Every night for the next three weeks Henry sits for his portrait. The chalk lines that mark the chair’s place begin to fade. Before each sitting Charlotte gets down on hands and knees to find the marks and line the chair up exactly. She’ll have him staring straight ahead, she thinks, into the face of the viewer, his big dark eyes like tunnels. She wants to create that odd moment when it is hard to tell whether those eyes are looking at you or whether you are looking into them—a certain opacity, a certain depth—the deep wild eyes of an animal, like the horses with which her career began. Horses in the fields. Horses drinking water from troughs covered with ice. Old dappled horses in their stables. She liked the shape of them, the wide neat planes of their faces. What would she call this one? Man by the Window. Man Sitting. Portrait of Henry. Portrait of a Husband. It was like naming a baby: the title fitted for a while, then didn’t, the creation outgrowing her meager definition.
“Could you turn to the left a fraction? And tilt your face down a bit? There. Good,” Charlotte says, hovering before him and pulling on her cigarette—a habit reserved for when she’s painting. She stands back, staring at the canvas, then squints as she sucks down more smoke. She breathes out, opens her eyes wide, and steps forwards with the brush.
“Watching you at work makes me think I ought to write a book about painting, about the use of museums and galleries in novels, perhaps. Something like that,” says Henry. “Characters in galleries.”
“Oh?” replies Charlotte, distracted.
“Yes, James and George Eliot. Rome.” It is nice, this time together. There’s something new and quiet about it that he likes, that helps him think, the feeling of her concentration in the air. It seems infectious.
Charlotte peers at him, makes a few sweeping gestures with her brush, then steps out from behind the canvas. “Yes, I suppose so. That could be interesting,” she says. He finds it hard to tell when she is listening and when she isn’t, whether she is open to conversation or not. “And now?” she asks. “Have you finished the chapter on Hardy?”
Henry lets out a small groan. “I’m tired of it. I don’t know how to finish it. People walked out today, you know.”
Charlotte is standing with her back against the wall, watching him talk. Watching, always watching. She looks down to her palette and mixes a shade of beige. She wants the texture of flesh, the illusion of candor. “What do you mean?”
“The students. Some walked out of the lecture this morning. They slip out when they think I’m not looking, but I hear the door. Everyone hears the door.” It had been a horrid day. Out of nowhere he has started suffering memory lapses in the middle of his lectures, the last four ruined by this forgetfulness. Today he was determined to get it right; he memorized and repeated and memorized. He carried handwritten pages, and notes on little rectangles of ruled paper.
When he stepped onto the stage he knew the lecture off by heart, all the twists and turns of argument, the unfolding of ideas like a shining, rising marble staircase. He took the first step up, reached the landing, moved higher. The faces were below him, bright-eyed, listening. He talked. They listened. He took another step, talked on, and when he looked up he could see the top; he could see where he was going, where he was to end up, the sun streaming down. For a moment he was distracted by the beauty, light overwhelmed him, and before he realized what was happening the steps had fallen away and he was left floating in the light of huge, confused, crazy ideas. Dust motes coasted on the air. He saw them rise slowly towards the closed window and thought of Lucie watching them float up and up on a sunbeam and trying to catch them in her dimpled little hands. “Mummy smells of strawberry,” she said as she banged her palms together, causing a spray of gold dust to fan out. “What is it?” Lucie asked. “What is the floating?”
He didn’t know where he was supposed to go next. He stared at the fluorescent light, at the little black dots of dead flies caught in the white tube. He looked out into the rows of seats, at the young, wide-open faces, watching him, waiting. He opened his mouth, sucked in the cold air, then started again. Anywhere. Somewhere. He didn’t know. He kept going, head down, eyes on the brown linoleum, his shiny shoes pacing the floor, trying to find the small turn he had missed.
Charlotte sighs. “Don’t say it,” Henry warns. “Don’t make excuses for them. It’s me. I forgot where I was up to and bungled the lot, not just a bit, the whole of it. It’s not coincidence. That’s how my thoughts are now, I don’t know why. It’s how the book is. Or whatever you want to call it. A complete mess.” He wants her to console him but she works away in silence, the brushstrokes scratching and wobbling the canvas. Charlotte mutters something to herself, then comes towards Henry, peers hard, and leaps back, ducking behind the painting. She glances at him, then back at the canvas, then glances away again.
“Do you remember when we took Lucie to the National Gallery,” Henry asks, “and people stopped to stare at her like she was part of the exhibition?”
“Yes,” says Charlotte, pausing and holding the brush in midair. “I remember just being so happy to be out of the house and looking at colors. You know, I haven’t done that since we’ve been here.”
“What?” asks Henry.
“Craved the sight of color. Like I used to, in winter, when it was all gray and just the little dots of primroses could send me into giddy bouts of joy.”
“I remember the Constable room,” says Henry. “I keep thinking of Henry James sending his characters wandering off around the Constables. Of course that’s not where they were, not where he put them, but I can’t change the image in my mind. For some reason that’s where Isabel always is when she meets Osmond again, in London, looking at Constable’s clouds.”
“We finally got to those rooms and then had to rush out because Lucie started screaming. We went there for those paintings. Then we never saw them. Maybe that’s why,” says Charlotte.
She wipes her brush on her apron, the same one that she made scones in just that afternoon. Then she fusses about, looking for a tube of sienna. She is beginning work on his eyes. “Could you lift your chin half an inch or so? And left?” she asks.
Henry fixes his vision on her. He thinks if he stares hard with wide, lifted eyes, he might channel some intensity into the painting. Over the past weeks he has begun to care about the future of this image. He wants it to succeed. He wants it to succeed while knowing the risks—that he might appear ugly or old or mean. But she seems happier now. She seems better than before. She is always happier when she works.
“She told me she wanted to go home today,” Charlotte says.
“Who?” replies Henry.
“Lucie. She said, ‘I want to go home now.’ ”
“What did you say?”
“What do you think? I told her we were home, that this is home.”
“And?”
“She gave me this dreadful look—so fierce, so confused—then turned and ran out into the garden. It was horrible. She knew I’d lied.”
“But you didn’t,” says Henry.
“I feel like I did.”
“I thought she would have forgotten.”
“Me too. I was afraid she would, and now I almost wish she had.” Charlotte’s hair has come loose and long wisps fall across her eyes. She lifts the back of her hand to her forehead and pushes the hair away.
“She’ll get used to it,” Henry reasons, looking to the floor. Paint is spattered across the floorboards and there are small tracks between the kitchen and easel from a blob of pigment stuck to the sole of Charlotte’s shoe.
“Will she?” asks Charlotte.
She works on in silence for another half hour or so, until she looks up and sees that Henry has nodded off in the chair. She puts down her brush and touches him gently on the face. He startles. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”
“Never mind. You go to bed,” she says. “I’ll clean up and come in later.”
She puts the paints away, washes the brushes, pushes the easel to one side, and then takes the kitchen scraps out to the compost. She shakes the plastic container, dislodging the wet globs of tea leaves and potato peel. The garden is lit up by the upstairs lights of the neighbors’ house. Charlotte has still not said hello, although she has heard them calling each other’s names: Delilah, Doris. Doris is the younger one. She can see her now, the shadowy outline of her body visible behind the lace curtains and thin blind. The woman sits on the edge of the bed in her nightie, the slope of fabric loose across her large breasts. She sits there very still, all alone, and after a few minutes reaches over and switches off the light. In the morning the blind will go up—although the lace curtain is always drawn—and she’ll be heard, downstairs, calling to the cat, the door open, her voice drifting through the trees, up and down the street. The sound of dry cat biscuits rattling on a tin plate, a fork tapping on the edge of a can.
A few days later there is a knock at the door. Henry is at work and the children are finally asleep after lunch. Charlotte has just set up the canvas and taken out her brushes when she hears the knock and opens the door to find Nicholas standing there, holding a box of apples. Charlotte apologizes—she hasn’t visited as she promised, and realizes this just now. There had been the car trip home, the argument, and then the work on the painting.
He waves her apology away. “Never you mind,” he says, holding out the box. “I just came by to bring you these. They’re from the garden, and one can only eat so many. You’d do me a favor taking them. The whole place stinks of rotting fruit.”
Charlotte lifts the box from his hands. Thanks him. “Won’t you come in?” she asks.
“No, no, I couldn’t.”
“Please,” she says.
He follows her inside. All about is the mess of paints and jars. “I am interrupting,” he says. Charlotte shakes her head and tells him she was just packing up, that she needs some tea. He slips his hands into his pockets and swings round from the hips, looking about. The photographs on the wall. The vase of wilting flowers on the dresser. The fallen petals. Piles of papers and books pressed open, facedown. He swivels and sees the painting. “Yours?” he asks. Charlotte holds out her hands, palms up, showing the paint stains on her fingers. He steps forwards, peering at the canvas. She comes to stand behind him.
“How incredibly wonderful,” he says softly.
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m not sure if I’ve got the eyes quite right, that left one especially,” she says, walking forwards and standing next to him.
“Does anyone really care about getting it right?”
“I don’t mean identical so much as—”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“—the life of it.” They stand for a moment, looking. She can hear Nicholas breathing, the air coming fast in and out of his nose.
“But there is the likeness,” he says, “of an unexpected kind—what you were just saying. The atmosphere of a man, so to speak.” He is quiet then. She wants to believe him.
“Will you stay for tea?” she asks.
They sit on the veranda and watch pigeons peck at the crumbs left over from the children’s sandwiches. Charlotte likes his chattiness, the gentle banter that is meant only to put her at ease: how he struggles with a coastal garden, his admiration of Henry’s vegetable beds, how he loves to swim far out to sea and float there on his back.
“Have you ever?” he asks.
“No, no, nothing like.”
“The sky here. That is the thing.”
He is wearing corduroy trousers and a white shirt with sweat marks growing at the pits and back. He tips his head to get at the dregs of his sweet tea. From deep in the house comes the sound of a child’s cry. Lucie waking. They both hear it. He puts the cup carefully back on the saucer and stands. “I’ll leave you—” he says.
“No, please stay.”