I knew I’d get on to stealing, the subject is never far from my thoughts.
But whoa, you’ll cry, dismount for a minute from that fancy hobby-horse of yours and tell us this: How was it that Polly Pettit née Plomer, whom you pinched from her husband and sought to set among the stars, how was it that she so suddenly lost her goddess’s glow? For that’s what you were out to do, we all know that, to make her divine and nothing less. All right, I admit it, I did attempt the task usually allotted to Eros — yes, Eros — the task of conferring divine light upon the commonplace. But no, no, it was more than that I was about: it was nothing less than total transformation, the clay made spirit. Pleasure, delight, the raptures of the flesh, such things mean nothing, next to nothing, to a man like me. Trans-this and trans-that, all the transes, that’s what I was after, the making over of things, of everything, by the force of concentration, which is, and don’t mistake it, the force of forces. The world would be so thoroughly the object of my passionate regard that it would break out and blush madly in a blaze of self-awareness. There were times, I remember, when Polly would shy away from me, covering herself with her hands, like Venus on her half-shell. “Don’t look at me like that!” she would say, smiling but frowning too, nervous of me and my devouring eye. And she was right to be nervous, for I was out to consume her entirely. And what was this urge’s secret spring? Love’s limitless mad demands, the lover’s furious hunger? Surely not, I say, surely not! It was aesthetics: it was all, always, an aesthetic endeavour. That’s right, Olly, go ahead, hold up your hands and pretend you are misunderstood. You don’t like it, do you, when the knife gets near the bone? Poor Polly, was it not the worst thing of all you could have done to her, to try to have her be something she was not, even if only in your eyes? And look at you now, in flight from her yet again, in some sort of queer cahoots with the Prince of the Snowy Shoulders. What a sham, what a self-deluding, shameless sham you are.
Ah, yes, nothing like the silken whip of self-reproach to soothe a smarting conscience.
Where was I, where were we? Rolling along, yes, Freddie and I, through the darkling eve. We got to the town as the shops were shutting. Always a saddish time of day, in autumn especially. Freddie asked where he might set me down. I didn’t know what to say, and said the railway station, which was the first place that came into my head. He looked surprised, and asked if I were going on a journey, if I were going away. I said yes. I don’t know why I lied. Maybe I did mean to go, to be gone, thus removing the fly, the buzzing bluebottle, from everyone’s ointment. He eyed my oilskins and my blackthorn stick, but made no comment. I could see him thinking, though, and even seemed to detect a stir of unwonted animation in his manner. What could it be that was exciting him?
The station when we pulled up at it was in darkness, and I clambered down from the cab and he drove away, the exhaust pipe at the back of that absurd machine puttering out gasps of night-blue smoke.
Now what should I do? I walked along the quayside, holding on to my trawler-man’s hat. It was a raw and gusty night, and the heaving sea off to my left was as black and shiny as patent leather, with now and then a white bird swooping in ghostly silence through the darkness. My brain was barely functioning — perhaps this is what walks are for, to dull the mind and still its restless speculations? — and my feet, seemingly of their own will, turned me away from the harbour, and presently, to my mild surprise, I found myself standing in the street in front of the laundry and the door to the steep stairway that led up to the studio. It occurred to me that I could stay there for the night, sleeping on the sofa, old faithful itself. I was searching my pockets for the key when a figure slipped out of the darkness of the laundry doorway. I started back in fright, then saw that it was Polly. She was wearing a beret and a great black overcoat that was too big to have been her father’s and must have been left behind by some mighty yeoman ancestor. I was confused by her appearing so suddenly like that. I asked her how she had got there, noting the high-pitched, panicky warble in my voice. She ignored my question, however, and demanded that I open the door at once, for she was, she said, perishing with the cold. We trudged up the stairs in silence; I thought, as so often, of the gallows.
In the studio the big window in the ceiling was throwing a complicated cage of starlight across the floor. I switched on a lamp. It seemed colder in here than it had been outside, though my feet, in those borrowed boots, were unpleasantly and damply hot. I looked about at familiar things, that slanting window, the table with its pots and brushes, the canvases stacked with their faces to the wall. I felt more estranged than ever from the place, and curiously ill at ease, too, as if I had burst in crassly on someone else’s private doings. Polly in her giant’s coat stood with her eyes on the floor, clasping herself in her arms. She had taken off her beret and now she threw it on the table. I looked at her hair, and remembered how in the old days I would wind a thick swatch of it around my hand and pull her head far back and sink my vampire’s teeth into her pale, soft, excitingly vulnerable throat. I asked if she would take some brandy, to warm her up, but then I remembered that Marcus and I had finished the bottle. I enquired again, carefully, diffidently, how she had got here. “I drove, of course,” she said, in a tone of haughty contempt. “You didn’t see the car in the street? But of course you didn’t. You never notice anything that’s not yourself.”
I often think, in puzzlement and vague dismay, of my pictures, the ones that are in galleries, mostly minor ones, all over the world, from Reykjavik to the Republic of New South Wales, from Novy Bug to the Portlands, those sadly separated twins of coastal Oregon and Maine. The pictures have, in my mind, a hovering, liminal existence. They are like things glimpsed in a dream, vivid yet without substance. I know they are connected to me, I know that I produced them, yet I don’t feel for them in any existential way — I don’t register their distant presence. It was the same, now, with Polly. Somehow she had lost something essential, to my outward eye but more so to the inward one. Which was the greater mystery: that she had been for me what she had been once, or that she had ceased to be it now? Yet here she was before me, unavoidably herself. And of course that was it, that she was herself at last, and not what I had made of her. How dull and dulling they can be, these sudden insights. Better not to have them, perhaps, and cleave to a primordial bumpkinhood.
I started to apologise for having run off yet again, but I had hardly got going before she turned on me in a fury.
“How could you?” she said, with her chin tucked in and her wounded, furious eyes blazing at me accusingly. “How could you insult us like that?”