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?