she thought with pain, he doesn’t set out to hurt. He only needs someone to encourage him. To straighten his hair and spruce him up a little. Then he could shine. It occurred to her that, until tonight, she herself had been able to bring out what was generous and alive in Roland because she wasn’t a chance for love. She was already taken; with her, he was safe from failure, and so with her, he succeeded.
As she thought of this, she looked up at Roland with such warmth, such forgiveness, that he blushed brick red, almost purple, like a bruise, and the blush made a bond between them, a certain understanding. She could easily be the one if she cared to; he’d admitted it. It made the insides of her nostrils burn with surprise; she felt a flush of energy in her chest. She looked over at Hilary again, thinking, this should be you, Hil. And yet she felt a furtive pleasure that Hilary was still deep in conversation with Lawrence.
Gwen smiled a long easy smile at Roland. She felt gratified. She liked knowing she could be the one with him. She liked considering him as if she were single like Hilary. It was a long time since she had looked at a man with unmarried eyes.
When they talked about it, getting up the next morning, Gwen thought the party had been something of a success.
‘Of course it was,’ Lawrence announced. ‘Everyone there was completely remarkable. What a privilege to be in the room with such people. And oh, the pudding!’ He kissed his fingertips and tossed them in the air, then went back to scouring his teeth, toothpaste foaming from his jaws.
Gwen laughed, squeezing in at the sink. He had devoted himself to the store-bought chocolate cake.
Hyperbole often characterised Lawrence’s most serious statements. It was like a superstition with him, making fun. He feared to value anything too much in case he lost it.
‘But what do you mean by success? You want Roland to ask her out by himself?’ He shook his head.
‘You don’t think he will?’ Gwen whined a little, feeling mocked.
‘With the wound of Paul that he and I inflicted on her? It’s too much to expect him to make that up to her. Anyway, darling, you’re the one he wants. He doesn’t want her!’
She made an astonished face. ‘Come off it, Lawrence. He wants a woman who will make sacrifices for him. You remember he told us that once? I don’t make sacrifices for anyone!’
‘You make sacrifices for Will every thirty seconds.’ His voice trailed away as he went through the hall into the bedroom.
She scoffed at the mirror, spat into the sink. ‘Not the same thing at all.’
Lawrence reappeared, buttoning his shirt, grinning devilishly. He watched her reflection over her shoulder and she watched, too – watched him, watched herself. Then she blushed, more from shyness than anxiety. They both knew he had a point, but it did them no harm at all, this tiny gratification she had enjoyed, Roland’s attention. They laughed a little. It wasn’t serious. It was like being caught eating ice cream straight out of the carton with the freezer door open; she felt slightly embarrassed. Why not sit down, have a bowlful? But a chair and a bowl would formally acknowledge the appetite; a chair and a bowl would make it impossible to pretend that the ice cream wasn’t wanted, wasn’t even really being eaten. As good as being caught; so who was kidding who? It was a delicate torture, to remind them both how intimately Lawrence knew her appetites and her sensibility.
As for Roland’s admiration, Lawrence found it appropriate. It was further celebration of Gwen. Roland wasn’t anything Gwen really wanted; Lawrence was sure of that. It enchanted Lawrence to surprise his wife as she tasted something she didn’t really want; he loved the pathos of her inability to resist, and he felt a surge of strength in knowing she was his. ‘Poor Roland’ was what Lawrence really thought, but he didn’t say it aloud.
He leaned down and around to Gwen’s cheek, kissed her fondly. ‘I’m not suggesting that you should sacrifice anything for Roland.’
‘Hilary would make sacrifices, though,’ Gwen burbled. ‘That’s what she’s good at.’
But then she wondered uncomfortably, What kind of sacrifices? What kind of pleasure would Hilary have to forgo? Some deeply personal and necessary joy? Gwen remembered the sting Roland had administered with his comments about her private religion. What about mankind? she wondered. How could anybody drag her mind back from where it preferred to go? From its habitual satisfactions? In order to consider mankind? She felt angry at Roland, and she pushed the thought away.
‘Maybe Roland thinks he wants a woman who would make sacrifices. But frankly, my dear, that’s so last century.’ Lawrence paused to savour the absurd trendiness of his witticism. Then he affected a more earnest voice, ‘Don’t you think he’d lose interest in someone like that? Walk all over her, use her up, throw her out? He ought to have a wife who could challenge him, amaze him. Do we know anyone that good? That tough?’
Gwen squirmed a little, knowing whom Lawrence had in mind. He reached for her chin, tugging at it in his cupped fingers, pulling her into his control. It was possessive, somehow tender, as if he wanted only to remind her of something.
‘So, OK,’ she conceded. ‘Matchmaking’s at least as hard as painting. For me, maybe harder, since I don’t know yet how to do it.’
‘I should think,’ Lawrence agreed. He nodded, brooding, then added, ‘It’s a case of getting it exactly right once and once only. With painting, the more ways you can find, the more interest. And anyway, the paint lets you do it. But the people?’
Gwen’s studio was at the top of the house near the light. Already the autumn days seemed remorselessly short. Even if she didn’t stop for lunch at all, the light didn’t last as long as her appetite for work. She had ways of addressing this. She had systems, artifices, and she was always devising new ones.
Lately, she had one big, square canvas set on an easel directly underneath the vast skylight in the middle of the room, and another two wide, rectangular canvases facing the long window running across the back. Around the middle of the day, she usually worked on the square canvas underneath the skylight. Since it was October, the sun’s zenith barely achieved the top of sky, and, even at noon, the light slanted in at an angle. But for a little over an hour, the quality of the light remained almost steady, so that the colours, as she worked them, held their value, ever so briefly, ever so precariously, and allowed her to see what she was making: a vista of dropping emerald meadow at midsummer in broad day.
Of course the light from her city skylight was nothing like the gradual passage of limpid sun at the cottage in June. But it didn’t need to be. The meadow was a memory, a vision lodged in her mind long since. Gwen worked from what was in her mind. Catching what she could excited her for the hour or so that she tried. And she relished the time pressure because it reminded her of the transience of the scene at the moment that she had beheld it, of the urgency then of seeing it.
It wasn’t a picture of a summer day anyway. It was an experience of moisture – clumps of grass that harassed her ankles or were dazzled by the wind as separated blades, trees caressed by mild English clouds along a tamed horizon, a festival of birdsong. In full summer, the English countryside always looked to Gwen pleasant, accommodating, long in use. Like a well-pillowed drawing room in nature, it was inviting, cultivated, but without any roof. She meant the picture to convey this, and yet while she painted, her mind dipped from
