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den and a library. Not that she had a lot of spare time, especially with
the baby, and she liked to help in the nursery, taking care of the roses or
enjoying the conversation of green thumbs of all ages and persuasions.
She had learnt to drive; a different woman indeed behind the wheel of
the big Ford Custom ute. But there remained that part of herself, the
pre-Raphaelite side, the failed painter, the admirer of Streeton, the
lover of baroque music and Debussy and Fauré, the lute player, the
keen poetry reader, from Herbert to Follain, the girl who fancied she
could have been Alec Hope’s daughter. Sure her present state of mind
and lifestyle were less morbid and just as aesthetic as that other self;
she could still detect more potential vulgarity in what she was fifteen
or twenty years ago than in what she was now, but something had to be
preserved, something that did not belong to herself alone, a territory
of the imagination, a symbolic estate, that clearing in the wilderness
of reality which Jacques had once found perfectly embodied in Sydney
Long’s painting The Music Lesson.
She sat in a large Indian wicker armchair, facing the baby’s
wicker cradle. Her eyes dropped to the printed page:
“Half of the land, conscious of love and grief,
Half of the sea, cold creatures of the foam,
Mermaids still haunt and sing among the coves.”
Was it not the marine half that was now missing? But that half —she
disagreed with the poet— had never been the colder of the two.
76
ELLE EST ADOSSÉE à la montagne, tournée vers l’océan
(où Jacques est entré en tremblant, où les vagues le
bousculent), elle est là, si mal éclairée, elle se doit toute
sa lumière, qui se fait peu à peu, par ses propres moyens, quand on l’a
trouvée dans son humble recoin, accrochée trop bas, en dessous d’une
toile énorme, séparée de la montagne par la distance de plusieurs heures
de marche, d’une grande fatigue et de ce feu allumé la veille par la combustion
spontanée des feuilles dans un creux et encore mal éteint, fumant
blanc après la rosée nocturne. N’étant ni de la mer, ni de la terre, elle
n’est pas étendue sur le flanc, comme sa sœur de Copenhague ; mais elle