Under Sail (James Dunbar Series Book 2) by Richard Woodman

Author:Richard Woodman [Woodman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2018-08-29T23:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Coasting

London, Suffolk and at Sea, 1912–14

Chapter Ten – The Ambush

The gallery had two brilliant canvases on display. They showed no discernible form to Dunbar’s eye as he approached, but the rich colours of red and blue held a certain suggestion which, when he saw the titles, seemed oddly appropriate. They were called ‘Macaw I’ and ‘Macaw II’. In the bottom left-hand corner was a black squiggle which he deciphered as Retyn ’12.

He went in. It was immediately clear that Retyn’s two paintings, foundlings of Julia’s charity, concealed a dearth of material in the gallery, for the walls were bare and no-one occupied the neat table that stood with its accompanying chair at the rear of the room. For a moment Dunbar too stood with the same uncertain abandonment as the furniture, then Julia appeared from the rooms above, alerted by the jingle of the door-bell. As she recognised him, she stiffened, a tall, elegant figure in a dark blue dress whose pale features were crowned by the mass of her luxuriant red-gold hair.

Dunbar broke the silence. ‘All your letters were at the ship-owner’s offices. I’ve read them all. Julia, I’m most dreadfully sorry.’

She seemed to deflate, to lose her self-possession and that aloof remoteness which he realised now he had seen as an intimidating barrier, compounded as it was of her femaleness, her beauty, her social difference and her intellect.

‘Julia, I was a fool.’

‘You shouldn’t reproach yourself,’ she said as the distance between them diminished.

He shook his head. ‘I feel quite inadequate to this moment,’ he confessed.

She laughed, smiling up at him as they each slid their arms about the other. ‘You are; you don’t understand women.’

‘Women always say that to establish their inscrutability and their superiority to men.’

‘If you were in love with me, you might be more intuitive.’

‘In love?’ He thought of his unhappy obsession with Conchita. ‘As far as I have ever understood it,’ he said, with a hint of embitterment, ‘love is an altered state of consciousness which is almost entirely self-centred and seeks to consume the object of its passion.’

‘You would say that,’ she said, looking away. ‘Perhaps that’s true for men.’

‘Well, it seems to me that you see my misunderstanding as such only because in reality there is no common ground between men and women, with the exception of a kind of elevated and expedient perception that we cosily call being in love. The obsession with one person cannot possibly prove durable.’

‘So,’ she said with a rueful smile, ‘you are not in love with me?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Then you are . . .’

‘I am in an altered state of consciousness, utterly beside myself with a desire for you, yes.’

‘But it will not prove durable?’ She drew back, still holding him, but looking directly into his eyes.

Dunbar shrugged. ‘I cannot say. Can you?’

‘I don’t know, it is not me who is making this declaration.’ He bent to kiss her. ‘Am I to be set aside for Maureen?’

‘Julia!’

‘Well?’

‘Julia, for God’s sake, I know nothing about the girl.

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