Damn it, here’s another digression: there must surely be something or somewhere I don’t want to get to, hence all these seemingly innocent meanderings down dusty by-roads. One summer when I was a boy and we were staying at Miss Vandeleur’s, a circus came to town. At least, it called itself a circus, although it was more a sort of fit-up travelling theatre. Performances took place in a rectangular tent where the wind made the canvas walls flap and boom like mainmasts. The audience sat on backless wooden benches facing a makeshift stage, under multi-coloured light-bulbs strung on tent-poles that swayed and lunged, creating a lurid and excitingly inebriated effect. There were no more than half a dozen players, including a hot-eyed girl contortionist, who at the intervals sat on a chair in front of the stage and sang sentimental ditties, accompanying herself on a piano-accordion, the pearly lustre of which illumined for me many a nocturnal fantasy. The circus stayed for a week and I went to all seven nightly shows and the Saturday matinée as well, entranced by the gaud and glitter of it all, though it was the same experience every night, since the acts never varied, except for the odd fluffed line or an acrobat’s unintended tumble. Then, on the morning after the final performance, I made the mistake of hanging about to watch the magic being dismantled. The tent came down with a huge, crumpling sigh, the benches were heaved like carcasses on to the back of a lorry, and the girl contortionist, who had exchanged her sequins for a high-necked jumper and rolled-up jeans, stood in the doorway of one of the caravans with a vacant stare, smoking a cigarette and scratching her belly. Well, that’s just how it was in the south, at the end. The iridescent glow went dull, and eventually it was as if everything had been folded up and shunted away. And yes, that’s me all over, for ever the disappointed, disenchanted child.
My chronology is getting shaky again. Let’s see. We stayed down there for, what, three years, four? There was the first visit, when we sneaked off for a holiday together and I proposed and Gloria accepted, after which we returned home and lodged in Cedar Street. It was to Cedar Street that Ulick Palmer, my louche father-in-law, would come knocking at dead of night, drunk and tearful, to beg for a bed, and Gloria, against my hissed protests, would bring him in and put him to sleep on the sofa in the living room, where he would pollute the air with an awful stench of stale whiskey and sulphurous farts, and puke on the carpet too, as often as not. Ma Palmer also was a frequent visitor, alighting unheralded, in her crow-black coat and her hat with a veil, to sit for hours on the same living-room sofa, her back ramrod-straight, her nostrils dilating and seeming always about to shoot out dragon-jets of smoke and flame. Then the child came, unexpectedly, and as unexpectedly went. After that there was nothing for it but to abandon everything and flee south in desperation to the one place where we had been unequivocally, if briefly, happy. Foolishness, you’ll say, pathetic self-delusion, and you’ll be right. But desperation is desperation, and calls for desperate measures. We thought our pain would be in some way assuaged down there; surely, we thought, even grief couldn’t hold out against all that Provençal mirth and loveliness. We were wrong. Nothing more cruel than sunshine and soft air, when you’re suffering.
As a matter of fact, I think that sojourn in the south was one of the things that set me on the road to painterly ruin. The light, the colours, drove me to distraction. Those throbbing blues and golds, those aching greens, they had no rightful place on my palette. I’m a son of the north: my hues are the hammered gold of autumn, the silver-grey of the undersides of leaves in rainy springtime, the khaki shine of chilly summer beaches and the winter sea’s rough purples, its acid virescence. Yet when we abandoned the salt flats and the strident song of the cicada and came back home — we still called it home — and settled here at Fairmount, on Cromwell’s hill, the bacillus of all the sun-soaked beauty we had left behind was still lodged in my blood and I couldn’t rid myself of the fever. Is this so, or am I scrambling again after explanations, excuses, exonerations, all the exes you can think of? But take that last thing I was working on, the unfinished piece that finished me for good: look at the blimp-coloured guitar and the table with the checked cloth that it rests on; look at the louvred window opening on to the terrace and the flat blue beyond; look at that gay sailboat. This was not the world I knew; these were not my true subject.
But, then, what is my true subject? Are we talking of authenticity here? My only aim always, from the very start, was to get down in form that formless tension floating in the darkness inside my skull, like the unfading after-image of a lightning flash. What did it matter which fragments of the general wreckage I settled on for a subject? Guitar and terrace and azure sea with sail, or Maggie Mallon’s fish shop — what did it matter? But, somehow, it did; somehow, there was always the old dilemma, that is, the tyranny of things, of the unavoidable actual. But what, after all, did I know of actual things, wherever they rose up to confront me? It was precisely actuality I took no interest in. So I ask again if that’s what really stymied me: that the world I chose to paint was not my own. It’s a simple question, and the answer seems obvious. But there’s a flaw. To say the south wasn’t mine is to suggest that somewhere else was, and tell me, where might that rare place be found, pale Ramon?
—
It wasn’t Gloria’s car I heard stopping outside the gate-lodge that day — no more than half a week after my storm-tossed flight to freedom — when I was finally run to ground and led out of my lair by the ear. My wife wasn’t the only one who had guessed where I was in hiding. I must admit I felt put out to have been recaptured so easily. I would have thought everyone would assume I had made off to somewhere distant and exotic, the kind of place favoured by legendary artistes maudits, Harar in darkest Ethiopia, say, or a South Sea island with flat-faced, big-breasted brown women, and not that I had scurried back to that most banal of refuges, the house where I was born. My first instinct, when I heard the car turning in at the gate and drawing to a crunching stop outside, was to dart to the front door and shoot the bolt home and dive under a table and hide. But I didn’t. The truth is, I was relieved. I hadn’t really wanted to disappear, and my going had been less flight than frolic, however desperate to escape I had thought I was. I had gloried in being out on the roads that night of tempest and black rain, when the stubbled old farmer picked me up in his lorry and told me about the lovelorn lover found drowned under the bridge. It had seemed I was running not away from but towards something, the wildness of the weather matching the storm raging in my breast. But what had seemed bravado was, in truth, pure funk. I had been happy to carry on with Polly in secret, but when the secret was discovered I swept my coat-tails around me and ran, but even then I didn’t have the courage of my actions, and all along had waited in secret anticipation of being caught up with and — what? Reclaimed, or rescued? Yes: rescued from myself.
Gloria’s arrival on the doorstep, then, was what I had been half expecting and more than half hoping for all along, but anyone else, Marcus, say, or Gloria’s winged and scaly, fire-breathing mother, even an officer of the law, brandishing a warrant for my arrest on a charge of gross moral turpitude, would not have been more of a surprise than what I did find confronting me when I cautiously drew open the front door. For there she was, Polly herself, my dearest, darling Polly — how my blood sang at the sight of her! — with the child in her arms. My jaw dropped — really, jaws do drop, as I’ve had reason to discover, on more occasions than I care to recall — and my heart along with it, my poor old yo-yo of a heart that was so knocked about and bruised already.