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 time to time into something wilder and more crude that she half remembered from the brilliance and unbearable energies of her childhood in America. And when her mind dipped, deep, backwards, she would think, England is not like that, England is like this, making an implicit comparison; it was as if the scene she was painting held down some other scene and covered it.
On the pair of canvases by the back window, Gwen was doing something else, equally temperate, more mysterious: a pond in the woods, cloaked in mist, at dawn. And beside it, the same pond later in the day as the mist burned off so that the pond shone among the close-growing trees like phosphorescence. She liked to work on the first of these canvases very early in the morning, when the light from the window still reached long and low into its dank grey-green washes.
She would fetch the big wooden palette which she left tilted against the wall overnight to keep dust from clinging to the wet paint, and she would prod the little turds of colour with a small brush, with a knife, and with another, bigger, once white-haired brush, feeling how the colours had ever so slightly begun to seal themselves over in their sleep, like chrysalises around caterpillars. They would spread their wings, flatten out on to the palette as she waked them. She would snatch a brush into her mouth, clamp it there with wiry lips, tasting the white spirits she had cleaned it with, select another brush and another, until several bristled from her left fist as she narrowed her eyes again at where she had left off. She had hundreds of brushes in the studio, almost as many knives, stuffed upright into jars, flowerpots, pitchers, tin cans, all sizes, all shapes, each brush looking bleached and waterlogged as if it had rolled around the bottom of the sea, been abraded by sand, by surf, drifted ashore in harsh sun.
The sable hairs of her smallest brush would nip and sway at the soft mounds of Davy’s grey, Payne’s grey, burnt umber, terre verte, cadmium green, indigo, yellow ochre, probing the caches of colour. She would poke at the palette as if at a baby’s meal, mix and blend the tiny portions in dabs, deliver them with the delicate fingertips and the anxious poise of a mother’s hand towards an upturned mouth, then wait to see the effect before she offered more. On a clear