Chapter 33
The picture was delivered on Monday by two men, in a crate with a good deal of straw.
Leonora had them take it up to the blue room and prop it against the wall, before sending them away. She sat down on the edge of her bed and looked at it for the better part of an hour with her hands folded.
It was better than she remembered. That was the frightening part. Away from the northern light and the other pictures, it had gotten bigger somehow. The green in it seemed to stretch on and on, and the gate at the end of the path seemed to lead to a mysterious place.
This is either the best thing I have ever done or the cruelest, and I shall not know which until about eight o’clock this evening.
She nearly lost her nerve twice.
The first time was at four o’clock, when Peg came up to ask about the shutters and found her still sitting on the end of the bed.
Leonora heard herself say that perhaps it might be better kept for his birthday, and then had to ask Peg what month his birthday was in.
To her surprise, nobody in the house knew.
The second time was at half past six, when she caught her face in the mirror and understood exactly what she was about to do, which was to put a thing in front of her husband that said I have looked at you in four feet of green, and then stand in the room while he decided what to do about it.
He may hate it. He may look at it and see his mother’s wall and sequester himself in the treehouse for a week, and I will have done that to him with sixteen guineas and the best intentions in England.
She went down anyway.
She had spent four days not telling him, and it had nearly undone her.
He had asked twice. On Friday, at breakfast, he had said in the manner of a man reading a bill that he understood there had been a purchase.
Leonora had said that there had, and he had waited for her to elaborate, but she had only eaten her toast. On Sunday, he had come into the small parlor while she was writing to her mother and had stood by the window for eleven minutes without saying anything, which was, she now understood, how her husband asked a question when he had decided not to ask it.
She had it carried down after dinner.
He was in the study with the door open and a letter in his hand, and he put it down the moment she appeared.
“There is something in the drawing room,” she said, “that I would like you to come and look at.”
“The crate.”
“The crate.”
“It has been in my hall since eleven o’clock this morning and three separate people have refused to explain it to me.” He came round the desk. “Where are you putting it?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On you,” Leonora said, and opened the drawing room door.
The dust sheets were off the sofas. She had done that in the afternoon, with Peg, and she had had every candle in the room lit and the shutters folded back.
Colin stopped in the doorway upon seeing the four feet of a walled garden in June propped against the wall opposite. He did not say anything for a long time.
Leonora stood by the door with her hands clasped together and kept quiet, which was the hardest thing she had done all week, and watched him.
“You bought this,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it is yours,” Leonora replied. “It has been yours since three o’clock last Thursday.
I paid for it with your money, which I am aware is ridiculous, but I have decided to be shameless about it anyway, because there is nothing else in the world I have to give you that you do not already own. ”
Colin slowly crossed the room and stopped in front of the painting. He reached out his hand, paused, and then let it fall.
“There is a hat on the grass,” he observed.
“I know.”
“Somebody has put a hat down on the grass and gone away, and left the gate open, and they are coming back.” His voice had gone strange. “That is what the picture is. It is not a garden. It is a person who is coming back.”
“Yes,” Leonora agreed, tears filling her eyes.
“Where do you want it hung?”
“I don’t want it hung anywhere. I want you to hang it.
” She came a step into the room. “There is a wall at the north end of the gallery that has had nothing on it for fifteen years, and eleven feet of canvas propped against it under a black sheet that nobody in this house is permitted to speak of. I did not ask you about it again, and I am not asking you about it now.”
“Leonora—”
“I am only saying that there is a great deal of wall,” she continued.
“That it faces south, so it receives light all afternoon. That whatever you decide to do with the sheet is entirely your business. That it may stay there for another fifteen years, and I will never say one word about it.” She was crying now.
“Maybe it is time to let go of the past, Colin. Enough to make room for something new. That is all. That is what I came in here to say.”
Colin turned around. He was closer than she had expected, and his face was not shuttered at all. She saw it happening: his hand coming up, his head tilting, his chest rising.
She pressed her fingers against his mouth. “No,” she whispered.
He stopped instantly. He always stopped instantly. It was, she thought wildly, going to be the end of her.
“No,” she said again. “Not like this. Not because I have made you feel something in a drawing room with a picture. It isn’t fair to you, Colin, and it isn’t fair to me.
” Her voice broke. “We want different things. You have told me so plainly, and I believe you. I will not take a kiss from a man who is grateful and call it a marriage. Nobody should have to settle. Not you. Not me.”
“That is not what this is.”
“Then tell me what it is.” Her hands had begun to shake, so she folded them behind her back.
“Say one sentence, Colin. It does not have to be a promise. It does not have to be love. I am not asking you for the thing you told me you cannot give. Say one true sentence about what you want, and I shall stand here all night for it.”
She waited.
She waited longer than she had ever waited for anything, in a room full of candles, with four feet of June behind him, and she watched her husband open his mouth and find no words.
“That’s what I thought,” she sighed.
She rose on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. She did it slowly, exactly as he had done it to her at the altar in front of forty people. She felt him go absolutely still, before stepping back, picking up her candle, and making for the door.
“Goodnight, husband,” she said. “It’s a beautiful painting. I hope you hang it.”
She pushed the door to the blue room shut. Then she sat down on the floor with her back against it, which no duchess did, put her forehead on her knees, and stayed there for a long while in the dark without making much noise about it.
He could not do it. I gave him every possible way out.
I told him it needn’t be a promise or love, and he could not find one sentence.
He is the most honest man I have ever met, which means there was nothing there to find.
Or there was, and he has decided I am safer without it. And I do not know which.
That is my marriage in a nutshell. I shall be sixty and still not know which.
Down the corridor, on the other side of two inches of oak, she heard her husband’s door and then nothing for what felt like an hour. Then his boots retreated along the corridor and down the stairs.
Leonora sat on the floor and listened to him step out into the garden in the dark.
Go on, then. Hide in your treehouse.
She did not sleep until four.
At eight o’clock, she got up, put on a traveling dress, and sent for the carriage. She did not leave a note, because she could not think of one single thing to write that would not have been either a lie or too much of the truth.