The Center of the World (32 page)

“Fair enough,” I said. “But you didn’t answer my question: Are you having, or have you had, an affair?”

She hesitated for a moment before speaking. “No,” she said. “I am not having an affair. Someone kissed me once and I kissed him back. And it felt good. But I didn’t take the plunge. So now it’s my turn: Are you having an affair?”

I thought of Helen waiting for me in the bedroom. I thought of Gina and the kiss she gave me at the door of her hotel.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been tempted, but I haven’t. What you saw was both the beginning and the end of my romantic adventures with Ruth Carpenter.”

“I wondered if you’d gone to London to meet somebody. And when you came back I thought you had. You seemed sort of shifty and guilty, if you don’t mind my saying so. That’s why I left; I couldn’t stand it. You seem better today.”

“I know I was acting oddly,” I said. “I was feeling guilty. I met a woman in the cafeteria at the Tate. She was trying to pick me up. She was really pretty. Maybe in her late thirties. We had a nice conversation. It was a beautiful evening, and I walked her to her hotel after the museum closed. When we got there she asked me to come in for a drink. I said no and went back to my hotel by myself.”

“So why didn’t you go in with her, if she was so nice and pretty?”

I shrugged. “To be frank, I don’t really know, although, as I’ve thought about it, it’s not clear that she was actually willing. How come we don’t sleep with other people? We’re married; it’s a habit; it’s what we said we wouldn’t do. But it would have been false—a fantasy out of a bad movie. We’re the real deal.”

I saw the light in her eyes and all the happiness we had shared. I knew what I had to do.

 
THOSE WERE AMONG
the sweetest days of my life, even with all the suffering, even though Wyndham and the brats came back. Grant was gone. Turner was gone. We had fewer guests than previously. The house was often quiet. People said that the cause was Egremont’s great age, but he was in love for the first time in his life and had no patience for trivialities. So was I. It was a time bathed in light.

Egremont had a special cabinet designed to hold what we simply called “the painting.” It was installed in his bedroom. Every morning as the sun rose, I would open the cabinet and we two would lie in the bed, sometimes reading, sometimes chatting, sometimes falling back into delightful slumber. We would take our coffee thus. At length we arose—Egremont went to the fields and I to my occupations around the house.

Our guests often said to me that Egremont seemed to have aged. In the past, they recalled, he had been out in the fields as soon as the sun rose. It was still remarkable, they said, for a man
of his age to get out at all, but they noted that he seemed less active than before.

But the fact was that the painting had made him younger and, as he often said, more sensible. I remember one afternoon about a month after Turner had departed. We had gone up to his bedroom and I had opened the cabinet. We spent about an hour looking at the painting, pointing out beauties we had not noticed before. Then Egremont took me. I took my pleasure in him as well, for he had become most kind in this way. His skin was dry and almost transparent. His body hair had all but disappeared. The muscles that had been toned by so many years in the saddle hung upon his bones in loose folds. But bathed in the light from the painting, he was sweetly beautiful to me. And I had never felt so beautiful either. We were like two gods.

“If this is witchcraft,” he said as we lay exhausted amongst the pillows, “I am happily damned.” He kissed me gently on the forehead. “With one possible exception,” and here he nodded at the painting, “you are the fairest woman that ever lived. But you are her as well, so we need not trouble ourselves with the distinction. The good fortune is mine. To think that at my time of life I have spent the last hour as I have spent it is hardly short of miraculous. When I was young, there was nothing I feared more than the decline of my powers. I remember thinking that men ten years younger than I am now were only toothless idiots, gelded old fools.

“I cannot describe to you the bitterness that was in my heart, when my old fool failed me. It had done me such good service over the years, always ready to do a man’s work. When
I first met you it was still serviceable, but when it failed I was full of wrath and sorrow. I had ceased to be the man I was. I am sorry,” and here he kissed me sweetly again, “that I was cruel in those days, but my rage must find an outlet.”

We both looked at the painting again. We knew that it could not last. The painting can do much—it has great power, but no art, no matter how exalted, can stop the flow of time. We lived two years in that happy dream; and none of it, not the restoration of Egremont’s vigor or my own sweet pleasure, was sweeter than the kindness he showed me in his final years.

It was about two years after the painting was completed when Egremont first grew ill. It began innocently enough, with some discomfort in his throat and fits of sneezes, but it soon grew to a fever. His breathing became labored. His mind seemed to wander. We sent up to London for a doctor. After he examined the patient he took me aside and said that I must prepare for the worst. His words almost broke my heart, but I would not believe them. I felt in my heart something I had never felt before. I had come to love this man.

That was a terrible time. I never left his room for almost three months. With his last bit of strength and lucidity Egremont had forbidden Wyndham to enter on pain of forfeiting his inheritance. The doctors saw how his son disturbed him with his presence and enforced the edict. Wyndham thought I would steal the very bed linens, and he set up his desk outside the room. He wished to be there to provide assistance, he said, but I knew the truth. His idea of assistance was to repeat my commands to the servants so as to make it appear that they
came from him, or to question any decision that might result in expense and the diminishment of his inheritance.

But he was a weak man, and I was stronger than I had ever been. I still cannot understand how such a puny thing could have been fathered by a man like Egremont, but I did not pause then to work out the puzzle. I simply told him what I was going to do and he retreated before my wrath and contempt. I hardly know where I got such force of will. Sometimes, when I looked at the painting, I thought the very gods were giving it to me; sometimes I knew it was simply love that made me strong.

There is nothing worse than a proud old man in the grip of illness. Egremont was not an easy patient. He used his last bits of strength to rage against his weakness, to fight against the need he had for care. He would allow no one but me to attend him. I bathed him as if he were the child I had never had.

In the darkest hours of his illness, the great lord of Petworth almost stopped breathing. His chest moved slowly up and down, occasionally he tried to speak, but I could not make out the words, nor even tell if he was waking or dreaming. His eyes were sometimes open, but he gave no sign that he could see. When Dr. Haddon saw him in this state he told me, speaking as if Egremont was no longer in the room, that the end was nigh. Wyndham remained just outside the door; I could almost hear the clink as he counted the money that was to be his.

When the doctor left I opened the cabinet and sat down beside the bed. I looked at Egremont. He seemed such a poor and mortal shadow of himself. I looked at the painting. I had never felt before that life was so wonderful and that I had been so
fortunate. Egremont had been most kind to me. He had taken in a tainted woman and made her into a semblance of a lady. And, in those last years, he had given me his love. I took his thin hand in mine and began to weep. But then I felt a fleeting pressure. His eyes met mine for a moment, and he moved his head ever so slightly and looked at the painting. I cannot tell if he saw it too, but when I turned I saw the fleeting figure of a god beckoning to me and urging me to have faith. For these many years now, I have been trying to see that figure again, but though it has never reappeared to me in all its full vividness, the god still lives in my mind. He was in the upper right corner of the canvas, just above the place where the sky touches the battlefield.

Upon his recovery Egremont did not remember seeing the vision, but I am convinced that his health began to return when the god called to him from the canvas. It was by no means an easy recovery. For about two weeks I was wrestling with powers much larger than myself for Egremont’s life. It was a lonely struggle, and I hardly know how I, who had been so weak and so selfish for so long, found the strength and the will to persevere.

The doctors thought I was mad, but the victory was mine. When the London doctor next returned, Egremont beckoned to him and he leaned over the bed. Egremont’s words were clear enough: “How much, sir, did you charge to say that I was dead? Be off with you. If I am to die I shall do so without your assistance; if I live, I shall do so without it as well.”

From then on his recovery was slow but steady. Spring had come and I was able to throw open the windows and let the air
into the sickroom. One day, as we were at our breakfast, Egremont asked me how long it had been since I had gone outside.

I told him that I had not left his side since he fell ill about three months before. He took my hand and patted it gently. The tears that began to form at the corners of his eyes were the greatest gift I had ever been given.

“I have been too selfish,” he said. “You must get out and take some air. It will do you good. Besides, I wish to speak to my son. Call him in and leave us.”

I thanked my lord and did as he had bidden me. At the beginning of his illness I had all the looking glasses taken from the sickroom. When I passed the great glass in the hallway, I saw how I had aged. I had lived so much in the painting that I had come to think that time had stopped. With a shudder I saw that it had not.

The air was sweet and warm. The smell of earth rose from the grass about me as I walked toward the bench overlooking the pond. Happy as I was to be in the air, it was a struggle to make my way up the hill. I had to stop along the way to rest.

I pressed my hand to my breast and looked down upon Petworth House, my heart beating as though it would burst. When I thought of the pleasant hours I had passed in this very spot, my tears started to flow. I wondered what had become of young Grant. He had written once from London, but I had never replied. Also, truth be told, I felt that the painting had somehow carried me beyond whatever he might have been to me.

I sat there for about an hour. Perhaps I dozed a bit. I remember looking at the sky and seeing it as if for the first time. How
beautiful is the world, I thought—more beautiful even than the painting, but the painting’s sky gave form and meaning to the air around me, while the water of the sea beyond Helen’s window taught me what water was. I wept again for the wonder and amazement of it all.

When I returned to the house I saw that Egremont had not been improved by his son’s visit. But Wyndham was looking down at the floor like a puppy who had been beaten. He wished me good day with a painfully forced courtesy, assuring me that his only desire was to further his father’s wishes and that he knew that Lord Egremont’s wishes and mine were the same. He would endeavor, he went on, to do me any service that he could. I had merely to ask.

I bowed and thanked him. I had no more trouble from him while his father lived.

 
WE SAT DOWN TOGETHER
in our familiar living room. I took her hands in mine. “But I have been unfaithful, in a sense,” I said. “I haven’t slept with anyone else, but I haven’t told you the truth. I
feel
as if I’ve been unfaithful. I am ready to talk to you about it.”

I watched the expression that formed on her face. At first she seemed relieved, but then she seemed sad, more for me than for herself.

“For the last year or so I’ve had this feeling that my father was right, that I’m a loser and a failure. My life has seemed to me like a string of accidents. Even the good parts—our love, the kids, the life we made for ourselves—seemed random and pointless. I was going to die and the fact that I had lived wasn’t going to matter one way or another. My whole life could have happened to someone else.