Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [103]
It was charming, no doubt, but there was something unseemly in it to Erasmus’s view. It might be permissible in an unmarried girl, and one who had been much indulged – too much, he sometimes thought these days; but it would not do for a wife, who after all is guardian of her husband’s dignity. He would have liked to speak to her immediately about it but hesitated to do so, being afraid that she would misunderstand his motives. She was wilful and did not take kindly to correction. But he was resolved to make his views plain to her when they were married. Small resolves of this sort were mixed inextricably with his larger ambitions for the future.
Finding himself unable to control the present, as he could the future, by excluding anything unpalatable, he tried to do it by grasping for the essence of Sarah’s life before he had appeared in it. He would question her in a painstaking fashion, but his questions always failed to elicit what he sought; and any information she herself volunteered was somehow unmanageable. Her catechism dress, a pet pug, visits to Chester with her mother – his mind could not work on these things, he could not take them over. Trying to imagine a past for her, a separate existence, a time when he was not present, this was as painful and difficult as trying to be Ferdinand to her Miranda, and in fact not much dissimilar.
What came more easily to him was a sort of appropriation; he was happiest when he could take her experience and reinterpret it for her. One morning in early August when they had arranged to go riding together, as he was waiting for her in a small room adjacent to the salon, his eye fell on a painting hanging there, set in an elaborate, scroll-gilt frame. It was a picture of a landscape with lords and ladies in fashionable dress of some former period. The men were handsome and proud, the ladies slender and exquisite. Accompanied by servants and long-legged, elegant hounds they strolled through orchards, where fruit glowed among dark leaves and the turf beneath their feet was spangled with white flowers. Erasmus gazed for some time at the painting, struck by the sense of serene enjoyment contained in it. It was obviously old; the pigments had thickened and darkened, and the glaze showed through here and there. But there was a brightness still about the faces of these fashionable strollers; they had a charmed, invulnerable air, as if blessings were raining invisibly down through the strangely rounded, clump-shaped trees.
When Sarah came in, dressed for riding in a dark green habit, he asked her where the painting had come from.
‘It belonged to my mother’s family, I believe – so I have heard tell.’
‘You are not sure?’ He smiled, thinking it odd that she should be vague about such a thing; he knew the exact provenance of every article in his own house.
‘It has been here for as long as I remember,’ she said, with something defensive now in her tone. ‘Always in this same place.’
‘Do you not know who painted it?’
‘I have no idea. Is that so strange?’
‘When it is known who painted a picture, the value of it may thereby increase.’ Erasmus said this rather loudly and sententiously, secure in his greater knowledge of affairs.
‘Value?’ Sarah arched her brows at him as if in some surprise. She paused a moment, then said, ‘If I ever knew the name of the painter, I have forgot it. It will be some foreign man who lived long ago. I do not know how it is titled, either. I mean what he called it. But I do know what it is about.’
Erasmus recognized the distinctness