She didn’t find it necessary, later, to tell the whole story to Robert, but when it was time to go to bed Rebecca said that she absolutely had to finish reading something for work and asked him to go to sleep, she would stay out there—she wouldn’t be long.
“If Emma wakes up?” he asked.
“As usual. Suffocate her with a pillow.”
“Okay.”
He was a sweet-natured man.
Lying on the sofa, Rebecca picked up the book by Klarisa Rode, began again from the beginning, and read it to the end. It was two in the morning when she got to the last page. The story was set in a Danish town in the eighteenth century, and was about a father and his five children. She found it beautiful. Near the beginning there was, in fact, as if inlaid, the portrait that Jasper Gwyn had made of her, but Rebecca looked in vain, in the rest of the book, for something that bore significant traces of it. Nor could she find a single page that might have been written deliberately for her. Only that kind of painting, standing in a corner, with indisputable mastery.
Things had ended so long ago with Jasper Gwyn that to try to understand, now, what that whole business meant seemed for a moment an effort that she had no desire to make. It was late, the next day she had to take Emma to her mother-in-law and then rush off to work. She thought it was better to forget about it and go to bed. But as she was turning out the lights and putting some other thing in its place, she had the strange sensation of not being there, and of refining the details of someone else’s life. With a prick of dismay she realized that, in a single day, a certain distance that she had worked at for years had elegantly shifted—a curtain in a gust of wind. And from far away came a nostalgia that she thought she had defeated.
So, instead of going to bed, she did something she would never have imagined doing. She opened a closet and took out from under a pile of winter blankets the folders with the portraits. She made some coffee, sat down at the table, and began to open the folders, randomly. She began to read here and there, in no order, as she might have walked through a gallery of paintings. She didn’t do it to try to understand, or to find answers. Only she enjoyed the colors, that particular light, the sure step, the traces of a certain imagination. She did it because all that was a place, and in no other place would she have wanted to be that night.
She stopped when the first light of dawn was filtering in. Her eyes were burning. She felt a sudden, heavy weariness, unavoidable. She got in bed, and Robert woke just enough to ask her, without really being aware of it, if everything was all right.
“Yes, go to sleep.”
She pressed against him lightly, turning onto her side, and fell asleep.