The Blue Guitar

I

CALL ME AUTOLYCUS. Well, no, don’t. Although I am, like that unfunny clown, a picker-up of unconsidered trifles. Which is a fancy way of saying I steal things. Always did, as far back as I can remember. I may fairly claim to have been a child prodigy in the fine art of thieving. This is my shameful secret, one of my shameful secrets, of which, however, I am not as ashamed as I should be. I do not steal for profit. The objects, the artefacts, that I purloin — there is a nice word, prim and pursed — are of scant value for the most part. Oftentimes their owners don’t even miss them. This upsets me, puts me in a dither. I won’t say I want to be caught, but I do want the loss to be registered; it’s important that it should be. Important to me, I mean, and to the weight and legitimacy of the — how shall I say? The exploit. The endeavour. The deed. I ask you, what’s the point of stealing something if no one knows it’s stolen save the stealer?

I used to paint. That was my other passion, my other proclivity. I used to be a painter.

Ha! The word I wrote down at first, instead of painter, was painster. Slip of the pen, slip of the mind. Apt, though. Once I was a painter, now I’m a painster. Ha.

I should stop, before it’s too late. But it is too late.

Orme. That’s my name. A few of you, art lovers, art haters, may remember it, from bygone times. Oliver Orme. Oliver Otway Orme, in fact. O O O. An absurdity. You could hang me over the door of a pawnshop. Otway, by the by, after an undistinguished street where my parents lived when they were young and first together and where, presumably, they initiated me. Orme is a plausible name for a painter, isn’t it? A painterly name. It looked well, down at the right-hand corner of a canvas, modestly minuscule but unmissable, the O an owlish eye, the r rather art-nouveauish and more like a Greek τ, the m a pair of shoulders shaking in rich mirth, the e like — oh, I don’t know what. Or yes, I do: like the handle of a chamber pot. So there you have me. Orme the master painster, who paints no more.

What I want to say is

—

Storm today, the elements in a great rage. Furious gusts of wind booming against the house, shivering its ancient timbers. Why does this kind of weather always make me think of childhood, why does it make me feel I’m back there in those olden days, crop-haired, in short trousers, with one sock sagging? Childhood is supposed to be a radiant springtime but mine seems to have been always autumn, the gales seething in the big beeches behind this old gate-lodge, as they’re doing right now, and the rooks above them wheeling haphazard, like scraps of char from a bonfire, and a custard-coloured gleam having its last go low down in the western sky. Besides, I’m tired of the past, of the wish to be there and not here. When I was there I writhed fretfully enough in my fetters. I’m pushing fifty and feel a hundred, big with years.

What I want to say is this, that I have decided, I have determined, to weather the storm. The interior one. I’m not in good shape, that’s a fact. I feel like an alarm clock that an angry sleeper, an angry waker, has given such a shake to that all the springs and sprockets inside it have come loose. I’m all ajangle. I should take myself to Marcus Pettit for repair. Ha ha.

They will be missing me by now, over there on the far side of the estuary. They will wonder where I’ve got to — I wonder the same thing myself — and won’t imagine I’m so near. Polly will be in an awful state, with no one to talk to and confide in, and no one at all to look to for comfort except Marcus, whose comfort she is hardly likely to call on, much, given the state of things. I miss her already. Why did I go? Because I couldn’t stay. I picture her in her cramped parlour above Marcus’s workshop, huddled in front of the fire in the murky light of this late-September afternoon, her knees shiny from the flames and her shins mottled in diamond shapes. She will be nibbling worriedly at a corner of her mouth with those little sharp teeth of hers that always remind me of the flecks of glistening fat in a Christmas pudding. She is, was, my own dear pudding. I ask again: Why did I leave? Such questions. I know why I left, I know very well why, and should stop pretending that I don’t.

Marcus will be in his workshop, at his bench. I see him, too, in his sleeveless leather jerkin, intent and hardly breathing, the jeweller’s glass screwed into his eye socket, plying his tiny instruments that are in my mind’s eye a steel scalpel and forceps, dissecting a Patek Philippe. Although he is younger than I am — it seems to me everyone is younger than I am — his hair is thinning and turning grey already and, see, hangs now in feathery wisps on either side of his leaning narrow saintly face, stirred by each breath he breathes, stirred a little, a little. He used to have something of the look of the Dürer of that androgynous self-portrait, the three-quarters profile one with tawny ringlets and rosebud mouth and disconcertingly come-hither eye; latterly, though, he might be one of Grünewald’s suffering Christs. “Work, Olly,” he said to me dolefully, “work is all I have to distract me from my anguish.” That was the word he used: anguish. I thought it queer, even in such dire circumstances, more a flourish than a word. But pain compels eloquence — look at me; listen to me.

The child is there too, somewhere, Little Pip, as they call her — never just Pip, always Little Pip. It’s true she’s quite small, but what if she grows up an amazon? Little Pip the Gentle Giantess. I shouldn’t laugh, I know; it’s jealousy jogging my funny bone, jealousy and sad regret. Gloria and I had a little one of our own, briefly.

Gloria! She had slipped my mind until this moment. She too will be wondering where on earth I am. Where, on earth.

Damn it, why does everything have to be so difficult.

—

I am going to think about the night I finally fell in love with Polly, finally for the first time, that is. Anything for diversion, even though thoughts of love are what I should be diverting myself from, seeing how hot the soup is that love has got me into. It happened at the annual dinner of the Guild of Clockmakers, Locksmiths and Goldsmiths. We were there as Marcus’s guests, Gloria and I — Gloria under protest, I may add, she being as susceptible as I am to boredom and general fed-upness — and were sat with him and Polly at their table, along with some others whom we needn’t take any notice of. Beefsteak and roast pork on the menu, and spuds, of course, boiled, mashed, baked or chipped, not forgetting your perennial bacon-and-cabbage. Perhaps it was the flabby stink of seared flesh that was making me feel peculiar; that, and the smoke from the candles on the tables and the borborygmic blarings of the three-piece band. There was a ceaseless clamour of voices behind me in the big hall, a rolling heavy swell out of which there would spurt now and then, like a fish leaping, a shriek of some woman’s tipsy laughter. I had been drinking but I don’t believe I was drunk. All the same, as I talked to Polly, and looked at her — indeed, gloated on her — I had the sense of dawning illumination, of sudden epiphany, that so often comes at a certain stage on the way to drunkenness. She seemed not newly beautiful, exactly, but to radiate something I hadn’t noticed before, something that was hers, uniquely: the abundance of her, the very being of her being. This is fanciful, I know, and probably what I thought I was seeing was merely an effect brought on by the fumes of bad wine, but I’m trying to fix the essence of the moment, to isolate the spark that would ignite such a conflagration of ecstasy and pain, of mischief, damage and, yes, Marcusian anguish.

And anyway, who’s to say that what we see when we’re drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria?

Polly is no great beauty. In saying this I am not being unchivalrous, I hope; it’s best to start out candid, since I aim to continue that way, in so far as I am capable of candour. Of course, I found her, find her, altogether lovely. She is full-figured, biggish in the beam — picture the nicely rounded nether half of a child-sized cello — with a neat, heart-shaped face and brownish, somewhat unruly hair. Her eyes are truly remarkable. They are pale grey, they seem almost translucent, and in certain lights take on a mother-of-pearl sheen. They have a slight cast, which finds an endearing echo in the slight overlap of her two pearly front teeth. She has a placid mien for the most part, but her glance can be surprisingly sharp, and her tone at times can deliver quite a sting, quite a sting. Mostly, though, she keeps a wary eye on a world she doesn’t feel entirely at ease in. She is always conscious of her lack of social polish — she’s a country lass, after all, even if her folk are shabby-grand — in comparison to my poised Gloria, for example, and is unsure in matters of etiquette and nice behaviour. It was very affecting to see, that night at the Clockers, as the evening is colloquially known, how at the start of each course she would glance quickly about the table and check which item of cutlery the rest of us were favouring before daring to pick up knife or fork or spoon for herself. Maybe that’s where love begins, not in sudden seizures of passion but in the recognition and simple acceptance of, of — of something or other, I don’t know what.

The Clockers is a tedious affair, and I felt a fool for coming. I had turned my back on the festive crowd and, propped on my elbows, was leaning forwards earnestly across the table so that my face, hot and throbbing, was almost in Polly’s bosom, or would almost have been had she not turned halfway away from me on her chair, so that she was looking sideways at me along the curve of her nicely plump right shoulder. What did I talk to her about, with such force and fervour? I can’t remember — not that it matters: the matter was in the tone, not the content. I could feel Gloria monitoring us, with an amused and sceptical eye. I often think Gloria married me so as always to have something to make her laugh. I don’t mean to sound resentful, not at all. Her laughter is not cruel or even hurtful. She just finds me funny, not for what I say or do but for what I am, her rufous-headed, roly-poly and, did she but know it, light-fingered manling.

Polly at this time, the time of the night at the Clockers when I fell in love with her, had been married for three or four years, and was certainly no dewy-eyed lass of the kind that might be thought susceptible to my insinuative blandishments. All the same, it was plain I was having an effect on her. Listening to me, she had taken on that vaguely staring, wide-eyed expression, accentuated by her lopsided gaze, of a married woman in whom a tentative delight is dawning as she realises, incredulously, that a man she has known for years and who is not her husband is suddenly telling her, in however roundabout and high-flown a fashion, that he has all of a sudden fallen in love with her.

Marcus was away among the dancers, whooping and stomping. Despite his diffident and incurably melancholic disposition he does love a party, and joins in with violent enthusiasm at the first pop of a cork or blast on a bugle — that night he had invited Gloria no fewer than three times to jump up and join him in his capers, and on each occasion, to my considerable surprise, she had accepted. In my early days with Polly I used to try, treacherous hound that I am, to get her to talk about Marcus, to tell me things he said and did in the privacy of their lives together, but she’s a loyal soul and let me know straight away and with impressive firmness that her husband’s peculiarities, if indeed he had any, which she wasn’t saying he had, were a forbidden topic.

How did we meet in the first place, the four of us? I think it must have been Gloria and Polly who struck up a friendship, or better say an acquaintanceship, though I seem to have known Marcus all my life, or all of his life, since I’m the older of the two of us. I recall an initial picnic in an ornamental park somewhere — bread and cheese and wine and rain — and Polly in a white summer dress, bare-legged and lissom. Inevitably, I see the occasion in the light of old man Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe—the earlier, smaller one — with blonde Gloria in the buff and Polly off in the background bathing her feet. Polly that day seemed hardly more than a girl, pink-cheeked and creamy, instead of the married woman that she was. Marcus was wearing a straw hat with holes in it, and Gloria was her usual glorious self, a big bright beauty shedding radiance all round her. And, my God, but my wife was magnificent that day, as indeed she always is. At thirty-five she has attained the full splendour of maturity. I think of her in terms of various metals, gold, of course, because of her hair, and silver for her skin, but there is something in her too of the opulence of brass and bronze: she has a wonderful shine to her, a stately glow. In fact, she is a Tiepolo rather than a Manet type, one of the Venetian master’s Cleopatras, say, or his Beatrice of Burgundy. To my luminous Gloria, Polly could hardly hold one of those little votive candles people used to pay a penny for in church and set burning in front of their favourite saint’s statue. Why then did I—? Ah, now, that’s the nub of the matter, one of the nubs, that I have worn everything down to.

The Clockers ended in the mysteriously abrupt way that such things do, and most of the people at our table had already risen and were making befuddled attempts to organise themselves for departure when Polly fairly sprang to her feet, thinking of Little Pip, I imagine — Polly’s father and her addled mother were supposedly minding the child — but then paused a second and did a curious, shivery little flounce, surprisedly smiling with eyebrows raised and her hands held out from her sides with the palms flat on the air, like a toddler attempting a curtsy. It may have been nothing more than the effect of her bum detaching itself from the seat of her chair — it was very hot and humid in the room — but to me it seemed that she had been lifted, suddenly, lightly, by the action of some invisible and buoyant medium: that she was, literally, and for a second, walking on air. This was hardly the result of the fervid harangue I had been subjecting her to in the absence of her husband, yet I was moved, to hot tears, almost, feeling I had somehow been allowed to share with her in this brief and secret exaltation. She took up her velvet purse, still with a trace of that faintly surprised smile — was she even blushing a little? — and made a show of looking about for Marcus, who was fetching their coats. Then I too rose, my heart fluttering and my poor knees gone to rubber.

In love! Again!

When we came outside the night seemed unwontedly huge under a skyful of glistening stars. After the noise within, the silence out here rang thrillingly in the frosty air. At first Marcus’s car wouldn’t start because, being a cheapskate, he had filled the fuel tank with an inferior sort of fluid and the pipes were clogged with salt. While he was under the bonnet, sighing and softly cursing, Polly and I stood waiting on the pavement, side by side but not touching. Gloria had moved a little way off to smoke a furtive cigarette. Polly had her coat wrapped tightly round her and her chin was sunk in its fur collar, and when she looked at me she did not turn her head but swivelled her eyes sideways comically, with a clown’s hapless, downturned grin. We said nothing. I thought of taking hold of her and drawing her to me while Gloria wasn’t looking and kissing her quickly, if only on the cheek, or even the forehead, as an old friend might at such a moment; but I didn’t dare. What I really wanted to do was to kiss her lips, to lick her eyelids, to dart the tip of my tongue into the pink and secret volutes of her ear. I was in a state of heady amazement, at myself, at Polly, at what we were, at what we had all at once become. It was as if a god had reached down from that sky of stars and scooped us up in his hand and made a little constellation of us on the spot.

It has always seemed to me that one of the more deplorable aspects of dying, aside from the terror, pain and filth, is the fact that when I’m gone there will be no one here to register the world in just the way that I do. Don’t misunderstand me, I have no illusions about my significance in the torrid scheme of things. Others will register other versions of the world, countless billions of them, a welter of worlds particular each to each, but the one that I shall have made merely by my brief presence in it will be lost for ever. That’s a harrowing thought, I find, more so in a way even than the prospect of the loss of self itself. Consider me there that night, under that strew of gems on their cloth of purple plush, having been set upon out of nowhere by love and gazing all about me with my mouth open, noting how the starlight laid sharp shadows diagonally down the sides of the houses, how the roof of Marcus’s car gleamed as if under a fine skim of oil, how the fox fur of Polly’s collar bristled in burning tips, how the roadway darkly shone with frosted grit and the outlines of everything glimmered — all that, the known and common world made singular by my just looking at it. Polly smiling, Marcus vexed, Gloria with her fag, the parcel of people behind me coming out of the Clockers in a burst of drunken hilarity, their breath forming globes of ectoplasm on the air — they would all see what I saw, but not as I did, with my eyes, from my particular angle, in my own way that is as feeble and imperceptive as everyone else’s but that is mine, all the same: mine, and hence unique.

Marcus finished whatever it was he had been doing to the car’s plumbing and straightened up and shut the bonnet with a bang that seemed to make the night draw back in alarm. Muttering about carburettors and wiping his hands down his long narrow flanks he got behind the wheel and pressed the starter crossly, and with a cough and a wheeze the machine shuddered into life. He sat there with the door open and one foot on the pavement, revving the motor and listening to the poor brute’s arcing wails. I like Marcus, really, I do. He’s a decent fellow. I think he regards himself in somewhat the way that Gloria regards me, as all right in general but fundamentally hapless, susceptible of being put upon, and more or less risible. As he sat there, his ear cocked to the sounds the engine was making, he kept shaking his head in rueful fashion, smiling tightly to himself, as if the breakdown were just the latest in a series of small, sad misfortunes that had been dogging him all his life and that he seemed incapable of avoiding. Ah, Marcus old chap, I’m sorry for everything, truly I am. Odd, how hard it is to say sorry and sound convincing. There should be a special, exclusive mode in which to frame one’s regrets. I might bring out something on the subject, a manual of handy hints, or even a style-book: An Alphabet of Apologies, A Sampler of Sorrys.

Gloria and I got into the back seat, me behind Polly, where she sat in front beside Marcus. I could smell the cigarette smoke on Gloria’s breath. Polly was laughing and complaining of the cold, and indeed, observed from where I sat, with her round dark glossy head sunk in that fur collar, she might have been a plump little Eskimo squaw all bundled up in sealskins. As we glided through the silent streets I watched the brooding houses and shut shops as we passed them smoothly by, trying to keep my mind off Marcus’s maddeningly slow and cautious driving. Pierce’s Seed & Hardware, Cotter’s the Chemist, Prendergast’s the Pie Emporium, the hovel once inhabited by the legendary midwife Granny Colfer, with its squinting bull’s-eye panes — an eyesore! — wedged between the Methodist Hall and the many-windowed meeting rooms of the Ancient Order of Foresters. Miller the Milliner, Hanley the Haberdasher. My father’s print shop, as was, with my studio above, also as was. The Butcher. The Baker. The Candlestick-maker. Why ever did I come back and settle here? When a youth, as I’ve remarked, I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. Gloria says it’s because I was afraid of the big world and so retreated to this little one. She may be right, but not wholly so, surely. I feel like an archaeologist of my own past, digging down through layer after layer of schist and glistening shale and never reaching bedrock. There’s the fact, too, the secret fact, that I foresaw myself cutting a new figure in the old place, lording it in my big cream-coloured house up there on Fairmount — Hangman’s Hill, it was previously called, until the Town Council voted, wisely, to change the name — with the world I was supposed to be afraid of making its way in fealty to my door. I would be like Picasso in Vence, or Matisse at the Château de Vauvenargues, though I ended up more like poor Pierre Bonnard, held in hen-pecked captivity in Le Cannet. Instead of honouring me, however, the town thought me a bit of a joke, with my hat and cane and gaudy foulards, my overweening demeanour, my golden, young and utterly undeserved wife. I didn’t mind, so charmed was I to be back among the scenes of childhood, all magically preserved, as if sunk in a vat of waterglass and kept specially for me, in confident and patient expectation of my inevitable homecoming.

Main Street was deserted. The Humber lumbered along in the wake of the twin beams of its headlights, grumbling to itself. A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads. First twinge of jealousy. More than a twinge. What were they talking about? Nothing. Isn’t that what people always talk about when there are others around to overhear them?

Next thing I knew there was something scrabbling at my knee, and I would have given a squeak of fright — it was entirely possible Marcus’s ancient motor would have rats — but when I looked down I saw the glimmer of a hand and realised it was Polly who had got hold of me there. Without giving the slightest sign of movement she had managed to reach her arm through the gap between the door and her seat, on the side where Marcus wouldn’t see, and was fondling my kneecap in a manner that was unmistakable. Now, this was a surprise, not to say a shock, despite all that had gone on between us at the table earlier. The fact is, whenever I made an overture to a woman, which I seldom did, even in my young days, I never really expected it to be entertained, or even noticed, despite certain instances of success, which I tended to regard as flukes, the result of misunderstanding, or dimness on the part of the woman and simple good fortune on mine. I’m not an immediately alluring specimen, having been, for a start, the runt of the litter. I’m short and stout, or better go the whole hog and say fat, with a big head and tiny feet. My hair is of a shade somewhere between wet rust and badly tarnished brass, and in damp weather, or when I’m by the seaside, clenches itself into curls that are as tight and dense as cauliflower florets and stubbornly resistant to the fiercest combings. My skin — oh, my skin! — is a flaccid, moist, off-white integument, so that I look as if I had been blanched in the dark for a long time. Of my freckles I shall not speak. I have stubby arms and legs, thick at the tops and tapering to ankle and wrist, like Indian clubs only shorter and chubbier. I entertain a fancy that as I get older and my girth increases these stubs will steadily retract until they have been absorbed altogether, and my head and thick neck will flatten out too, so that I’ll be perfectly spherical, a big pale puffball to be bowled along at first by kindly Gloria and then, after she has lost heart, by a stern, white-clad person in rubber soles and a starched cap. That anyone, especially a sensible young woman of the likes of Polly Pettit, should take me seriously or give the slightest credence to what I had to say is still to me a matter for amazement. But there I was, with my knee being felt by this very Polly, while her husband, hunched forwards all unknowing at the wheel, with his nose nearly touching the windscreen, drove us slowly homewards, in his old pumpkin of a car, through this lustrous and suddenly transfigured night.

Gloria, my usually sharp-eyed wife, noticed nothing either. Or did she? One never quite knows, with Gloria. That’s the point of her, I suppose.

Anyway, that was that, for then. But I want it understood and written into the record that technically it was Polly who made the first move, by virtue of that fateful feeling of my knee, since my overheated blandishing of her at the table earlier had been a matter solely of words, not actions — I never laid a finger on her, m’lud, not that night, I swear it. When I reached down now and tried fumblingly to take her hand she instantly withdrew it, and without turning gave an infinitesimal shake of the head that I took as a caution and even a rebuke. I was greatly agitated, no less by Polly’s caress than by her rebuff, and I asked Marcus to stop and let me off, saying I wanted to walk the rest of the way home and clear my head in the night air. Gloria looked at me briefly in surprise — I’ve never been much of a one for outdoors, except in my painterly imagination — but made no comment. Marcus stopped the car on the bridge over the mill-race. I got out, and paused a moment and put a hand on the roof of the car and leaned back in to bid husband and wife goodnight, and Marcus grunted — he was still annoyed with himself over the car not starting — and Polly only said a quick word that I didn’t catch and still wouldn’t turn her head or look at me. Off they drove, the exhaust smoke leaving an acrid, saline stink on the air, and I walked slowly in their wake, over the little humpbacked bridge, with the mill-stream gushing and gulping under me, my thoughts in a riot as I watched those rubious tail-lights dwindling into the darkness, like the eyes of a stealthily retreating tiger. Oh, to be devoured!

—

Now, as to the subject of thieving, where to start? I confess I am embarrassed by this childish vice — let’s call it a vice — and frankly I don’t know why I’m owning up to it, to you, my inexistent confessor. The moral question here is ticklish. Just as art uses up its materials by absorbing them wholly into the work, as Collingwood avers — a painting consumes the paint and canvas, while a table is for ever its wood — so too the act, the art, of stealing transmutes the object stolen. In time, most possessions lose their patina, become dulled and anonymous; stolen, they spring back to life, take on the sheen of uniqueness again. In this way, is not the thief doing a favour to things by dint of renewing them? Does he not enhance the world by buffing up its tarnished silver? I hope I have set out the preliminaries of my case with sufficient force and persuasiveness?

The first thing I ever stole, the first thing I remember stealing, was a tube of oil paint. Yes, I know, it seems altogether too pat, doesn’t it, since I was to be an artist and all, but there you are. The scene of the crime was Geppetto’s toyshop up a narrow lane off Saint Swithin Street — yes, these names, I know, I’m making them up as I go along. It must have been at Christmastime, the dark falling at four o’clock and a gossamer drizzle giving a shine to the mussel-blue cobbles of the laneway. I was with my mother. Should I say something about her? Yes, I should: she’s due her due. In those early days — I was nine or ten at the time I’m speaking of — she was less like a mother than a well-disposed older sister, more well-disposed, certainly, than the sister I did have. Mother always affected a distrait and even slightly dazed manner, and was generally inadequate to the ordinary business of life, a thing people found either exasperating or endearing, or both. She was beautiful, I think, in an ethereal sort of way, but gave little attention to her appearance, unless her seeming negligence was a carefully maintained pose, though I don’t believe it was. Her hair in particular she let go wild. It was russet in colour and abundant but very fine, like a rare species of ornamental dried grass, and in almost every memory I have of her she is running her fingers through it in a gesture of vague and ruefully humorous desperation. There was a touch of the gypsy about her, to the shame and annoyance of her children, excepting me, for in my eyes everything she was and did was as near to perfection as it was humanly possible to be. She wore peasant blouses and billowing, flower-print skirts, and in the warmer months elected to go barefoot about the house and sometimes even in the street — she must have been a scandal to our hidebound little town. She had strikingly lovely, pale-violet eyes, which I have inherited, though certainly they are wasted on me. When I was little we were never less than happy in each other’s company, and I wouldn’t have minded, and I suspect she wouldn’t, either, if there had been only the two of us, without my father or my older siblings to crowd the scene. I don’t know why I should have been her favourite but I was. I suppose, being young, I wasn’t ugly yet, and anyway, mothers always favour their last-born, don’t they? I would catch her watching me intently, with bright-eyed expectation, as if at any moment I might do something amazing, perform some marvellous trick, upend myself in an effortless handstand, say, or launch into an operatic aria, or sprout little gold wings at my wrists and ankles and fly up flutteringly into the air.

I had announced early on, in my most precocious and grandest manner, that I intended to be a painter — what an unbearable little twerp I must have been — and of course she thought it a splendid notion, despite my father’s anxious murmurings. Naturally the usual crayons and coloured pencils wouldn’t do at all, no, her boy must have the best, and at once we set off together for Geppetto’s, the only place in town we knew of that stocked oil paint and canvases and real brushes. The shop was high-ceilinged yet cramped, like so many of the houses and premises in the town; so narrow was it indeed that customers tended automatically to enter it at a sideways shuffle, insinuating themselves through the tall doorway with averted faces and retracted tummies. There was a wrought-iron spiral staircase on the right, which I always thought should lead up to a pulpit, and the walls were fitted with shelves of toys to the ceiling. The art supplies were at the back, on a raised section up three steep steps. There Geppetto had his desk, also high and narrow, more like a pulpit, really, a vantage from which he could survey the entire shop, peering over the tops of his spectacles with that benign and twinkling smile in which there glinted, like a bared incisor, the sharp, unresting watchfulness of the born huckster. His real name was Johnson or Jameson or Jimson, I can’t remember exactly, but I called him Geppetto because, with his fuzzy white sidelocks and those rimless specs perched on the end of his long thin nose, he was a dead ringer for the old toy-maker as illustrated in a big Pinocchio picture-book that I had been given as a gift one Christmas.

By the way, I might say many things about that wooden boy and his yearning to be human, oh, yes, many things. But I won’t.

The various colours, I see them still, were set out in a ranked and captivating display on a carved wooden stand like an oversized pipe-rack. Straight away I fixed on a sumptuously fat tube of zinc white. The tube, by happy coincidence, seemed itself made of zinc, while the white label had the matt, dry texture of gesso, a shade I’ve favoured ever since, as you’ll know if you know anything of my work, which I hope you don’t. By instinct I made sure not to let my interest show, and certainly wouldn’t have been so foolhardy as to pick the thing up and examine it, or even to touch it. There is a particular kind of sidewise regard for the object of his desire that in the first stage of stealing it is all the thief will permit himself, not only for reasons of strategy and security but because gratification postponed means pleasure enhanced, as every voluptuary knows. My mother was talking to Geppetto in her distracted way, gazing past his left ear and absent-mindedly fiddling with a pencil she had picked up from his desk, turning and turning it in her attractively slender though somewhat mannish fingers. What can they have been talking about, such an ill-matched pair? I could see, despite my tender age and his years, that the old boy was greatly taken with this wild-haired, limpid-eyed creature. My mother, I should say, was always seductive in her dealings with men, whether intentionally or otherwise I can’t say. It was her very vagueness, I believe, the slightly fey, slightly frowning dreaminess, that dazzled and undid them. And therein I saw my chance. When I judged that she had lulled the old shopman into a state of glazed befuddlement, I shot out a claw and — snap! the tube of paint was in my pocket.

You can imagine how I felt, with fright making a burning lump in my throat and my heart banging away. Gleefully triumphant too, of course, secretly so, and horribly. I was in such a state of stifled excitement that it seemed my eyes might pop out of their sockets and my cheeks swell to bursting. Believe me, when it comes to first times, stealing and love have a lot in common. How thrillingly chilly that tube of paint felt, and what a weight it was, as if it were formed of an otherworldly element that had landed here from a distant planet where the force of gravity was a thousand times stronger than on earth. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had torn its way through my trousers pocket and smashed a hole in the floor and gone on plummeting downwards till it came out in Australia, to the amazement of blackfellows and the fright of kangaroos.

I think what most impressed me about what I had done was the quickness of it. I don’t mean just the quickness of the deed itself, although there was something eerie, something wizardly, in the seemingly instantaneous way the tube of paint got from its place on the wooden stand and into my pocket. I’m thinking of those Godley particles we hear so much about, these days, that at one moment are in one place and the next in another, even on the far side of the universe, with no trace whatever of how they got from here to there. That’s the way it always is with a theft. It’s as if a single thing by being stolen were on the instant made into two: the thing that before was someone else’s and this not quite identical thing that now is mine. It’s a kind of, what do you call it, a kind of transubstantiation, if that’s not going too far. For it did give me a feeling almost of holy awe, on that first occasion, and does so still, every time. That’s the sacral side of the thing; the profane side is if anything even more numinous.

Did Geppetto spy me in the act? I had the fearful suspicion that for all that he was in thrall to my mother’s azure gaze, even though it wasn’t fully focused on him, he had spotted my hand darting out and my fingers fixing on that lovely fat shiny half-pound of paint and magicking it into my pocket. Whenever I returned to his shop, and I would return there many times over the coming years, he would give me what I thought was a special, sly smile, quick with knowing. “Here he comes, our little painter!” he would exclaim, snuffling a soft laugh down his greyly hirsute nostrils. “Our very own Leonardo!” That first time I felt so euphoric I didn’t care if he knew what I had done, but all the same he was one person I made sure never to steal from again.

How did I account for the extra and costly tube of paint that my mother would have known she hadn’t purchased from Geppetto? Vague she may have been, but she was always careful with the pennies. Explaining the inexplicable and sudden appearance of an unfamiliar object is always a tricky business, as any recreational thief will tell you — I say recreational when really it’s a matter of aesthetics, even of erotics, but we’ll get on to all that in a while, if I have the heart for it. Prestidigitation comes into it — now you don’t see it, now you do — and I quickly became a dab hand at palming and unpalming my pilfered trifles. People in general are inattentive, but the thief never is. He watches and waits, then pounces. Unlike the professional burglar, in his stripes and ridiculously skimpy mask, who comes home from work at dawn and proudly tumbles the contents of his swag-bag on to the counterpane for his sleepy wife to admire, we artist-thieves must conceal our art and its rewards. “Where did you get that fountain pen?” we’ll be asked — or tie-pin, snuffbox, watch-chain, whatever—“I don’t remember you buying that.” The rules of response are, first, never to speak straight off, but let a beat or two go by before answering; second, seem a little unsure oneself as to the provenance of the bibelot in question; third, and above all, never attempt to be comprehensive, for nothing fans the flame of suspicion like an abundance of detail too freely offered. And then—

But I’m getting ahead of myself; a thief’s heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can’t keep from bragging.

My father, as I’ve mentioned, disapproved of my new hobby, which is how he regarded it — painting, that is — and continued to disapprove even when I was older and began to earn, even in the early days, not unappreciable sums for my daubs. At the start he was thinking of the expense, for after all he too made his living in or on the periphery of the art business and would have been aware of the cost of paint and canvas and good bristle brushes. However, I suspect his misgiving was in fact only a terror of the unknown. His son an artist! It was the last thing he would have expected, and what he didn’t expect frightened him. My father. Must I make a sketch of him, too? Yes, I must: fair is fair. He was an unassuming man, lanky, thin to the point of emaciation — obviously I must be a throwback — with stooped shoulders and a long narrow head, like the carved blade of a primitive axe. Rather a Marcus type, now that I think of it, though in aspect less refined, less the suffering saint. My father moved in a peculiar, mantis-like fashion, as if all his joints were not quite attached to each other and he had to hold his skeleton together inside his skin with great care and difficulty. My reddish-brassy-brown hair seems to be the only physical trait I inherited from him. I have his timidity, too, his small-scale fearfulness. Early on I developed a weary contempt for him, a thing that troubles me now, when sadly it’s too late to make up for it. He was good to my mother and me and the other children, according to his lights. What I couldn’t forgive him was his execrable taste. Every time I had to go into his shop my lip would curl in contempt, instantly and all by itself, like one of those old-time celluloid shirt-fronts. How I despised, even as a child, the so many prints of teary urchins and kittens at play with balls of wool, of dappled glades and antlered monarchs of the glen, and, prime object of my loathing, that life-sized head-and-shoulders portrait of a pensive Oriental beauty with green skin, framed in gilt and mounted in unavoidable splendour above the cash register. There was never any question of his stocking my stuff, certainly not — he didn’t ask, and I didn’t offer. Imagine my surprise and some dismay, then, on the day after he died when I was going through his things and came across a burlap folder, which I think he must have made himself, in which he had kept the portrait I did of my poor mother on her deathbed. French chalk on a nice creamy sheet of Fabriano paper. It wasn’t bad, for prentice work. But that he had kept it all those years, and in its own special folder, too, well, that was a facer. Sometimes I have the suspicion that there’s a lot I miss in the day-to-day run of events.

Wait a minute, though. Can I really count that tube of paint as the first thing I stole? There are many kinds of theft, from the whimsical through to the malicious, but there’s only one kind that counts, for me, and that’s the theft that is utterly inutile. The objects I take must be ones that can’t be put to practical use, not by me, anyway. As I said at the outset, I don’t steal for profit — unless the secret shiver of bliss that thieving affords me can be considered a material gain — whereas I not only wanted but needed that tube of paint, as I wanted and needed Polly, and there’s no doubt I put it to good use— Oops! That bit about Polly slipped out, or slipped itself in, when I wasn’t expecting it. But it’s true, I suppose. I did steal her, picked her up when her husband wasn’t looking and popped her in my pocket. Yes, I pinched Polly; Polly I purloined. Used her, too, and badly, squeezed out of her everything she had to give and then ran off and left her. Imagine a squirm, a shiver of shame, imagine two white-knuckled fat fists beating a breast in vain. That’s the trouble with guilt, one of the troubles: there’s no escaping its regard; it follows me around the room, around the world, like, all too famously, the Gioconda’s puffy-eyed, sceptical and smugly knowing stare.

—

Just down from the roof. Whew! The storm earlier this morning lifted off half a dozen slates and dashed them to the ground, smashing them to bits, and now the rain is coming through the ceiling in one of the back bedrooms, having already caused who knows what havoc in the attic. The house is only a ground floor over a basement so the roof isn’t all that high, but it’s steeply pitched and I can’t think what possessed me to shin up there, especially in this weather. I was negotiating my shaky way across the slates when I slipped and fell on my belly, and would have slithered all the way off and plunged to the ground had I not managed to grab on to the roof-ridge with my fingertips. What a sight that would have made, if there had been anyone to see me, wriggling and gasping like an impaled beetle, my pudgy legs thrashing and my toecaps searching desperately for purchase on the greasy slates. If I had fallen on to the concrete in the back yard would I have bounced? In the end I managed to get myself to calm down, and lay motionless for a while, still clutching on by my cold and stiffening fingers, being rained on, with a flock of jeering rooks wheeling about me. Then, closing my eyes and thinking of saying a prayer, I released my hold on the ridge and let myself slide slowly, clatteringly, down the slope until my toes, clenched inside my by now badly scuffed shoes, encountered the guttering and I came to a blessed stop. After another brief rest I was able to get up and scramble sideways at a crouch along the edge of the roof — amazing the gutters didn’t give way under me — with the hopping, rolling gait of an orangutan, hooting softly in terror, and gained the relative safety of the tall brick chimney that juts up at the north-west corner of the roof, or is it the south-east? Stupid to have gone up there in the first place. I might have broken my neck and not been found for weeks. Would those rooks have plucked out my corpse’s staring, shocked and disbelieving eyes?

I don’t know why I came here — I mean why here, to this house. This is where I grew up, this is where the past took place. Is it a case of the wounded rabbit dragging itself back to the burrow? No, that won’t do. It’s I who wounded others, after all, though certainly I didn’t get away unscathed. Anyway, this is where I am, and there’s no point in brooding on why I chose to come here and not somewhere else. I’m tired of brooding, it availeth naught.

I was wary of the woods, when I was young. Oh, I used to love wandering there, especially at twilight, under the high, darkling canopy of leaves, among the saplings and the sprays of fern and the big, purplish clumps of bramble, but I was always afraid, too, afraid of wild animals and other things. I knew the old gods dwelt there still, the old ogres. There is felling going on today — I hear it down in the distance, in the deep wood. Hard weather for that kind of work. There can’t be much timber left that’s worth cutting. All the property round here is still in the hands of the Hyland clan, though it’s mostly stripped by now of its erstwhile abundance. I feel its barrenness, as I feel my own. I expect the woodsmen will make their way up here in time and then the last of the old trees will be gone. Maybe they’ll fell me along with them. That would be a fitting end, to go down with a flailing crash. Better, at any rate, than sliding off a roof and cracking my pate.

My father bore a smouldering contempt for the Hylands, whom out of their hearing he referred to, witheringly, as the Huns, a reference to their Alpine origins. A hundred or so years ago the first of the Hohengrunds, which was their name originally, one Otto of that ilk, fled the towering, war-torn heights of Alpinia and settled here. In those days of plenty the by now pragmatically renamed Hylands — Hohengrund, Hyland: Get it? — soon became extensive landowners, and not only that but masters of industry, too, with a fleet of coal ships and an oil-storage facility in the town’s harbour that supplied the entire province. Their long heyday ended when the world, our new-old world that Godley’s Theorem wrought, learned to harvest energy from the oceans and out of the very air itself. Yet even as times got hard for them the family managed to cling on to their acres, and a pot or two of gold besides, and to this day in these parts the name of Hyland will cause some among the older denizens instinctively to doff a cap or tug a hoary forelock. Not my dad, though. A timid spirit he may have been, but my goodness when he got going on our self-styled overlords — whose precipitous decline had only begun when his was finishing — he was what folks round here would call a Tartar. How he would execrate them of an evening, bringing his fist down on the table with a bang and making the tea-things jump and rattle, while my mother turned ever more dreamy and plunged her fingers into her bird’s-nest of hair in vague-eyed distraction. Yet for all their ferocity I never quite believed in those rants. I suspect my father didn’t care tuppence about the Hylands, and only lit on them as an excuse to shout and thump the table and that way alleviate a little the sense of disappointment and failure that ate at him like a canker all his life. Poor old Dad. I must have loved him, in my way, whatever way that might have been.

It didn’t help his temper that the gate-lodge in which we lived — lodged, in fact — should be the property of those same Hylands and rented to us by the year. What a grim hush would fall upon the household when the time came, in the first week of January, for my father to don his best suit of shiny blue serge and make his muttering, chagrined way into town to the offices of F. X. Reck & Son, solicitors, land agents and commissioners for oaths, to submit himself, like some churl or vassal of yore, to the ceremonial renewal of the lease. The mansion that this house used to be the gate-lodge to was acquired in the last century by the first Otto von Hohengrund himself. By our time the big house was in the possession of one of Otto’s numerous descendants, a certain Urs, who was indeed of bearish aspect and wore lederhosen, I swear it, in the summer months. I would glimpse his children in the wood sometimes, delicate, pale-haired creatures but imperious withal. On a never-to-be-forgotten occasion one of them, a little girl with earphone braids and a perfect Habsburg lip, accused me of trezpazzing and slashed me across the face with a hazel switch. You can imagine my father’s rage when he saw the weal on my cheek and heard how I had come by it. However, retribution sometimes falls even upon the mighty, and the following autumn the same little girl was savaged by a wolf, one of a supposedly tame pair that her father had imported here, out of nostalgia no doubt for the terrible forests and mountain fastnesses of his ancestral lands. The thing had got out of its pen and come upon the child picking berries in a dell not far from the spot where she had slashed my face that day. My father pretended to be shocked like everyone else by this gruesome incident, but it was plain, to me at least, that in his secret heart he felt that justice, admittedly disproportionate, had been done, and was duly gratified.

I wonder what my first painting was of. Can’t remember. Some sylvan scene, I imagine, with leaves and stiles and moo-cows, all laid out perspectiveless under a goggling egg-yolk sun. I’m not sneering. It’s true I was merely happy at first, dabbling and daubing, and happiness, of course, in this context, doesn’t do at all. I spent more time, I think, in Geppetto’s treasure-house than I did in front of my easel — yes, she bought me an easel, my mother did, and a palette, too, the elliptical curves of which caused in me, and cause in me still, for I still have it, a secret amorous throb. The smell of paint and the soft feel of sable were to me what marbles and toy bows-and-arrows were to my coevals. Was I only at play, then, all innocently? Maybe I was, yet I did better work then, as a child, I’ll wager, than later on when I got self-conscious and began to think myself an artist. My God, the horror of trying to learn even the bare essentials! To re-learn them, that is, after the lucky flush of my carefree years came to an end. Everybody thinks it must be easy to be a painter, if you have some skill and master a few basic rules and aren’t colour-blind. And it’s true the technical side of it isn’t so difficult, a matter of practice, hardly more than a knack, really. Technique can be acquired, technique you can learn, with time and effort, but what about the rest of it, the bit that really counts, where does that come from? Borne down from the empyrean by plump putti and scattered upon the favoured few like Danaëan gold? I hardly think so. An early facility is cruelly deceptive. It was as if I had set off heedlessly up a gentle grassy slope somewhere in old Alpinia itself, plucking edelweiss blossoms and delighting in the song of the lark, and presently had come to the crest and stopped open-mouthed before a terrifying vista of range upon range of flinty, snow-clad peaks, each one loftier than the last, stretching off into the misty distances of a Caspar David Friedrich sky, and all requiring to be climbed. I suppose I could flatter myself and say I must have been wise beyond my years to recognise the difficulties so early on. One day I saw the problem, just like that, and nothing was to be the same again. And what was the problem? It was this: that out there is the world and in here is the picture of it, and between the two yawns the man-killing crevasse.

But wait, wait, I’m getting confused in my chronology, hopelessly confused. That insight didn’t come until much later, and when it did, it left me blinded. So maybe, all those years ago, I wasn’t such a perceptive little genius after all. That’s a fortifying thought, though I can’t think why it should be.

—

Somewhat later. I made myself go for a walk. It’s not a thing I often do, the reason being that it’s not a thing I do well. That sounds absurd, I know — in what way would a walk be done well or ill? Walking is walking, surely. The point, however, is not the walking, but the going for a walk, which in my estimation is the most futile and certainly the most formless of human pastimes. I’m as ready as the next man to savour the delights that Mother Nature spreads before us with such indulgence and largesse, probably readier, but only as an incidental pleasure in the intervals of the everyday. To set out with the specific purpose of being abroad in the clement air under God’s good sky and all the rest of it smacks to me of kitsch. I think the trouble is that I can’t engage in it naturally, without self-consciousness — that’s what I mean by speaking of it being done badly. I look with envy upon others I meet along the road. How heartily they tramp, in their knee-breeches and rain-proof jackets, fearlessly wielding those pairs of long, wonderfully slender walking-sticks, more like ski poles, with leather loops on the handles, and not a thought in their heads, it seems, their faces lifted with blameless smiles to the bright day’s blessing of light. I for my part skulk and sweat, mopping my streaming brow and clawing at a shirt collar that indoors was an easy fit but that now seems intent on throttling me. It’s true, I could pluck it open and snatch off my tie and cast it from me, but that’s just it. I’ve never been the unbuttoned type. I may look like Dylan Thomas in his premature decrepitude but I haven’t got his windy way.

What it is, you see, about being on a walk — I’m sorry to keep tramping on about it — with no other purpose than being on a walk, is that I feel watched. Not by human eyes, or even by animal ones. For me, nature is anything but inanimate. Today as I strolled — I do not stroll — along the back road that skirts the wood I felt the life of things thronging me about on every side, crowding me, jostling me: in a word, watching me. Why, I wondered uneasily, is there so much of it? Why is there grass everywhere, covering everything? — why are there so many leaves? And that’s not even to consider the goings-on underground, the rootling beetles, the countless squirm of worms, the riot of thready roots striking deep and deeper into the earth in search of water and of warmth. I was appalled by the profusion; I felt pressed down upon by the weight of it all, and soon turned about and scurried back to the house and fled indoors, with a tremulous hand pressed to my racing heart.

Yet when I painted I painted nature best, and most happily. There’s a paradox. Mind you, when it comes down to it, what else is there to paint? By nature, need I say, I mean the visible world, the entirety of it, indoors as well as out. But that’s not nature, strictly speaking, is it? What, then? It’s the all, the omnium, that I’m thinking of; the whole kit and boodle, mice and mountain ranges, and us, wedged in between, the measure of all things, God bless the mark, as they say in these parts.

There’s nothing to eat in the house. What am I to do? I could go out into the wood, I suppose, and forage for sweet herbs, or delve for pig nuts, whatever they are. Autumn is supposed to be the season of mellow fruitfulness, isn’t it? I’ve never been any good at looking after myself. That was what womenfolk did, they took care of me. Now see what I’ve become, a mute and lyreless Orpheus who would lose his head for sure, were he so foolish as to venture back among the maenads. O god departed! O deus mortuorum! To thee I pray.

—

My thoughts have turned yet again to that tube of zinc white I filched from Geppetto’s toyshop. I can’t seem to leave it alone. I’ve come definitely to the conclusion that it didn’t in fact constitute my first legitimate theft. Granted, the tube of paint was the first thing I stole, so far as I remember, but I stole it out of childish covetousness, and the deed had nothing in it of artistry and lacked the true erotic element. These vital qualities only entered in with Miss Vandeleur’s green-gowned figurine. Ah, yes. I have her still, that little porcelain lady, after all these years. What a sentimentalist I am. Or, no, that’s not right, what am I talking about? — sentimentality doesn’t come into it. The things I’ve kept I haven’t kept out of nostalgic attachment; as well suggest to the high priest of the temple that the holy relics he looks after and jealously watches over are mere mementoes of the mortal men and women, their original owners, who were destined one day to be elevated to sanctity. Wait! — there it is again, the hieratic note, the summoning of the sacred, while in fact the true end of stealing is mundane — transcendent, yet at the same time earthbound. Let me state it clearly. My aim in the art of thieving, as it was in the art of painting, is the absorption of world into self. The pilfered object becomes not only mine, it becomes me, and thereby takes on new life, the life that I give it. Too grand, you say, too highfalutin? Scoff all you like, I don’t care: I know what I know.

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 like 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.

“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 breathing,” 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.

Someone. Someone else.

Marcus once more cast about the room helplessly, then fixed his stricken gaze on me in a kind of mute beseeching, like a sick child looking to a parent for relief from its pain. I licked my lips and swallowed. “Who,” I asked — croaked, rather—“who is it she’s in love with?” He didn’t reply, only shook his head in the same dull, wounded way that he had done a few moments ago. I hoped he wasn’t going to start pacing again. I considered getting out the brandy that I keep in a cupboard behind bottles of turps and tins of linseed oil, but thought better of it: If we started drinking now, who could say what it would lead to, what tormented revelations, what stammered confessions? If ever there was a time for a clear head, this was it.

Drooping again, as if physically as well as emotionally exhausted, Marcus crossed to the sofa, unwound his glasses from behind his ears, and sat down. I winced inwardly, thinking of all the times Polly and I had lain together on those stained green cushions. I was sweating, and kept digging my nails spasmodically into my palms. A faint continuous tremor, like an electrical current, was running through me. When he is excited or upset Marcus has a way of winding his long legs around each other, hooking one foot behind an ankle, and joining his hands as if for prayer and thrusting them between his clenched knees, a pose that always makes me think of that sign outside chemists’ shops showing the Rod of Asclepius coiled about by a serpent. Twisted up like that now he began to talk in a slow, toneless voice, gazing blankly before him. It was as if he had escaped some natural calamity unscathed in limb but numb with shock, which was, come to think of it, the case. I was glad I was standing with the window behind me, since from where he sat he would not be able to make out my face clearly: it would have been quite a sight, I’m sure. He said that for a long time now, for many months — all the way back to last Christmas, in fact — he had suspected that things were not right with Polly. She had been behaving in strange ways. There was nothing definite he could have pointed to, and he had told himself he was imagining things, yet the niggle of doubt would not be stilled. Her voice would trail off in the middle of a sentence and she would stand motionless, with something forgotten in her hand, lost in a secret smile. She had become increasingly impatient with Little Pip. One day, he said, when she was in a hurry to go out she had screamed at the child because she was refusing to lie down for her nap, and in the end she had thrust the mite into his arms and told him he could look after her since she was sick of the sight of her. As for her attitude to him, she swung between barely restrained irritation and overblown, almost cloying, solicitude. She was sleepless, too, and at night would lie beside him in the dark, tossing and sighing for hours, until the bedclothes were knotted around her and the bed was steaming with her sweat. He had wanted to confront her but hadn’t dared to, being too much in fear of what she might tell him.

Above me the rain was whispering against the window-panes with stealthy, lewd suggestiveness.

But what had happened, I asked, again convulsively licking my lips that by now had gone dry and cracked, what was it exactly that had happened to convince him that Polly was betraying him? He gave a despairing shrug, and corkscrewed himself around himself more tightly still, and began rocking backwards and forwards, too, making a soft, crooning sound, limp strands of damp hair hanging down about his face. There had been a fight, he said, he couldn’t remember how it had started or even what it had been about. Polly had shouted at him, and had gone on shouting, as if demented, and he had — here he faltered, aghast at the memory — he had slapped her face, and his wedding ring, of all things, had cut her cheek. He held up a finger and showed me the narrow gold band. I tried to picture the scene but couldn’t; he was talking about people I didn’t know, violent strangers driven by ungovernable passions, like the characters in, yes, in a particularly overblown operatic drama. I was simply unable to imagine Polly, my shy and docile Polly, shrieking in such fury that he had been goaded into hitting her. After the slap she had put a hand to her face and looked at him without a word for what seemed an impossibly long time, in a way that had frightened him, he said, her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together in a thin, crimped line. He had never known such a look from her before, or such a silence. Then above their heads a wailing started up — the fight had taken place in Marcus’s workshop — and Polly, white-faced except for the livid print of his hand on her cheek and the smear of blood where his ring had cut her, went away to tend the child.

I felt as if a hole had opened in the air in front of me and I was falling into it headlong, slowly; it was a not entirely unpleasurable sensation, but only giddy and helpless, like the sensation of flying in a dream. I have known the feeling before: it comes, a moment of illusory rescue, at the most terrible of times.

“What am I going to do?” Marcus pleaded, looking up at me out of eyes that burned with suffering.

Well, old friend, I thought, feeling suddenly very weary, what are any of us going to do? I went and opened the cupboard. Prudence be damned — it was high time to break out the brandy.

—

We sat side by side on the sofa and between us over the space of an hour drained the bottle, passing it back and forth and swigging from the neck; when we started it had been at least half full. I was sunk in silence while Marcus talked, going over the highlights of the story — the legend! — of his life with Polly. He spoke of the days of their courtship, when her father had disapproved of him, though the old boy would never say why; snobbery, Marcus suspected. Polly was not long out of school and was helping on the farm, keeping chickens and in the summer selling strawberries from a stall at the front gate, for the value of land had fallen, or some such, and the family had subsided into a state of genteel penury. Marcus had finished his apprenticeship and was in the employ of an uncle, whose watch-repair business in time he would inherit. Polly, he said, his voice shaking with emotion, was everything he could have hoped for in a wife. When he began to speak of their honeymoon I braced myself, but I needn’t have worried: he’s not a man to share the kind of confidences I feared, even with the friend he thought me to be. He couldn’t have been happier than he was in those early days with Polly, he said, and when Little Pip came along it had seemed his heart would burst from such an excess of bliss. Here he broke off and struggled to sit upright and tears welled in his eyes, and he gave a great hiccupy sob and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. His grief was grief, all right, lavish and unconstrained, yet, as I couldn’t help noticing with interest, it might as well have been a kind of euphoria: all the signs of it were the same.

“What am I going to do, Olly?” he cried again, more desperate than ever.

I still had that sense of buoyant falling, which intensified now, due to the brandy having its inevitable effect, into a growing and wholly inappropriate lightheartedness. How could he be so sure, I asked again, that what he suspected of Polly was really the case? Wasn’t it possible he was imagining the whole thing? The mind when it starts to doubt, I said, knows no limits, and will credit the most outlandish fantasies. I should have shut up, of course, instead of which I kept on tugging at that loose end of yarn. It was as if I wanted it all to come unravelled, wanted Marcus to pause, and think, and turn and stare at me, his eyes widening in astonishment and gathering fury as the terrible truth dawned on him. Some desperate part of me wanted him to know! Yet how perverse to dread one’s fate while at the same time reaching out eagerly to draw it close.

At this point Marcus did pause, did turn to me, and with another lugubrious hiccup put a hand on my arm and asked in a voice thick with emotion if I realised how much my friendship meant to him, what a privilege it was, and what a comfort. I mumbled that I, of course, in my turn, was glad to have him for a friend, very glad, very very very glad. I had a feeling now as of everything inside me slowly shrivelling. Encouraged, Marcus embarked on an extended soliloquy in praise of me as trusted companion, stout soul and, incidentally, world-beating painter, all the while looming into my face with eager sincerity. I wanted, oh, how I wanted, like the buttonholed wedding guest, to make myself turn aside from that glittering eye, but it held me fast. Yes, he declared, more fervently still, I was the best friend a man could hope for. As he spoke, his face seemed to swell and swell, as if it were being steadily inflated from inside. At last, with a mighty effort, I managed to tear myself away from his brimming, soulful stare. His hand was still on my arm — I could feel the heat of it through the sleeve of my coat, and almost shuddered. Now he broke off his peroration and leaned his head far back and sucked a final drop from the bottle. It was clear he had a great deal more to say, and would certainly say it, with ever-increasing passion and sincerity, if I didn’t find a means of distracting him.

“You were telling me,” I said, with demurely lowered eyes and fiddling at one of the sofa buttons, “you were telling me about the fight with Polly.”

Some distraction.

“Was I?” he said. He heaved a fluttery sigh. “Oh, yes. The fight.”

Well, he said, putting on his spectacles again — I am always fascinated by the intricate way he has of looping them on to his ears — after he had slapped Polly and she had gone off upstairs he had stalked about the workshop for some time, disputing with himself and kicking things, then had followed her, angrier than ever, and confronted her in their bedroom. She was sitting on the side of the bed with the child in her arms. Was there, he demanded, someone else? He hadn’t imagined there was, not for a second, and had only said it to provoke her, and expected her to laugh at him and tell him he was mad. But to his consternation she did not deny it, only sat there looking up at him and saying not a word. “The same look again,” he said, renewed tears springing to his eyes, “the same look, only worse, that she gave me in the workshop when I hit her!” He hadn’t thought her capable of such blank remoteness, such calm and icy indifference. Then he corrected himself: no, he had seen her look like that once before, a little like that, in the early stages of her pregnancy, when the baby had begun to kick and be a real presence. That was a case too, he said, of someone coming into her life, of a third party — those were his words, a third party — getting inside her — those too, his very words — and absorbing all her concentration, all her care; in short, all her love. At the time he had felt excluded, excluded, yes, but not rejected, not like now, when she sat on the bed like that with her cold and frightening gaze fixed on him and the realisation came to him that he had lost her.

“Lost?” I said, and attempted a chiding laugh, even as a hand with freezing fingers was laying itself on my heart. “Oh, come now.”

He nodded, sure of what he knew, and screwed his legs around each other more tightly still, and thrust his hands between his knees and again made that thin mewling sound, like an animal in pain.

The rain had stopped and the last big drops were dripping down the window-panes in glistening, zigzag runnels. The clouds were breaking, and craning forwards a little and looking high up I could see a patch of pure autumnal blue, the blue that Poussin loved, vibrant and delicate, and despite everything my heart lifted another notch or two, as it always lifts when the world opens wide its innocent blue gaze like that. I think the loss of my capacity to paint, let’s call it that, was the result, in large part, of a burgeoning and irresistible and ultimately fatal regard for that world, I mean the objective day-to-day world of mere things. Before, I had always looked past things in an effort to get at the essence I knew was there, deeply hidden but not beyond access to one determined and clear-sighted enough to penetrate down to it. I was like a man come to meet a loved one at a railway station who hurries through the alighting crowd, bobbing and dodging, willing to see no face save the one he longs to see. Don’t mistake me, it wasn’t spirit I was after, ideal forms, Euclidean lines, no, none of that. Essence is solid, as solid as the things it is the essence of. But it is essence. As the crisis deepened, it wasn’t long before I recognised and accepted what appeared to me a simple and self-evident truth, namely, that there was no such thing as the thing itself, only effects of things, the generative swirl of relation. You would beg to differ? I said, striking a defiant pose, hand on hip. Try isolating the celebrated thing-in-itself, then, I said to a throng of imaginary objectors, and see what you get. Go ahead, kick that stone: all you’ll end up with is a sore toe. I would not be budged. No things in themselves, only their effects! Such was my motto, my manifesto, my — forgive me — my aesthetic. But what a pickle it put me in, for what else was there to paint but the thing, as it stood before me, stolid, impenetrable, un-get-roundable? Abstraction wouldn’t solve the problem. I tried it, and saw it was mere sleight of hand, meremost sleight of mind. And so it kept asserting itself, the inexpressible thing, kept pressing forwards, until it filled my vision and became as good as real. Now I realised that in seeking to strike through surfaces to get at the core, the essence, I had overlooked the fact that it is in the surface that essence resides: and there I was, back to the start again. So it was the world, the world in its entirety, I had to tackle. But world is resistant, it lives turned away from us, in blithe communion with itself. World won’t let us in.

Don’t misunderstand me, my effort wasn’t to reproduce the world, or even to represent it. The pictures I painted were intended as autonomous things, things to match the world’s things, the unmanageable thereness of which had somehow to be managed. That’s what Freddie Hyland meant, whether he knew it or not, when he spoke to me that day of the inwardness he had spotted in those dashed-off sketches of mine. I was striving to take the world into myself and make it over, to make something new of it, something vivid and vital, and essence be hanged. A boa constrictor, that was me, a huge, wide-open mouth slowly, slowly swallowing, trying to swallow, gagging on enormity. Painting, like stealing, was an endless effort at possession, and endlessly I failed. Stealing other people’s goods, daubing scenes, loving Polly: all the one, in the end.

But does that world exist, what I have here called world? Maybe the man on the railway platform is running towards someone who will never arrive, who will always be the distant beloved, an image he formed for himself, an image lodged inside him that he keeps trying to conjure into being, trying and failing, the image of a person who never boarded the train in the first place.

You see my predicament? I state it again, simply: the world without, the world within, and betwixt them the unbridgeable, the unleapable, chasm. And so I gave up. The great sin I am guilty of, the greatest, is despair.

Pain, the painster’s pain, plunges its blade into my barren heart.

Marcus beside me had fallen asleep. Dazed by alcohol and exhausted by his own misery he had let his head slump back on the sofa with his eyes closed, and now he was snoring softly, the empty brandy bottle lolling in his lap. I sat and thought. I like to think when I’m a little drunk. Though maybe thinking is not the word, maybe thinking is not quite what I do. The brandy seemed to have expanded my head to the size of a room, not this room but one of those vast reception halls that court painters used to be required to do in drypoint, rafters and leaded lights and groups of courtiers standing about, the gentlemen in thigh-high boots and fancy hats with feathers and the ladies flouncing in farthingales, and in the midst of them the Margrave, or the Elector Palatine, or perhaps even the Emperor himself, no larger or more strikingly attired than the rest and yet, thanks to the painter’s skill, the undoubted centre of all this grand, unheard talk, all this unmoving bustle.

How my mind wanders, trying to avoid itself, only to meet itself again, with a horrible start, coming round the other way. A closed circle — as if there were any other kind — that’s what I live in.

Marcus was bound to wake up sooner or later, and meanwhile I was again casting about desperately for something I might say to him, something neutral, plausible, calming. One has to say something, even if the something is nothing. To keep quiet would have been my best, my safest, recourse, but guilt has an irresistible urge to babble, especially in the early, hot stages. I knew the game was up. Polly, bless her honest heart, would not withhold for long the identity of her lover — she wouldn’t have the tenacity for it, would weaken in the end and blurt out my name. And what about me? I had been lying all my life, I swam in a sea of minor deceptions — thieving makes a man into a master dissembler — but could I trust myself now to keep my head above water, in these turbid and ever-deepening straits? If I flinched, if I made the merest flicker, I would give myself away on the spot. Marcus might be self-absorbed and generally unheeding, but jealousy when it really got its claws into him would give him a raptor’s unblinking, prismatic eye, and with it he would surely see what was, after all, plain to be seen.

I rose quietly, though not entirely steadily, and crossed to the window. There was a big, scouring wind blowing and by now it was a Poussin sky all over, blue as blue with majestic floatings of cloud, ice-white, bruise-grey, burnished copper. I would have done it with a thin cobalt wash and, for the clouds, big scumblings of zinc white — yes, my old standby! — dark ash and, for the glowing copper fringes, some yellow ochre toned up with, say, a dash of Indian red. One can always allow oneself a sky, even at one’s most determinedly inward. An airship was sailing past, at a considerable height, its battleship-blue flank catching the sun and the giant propeller at the rear a diaphanous silver blur. Would I include it in my sky, if I were painting it? Preposterous things, these dirigibles, they remind me of elephants, or rather the corpses of elephants, bloated with gas, yet there is something endearing about them too. Matisse put one of the now outmoded flying machines — how I miss them, so elegant, so swift, so thrillingly dangerous! — into a little oil study, Window Open to the Sea, that he did after he and his adored new wife, Olga, returned to France from London in 1919—see the facts I have at my fingertips?

Next thing I was rummaging among scores of old canvases stacked against the wall in a corner. I hadn’t looked at them in a long time — couldn’t bear to — and they were dusty and draped with cobwebs. I was after that still life I had been working on when I was overtaken by what I like to call my conceptual catastrophe — how much nakedness they cover, the big words — and my resolve failed me and I couldn’t go on painting, trying to paint. I must have done a dozen versions of it, each one poorer than its predecessor, to my increasingly despairing eye. But I could find only three, two of them merely exploratory studies, with more canvas showing than paint. The third one I pulled out and carried to the window, blowing at the dust on it as I went. It was a biggish rectangle, some four feet wide and three feet high. When I had set it down in the daylight and stood back, I realised it must have been the sight of the airship whirring past that had put me in mind of it. At the centre of the composition is a large, grey-blue kidney shape with a hole more or less in the middle and a sort of stump sticking out at the upper left side. When Polly saw the picture one day, before I had turned its face finally to the wall in disgust, she asked if the blue thing, as she called it, was meant to be a whale — she thought the hole might be an eye and the stump a finny tail — but then laughed at herself embarrassedly and said no, that when she looked more closely she could see that it was, of course, an airship. I wondered how she could imagine I would want to paint such a thing, but then thought, why not? When it comes to subjects, what’s the difference between a blimp and a guitar? Any old object serves, and the more amorphous its shape the more the imagination has to work with.

The imagination! Imagine you hear a hollow laugh.

Behind me Marcus stirred and muttered something, then sat up, coughing. The light from the window turned the lenses of his spectacles into opaque, watery discs. The brandy bottle tumbled to the floor and rolled in a half-circle, drunkenly. “Christ,” he said thickly, “did we finish it all?”

He seemed so helpless, so much at a loss, and I was moved, suddenly, and could almost have embraced him, as he sat there, drunk, desolated, heartbroken. After all, he was, or had been, my friend, whatever that might mean. But how would I dare offer him comfort? I felt as if I were standing outside a burning building, with the fierce heat of the flames on my face and the screams of the trapped coming out at every window, knowing it was my carelessly discarded match that had set the conflagration going.

I suggested we should go out and find something to eat, on the general principle, invented by me at just that moment, that grief always requires to be fed. He nodded, yawning.

As we were leaving, he paused by the scarred and stained oak table where I used to keep the tools of my trade — tubes of pigment, pots of upended brushes, so on. I still keep them there, along with general odds and ends, all in a jumble, but they’re no longer what they were. The energy has gone out of them, the potential. They’ve become over-heavy, almost monumental. In fact, they’ve come to seem like subjects for a still life, set out just so, waiting to be painted, in all their innocence and lack of workaday intent. Marcus, tarrying there, picked up something and looked at it closely. It was a glass mouse, life-sized, with sharp ears and tiny incised claws, a pretty thing, of no real value. “Funny,” he said, “we used to have one just like this — it even had the same bit missing from the tip of its tail.” I let my eyes go vague and said that was a coincidence. I had forgotten I had left it there. He nodded, frowning, still turning the thing in his fingers. He was welcome to have it, I said quickly and with much too much eagerness. Oh, but no, he replied, he wouldn’t dream of taking it, if it was mine. Then he put it back on the table and we went out.

If it was mine? If?

There is a particular shiver that travels down the spine at certain moments of peril and frightful possibility. I know it well.

—

Outside, wild gusts of wind swept through the streets, driving scuds of silvery rain before them, and enormous, claw-like sycamore leaves, fallen but still green, some of them, skittered along the pavements, making a scratching sound. Perversely, I felt invigorated and more light of heart than ever — I was turning into a hot-air balloon myself! — even though everything I held or should hold dear was threatened with dissolution. I’ve noticed it before, how in a state of deepest dread, and perhaps because of it — this is a thief talking, remember — I can be brightly alert to the most delicate nuances of weather and light. I love the autumn best, love to be about on blustery September days like this, with the wind pummelling the window-panes and great luminous boilings of cloud ascending a rinsed, immaculate sky. Talk about the world and its things! — no wonder I can’t paint. Poor Marcus shuffled along beside me with the gait of a weary old man. He was producing a different sound now, a faint, breathy, high-pitched whistling. It seemed the sound of his pain itself, the very note of it, issuing from him in these constricted, bagpipe puffs and skirls. And who, I asked myself, who was the secret cause of all that pain? Who indeed.

We went to the Fisher King, a run-down chop-house with metal tables and stainless-steel chairs and the day’s menu chalked up on a blackboard. When I was a boy it used to be Maggie Mallon’s fish shop. Maggie herself, the original fishwife, was for some long-forgotten reason an object of ridicule in the town. Small boys would chant a song in mockery of her—Maggie Mallon sells fish, three ha’pence a dish! — and throw stones through the open doorway at the customers inside. It’s not true what Gloria says, that I fled here out of fear of the world. The fact is, I’m not really here, or the here that I’m here in is not here, really. I might be a creature from one of that multitude of universes we are assured exists, all of them nested inside each other, like the skins of an infinitely vast onion, who by cosmic accident made a misstep and broke through to this world, where I was once and have become again what I am. Which is? A familiar alien, estranged and at the same time oddly content. I must have known my gift, as I’ll call it, was going to fail me. What creature is it that returns to die in the place where it was born? The elephant, again? Maybe so, I forget. I am undone, a sack of sorrow, regret and guilt. Yet oftentimes, too, I entertain the fancy that somewhere in that infinity of imbricated other creations there’s an entirely other me, a dashing fellow, insolent, devil-may-care and satanically handsome, whom all the men resent and all the women throw themselves at, who lives catch as catch can, getting by no one knows how, and who would scorn to fiddle with colouring-boxes and suchlike childish geegaws. Yes yes, I see him, that Other Oliver, a man of the deed, a kicker out of his way of milksops such as his distant doppelgänger, yours truly, yours churlishly, yours jealously; yours oh, oh, oh, so longingly. Yet would I leave again and try to be him, or something like him, elsewhere? No: this is a fit place to be a failure in.

Marcus was bent over his plate, working his way through a heaping of fried fish and mashed potato, pausing now and then to give his unstoppably runny nose a wipe with his knuckle. Heartache and distress didn’t seem to have dulled his appetite, I noticed. I watched him, engrossed in him, despite myself and the thunderous sensation of horror rumbling away inside me. I was like a child at a wake covertly studying the chief mourner, wondering how it must be to suffer so and yet still be prey to all the hungers, itches and annoyances of everyday. Then idly my gaze wandered, and I remarked to myself how smeared and scratched the tables were, how dented and stained the stainless-steel chairs, how scuffed the once-polished rubber floor-tiles. Everything is reverting to what it used to be, or so we are assured by the savants who know about these things. Retrograde progression, they call it — apparently something to do with those tempests on the surface of the sun. It won’t be long until again there’ll be wooden settles in here, and rushes on the floor and pelts on the walls, and half an ox roasting on a spit over a fire of faggots and dried cow dung. The future, in other words, will be the past, as time turns on its fulcrum into another cycle of eternal recurrence.

The past, the past. It was the past that brought me back here, for here, in this townlet of some ten thousand souls, a place that might have been dreamed up by the Brothers Grimm, here it is for ever the past; here I am stalled, stilled here, cocooned; I need never move again until the moment comes for the great and final shift. Yes, I shall stay here, a part of this little world, this little world a part of me. At times the obviousness of it all takes my breath away. The circumstances in which I find myself appal and please me in equal measure, these circumstances of my own devising. I call it life-in-death, and death-in-life. Did I say that?

Marcus had cleared his plate and now he pushed it aside and leaned forwards with his forearms on the table and his long thin fingers interfolded and, this time in a brusque, matter-of-fact tone that despite myself I found irritating — how dared I be irritated by a man I had so grievously betrayed? — demanded of me that I tell him what he should do about Polly and her faceless fancy-man. I lifted my eyebrows and blew out my cheeks to show him how daunted I was by his needy demands, and how little help there was that I could offer him. He gazed at me for a long moment, thoughtfully, it seemed, nibbling a speck of something hard between his front teeth. I felt like a statue in an earthquake, swaying on my plinth while the ground heaved and buckled. Surely the truth was going to dawn on him, surely he couldn’t keep on not seeing what he was staring in the face. Then he noticed I had hardly touched my food. I said I wasn’t hungry. He reached across and took a flake of mackerel from my plate and put it in his mouth. “Gone cold,” he said, wrinkling his nose and chewing. The act of eating is such a peculiar spectacle, I’m surprised it’s not permitted only in private, behind locked doors. We were both a little drunk still.

On holiday at Miss Vandeleur’s I was dawdling one day on the sandy golf course that stretched for a mile or two along the landward side of the dunes, and came upon a golf ball sitting pertly on the neatly barbered grass of the fairway, plain to see and seemingly unowned. I picked it up and put it in the back pocket of my shorts. As I was straightening up, two golfers appeared, emerging head-first from a dip in the fairway like a pair of mermen rising out of a rolling green sea. One of them, fair-haired and florid-faced, wearing yellow corduroy trousers and a sleeveless Fair Isle jumper — how can I remember him so clearly? — fixed on me an accusing eye and asked if I had seen his ball. I said no. It was plain he didn’t believe me. He said I must have seen it, that it had come this way, he had watched it until it went out of sight beyond the rim of the hollow from where he had hit it. I shook my head. His face grew more flushed. He stood and glared at me, hefting a wooden driver menacingly in a gloved right hand, and I gazed back at him, all bland-eyed innocence but shivering inwardly with alarm and guilty glee. His companion, growing impatient, urged him to give it up and come on, yet still he tarried, eyeing me fiercely, his jaw working. Since he wasn’t going to budge I had to. I moved away slowly, stepping slowly backwards so that he shouldn’t see the outline of the ball in my back pocket. I fully expected him to pounce on me and turn me upside down and shake me as a dog would shake a rat. Luckily just then the other one, who had been annoyedly hacking about in the long grass beside the fairway, called out in triumph — he had found someone else’s lost ball — and while my accuser went to look at it I seized the chance and turned on my heel and hared off for the sanctuary of Miss Vandeleur’s rackety villa. That’s how I was now with Marcus, just as I had been that day on the links, in a sweat of fear and shivery turmoil, sitting squarely in front of him, not daring to turn from him in case he should spot a telltale bulge and know at once that I was the one who had brazenly pocketed his goose-fleshed, pale and bouncy little wife.

By the way, I don’t count the taking of that golf ball as theft, properly speaking. When I saw the ball I assumed it had been forgotten and left there by mistake, and was therefore fair game for anyone who thought to pick it up. The fact that I didn’t give it back to its owner, when he materialised, was due more to accident than intention. I was afraid of him, with his red face and his ridiculous trousers, afraid that if I produced the ball he would accuse me of having stolen it deliberately and might, who knows, do violence to me, cuff me about the ears or hit me with his driver. True, it’s a fine distinction between seizing the opportunity to steal a thing and being led by circumstance to make off with it, but distinctions, fine or otherwise, are not to be gainsaid.

Now Marcus launched into a new round of reminiscences, in sorrowfully doting tones, turning aside to gaze out of the window. I cleared my throat and lowered my eyes and fingered the cutlery on the table, shuffling my feet and squirming, like a martyr made to sit on a stool of red-hot iron. He spoke of his earliest days with Polly, just after they were married. He used to love just to hang back and watch her, he said, when they were at home together, and she was doing the housework, cooking or cleaning or whatever. She had a way every so often of breaking into brief little runs, he said, little short aimless dashes or sprints here and there, fleet-footed, dancingly. As he was telling me this I pictured her in my mind, seeing her as one of those maidens of ancient Greece, in sandals and cinctured tunic, surging forwards in ecstatic welcome for the return of some warrior god or god-like warrior. I tried to think if I had ever seen her do as he described, tripping blithely about my studio, under that slanting, sky-filled window. No, never. With me she did not dance.

Outside in the day, a billow of ash-blue smoke swept down from a chimney high above and rolled along the street.

I looked about the chill and cheerless room. At a dozen tables vague, overcoated lunchers were bent heavily over their plates, resembling sacks of meal stacked more or less upright, in twos and threes. On a small triangular shelf high up in one corner there was a stuffed hawk under a bell-jar, I think it was a hawk, some kind of bird of prey, at any rate, its wings folded and haught head turned sharply to the side with beak downturned. Come, terrible bird, I silently prayed, come, cruel avenger, alight on me and gnaw my liver. And yet, I thought, and yet how fierce — how crested, plumed and fierce! — was the fire I stole.

I blinked, and gave a sort of shiver. I hadn’t noticed Marcus falling silent. He sat with his stricken gaze still turned to the window and the day’s bright tumult outside. I looked at our plates, haruspicating the leavings of our lunch. They did not bode well, as how should they? “I don’t know Polly, now,” Marcus said, with a sigh that was almost a sob. He fixed me with those poor pale eyes of his, weakened by years of minuscule work and bleared still from the brandy. “I don’t know who she is any more.”

Some sins, not perhaps the gravest in themselves, are compounded by circumstance. On the night she died, our daughter, Gloria’s and mine, I was in bed not with my wife but with another woman. I say woman although she was hardly more than a girl. Anneliese, her name, very nice, name and girl both. I met her — where? I can’t remember. Yes, I can, she was one of Buster Hogan’s bevy, I met her with him. How is it frauds like Hogan always get the girls? Assuredly he was every inch the artist, impossibly handsome, with those merrily cold blue eyes, the slender fingers always carefully paint-stained, the slight tremor of the hand, the satanically seductive smile. Anneliese only went to bed with me in the hope of making him jealous. What a hope. I may style myself a cad, but Hogan was, and no doubt still is, the nonpareil. That was in the Cedar Street days. Silly, irresponsible time, I look back on it now with a queasy shudder. No good telling myself I was young, that’s no excuse. I should have been devoting myself to work instead of mooning around after the likes of Buster Hogan’s girls. Il faut travailler, toujours travailler. I sometimes wonder if I lack a fundamental seriousness. Yet I did work, I did. Tremendous application, when the fever was on me. Learning my trade, honing my craft. But what happened to me, how did I lose myself? That’s not a question, not even a rhetorical one, only a part, a verse, a canticle, of the ongoing jeremiad. If I don’t lament for myself, who will?

Olivia, our daughter was called, after me, obviously. Ponderous name for a baby, but she would have grown into it, given time. It was a great shock when she arrived: I had wanted a boy, and hadn’t even considered the possibility of a girl. A hard birth it was, too — Gloria did well to survive it. The child didn’t, not really. She seemed healthy at first, then not. Game little thing, all the same. Lived three years, seven months, two weeks and four days, give or take. And that’s how it was: she was given and, shortly thereafter, taken.

I didn’t know she was dying. That’s to say, I knew she was going to die, but I didn’t know it would be that night. She went quickly, in the end, surprising us all, giving us all the slip. How did they find me? Through Buster, probably: it would have amused him to tell them where I was and what I was up to. It was the middle of the night, and I was asleep in Anneliese’s bed with one of Anneliese’s amazingly heavy legs, as heavy as a log, thrown across my lap. The telephone had to ring a dozen times before she woke up, groaning, and answered it. I can still see her, sitting on the side of the bed in the lamp-light with the receiver in her hand, pushing away a strand of hair that had caught in something sticky at the corner of her mouth. She was a thick-set girl, with a nice roll of puppy-fat around the waist. Her shoulders gleamed. Let me linger there in that last moment before the fall. I can count, if I wish, each delicate knob of leaning Anneliese’s spine, from top to bottom, one, and, two, and, three, and—

Every few yards along the seemingly endless corridors of the hospital there were nightlights set into the ceiling, and as I flitted from pool to pool of dim radiance I felt as if I were myself a faulty light-bulb, flickering and flickering and about to go out. The children’s wing was overcrowded — a measles epidemic was in full swing — and they had put our little girl in an adult ward, in an adult-sized bed, off in a corner. It was dim there, too, and as I hurried through the room I confusedly imagined that the patients reposing on either side of me were in fact corpses. A lamp had been rigged up where the child was, and Gloria and a person in a white coat were leaning over the bed, while other vague figures, nurses, I suppose, and more doctors, stood back in the shadows, so that the whole thing looked like nothing so much as a nativity scene, lacking only an ox and an ass. The child had died a minute or two before my arrival, had, as Gloria told me afterwards, just drifted away with a long, ragged sigh. Which meant, we both were determined to believe, that she had not suffered, at the end. I stumbled to my knees at the bedside — I wasn’t entirely sober, there’s that to confess to as well — and touched the moist brow, the slightly parted lips, the cheeks on which the bloom of death was already settling. Never knew flesh so composed and unresponsive, never before or since. Gloria stood beside me with her hand resting on the top of my head, as if she were conferring a blessing, though I suppose she was just holding me steady, for I’m sure I was listing badly. Neither of us wept, not then. Tears would have seemed, I don’t know, trivial, let’s say, or excessive, in bad taste, somehow. I felt so odd; it was like suddenly being an adolescent again, awkward and clumsy and cripplingly at a loss. I got to my feet and Gloria and I put our arms around each other, but it was no more than a perfunctory gesture, a grapple rather than an embrace, and brought us no comfort. I looked down at the child in that big bed; with only her head on show, she might have been a tiny perished traveller sunk to the neck in a snowdrift. From now on, all would be aftermath.

Gloria asked where I had been all night, not to accuse or complain, but absently, almost. I can’t remember what lie I told her. Maybe I told her the truth. It would hardly have mattered, if I had, and probably she wouldn’t have heard me, anyway.

What I want to know, and can’t know, is this: Was she aware that she was dying, our daughter? The question haunts me. I tell myself she couldn’t have known — surely at that age a child has no clear idea of what it is to die. Yet sometimes she had a look, distant, preoccupied, gently dismissive of all around her, the look that people have when they are about to set off on a long and arduous journey, their minds already off in that distant elsewhere. She had certain absences, too, certain intermittences, when she would become very still and seem to be trying to listen to something, to make out something immensely far-off and faint. When she was like that there was no talking to her: her face would go slack and vacant, or she would turn aside brusquely, impatient of us and our noisiness, our fake cheerfulness, our soft, useless hectoring. Am I making too much of all this? Am I giving it a spuriously portentous weight? I hope I am. I would wish she had gone blithely unaware into that darkness.

I could have told Marcus, there in the awful place that used to be Maggie Mallon’s, could have told him about the child, about the night she died. I could have told him about Anneliese, too. It would have been some sort of confession, and the idea of me in bed with a girl might have jogged him enough to make him see the immediate thing he wasn’t seeing, the real thing that I should have been confessing to. I would have been relieved, I think, had he guessed what I was keeping from him, though only in the sense of being relieved of an awkward and chafing burden — I mean, it wouldn’t have made me feel better, only less loaded down. I certainly wouldn’t have expected catharsis, much less exoneration. Catharsis, indeed. Anyway, I said nothing. When we left the Fisher King my unconsoled friend muttered a quick goodbye and walked off with his hands plunged in his pockets and his shoulders sloped, the very picture of dejection. I stood a minute and watched him go, then I too turned away. The weather had changed yet again, and the day was clear and sharp now with a quicksilver wind blowing. Season of fall, season of memory. I didn’t know where to go. Home was out of the question — how could I look Gloria in the eye, after all that had passed between Marcus and me? One of the things I’ve learned about illicit love is that it never feels so real, so serious and so gravely precious as at those moments of breathless peril when it seems about to be discovered. If Marcus were to tell Gloria what he had told me, and Gloria were to put two and two together — or one and one, more accurately — and come to a conclusion and confront me with it, I would break down on the spot and confess all. I could lie to Gloria only by omission.

There was something in my pocket, I took it out and looked at it. I had pinched a salt cellar from the restaurant table, without noticing. Without even noticing! That will show you the state I was in.

I set off for the studio, having nowhere else to go. The wind was shivering the puddles, turning them to discs of pitted steel.

Someone, Marcus had said, someone: so I was safe, so far, in my anonymity. I felt as if I had fallen under a train and by the simple expedient of lying motionless in the middle of the track had been able to get up, when the last carriage had hurtled past, and clamber back on to the platform with nothing more to show from the misadventure than a smudge on my forehead and a persistent ringing in my ears.

When I left the town for the first time all those years ago, to seek my fortune — picture me, the classic venturer, my worldly possessions over my shoulder in a handkerchief tied to a stick — I took certain choice things away with me, stored in my head, so that I might revisit them in after years on the wings of memory — the wings of imagination, more like — which I often did, especially when Gloria and I went to live in the far, bleached south, to keep myself from feeling homesick. One of those treasured items was a mental snapshot of a spot that had always been for me a totem, a talisman. It was nowhere remarkable, just a bend in a concrete road on the side of a hill leading up to a little square. It wasn’t what could be called a place, really, only a way between places. No one would have thought to pause there and admire the view, since there wasn’t one, unless you count a glimpse of the Ox River, more a trickle than a river, down at the foot of the hill, meandering along a railed-off culvert. There was a high stone wall, an old well, a leaning tree. The road widened as it rose, and had a tilt to it. In my recollection it’s always not quite twilight there, and a greyish luminance suffuses the air. In this picture I see no people, no moving figures, just the spot itself, silent, guarded, secretive. There is a sense of its being removed, somehow, of its being turned away, with its real aspect facing elsewhere, as if it were the back of a stage set. The water in the well plashes among mossed-over stones, and a bird hidden in the branches of the languishing tree essays a note or two and falls silent. A breeze rises, murmuring under its breath, vague and restless. Something seems about to happen, yet never does. You see? This is the stuff of memory, its very lining. Was that what I was looking for in Polly: the hill road, the well, the breeze, the bird’s faltering song? Can that be what it was all about? I’ll be damned. Polly as the handmaid of Mnemosyne — the notion never occurred to me, until now.

Let me try to tease this out.

Or no, please, no, let me not.

Anyway, it was to that spot I retreated after leaving Marcus, and tarried there a while, listening to the wind in the leaves and the well-water tinkling. I wished that some god would come and transform me into laurel, into liquid, into air itself. I was shaken; I was fearful. The end of my world was nigh.

I went to the studio, my last refuge indoors. Not much of a refuge, though, for I found Polly waiting for me at the top of the steep stairway. She had no key — prudently, I had not let her have one, despite her repeated hints and, as time went on, increasingly resentful demands — but the launderer’s wife had let her in downstairs. She was sitting sideways on the top step, leaning with her shoulder against the door and hugging her knees to her chest. When I had climbed the stairs — scaffold, I nearly wrote — she leaped up and embraced me. She is in general a warm-blooded girl but today she was fairly on fire, and trembling all over and gasping rather than breathing; it might have been a bolting colt that had flung itself into my arms. She had a hot smell, too, fleshy and humid, almost the same smell, it seemed, of teary distress, that I had caught from Marcus earlier. “Oh, Oliver,” she said in a muffled wail, her mouth squashed against the side of my neck, “where were you?” I told her, in an undertaker’s tolling tone, my guts clenching, that I had been to lunch with — wait for it — with Marcus! At once she reared back, holding me at arm’s length, and stared at me horror-struck. I noticed the mark over her cheekbone from Marcus’s wedding ring; it wasn’t much of a cut but the skin around it was livid. “He knows!” she cried. “He knows about us — did he tell you?”

I swerved my eyes away from hers and nodded. “He told me about you,” I said. “Me, he doesn’t seem to know about.” Ghastly though the moment was, I’m ashamed to say that I could feel a stirring in my blood — how coy we are — what with the sultry smell she was giving off and the pressure of her hips against mine. The first time I got a girl into my arms and rubbed myself against her — never mind who she was, let’s spare ourselves all that — what startled me and excited me deeply, however paradoxical it may sound, was the absence at the apex of her legs of anything except a more or less smooth, bony bump. I can’t think what I had expected to be there. I wasn’t that innocent, after all. Somehow, though, it was the very lack that seemed a promise of hitherto unimagined and delightful explorations, insubstantial transports. How fantastic they were, my dreams and desires. It’s bound to be the same for everyone. Or maybe it’s not. For all I know, the things that go on inside other people may bear no resemblance whatever to what goes on in me. That is a vertiginous prospect, and I perched up there all alone in front of it.

“Of course he doesn’t know it’s you!” Polly said. “Do you think I’d tell him?” She gave me an aggrieved sniffle, seeming to expect thanks. I said nothing, only got the key out of my pocket and reached around her and opened the door and stumped ahead of her into the room. I was like a man made of stone, or no, of chalk, stolid and stiff yet quick to crumble.

After the dimness of the stairs the studio blazed with a white, almost phosphorescent, radiance, and the window was so bright I could hardly look at it. There was still a faint whiff of brandy in the air, mingled with the ever-present soggy aroma of soap suds from downstairs. It was cold in the room — I had never figured out how to heat the place properly — and Polly stood with her shoulders indrawn and her arms tightly folded across her chest, hugging herself. She had no make-up on, not even lipstick, and her features seemed smeared, and almost anonymous. She was wearing a bran-coloured duffel-coat and those flat shoes, like dancing pumps, that I suspect she wears, or used to wear, in deference to my short stature — I say again, if I haven’t said it already, she really is unfailingly considerate and kind, and certainly didn’t deserve the grief and heartache that I caused her, that I’m causing her yet. I remarked on the shoes, saying she shouldn’t have come out so lightly shod on such a day. She gave me a blackly reproving frown, as if to ask how I could talk about such things as weather and footwear at a time like this. Quite right, of course: I’m never any good in moments of high drama, and become either tongue-tied or uncontrollably garrulous. It’s always difficult when a person one has known intimately takes a sudden step, up or down, on to a new and altogether different level. I hardly recognised my cherished and ever-lovable Polly in this whey-faced, distressed and anxious creature in her shapeless coat and pitiable shoes. Particularly unsettling was the look in her eyes, a mixture of fear and doubt and defiance, and utter, utter helplessness. Whyever did she let me wheedle my way into her heart? What opportunity for escape and fulfilment had seemed to open before her when I started verbally pawing her that long-ago night at the Clockers, the night that had led with oiled inevitability to this moment, with the two of us standing there in the chilly light of day, not knowing what to do, with ourselves or with each other?

It hadn’t been more than a couple of hours since I had been there with Marcus, my heart equally filled with foreboding, my mind equally at a loss. Next thing Gloria would come storming in and the grotesque bedroom farce would be complete.

All at once, for no reason I could or can think of, I found myself recalling the last visit my father paid to the print shop, when it was already sold but the launderer had not yet moved in. Why was I there that day? Dad was mortally ill, he would die a few weeks later, so I suppose he had to have someone to accompany him on his valedictory outing. But why me? I was the youngest of the family. Why didn’t one of my brothers or my sister go with him? I was fifteen, and in a rage. I was young and callous and death bored me — death as it is for others, that is, my own and the prospect of it being one of the most fascinating and feared topics for thought and speculation. I had already lost my mother and was indignant that I would so soon again have to accompany my father on the same final, dismal descent. There was a lot of stuff left in the shop. Dad had tried to get rid of it all, but by now the town knew he was dying, and was therefore infected with bad luck, and on the day of the Positively Final Monster Sale few customers turned out. Now, stooped and cadaverous, he sorted among boxes of prints, looking for who knows what, thumbed through dog-eared account books, peered into the empty cash register, vexedly sighing when he wasn’t coughing. It was a summer Saturday afternoon, and billows of gilded dust-motes undulated in the air, and there was a smell of dry rot and parched paper. I stood in the open doorway with my hands in my pockets, glowering out into the sunlit street. “What’s the matter with you?” my father called to me testily. “I’ll be finished here in a minute, then you can go.” I said nothing, and kept my back turned. People passing by put their heads down and would not look in. The thought occurred to me that in a way my father was dead already, and everyone, including myself, was impatient for him to realise it and take himself off, out of our troubled sight. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash behind me, so loud that I instinctively ducked. My father had pushed over a heavy wooden display stand, it lay now face down at his feet in a cloud of dust. The side of it had splintered, and I remember marvelling at the stark, shocking whiteness of the wound where the inner wood was nakedly on show. My father stood at a crouch, knees bent and elbows crooked, looking at what he had done and shaking all over, his face twisted and his side teeth bared in a furious snarl that made me wonder for a moment if he had gone completely and violently mad at last, cracking under the strain of facing the death awaiting him. I gaped at him, frightened, but fascinated, too. Awful, isn’t it, how the most appalling calamity will seem a welcome punctuation of life’s general tedium? Boredom, the fear of it, is the Devil’s subtlest and most piercing goad. After a moment my father went limp, as if all his bones had melted on the spot, and he closed his eyes and put a trembling hand to his forehead. “Sorry,” he muttered, “it fell. I must have bumped it.” We both knew this was a lie, and were embarrassed. He wore a white shirt and a dark tie, as he always did in the shop, a biscuit-coloured cardigan with those buttons made of braided leather, and the pair of cracked black shoes that were, when I found them under his bed the day after he died, the thing that at last pressed a secret lever and let me break down and weep, sitting on the floor, in the puddle of my grieving self, holding them, one in each hand, while big hot extravagant tears rolled down my cheeks and dropped ticklingly off the tip of my chin. Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong? I think of my father’s worn shoes, of that cardigan with the drooping pockets, of his stringy neck wobbling inside a shirt-collar that lately had become three or four sizes too big for him, and it is as if I had woken up to find that while asleep I had put to death some small, defenceless creature, the last one, the very last, of its marvellous species. No forgiveness? None. He would let me off, would Dad, if he were here, but he isn’t, and I’m not permitted to absolve myself. No crime, no charge, aye, and no acquittal, either.

I led Polly to the sofa, as so often before but with a very different intent this time, and we sat down side by side, like a pair of guilty miscreants settling themselves resignedly in the dock. She hadn’t taken off her coat, and this made her look more miserable still, all toggled up in bulky shapelessness. “What am I going to do?” she said, a faint, strangled cry. I told her that was what Marcus had asked me when he was here, and that I hadn’t known what to say to him, either. “He was here?” she said, staring at me. I told her about him coming up the stairs and bursting in and demanding drink; I told her about us emptying the brandy bottle. “I thought you were drunk, all right,” she said. After that she was silent for a while, thinking. Then she began to speak about her life with Marcus, just as Marcus, a while ago, had spoken of his life with her. Her account of it — their early days together, the baby, their happiness, all that — was strikingly similar to his. This irritated me. In fact, I was by now in a state of irritation generally. Life, which had seemed so various before, a sprawling pageant of adventure and incident, had all at once narrowed to a point, the nexus of this little trio: Polly, her husband, me. Glumly I foresaw the days and weeks to come, as gradually our drama unfurled itself in all its predictable awfulness. Polly would admit who her secret lover was, and Marcus would come and shout at me and threaten violence — perhaps more than threaten — then Gloria would find out and I’d have her to deal with, too. I felt beaten down just by the thought of it. Polly was still telling her story, more to herself it seemed than to me, in a dreamy, singsong voice. I kept being distracted by the window and the washed-blue sky outside, with its sedately sailing pearl-and-copper clouds. Clouds, clouds, I never get used to them. Why do they have to be so baroque, so gaudily and artlessly lovely? “We used to take baths together,” Polly said. That got my attention. At once I had a searingly vivid image of them, sitting at either end of the tub, their soapy legs entwined, splashing each other, Marcus chuckling and Polly hilariously squealing. It was strange, but I had never, before today, thought of them in the intimacy of their lives together. Marvellous how the mind can keep things tightly sealed away in so many separate compartments. I knew, of course, that they shared a bed — there was only one bed in their house, a double, Polly had told me so herself — but I had declined to picture the ramifications of this simple though striking fact. I could no more have imagined them making love than I could have pictured my parents, when they were alive, clasped to each other in the throes of passion. All that was changed, now. I could feel my shoulder-blades begin to sweat. Is there anything more overwhelming than the sudden onset of jealousy? It rolls over one inexorably, like lava, boiling and smoking.

“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.