Shadow of a Man by May Sarton

Author:May Sarton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504017961
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER SIX

The next day they did after all go to see pictures and what had been a threat when Solange said it and had meant we shall go to see pictures and be sensible, now became something entirely different, became we shall go to see pictures together because every familiar painting in the Louvre must be seen again now, because it has become something entirely different, because we ourselves are not the same people we were yesterday. They walked arm in arm, full of a secret tenderness for each other’s bodies, content to walk down the long formal galleries in a dream, stopping here and there and especially before the Chardins, the Pieter der Hoochs, and the Vermeer because such ecstasy needs simple objects to rest on, a loaf of bread, a fish on a plate. Every now and then Francis looked at Solange, just to be sure it was true, to receive again the slight shock, the tingle of something like fear as he realized again that he had entered into a universe he had not known existed and which was his to love, cherish, learn by heart. But this was not to be talked about, only felt. They talked instead about what they looked at, drawing each other’s attention to some detail, sometimes laughing suddenly when in their state of mastery of all around them they concluded that a certain painting was absolutely false or ludicrous. Occasionally they disagreed.

“Darling,” said Solange after half an hour of this sort of looking, “I shall have to sit down. I’m dead.”

They went back, searching already for a past, to the same two chairs under the stone urn where they had sat a few days before.

“I didn’t know when we sat here before,” Francis said happily, lighting a cigarette and passing it to her like a present. “Oh, the things I didn’t know,” he laughed. And then, “My love, my love, how did I ever find you?”

The pink tobacco plants behind them waved back and forth hysterically in a sudden gust of wind. Clouds they hadn’t noticed covered the sun and Solange shivered. The bubble of happiness she had held so lightly in her hands, burst and she was filled with forebodings. She turned to him, and saw he was still there, smiling his secret smile, his brilliant wilful reality taking all this for granted already. Whom would he marry? What had she stolen in one night from a young girl—some young girl she would never know, perhaps waiting in America?

“Why are people so afraid of happiness?” she asked him and asked herself. “Why is it always slightly suspicious? Why do we turn it round and round looking for the flaw?”

“But you are happy?” Francis asked, disturbed by this change of her mood as if she were reflecting the sky. “You have no regrets?”

“No, dear heart.” For a while at least, she thought, let us believe we are angels even if we have to become monsters to ourselves later. So they sat hand in hand until large drops of rain forced them to run out to the street and climb into a taxi.

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