PART THREE: your heart wants to laugh; mine wants to cry (Teddy/Jean)
1. À La Claire Fontaine
How long has it been now, that she's loved him? An hour, a day, a year, or eternity? She can barely remember a time when she was not in love with him, when the thought of him has not excited her passions, has not made her heart beat faster. How can she remember a time when she was not herself?
She is leaving now. Her position at Marcia Blaine has not just been her vocation, it has been her lifeline. Now, her life is empty, for he is no longer a part of it. How can he be? He is married, and, besides, this school has been their world. Their love, renounced as it is, will not survive outside the sheltered confines of this institution.
No one is left here; her footsteps echo hollowly as she walks, defeated and betrayed, to the tram stop, clutching her possessions like an anchor. Numbly, she navigates her way home as though in a dream, and when she finally realises she is home, she cannot remember how she got there.
There is a nightingale singing in the oak tree outside her window, and she begins to cry. How can she go on without him?
She's loved him so long... and, though she might want to forget, she never will.
2. A Case of You
'Love is touching souls.'
She told him that, once upon a time, and he knows that it is true. How else can this be explained? She still possesses him, obsesses him... whenever he paints, whatever he paints, resembles her in a way quite unfathomable to him.
He thinks of her always; her name, her face, her scent an ever-present companion. He wants her still, after six years of loving her and living without her. He doesn't know why he loves her. Perhaps it is her supreme and enchanting disregard for anything that does not conform to her lifestyle; perhaps it is her sheer hypocrisy – going to church (any church, as long as it is not Catholic) faithfully and then falling into bed with Gordon Lowther (a thought that always makes him clench his fists. Why Gordon and not he? He often tries to forget the fact that he is married; that he is Catholic – two things that, despite her love for him, she cannot forget even if he can). But he loves her. She is a part of him now, emerging willy-nilly the more he tries to forget her. It's hard to do that when everywhere he looks, there she is.
3. To His Coy Mistress
The years they do not have together are not enough for him to love her. He wants to linger in her eyes, their deep depths unfathomable and mysterious; the gentle curves of her lips enrapturing him. He can never paint her the way she deserves to be painted, and even the hours she might have spent posing for him would never have been enough to cure the endless fascination she holds for him.
He wishes they might have had their own tiny island, a world apart from everything they had known. And time, he wishes they might have had time to learn each other, to love each other. Why does he remain so consistently in love with her? He knows they have no future; they never have. But still, he hopes against hope that one day they might have world enough and time.
4. Almost Lover
She goes to his studio for the first and last time a year after her dismissal, a month after Sandy leaves Edinburgh. The second War has begun, and the bouquet of flowers she brings for Teddy's wife seem to bring a false cheeriness to the loud room. Six children run wild on the lower floors of the house, so loud she cannot bear it.
He sees her discomfort, always alert to every shift in her emotion, and brings the defeated, melancholy woman up to his studio. It is quiet there, quiet and bright with the light that streams through open windows. She wants to shy away, feeling safer in the shadows, but he takes her hand and draws her out.
Portraits surround her, but she cannot take them in; faces merge into each other, colours combine as he pulls her closer, desperate to possess her, at long last. Footsteps on the stairs signal the arrival of his wife, and she reluctantly frees herself from his ever-tightening embrace. She turns away from him, facing Mrs. Lloyd with a stoicism that is so particular to martyrs. She feels him staring at her, hears his silent plea for her to stay... but she follows Mrs. Lloyd down the stairs, leaving him forever while her heart breaks.
