“Speaking of which,” Ruth looked over at Beauvoir, “Peter, do you have a piece of paper? I feel a poem coming on. Now, do you think it’s too much to put the words ‘asshole’ and ‘shithead’ in the same sentence?”
Beauvoir winced.
“Just close your eyes and think of England,” Ruth advised Beauvoir, who had actually been thinking of her English.
Gamache walked over to Peter, who continued to stare at his wife’s works.
“How are you?”
“You mean, do I want to take a razor to those and slash them to bits, then burn them?”
“Something like that.”
It was a conversation they’d had before, as it became clear that Peter might soon have to cede his place as the best artist in the family, in the village, in the province, to his wife. Peter had struggled with it, not always successfully.
“I couldn’t hold her back even if I tried,” said Peter. “And I don’t want to try.”
“There’s a difference between holding back and actively supporting.”
“These are so good even I can’t deny it anymore,” admitted Peter. “She amazes me.”
Both men looked over at the plump little woman looking anxiously at her friends, apparently unaware of the masterpieces she’d created.
“Are you working on something?” Gamache nodded toward the closed door to Peter’s studio.
“Always am. It’s a log.”
“A log?” It was hard to make that sound brilliant. Peter Morrow was one of the most successful artists in the country and he’d gotten there by taking mundane, everyday objects and painting them in excruciating detail. So that they were no longer even recognizable as the object they were. He zoomed in close, then magnified a section, and painted that.
His works looked abstract. It gave Peter huge satisfaction to know they weren’t. They were reality in the extreme. So real no one recognized them. And now it was the log’s turn. He’d picked it up off the pile beside their fireplace and it was waiting for him in his studio.
The desserts were served, coffee and cognac poured; people wandered about, Gabri played the piano, Gamache kept being drawn to the paintings. Particularly the one of the unknown woman. Looking back. Clara joined him.
“My God, Clara, they’re the best works of art ever produced by anyone, anywhere.”
“Do you mean it?” she asked in mock earnestness.
He smiled. “They are brilliant, you know. You have nothing to be afraid of.”
“If that was true I’d have no art.”
Gamache nodded toward the painting he’d been staring at. “Who is she?”
“Oh, just someone I know.”
Gamache waited, but Clara was uncharacteristically closed, and he decided it really didn’t matter. She wandered off and Gamache continued to stare. And as he did so the portrait changed. Or perhaps, he thought, it was a trick of the uncertain light. But the more he stared the more he got the sense Clara had put something else in the painting. Where Ruth’s was of an embittered woman finding hope, this portrait also held the unexpected.
A happy woman seeing in the near and middle distance things that pleased and comforted her. But her eyes seemed to just be focusing on, registering, something else. Something far off. But heading her way.
Gamache sipped his cognac and watched. And gradually it came to him what she was just beginning to feel.
Fear.