Iain Pears - The Portrait

Ardnamurchan? Oh. Yes. I went to recover from a broken heart. I had been rejected. Don’t smile so; it is a bitter thing and to be avoided, as you always did avoid it. You never did love your wife, did you? I kept my own passion a secret. No-one wants their humiliations known, and I was refused when I went down on my knees and said my piece.

Evelyn, of course; I see I have surprised you. How inappropriate, you are thinking. What a bizarre choice. You would never be so careless; were not. You picked your wife with the same care you pick your clothes or your painters. Someone who will reflect well on you, help you along. Love does not come into it. But I loved Evelyn, I think, and that made all the difference.

You think? Don’t you know? Surely it is not something you can be unsure about?

Well, yes. It is. If you have never felt the emotion before, and have had no practise. Love is not something that comes easily to people like me. It is too much bound up with sin. Love for God, that is simple. Love for your fellow man is also straightforward, if, generally speaking, quite unjustified. Love for a friend—quite easy although not without its complications. But love for a woman—ah, well now. That is the hardest, because it involves the carnal. Such feelings should surely be reserved for the low and the unworthy. To love a fine woman is to bring her down to the gutter.

Don’t look at me like that! I’m not saying I approve, merely that this was how I was brought up. I am, after all, the only evidence that my parents ever even touched each other. When I grew up, when I was playing the painter, I bathed myself in all the lusts I could think of, to coat myself in sin and create a gulf between myself and my beginnings that was so wide I could never go back. But it was not with real pleasure; I did not truly enjoy sin, and that, of course, takes most of the point of it away. I sinned because I felt I ought to. Even fornication was turned into a duty. By running away from my origins, I found myself coming back to them, like an ant walking round the rim of a plate and ending up back where he started.

Evelyn was different, hence the proposal. I think I knew it the moment I first talked to her in Paris. We were alone in the atelier, and she had been strenuously ignored by everyone there. That wasn’t unusual, I suppose; it was a sort of initiation rite, to test people out, see how tough they were. And she was a woman. At least we didn’t riot and burn her canvasses, like the French students did when women were first let into the Beaux-Arts. Many a man was treated in the same way for a month or so. We were a group, and mistrusted outsiders. But enough was enough, and she clearly wasn’t taking it very well, so I called over to her one evening, after everyone else had gone home.

“What do you think?” I asked. I’d been working hard all day on a painting, building it up from sketches I’d been making for the last month. I’d persuaded myself it was good. I was not yet vain, but I was growing rapidly in self-confidence. Besides, you had already seen it and paid fulsome compliments. I was letting her see it to give her a little treat. Show her what good painting was. I didn’t want her opinion, and expected only her admiration and her thanks for including her, taking her seriously.

Evelyn came over and looked. Very seriously, with a frown on her face. But not for long. “Not very good,” she said, eventually.

“Pardon?”

“It’s not very good. Is it? It’s too cluttered. What is it? A woman in a kitchen? She looks more as though she’s finding her way through a junk shop.” She paused, and thought some more. “Clean out the background, let the eye go to the woman herself. The pose is fine, but you’re wasting it. Where’s the centre? What’s the point? If you want the viewer to figure it out, you’ve got to give them a little help. What are you trying to do? Show how clever you are? How much you’re in charge of perspective and colour?”

“That’s your opinion?”

“It is. And you will no doubt disregard it completely. But then, you shouldn’t have asked.”

And her eyes went back to the canvas, then flickered back to me, for a brief moment. There was laughter in them, even though her face was otherwise totally solemn. She knew full well she was being presumptuous considering I was both older and more experienced than she. She was testing me, seeing how I would react. Would I be pompous, take umbrage and start lecturing her about the fine qualities of my work? “No, no, you don’t understand it. If you look . . .”

But that is not where my vanity lies. And the faint twinkle of amusement in her eyes touched me. I laughed myself. I wasn’t completely sure she was right, although cramming too much in has always been a weakness of mine. But we signed a contract with that glance. The complicated relationship of fawning and flattering she had seen when I was with you was not her way. She would give neither. And I wanted neither from her. From that moment on I liked her but was also a little disconcerted. For she had challenged you with those remarks, and bit by bit I saw how empty your compliments could be. You were being lazy with me; you did not take me so seriously after all. She was right about the picture; you were not. You were fallible.

On the other hand, I rarely showed her any of my pictures again. Not the ones I cared about, anyway. I was too frightened of what she would see. A man can take only so much criticism. I never thought she might be equally wary of my opinion about her efforts.

Do you know what it’s like to like someone, you who acknowledges no equal? Not to see all things in hierarchy, not to strain to be better, or more powerful, than the person you are with? Not to classify someone as friend or enemy, dependent or patron? Not to envy or be envied? It is friendship; I thought it might also be love. I still can’t tell them apart.

I have had my passions and infatuations, although far fewer than my reputation might suggest, but there is enough of the Church of Scotland in me to have a suspicion of the fleshly thrall. Certainly I discovered that the magic always faded fast; no woman, however opulent, however seductive, interested me for very long. Not in the way that Evelyn did, and I was never attracted to her in that way at all. I think I wanted to know her, and the more my friendship with you faded and became bound by conditions and doubts, the more I craved her uncomplicated simplicity. I walked with her round London and Paris too; but it was a different experience. She didn’t want to teach, nor did she lecture. When she looked at a statue or building, she did not wish to classify and pigeonhole. There were none of the flat condemnations or soaring praise that you would deliver; she always tried to appreciate what the artist had been doing, however poor the result. She even found a good word for those pompous old goats from the Beaux-Arts. And above all, she took these walks because of companionship, nothing more. But there was always something in her which held back, which seemed afraid—I even thought seemed repelled—by my presence when I stood close to her. Yet she was so open at the same time. How could that be? It infuriated and frustrated me, and that, I decided, must be a symptom of love.

Coming to a decision took a long time. I delayed till we both came back to England, then some more until my career began to prosper a little, but eventually, in spring 1904, I made up my mind and proposed. Abruptly, and with little romantic style, I must say. I hadn’t even seen much of her for some time when I went round to have my say. Flowers and gifts and all the sort of thing one should employ to create a special moment did not occur to me, which is just as well as it would have been wasted money. She turned me down flat; all I got was a look of shock and astonishment and, even worse, slight anger. Even the idea offended her. I could not see why, then. No-one else was going to make her an offer, and most women, so I had always believed, were at the very least flattered to be asked.