Extract: The Winter Guest by Karen Swan
Paris
3 August 1962
The sun was climbing quickly now and the morning haze burning off; hard-edged shadows criss-crossed on the pavements as she walked, snatched conversations coming to her ear and falling away again, the low rumble of traffic a background noise filling her head. On the water, the boats motored past, tourists sitting on plastic bucket seats, cameras around their necks as they gazed at the great landmarks: Notre-Dame, the Tour Eiffel, the Louvre, the Ile de la Cité. And at her. She wondered briefly what they saw as their eyes lingered on her long hair fluttering in the light breeze, her short skirt flashing tanned legs. Did they think her a Parisian? Did she fit here?
The tip of the Eiffel Tower was beginning to probe above the grey rooftops that stretched ahead of her, and she decided to head for it as she walked along the Quai d’Orsay and past the old railway terminus. She hardly dared admit to anyone that the wife of the Swiss ambassador to Paris had never been up the city’s most famous monument. But as she got to the Pont de l’Alma, she looked across the water and saw the brutalist hulk of the Palais de Tokyo. She stopped, remembering Eva’s remarks about the travelling Sargent exhibition.
A glance at her watch told her it was only eleven twenty, the day still stretching ahead of her like a promise. She had time to drop in there first, didn’t she? It was a shame to go indoors and remove herself from this fine day, but it would be worse still to miss the chance of seeing one of her favourite paintings while it was on loan here. She could just visit the one painting and be on her way again.
She crossed the river and headed for the concrete monolith, feeling enlivened now she had a destination. It was like a modernist Acropolis, and people looked no bigger than ants as they moved amongst the vast, towering columns.
She bought a ticket and ran up the steps, wandering through the stripped-back concrete halls to the salon that held the Sargent masterpieces. It felt like the wrong space entirely for a Sargent to be hanging– he had painted for Victorian parlours and ballrooms, for rooms filled with velvet cushions and silk rugs – and yet, as she rounded a corner and saw from a distance the piece she had been looking for, the background faded away. It didn’t matter at all where it was hanging, she could see only the richness of the work on the canvas: the masterful brushwork, the exquisite layering of whites which somehow became colours as they were set against themselves, cast as greys, blues, peach, violet, lime . . . The central figure was enigmatic, her face all but obscured by her deep hood, but there was the artist’s characteristic rendering of feminine delicacy in her arms as she held up the brim.
It was even more beautiful than Lise had anticipated. She held her breath as she scanned it, taking in the smaller details as her eyes adapted. She loved the proportions Sargent had chosen, the entire upper third, almost half, of the canvas dedicated to pure empty space, to more white that wasn’t white . . .
Lise came back to herself, the painting falling away from her again, as her intuition pricked and she became aware of a weight on her back. Not a physical load, but . . . a heat, almost.
It was a sensation she already knew, she realized, as she turned slowly to find a blue gaze fixed on her. She caught her breath as the man rose from the bench and walked over.
