“Bad things? No. Why should I have?”
“You may find it difficult to believe, but, Vincent, when I kissed you yesterday, it was the first time I had ever kissed a man.”
“But why? Have you never been in love?”
“No.”
“What a pity.”
“Isn’t it?” She was silent for a moment. “You have loved other women, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Many of them?”
“No. Just . . . three.”
“And did they love you?”
“No, Margot, they didn’t.”
“But they must have.”
“I’ve always been unfortunate in love.”
Margot moved closer to him and rested her arm on his lap. She ran the fingers of her other hand over his face playfully, touching his high ridged, powerful nose, the full, open mouth, the hard, rounded chin. A curious shiver ran through her; she took her fingers away.
“How strong you are,” she murmured. “Everything about you; your arms and chin and beard. I’ve never known a man like you before.”
He cupped her face in his hands roughly. The love and excitement that throbbed there made it appealing.
“Do you like me a little?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes.”
“And will you kiss me?”
He kissed her.
“Please don’t think ill of me, Vincent. I couldn’t help myself. You see, I fell in love . . . with you . . . and I couldn’t keep away.”
“You fell in love with me? You really fell in love with me? But why?”
She leaned up and kissed him on the corner of the mouth. “That’s why,” she said.
They sat quietly. A little way off was the Cimetière des Paysans. For ages the peasants had been laid to rest in the very fields which they dug up when alive. Vincent was trying to say on his canvas what a simple thing death was, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf, just a bit of earth dug up, a wooden cross. The fields around, where the grass of the churchyard ended beyond the little wall, made a last line against the sky, like the horizon of the sea.
“Do you know anything about me, Vincent?” she asked softly.
“Very little.”
“Have they . . . has anyone told you . . . my age?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m thirty-nine. In a very few months I shall be forty. For the last five years I have been telling myself that if I did not love someone before I left my thirties, I should kill myself.”
“But it is easy to love, Margot.”
“Ah, you think so?’”
“Yes. It’s only being loved in return that is difficult.”
“No. In Nuenen it is very hard. For over twenty years I have wanted desperately to love someone. And I never have been able to.”
“Never?”
She glanced away. “Once . . . when I was a girl . . . I liked a boy.”
“Yes?”
“He was a Catholic. They drove him away.”
“They?”
“My mother and sisters.”
She rose to her knees in the deep loam of the field, soiling her pretty white dress. She placed both elbows on his thighs and rested her face in her hands. His knees touched her sides, gently.
“A woman’s life is empty if she has no love to fill it, Vincent.”
“I know.”
“Every morning, when I awakened, I said to myself, ‘Today, surely, I shall find someone to love! Other women do, so why shouldn’t I?’ Then night would come and I would be alone and miserable. An endless row of empty days, Vincent. I have nothing to do at home—we have servants—and every hour was filled up with longing for love. With each night I said to myself, ‘You might just as well have been dead today, for all that you have lived.’ I kept bolstering myself up with the thought that some day, somehow, a man must come along whom I could love. My birthdays passed, the thirty-seventh, and eighth, and ninth. I could not have faced forty without ever having loved. Then you came along, Vincent. Now I too have loved at last!”
It was a cry of triumph, as though she had gained a great victory. She leaned up, holding her mouth to be kissed. He stroked her soft hair back from her ears. She flung her arms about his neck and kissed him in a thousand wandering nibbles. Sitting there on his little painter’s stool, his palette at his side, and the Cimetière des Paysans just in front, holding the kneeling woman close to him, and engulfed in the flow of her welled-up passion, Vincent felt for the first time in his life the luscious, healing balm of a woman’s outpoured love. And he trembled, for he knew that he was on sacred ground.
Margot sat on the earth between his legs, her head back on his knee. There was colour in her cheeks and lustre in her eyes; she was breathing deeply and with effort. In the flush of her love she looked not more than thirty. Vincent, unable to feel anything at all, ran his fingers over the soft skin of her face until she clasped his hand, kissed it, and held the palm against her burning cheek. After a time she spoke.
“I know that you don’t love me,” she said quietly. “That would be asking too much. I only prayed to God to let me fall in love. I never even dreamed it would be possible for anyone to love me. It’s loving that’s important, isn’t it, Vincent, not being loved.”
Vincent thought of Ursula and Kay. “Yes,” he replied.
She rubbed the back of her head against his knee, looking up at the blue sky. “And you’ll let me come with you? If you don’t want to talk, I’ll just sit by quietly and never say a word. Only let me be near you; I promise not to disturb you or interfere with your work.”
“Of course you can come. But tell me, Margot, if there were no men in Nuenen, why didn’t you go away? At least for a visit? Didn’t you have the money?”
“Oh, yes, I have plenty of money. My grandfather left me a good income.”
“Then why didn’t you go to Amsterdam or The Hague? You would have met some interesting men.”
“They didn’t want me to.”
“None of your sisters are married, are they?”
“No, dear, all five of us are single.”
A flash of pain went through him. It was the first time a woman had ever called him dear. He had known before how miserable it was to love and not be loved in return, but he had never suspected the utter sweetness of having a good woman love him with the whole of her being. He had looked upon Margot’s love for him as a sort of curious accident to which he was no party. That one, simple word, spoken so quietly and fondly by Margot, changed his entire mental state. He gathered Margot to him and held her quivering body against his.
“Vincent, Vincent,” she murmured, “I love you so.”
“How queer that sounds, to hear you say you love me so.”
“I don’t mind now that I’ve had to go all these years without love. You were worth waiting for, my very own dear. In all my dreams of love I never imagined that I could feel about anyone the way I do about you.”
“I love you too, Margot,” he said.
She drew away from him slightly. “You don’t have to say that, Vincent. Maybe after a while you will come to like me a little. But now all I ask is that you let me love you!”
She slipped out of his arms, put his coatto one side, and sat down. “Go to work, dear,” she said. “I must not get in your way. And I love to watch you paint.”
5
NEARLY EVERY DAY Margot accompanied him when he went out to paint. Oftentimes he would walk ten kilometres to reach the exact spot on the heath that he wanted to work with, and they would both arrive tired and exhausted by the heat. But Margot never complained. The woman had undergone a startling metamorphosis. Her hair, which had been a mouse brown, took on a live blonde tint. Her lips had been thin and parched; now her mouth went full and red. Her skin had been dry and almost wrinkled; now it was smooth and soft and warm. Her eyes seemed to grow larger, her breasts swelled out, her voice took on a new lilt, and her step became strong and vigorous. Love had opened some strange spring within her, and she was constantly being bathed in its elixir of love. She brought surprise lunches to please him, sent to Paris for some prints that he had mentioned with admiration, and never intruded on his work. When he painted, she sat perfectly still at his side, bathing in the same luxuriant passion that he flung at his canvases.