Читать онлайн «Falling Slowly»

1

On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who still thought of herself as Miriam Sharpe, paused as usual to examine the pictures in the windows of the Duke Street galleries. She hoped one day to find the image she unconsciously sought, without knowing why she sought it, something to lift the spirits, to transport her on an imaginary journey, to give a hint of the transcendence which was so blatantly lacking in her everyday life of words and paper. Today there was a Dutch flower piece, badly darkened by age and varnish, and a portrait of an Elizabethan boy, snug in his ruff, his lashless eyes denoting a childhood of unchildish amusements – nothing, in short, to appeal to the vague restlessness she always felt before settling down to another silent day’s work. But further down the street, in a gallery specializing in images of the nineteenth century destined for easy consumption – girls in frills on swings, neat northern townscapes – she found something to her taste, a smoky winter scene by an artist of whom she had never heard, Eugène Laloue. It was clearly signed at the lower left, and on the frame a small brass plate proclaimed; ‘Place du Châtelet under Snow’. She looked closer, drawn in by the dirty yellow sky, smoky where it met the roofs of the buildings, under which she could imagine herself trudging home after a cold day. That yellow sky supplied its own illumination, although there were lights on in the buildings to the left, and even in a shop, too small to be of much consequence but surprising in this vaguely affluent setting. On the ground snow had been puddled into water by passing feet; it dusted the tops of the street lamps and the bench on which no one would sit. Groups of people stood waiting for the horse-drawn omnibus which could be seen approaching in the distance. In the centre of the picture a mother in a long black coat and a large black hat guided a dressed-up child to the nearer pavement. All this was suitably animated.

She stood for perhaps seven or eight minutes examining this image, unperturbed by the jostling passers-by who barely registered in her consciousness, although they were recognizably of the same genus as the tiny winter-clad people in the picture. When she turned away from the window she was vaguely disconcerted to see that there was no snow on the ground and that the sky was the colourless grey of an overcast April day. She could not have said why the picture held such fascination for her, but she recognized that it was the high point of a day which promised nothing more exciting. It was not merely that the scene was of Paris: Paris held no secrets for her. Her work involved brief but regular visits to her agency in the rue Soufflot. These too were of little consequence and led her to wonder where the legendary glamour of the literary scene was to be found. She was intimidated by the decisive young women with whom she had little in common; her work as a translator was satisfactory but it was largely routine, and in this connection she could hardly aspire to prominence. Once out of the office she marvelled at how little time had passed, leaving her free for the rest of the day.