms of the heart, no plunging cataracts in the blood, or not ones that are unique to her. I can’t believe it. I think it’s just that sorrow for our lost child hardened about her into a carapace as impenetrable as porcelain. Sometimes, at night especially, when in the dark we lie sleepless side by side—she, too, suffers from insomnia—I seem to sense, to hear, almost, from deep, deep within her, a kind of dry, soundless sobbing.
She blames me for our daughter’s death. How do I know? Because she told me so. But wait, no, wait—what she said was that she couldn’t forgive me for it, which is quite a different thing. I hasten to say that the child died of a rare and catastrophic condition of the liver—they told me the name for it but I made myself forget it on the spot—no one could have saved her. Hard to think of such a little thing having a liver at all, really. It was years later that Gloria turned to me and said out of the blue—what blue? black, more like—“You know I can’t forgive you, don’t you?” She spoke in a mild, conversational tone, seemingly without rancour, indeed without emotion of any kind that I could register; it was simply a fact she was stating, a circumstance she was apprising me of. When I made to protest she cut me off, gently but firmly. “I know,” she said. “I know what you’ll say, only there has to be someone for me not to forgive, and it’s you. Do you mind?” I thought about it, and said only that minding hardly came into it. She, too, reflected for a moment, then nodded curtly and spoke no more, and we walked on. Very peculiar, you’ll think, a very peculiar exchange, and so it was; yet it didn’t seem so at the time. Grieving has the oddest effects, I can tell you; guilt, too, but that’s another matter, kept in another chamber of the over-full and suffering heart.
I’ve forgotten so much about our child, our little Olivia—very handy, these sink-holes I’ve sunk in the seabed of memory. She has become mummified, for me. She endures inside me like one of those miraculously preserved saintly corpses that they keep behind glass under the altars of Italian churches; there she reposes, tiny, waxen, unreally still, herself and yet other, changeless through the changing years.
We had her when we were living in the city, in a rented house on Cedar Street, a poky place with tiny windows and ill-fitting floorboards that squealed in fright when trodden on. The attraction for me was an attic with a north-facing roof-light under which I set up my easel. I was working a storm in those days, half the time in awe of my gift and the other half in a blue terror, fearing I was getting nowhere and fooling myself that I was. The worst of Cedar Street was that our landlady wa
s Gloria’s mother, the Widow Palmer. She’s ill-named, for there’s nothing in her of the palm tree’s polish and languid poise. On the contrary, she’s a stiff old bird of hawk-like aspect—she’s on her perch even yet—with iron curls and a clenched and bloodless mouth, and one of those noses—retroussé, on dit, though that’s far too handsome a word for what it describes—that offer an unwelcome view into the caverns of the nostrils even when the face is viewed full-on. But I’m being hard. Hers wasn’t an easy life, not only in her widowhood but even more so when her husband was still around to torment her. This rakish fellow, Ulick Palmer of the Palmers of Palmerstown, as he used straight-facedly to style himself, was a waster who scorned her while he was alive and at his death left her as good as destitute, except for a few bits of property scattered about the city, hence the Cedar Street house, for which I was compelled to pay an outrageously disproportionate rent, a matter of smouldering resentment on my part and of bristling defensiveness on Gloria’s. Incidentally, how such a pinched pair as Ma and Pa Palmer managed between them to produce so magnificent a creature as my Gloria I’m sure I don’t know. Maybe she was a foundling and they never told her; it wouldn’t surprise me.
It was sorrow that drove us to the sun-dazed south. Sorrow encourages displacement, urges flight, the unresting quest for new horizons. After the child’s death we made ourselves into moving targets, Gloria and I, in order to dodge, to try to dodge, the fiery darts the god of grief shoots from his burning bow. For loss and love have more in common than might seem, at least so far as feeling goes. I suppose it was inevitable we would hurry back to the scenes of our first dallyings, as if to annul the years, as if to wind time backwards and make what had happened not happen. Gloria took our tragedy harder than I did, and that also was inevitable: it was a part of her, after all, flesh of her flesh, that had died. My role had been not much more than to release, three trimesters previously, the tiny mad wriggler whose one intent had been to kick his way free of me and go tadpoling towards his disdainful yet in the end all too receptive target. Another piercing, among piercings. How neatly it all seems to hang together, this life, these lives.