Excerpt from The Blue Guitar by John Banville, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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.

Excerpted from The Blue Guitar by John Banville. Copyright © 2015 by John Banville. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.