‘Where are we going, Edward? Are we going to the Wallace Collection to see where Lord Powerscourt was shot?’
‘We are going to the Wallace Collection, Sarah,’ said Edward, as he led her up the drive, ‘but we are not going to the scene of the shooting. I want to take you to look at a painting on the second floor, if I may.’
They walked up the grand staircase where Powerscourt had been shot. They came to one of the smaller rooms on the first floor. High up on the wall by a window was a mythological painting about three feet square. In front of an Arcadian landscape with a brooding sky of dark clouds, it showed the Four Seasons, facing outwards, hand in hand in a stately dance. Autumn, at the rear of the painting, had dry leaves in her hair and represented Bacchus, the God of wine. To the right of Bacchus was Winter with her hair in a cloth to keep out the cold, then Spring, her hair braided like ears of corn, and Summer, linked to Spring on her left and Autumn on her right. The picture was framed on the right by a block of stone that might mark the site of someone’s grave and on the left by a statue showing the youthful and mature Bacchus with a garland. At the bottom edges of the painting two putti played with an hourglass each. The musical accompaniment was provided by Saturn, the god of time, playing on his lyre, and in the clouds above, Apollo, the sun god, drove his chariot across the sky to create the day.
‘It’s called A Dance to the Music of Time,’ said Edward, looking closely at Apollo’s companions in the clouds. ‘It’s by a Frenchman called Nicolas Poussin. He was always doing stuff like this,’ Edward went on airily, ‘mythological scenes, idealized landscapes, philosophical messages tied up with the poetry of Ovid or somebody like that. I think he painted some of them for a cardinal or some other grand fellow in Rome.’
Sarah was wondering why Edward had brought her here to see it. It was certainly beautiful but there must be a reason. ‘What does it mean?’ she said.
‘Well,’ said Edward, ‘originally it had to do with the myth of Jupiter’s gift of Bacchus, god of wine, to the world after the Seasons complained about the harshness of human life. It could mean lots of things. It could mean we should all be thankful not just for the gift of wine but for the stately order of the seasons which hold our lives in the pattern of their dance. I don’t think these Seasons are dancing very fast, you see. Time is going round at a fairly steady rate. The infants with the hourglasses, of course, represent the passing of time, the vanity of human aspirations, the fact that everything is going to end.’
‘You sound as if you think it’s a sad painting, Edward,’ said Sarah, taking his hand.
‘No, I don’t think it’s sad,’ he said, his eyes locked now on Saturn with his lyre. ‘These Seasons in a way are all trapped in their dance, like the characters in Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ whose happy melodist, like Saturn here, unwearied, is forever piping songs forever new. They could go faster but the painter won’t allow it. They could change places but Poussin won’t allow that either. If you were inside the circle, you wouldn’t be able to get out. Maybe, for the moments we look at the painting, we’re trapped too, trapped in the contemplation of our own mortality.’
‘You’re sounding very philosophical today, Edward. Do you think it’s the influence of Treasure Island?’
‘No,’ said Edward laughing. ‘It just made me think about time and time passing, Sarah. What’s happening over there in the square also makes you think of time passing. You can’t help it.’ You can’t put it off much longer, Edward said to himself. ‘You think time doesn’t affect you. People talk about having all the time in the world. They don’t. We don’t. It’s going away from us constantly, like the sand in those hourglasses. Eventually time, our time, quite literally, is going to run out.’
Suddenly Sarah thought she understood what was going on, the visit to the painting, the philosophical musings, the digressions into the history of art.
‘So, you see, Sarah,’ Edward went on, unaware that he had been rumbled, ‘I have been thinking that sometimes we must seize time in the way people talk about seizing the day. We can’t put things off till another day or week or month. Delay is futile. We must grasp the moment. Sarah, will you marry me?’
The question came on Sarah very unexpectedly. She knew it was coming but she hadn’t expected it to pop out so suddenly. Maybe Edward hadn’t intended it either. Maybe Time had seized Edward rather than the other way round. She squeezed his hand very tight.
‘Of course I’ll marry you, Edward,’ she said. ‘What took you so long? I thought you’d never ask.’
Lady Lucy was keeping watch in the hour before midnight. The nurse had tiptoed out of the room, saying she would be waiting outside on the stairs. This, Lady Lucy realized, was the first time she had been alone with Francis since he was shot. All day she had been seeing the same scene. She was at a funeral. She was burying another husband. Like the first one, this funeral had an honour guard of military colleagues, jackets pressed, trousers immaculate, clouds and sky visible in the burnished toecaps of their boots, polished swords raised in unison to give the last salute. By the graveside she had a child holding each of her hands as if their hearts would break. The Dead March from Handel’s Saul echoed round her head to accompany these pictures. She remembered the military bands playing it as Victoria’s funeral cortege had made its melancholy way through the streets of a mourning London.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her husband’s hand. She remembered him suddenly at the National Gallery where he had taken her on their first outing and she had talked about Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. She remembered him talking to the twins only the week before, walking them in his arms up and down the drawing room, that soft voice telling the latest of his children about the house he came from in Ireland, and the blue colour of the mountains and the great fountain at the bottom of the steps. She started to cry. She hadn’t let herself cry very much in case it upset the children but now there was nobody here, only Francis, and he couldn’t hear and he couldn’t see and she might never hear his voice again. She was racked by sobs, wondering if he knew how much she loved him, how happy he had made her, how her whole life with him had been illuminated by the power of his love for her.
‘Oh Francis,’ she whispered to him, ‘my poor darling. I love you so much. Please come back. I can’t bear it when you’re not here.’ Suddenly she remembered saying ‘Please come back’ to him before, at that terrible early morning parting at the railway station when he went off to the Boer War. Day after day, she remembered, there had been notices of the fallen in the newspapers, columns of names of the dead that seemed to grow longer every month. But Francis had survived all that. He had come home without a scratch. Now this investigation into an Inn of Court had left him virtually dead. She made a resolution there at a quarter to midnight on the fourth day of her husband’s illness. When he was better she was going to take him away somewhere warm, Amalfi perhaps or Positano, where they could look at the spectacular views and the deep blue sea. She would give him a beaker full of the warm south, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim. And when he was better, not before, she was going to ask him to give up investigating for ever. No more heaps of masonry falling on him in cathedral naves. No more maniacs tracking him through the elegant galleries of the Wallace Collection. No more desperate races down the mountain roads of Corsica with the bullets whining off the rocks. No more butchered bodies dumped in the fountains of Perugia. Nobody could be expected to put up with all that any more. She certainly couldn’t. Then, as she looked at that beloved face, which seemed now to be turning slightly grey, she started weeping uncontrollably again. For she might never have the chance to take Francis off to the Italian sunshine and the winding streets of Positano. He might be dead before she had the chance to take him there. He might die tomorrow. He might die tonight.