The Importance of Being Seven Read Free

he had taken this badly.
    ‘But I want to be here to help you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you like what I do for you?’
    She had reached out to embrace him, dropping the towel. Matthew shivered with delight. ‘Of course I do, my darling,’ she whispered. ‘Of course I do. You do whatever you like.’
    She realised how fortunate she was. Many women had husbands who were not in the least attentive – husbands who never ran their wives’ baths, nor made their breakfast, nor sent roses to the flat during the day, as Matthew often did. She was so lucky, but of course one needed a bit of space in a marriage, and she knew that sooner or later she would have to talk to Matthew about that. The problem, though, was that people often misunderstood a mention of space, and interpreted it as a suggestion to go away.

3. At Big Lou’s
     
    Elspeth need not have worried; of course Matthew understood all about space within a marriage and it was for this reason that he had not suggested that Elspeth help in the gallery. It would be better, he thought, for each of them to have a separate career: ‘I’ve seen too many couples come unstuck because they were working together,’ he said to Angus Lordie. He made this remark without really thinking, and even as he said it he realised that he could not think of a single marriage in which that had happened. On the contrary – all the marriages of that sort that he had seen were rather successful.
    ‘Or perhaps not,’ he added lamely.
    Angus had nodded wisely at Matthew’s original observation, and had not really heard the retraction. He knew very little about this as he had never been sufficiently stuck to become unstuck. It was a mystery to him how anybody lived with anybody else let alone worked with them too, and he could imagine nothing worse than having another person in his studio, painting her own paintings while he worked on his. He found that painting required completesilence – an artistic stillness – and the muse, fickle as she was at the best of times, would surely retreat in a huff if she had to contend with two painters in the same studio.
    ‘So I’m not going to ask Elspeth to help me in the gallery,’ Matthew went on. ‘I couldn’t bear it if we disagreed.’
    ‘That girl you had,’ said Angus. ‘Pat Macgregor. Did you disagree with her at all?’
    Matthew looked over Angus Lordie’s shoulder. They were sitting in Big Lou’s coffee house during this conversation and he was watching Big Lou wiping the stainless-steel counter with her cloth, or cloot as she called it. Had he seen eye to eye with Pat on matters artistic? He thought that he had, but then that was before he knew very much about anything, and he had probably not been in a position to challenge her views. It would be different now; Matthew had opinions, and some knowledge of art to back them up. He watched Big Lou at work. She was a handsome woman, in a big-boned, rather rural sort of way (Big Lou, of course, came from Arbroath, a part of Scotland noted for its handsome people). Now, as she polished away at the counter, a seemingly Sisyphean task, he saw her as she might appear in a painting by Bonnard, or possibly Vuillard.
    Those artists were exponents of intimism, in which small domestic scenes were captured and placed at the heart of a painting: interiors showing a woman sewing, or arranging flowers; a girl picking up a soup spoon at a table; a woman lying in the bath. Bonnard would have loved Big Lou, and had he been there would have depicted her in the act of polishing, her head down, intent on her task. And he would have caught the sun that filtered in through the window – the cold, Edinburgh sun, so unlike the light that he found in the south of France – and the colour of her dress, and the faded apron that she had tied carelessly about her waist. Bonnard would have captured all that and in so doing would have portrayed Big Lou in all her essential Arbroathheit.
    ‘No,’ Matthew said to