Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

So, in 1932, Julien had packed up his apartment, rented a smaller one to maintain at least a foothold in Paris, and headed back home, going initially to the big empty house in Vaison, which he had maintained as an act of thoughtless filial piety ever since his father’s death. He realized how much he hated the house, and was suffocated by the heavy furniture, the velvet curtains, the dark wallpaper, the ponderous pictures on worthy themes. In the end he sold it, sent the furniture to a brocanteur and took instead a large apartment in Avignon opposite the church of Saint Agricole. A curious, whimsical decision, for it would have been so much easier to have lived in Montpellier, but he decided that if he was to come home, then he would do so properly, and be in the city he had known since he was sent there en pension as a schoolboy of twelve. He refused to live in Montpellier itself; rather he traveled there by train when necessary, lived in a guesthouse when teaching, and always returned to his true home the moment his liberty was granted him.

The apartment he lived in for the rest of his life was not in the most opulent part of the town—that already lay beyond the walls, in the grand suburbs that had been spreading since the latter part of the previous century—but he considered it to be by far the best, on a circling avenue of handsome eighteenth-century buildings, alive with shops and bars and restaurants and people, not so large that it attracted the motorcars that were beginning to clog the streets with their smells and impatient raucous horns. His building was light and airy, angled to avoid the whine of the winds in winter and the excessive heat of the summer. Into this he put his eclectic, judiciously chosen collection of furniture and pictures—his little Greuze, the Cézanne he had bought at a street market in Avignon for a few francs, the drawings he had acquired in Rome, the picture of the hills of Jerusalem, which Julia had given him—and they fitted as if they had all been designed for the pale green walls and the soft gray of the delicately carved woodwork. Over the years he added to his collection, carefully buying works that few others liked. By the time of the war, he had a substantial number that were beginning to be of some value. Among these were four paintings by Julia, which he had selected quite ruthlessly, returning to her studio each time he went to Paris, coming away empty-handed on nearly every occasion.

“You are very hard to please,” she said dryly once, after he had examined carefully one work she was proud of and yet again shaken his head. “What do you like?”

“I don’t know. Something special. There’s a vacuous reply for you.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “An intellectual like yourself. You should do better. Why don’t you like this, then?” She pointed at one painting, a seemingly rough sketch of a woman in a boat, the form of the woman blending into the shape of the water. She was pleased with it; she remained pleased with it despite him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She grunted. “Go on. You’ll have to try harder than that.”

“You’ve looked at too many pictures, you know too much. You are too aware of what you’re doing and of the past. That’s what’s wrong with it.”

“Hard words,” she commented. “And being too aware of the past seems a strange criticism from a classicist.”

“True.” He thought, then smiled apologetically. “I don’t mean to criticize. I meant it as a compliment.”

“Really? Heaven help me if you decide to be rude.”

“I am never rude. What I mean is that you really are very good. And that is not simply because I adore you without reserve. Although it helps. But look: You have Matisse and Cézanne and a bit of Puvis there. A touch of Robert, perhaps, as well. I look at that picture and I can see what you’ve built it out of. That’s what’s wrong.”

“Derivative and second-rate, you mean?” She was not in the slightest bit offended; it was one of her best qualities and one Julien could never share.

“Not at all. I mean you are being too careful. That’s what I mean. This is a perfectly good picture. And if I didn’t know you I would be impressed and charmed. But I do know you.”

He thought some more, wondering whether he dared say precisely what he felt, for he knew he could never explain exactly why the idea came to him. “It’s the painting of a dutiful daughter,” he said eventually, looking at her cautiously to see her reaction. “You want to please. You are always aware of what the person looking at this picture will think of it. Because of that you’ve missed something important. Does that make sense?”

She thought, then nodded. “All right,” she said grudgingly and with just a touch of despair in her voice. “You win.”

Julien grunted. “Have another go, then. I shall come back and come back until you figure it out.”

“And you’ll know?”

“You’ll know. I will merely get the benefit of it.”

“What if I get it wrong?”

He shook his head and grinned. “Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

THE CONVERSATION summed up much of his appeal for her. Alone of anybody she had ever met he allowed her room to breathe. He wanted nothing from her. Merely knowing that she lived was sufficient for him. He did not wish to live with her, marry her, did not become jealous or fretful for her. He did not watch her or live through her. Did not swamp her with attentions or drown her with excess adoration. Above all, he did not make things easy for her. All negatives, all things she was unused to. He admired what she did, but was brutally honest when asked his opinion. Where he found the resource for this neither she nor he knew; it was a far cry from the self-confident pretense he learned with many of the women he pursued over the years, or the detachment he formed for the world in general.

Both Bernard and Marcel—neither of them particularly acute in such matters—realized that Julien and Julia were deeply in love with each other. Julien was afraid that if they became lovers now, Julia would turn into another woman, one to be consumed and discarded, and so he held back for fear that showing his love would extinguish it. Julia, in contrast, was not yet sure enough of herself for the battle—with her work and her father—that would result. She knew that her irresolution would seem pathetic and childish to many, that a stronger person would dispatch the looming, overbearing presence of her father and demand the right to a life untrammeled by his needs. He was an impossible man, and placed her in an impossible position. For most of her life she had had no one but him, and she was afraid not so much of his hurt if she fell in love, but of what it would say about her. Her life had been utterly selfish, she knew; she had allowed no one in to disrupt it; was she now to hurt so desperately the one person who had always meant something to her? She had to put someone’s interests and needs above her own in order to remain human; and the only person she could do this for was her father.

So she was contradictory and difficult, with him and with Julien, hard to understand; often irritable, veering between affection and criticism, drawing close then pulling away again. She knew all the while that she did indeed love Julien, needed his existence in a way that she had never known with anyone else. When she was depressed or frustrated with her work, she thought of him, constantly concerned herself with where he was and what he was doing, felt incomplete without him, and anxious when he was there lest a mistake ruin everything. If he had only forced the issue that day in Palestine before she could consider all the complications, then, she sometimes told herself, all would have been well. She even felt slightly insulted by his rejection, but knew that such disdain was unjust. Julien could not make it so easy for her; he wanted her soul as well, and must bide his time until she was ready to give it.