Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [105]
This was, he felt, an important question, and one she should have tried to answer. However, she said nothing. She kept her face still turned from him. The ride together did not promise well and they might have decided against it, had not Miss Purdy, dressed and ready, now put in an appearance. If she saw anything amiss between them, she did not remark on it; the morning was fine and she was looking forward to her ride.
It was a day of pale sunshine and light cloud. They rode together in silence, through meadows thick with vetch and buttercups and clover, Sarah in front, then Erasmus, prey to conflict still, dignity preventing him from riding alongside, love from falling too far behind. Miss Purdy kept further back on her stout, short-legged mare.
Unhappiness in Erasmus was compounded with resentment. She had been perverse and unjust, he felt. Was he not allowed an opinion? To be misappreciated is never one’s own fault; it must therefore be Sarah’s if he had failed to demonstrate his true worth. He wanted her to see that it had been a disinterested quest for truth that had led him to discuss the painting with her. She expected still the indulgence accorded to children. He had shown her the respect of treating her as an adult – that was all his offence.
He marshalled this in his mind as he rode along. He knew it to be true by the infallible sign that the alternative to thinking so involved self-reproach. He had never been much given to introspection. He knew what he wanted, and that was motive and reason enough. He knew he wanted to marry Sarah Wolpert. He knew he wanted to be rich. Some deep unease, something akin to fear, would come to him at any attempt, whether made by himself or others, to root about below the level of his conscious will. Virtue lay in achievement. It was this that since early childhood had led him to sanctify his desires by taking them to the high altar of his room and giving them the form of solemn promises.
Their way wound upwards, at first through stands of mixed woodland, then out into more open country. After some half hour, as they were approaching a point where the bridle-path curved round a low spur, Sarah turned in her saddle to glance briefly over her shoulder at Erasmus, then urged her mount into a trot. He followed suit, as it was clear he was intended to, and found her reining in broadside across the track at the far side of the spur. She looked at him with the expression of conspiratorial glee he had come to recognize and rejoice in – they had achieved by this stratagem a minute or two out of sight of Miss Purdy.
He had the grace at once to realize that with generosity greater than his own she had contrived this occasion for them both. He saw too, almost as quickly, that though an exchange of smiles might have been enough for reconciliation, a kiss would be considerably better. He urged his mount forward. The two horses drew close, rubbed hot flanks together; and their riders leaned forward in the saddle and kissed with a warmth the more eager for the fact that they could touch nowhere but at the lips.
Other kisses there had been between them during the foregoing weeks; but in the isolation of this moment, the overwhelming sense of love restored and faults forgiven, Erasmus seemed for some moments to achieve the dream of containment he was always pursuing; sky and land formed a bubble of thin crystal shot through with light and he and Sarah were caught and held in it beyond the touch of change. It came with a shock almost, as he drew away from her and the walls of their bright capsule dissolved, to find himself exposed again to the touch of air, the world of colours, the attention, possibly reproachful, of the approaching chaperone. ‘I am sorry I hurt your feelings,’ Sarah said in low quick tones. ‘I did not mean to.’
Love does not stand still, as everyone knows; it is always adding to its own shape whether by advance or retreat. Wounds can be absorbed, but only like elements embodied in a story; they are always there, part of the meaning. Sarah