Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [104]
For a short while Erasmus considered her gravely. Then he looked back at the painting, but with a sharper and more deliberate attentiveness now. ‘Paradise?’ he said after some moments of scrutiny. ‘Who has servants in paradise? Those are servants, aren’t they?’
‘No, no,’ she said quickly and somehow urgently, as if a word in time now could prevent serious misunderstanding. ‘No, people would see it in the light of their own lives. If you have servants while you are alive, you would naturally think of having them in paradise too. I have known this picture all my life. It used to fascinate me when I was a little girl, the expression on their faces. They are in paradise. You see how blessed they are. Nothing can touch them, they command everything.’ She had spoken volubly and with the same note of urgency, a tone almost of pleading, childish and insistent.
Erasmus looked at her with the same deliberateness with which he had regarded the painting. His face wore an expression she had never seen on it before, patronizing and almost contemptuous. ‘And dogs?’ he said. ‘And fine clothes? Those are hunting dogs, you know. Do folk go hunting in paradise?’
In her expression now as she looked at him there was a kind of bewilderment. ‘But I have explained that to you,’ she said. ‘People have to see things in their own way. If it is happiness on earth to wear beautiful clothes and be at leisure, then they think it must be the same in heaven too.’
‘Explained it to me?’ Erasmus was smiling still but his eyes had narrowed. He said, ‘I believe you see yourself as one of those fashionable ladies, Sarah, don’t you? That must be why you like the picture so much. You think paradise is a place to dress up and act a part in. It is like being on a stage, isn’t it, like The Enchanted Isle?’
‘That is not how I feel at all, it is just the contrary,’ she said, regarding him more narrowly. ‘I always felt that they were in another world from mine, that is why –’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That is what you may think you felt but it is not the truth of the matter. Children make up stories. You must always have known it was really just a picture of people walking about in a garden, but you made up a story about them. I tell you, Sarah, I know you better than you know yourself.’
The shaft of perception had restored his good humour. He gestured towards the painting. ‘These are just people walking about in a garden,’ he said. ‘If you will only look properly at the picture, you will see that I am right.’
Turning back towards her, he was surprised to encounter a face set against him, blue eyes that looked antagonism. ‘Well, well, what a long time I have been mistaken!’ she said, in the tone of angry sarcasm with which she nearly always began quarrels. ‘And just imagine, I might have continued in error if one fine morning Erasmus Kemp hadn’t condescended to take a look and tell me what opinion I ought to have, which of course turns out to be just exactly the same as his. In fact it seems I have always been of his opinion really, but without knowing it.’ She had begun steadily enough, but her voice quivered now. ‘You don’t know me at all,’ she said. ‘You don’t see me as I am. When you say what I am like, I don’t recognize myself. You don’t want me to have anything of my own. You don’t want me to have anything to give you. You are not in the least bit interested in the painting.’
‘Not interested?’ Erasmus repeated slowly. He could not understand what she meant. He was hurt and astonished at this resistance to his knowledge of her – it was like a rejection of his love. ‘Sarah, consider a moment,’ he said. ‘Reflect on what you say. Can people not discuss an old painting together?’ He drew himself up and looked at her with a sort of gloomy remonstrance. ‘If we are to fall out over small things, how