The Portrait by Iain Pears

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