A day or two later we met again. He told me that he wanted me to come down to Devonshire—he’d got the very place there that he wanted for a background. He said:
“I’m married, you know. And I’m very fond of my wife.”
I said if he was fond of her she must be very nice.
He said she was extremely nice. “In fact,” he said, “she’s quite adorable—and I adore her. So put that in your pipe, young Elsa, and smoke it.”
I told him that I quite understood.
He began the picture a week later. Caroline Crale welcomed me very pleasantly. She didn’t like me much—but, after all, why should she? Amyas was very circumspect. He never said a word to me that his wife couldn’t have overheard, and I was quite polite and formal to him. Underneath, though, we both knew.
After ten days he told me I was to go back to London.
I said: “The picture isn’t finished.”
He said: “It’s barely begun. The truth is, I can’t paint you, Elsa.”
I said: “Why?”
He said: “You know well enough why, Elsa. And that’s why you’ve got to clear out. I can’t think about the painting—I can’t think about anything but you.”
We were in the Battery garden. It was a hot sunny day. There were birds and humming bees. It ought to have been very happy and peaceful. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt—somehow—tragic. As though—as though what was
going to happen was already mirrored there.
I knew it would be no good my going back to London, but I said: “Very well, I’ll go if you say so.”
Amyas said: “Good girl.”
So I went. I didn’t write to him.
He held out for ten days and then he came. He was so thin and haggard and miserable that it shocked me.
He said: “I warned you, Elsa. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I said: “I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d come.”
He gave a sort of groan and said: “There are things that are too strong for any man. I can’t eat or sleep or rest for wanting you.”
I said I knew that and that it was the same with me, and had been from the first moment I’d seen him. It was Fate and it was no use struggling against it.
He said: “You haven’t struggled much, have you, Elsa?” And I said I hadn’t struggled at all.
He said he wished I wasn’t so young, and I said that didn’t matter. I suppose I might say that for the next few weeks we were very happy. But happiness isn’t quite the word. It was something deeper and more frightening than that.
We were made for each other and we’d found each other—and we both knew we’d got to be together always.
But something else happened, too. The unfinished picture began to haunt Amyas. He said to me: “Damned funny, I couldn’t paint you before—you yourself got in the way of it. But I want to paint you, Elsa. I want to paint you so that that picture will be the finest thing I’ve ever done. I’m itching and aching now to get at my brushes to see you sitting there on that hoary old chestnut of a battlement wall with the conventional blue sea and the decorous English trees—and you—you—sitting there like a discordant shriek of triumph.”
He said: “And I’ve got to paint you that way! And I can’t be fussed and bothered while I’m doing it. When the picture’s finished I’ll tell Caroline the truth and we’ll get the whole messy business cleared up.”
I said: “Will Caroline make a fuss about divorcing you?”
He said he didn’t think so. But you never knew with women.
I said I was sorry if she was going to be upset, but after all, I said, these things did happen.
He said: “Very nice and reasonable, Elsa. But Caroline isn’t reasonable, never has been reasonable, and certainly isn’t going to feel reasonable. She loves me, you know.”