The Catalans: A Novel by Patrick O'Brian

marriage too much to countenance it with a present, yet felt too much engaged by her use of Madeleine and by her interior promise, as well as by her affection for her, to feel at all easy, was very happy to do what Madeleine asked: she went at once, without stopping to put on her hat, and in ten minutes the thing was done. It proved an invaluable source of supply: it not only bought Francisco’s materials and many of their meals, but it enabled him to spend a good part of his time with his friends at Collioure.
    Painting is a messy business: it cannot be carried out in a shining little parlor where the position of each object is sacred. A room that is to be kept immaculate for wakes and marriages, the polished morgue of a self-respecting house, is not suitable; and there arose a great bitterness over the drops of paint, the smell in the room, and the wrongful displacement of the central table; for now Madeleine, typing at Me. Roig’s, could not always be there to clean and to replace before one of her aunts or her mother got in.
    Francisco took his easel to Collioure. His particular friends of the time had a very large attic where there was room for all to work, and there he took up his stand.
    This was lonely for Madeleine, and when he took to sleeping there, it was more so. She did not tell her mother or anyone else—she would never have done so at any time, but now that she was so withdrawn from them it would have been even less possible: for she was withdrawn from them, although Francisco blamed her for being entirely on their side, not with him at all: that was the root of all their quarreling.
    She said as she lay there alone, watching the light of the street lamp swinging madly on the ceiling as the gale of the equinox took it, she said that it was better to watch it and know that he was on dry land than to watch it and think of him at sea. She said this, but she was saying it against her knowledge—a knowledge that she would not formulate or allow to appear whole, but which grew so substantial and familiar in those last weeks that she was not surprised, not fundamentally surprised, however cruelly shocked she was, when she came home one day from Me. Roig’s house and found Francisco pale and strange in the middle of his possessions, packing them—his only. He spoke as if he were drunk, but he was not drunk. He had meant to get out alone, unseen; he had not thought he would be disturbed, and when he saw her he was uncertain what attitude to take. He had not prepared one. There was a terrible embarrassment between them, as if they were naked in front of strangers.
    He saw that she did not intend to scream or fight and asked her to find his blue suit.
    She said “Have you got your best shirts?”
    He said “I took them last week,” and after a second he flushed an ugly dark color, because he had lain with her since then.
    She said “Do you want this?” It was her portrait that he had painted in the autumn. It was his best piece of work: it was framed. He said Yes, to put it by the other paintings stacked by the door; but he did not look and his voice was hardly recognizable.
    They did not say anything more, and she went out of the room: she did not watch him pick up the load of things, the too-many parcels, bundles; go awkwardly out, down the stairs, put the things down, open the door, pick them up, and bolt out. His feet went sounding up the street, for he had shoes on; and in a minute the hollow wind slammed the door after him.
    At the crossroads he jerked into the car, into the back seat, and the woman in front, after a glance at his face, started the engine and drove rapidly away on the white road of the coast.
    He sat there in the back, abandoned to the movement of the car: he had never felt anything like this in his life. It was as if his whole being, the whole of the inside of his body, were bleeding, bleeding. The pain was something utterly beyond his experience.
    It did not surprise him that his face