Wild Heart (40 page)

Heaven.

"I'm finished," her mother-in-law announced, standing up and laying brush and palette on her chair. "For now." She picked up a rag to wipe her hands and walked over to Michael's side. "Oh, that's stunning." She leaned against him and put her arm around his shoulders, bending close to peer at his painting.
Mother and son,
thought Sydney. How beautiful they looked together. Elizabeth wore a paint-spattered smock over her violet gown, and a tartan scarf to keep her hair from blowing in her eyes. In the afternoon sun she looked her age, forty-five or so, Sydney reckoned; but sometimes, by candlelight or flattering gaslight, she looked like a girl.

Michael gave her waist a squeeze, then stood up to look at her painting. "Oh, it's beautiful," he exclaimed, earnest and delighted. "Yours is much better than mine."

"Oh, no, yours is."

"No, it's not." He laughed at the idea.

"Bring them both over here and let us judge," Lord Auldearn suggested—foolhardily, in Sydney's opinion; she wanted no part of this contest. "Call me Terence," her father-in-law had invited on the morning of her wedding, and she had thanked him and said she would. So far, though, she hadn't. Couldn't.
Terence"!
No, no, no; impossible. So far she was calling him nothing at all.

They all had chairs on the quarterdeck, the Winters and the MacNeils. Lord Auldearn had reserved them for the whole voyage on the first day out, and the chairs were unquestionably the best situated and the most deluxe on the ship. How fortunate, Sydney often considered, that she liked her two families so much, the old one and the new one. It wasn't every bride who would happily share her honeymoon with her husband and seven other people.

It took some more urging, but presently Michael and his mother brought their paintings over to his father's deck chair. Auldearn looked and looked, but pronounced no judgment. Papa leaned over to peer at the canvases, hemming and humming, squinting through his pince-nez. Overcome with curiosity, Sydney made the ultimate sacrifice and got up to look, too.

They had both used oils—watercolors dried too fast in the breeze—but aside from that the two artists' depictions of the sea had nothing in common. A strong, confident line bissected Elizabeth's canvas where dark water met light sky, blue on blue. The painting was quietly dramatic and very pleasing to the eye. She had captured the tran-quility of the sunny, lazy day and had avoided monotony by the addition of whitecaps and clouds and imaginary gulls. It was a lovely painting.

Michael's painting had no frame, no visual landmark like sky or horizon to orient the viewer; he had painted the ocean and nothing else. The result ought to have been chaotic, a great blue muddle, but it wasn't. No one could mistake the energetic layerings and shadings of blue and green, umber, yellow, ochre, and ultramarine for anything but the moody, complicated sea. Where he had piled on paint in thick coats, layer after layer, he had even created a third dimension. Somehow the painting satisfied even as it unsettled.

"I teach art, you know," Elizabeth said mildly, perched on the edge of her husband's chair. She smiled, acknowledging what they were all thinking: there were still so many things they didn't know about each other. "Just a few students. They come to me—it's not an art school, nothing like that."

"They come to her
after
art school," Auldearn put in gruffly. "Don't be so modest, Lizzy."

She gave his cheek a brush with the back of her hand, absently affectionate. "I could teach you, Michael, but I'm afraid."

"Afraid? Why?"

"Your work has no discipline at all, none. It's pure imagination. I'm afraid I'd refine it. You'd learn the rules and lose the directness and emotion that makes your work unique. It's not a childlike quality. I've seen children paint with this much abandon, but not with this depth."

It was true, Sydney thought, with mounting excitement. Michael seemed to be
inside
the waves, inside
all
his paintings, because he had never been taught to take himself out of them. What if his talent was truly special? What if he could be a
real
artist, recognized for it, satisfied by it? She wanted it for him, she realized. It fit. She believed it was his calling.

"Some
discipline, though," his father offered tentatively, deferring to the expert. "Don't you think, Lizzy?"

"Perhaps, but only a little. One would have to be so careful. Uninhibitedness is good, but not if it prevents an artist from showing us his vision. That's what rules are for, ideally—to make it easier for you to communicate with us. On the other hand, there's a danger that learning the rules might blur your vision, Michael. Cloud it. That's what frightens me."

"But you could teach me," he said cheerfully.

"No—but there's someone at the University of Edinburgh I know and trust."

"Frost?" asked Auldearn.

She nodded. "He would be careful. Respectful. Yes, I'd trust him."

Sydney's father took the unlit pipe out of his mouth. "The Art Institute in Chicago," he mentioned, "is one of the finest schools in the world."

Sydney could have kissed him.

"Yes, it is," Elizabeth agreed, nodding vehemently. "Indeed it is. Michael can study wherever he likes. Or nowhere."

There was a thoughtful pause.

"You know," Papa spoke up again, "these two paintings would make the perfect appendix to a paper I'm working on about human evolution."

Nobody actually groaned, but there was a subtle sagging all around.

"But then again, maybe not," he corrected himself, oblivious. "We could say Michael's painting, because it's 'wild,' is purely the product of heredity—pure nature, in other words—and Lady Auldearn's, the product of environment. Teaching."

"But my mother was an artist," Elizabeth protested. "Which means I must have acquired some of my talent, such as it is, from her. Heredity."

"Precisely," Papa cried, delighted. "And Michael lived in the wild all those years, not in a vacuum. In a sense, the wilderness was his school, as surely as . . ."

"The Royal Academy."

"The Royal Academy was yours. And who's to say which influence, even if you could separate them, produces a better artist in the end? Not I," Papa demurred.

"Not I," everyone echoed.

Not long after that, the MacNeils gathered up their belongings and excused themselves, saying they wanted to rest before dinner. They had all gotten so lazy; Sydney realized it when nobody even thought of responding, "Rest from
what?"

Her father rose with them, but hung back for a moment, letting them go ahead. He had been waiting to light his pipe out of deference to Elizabeth. He fired it up now, and the smoke and his thin white hair blew westward in a stream, duplicating in miniature the ship's smokestack overhead. "Not an art critic," he uttered, reverting to his laconic classroom style. "Wouldn't know the first thing about it. Just going on feel. Instinct, hm? Personal preference, too. Wouldn't want this repeated."

"What, Papa?" Sydney asked, mystified.

"What I said about the better artist. Hm?" He pointed with one discreet finger at Michael's canvas drying on top of a vacated deck chair. "This is better. Not technically." He screwed up his face. "Spiritually? Wrong word.
Heart,"
he realized, sounding surprised. "That's it. More heart. Don't tell your mother, hm?" He lifted his eyebrows con-spiratorially, flashed his sweet smile, and tottered away.

Michael stared thoughtfully after him. What an interesting afternoon this had been. Sydney slipped her hand through his arm and they wandered over to the railing. "Sunfall," he told her, pointing to the horizon. "That's what I used to call it, in my mind. Before I knew the right word."

"Sunfall." She smiled up at him, and the reddish sunset lit sparks in her pretty hair. Fox hair. Their deck was deserted; he put his arm around her waist, inside her shawl, and she put hers inside his jacket. He had been wanting to touch her all afternoon.

"I'm so full, Sydney."

"Full?"

He looked out across the sparkling, darkening water and thought that the depth and the vastness of it were (ike his soul right now, his heart. "I'm full," he repealed; it was as close as he could come. "And I've come around in a circle."

"What do you mean?" She leaned against him, resting her cheek on his shoulder.

"I can remember the other ship. And I remember this ocean. It took me from my home when I was a child, and now it's taking me back."

"Home," she said softly.

"Are you sad?"

"No! Why would I be?"

"Because I'm going to my home, but you're leaving yours. We don't know for how long."

"Oh, well, I see you're not as smart as I thought you were."

"What? I'm not?"

"No." She glanced behind them, then stuck her fingers inside his belt and pulled him closer. Very daring—they were almost embracing. "There's no such thing as leaving home or going home anymore."

"There's not?"

She shook her head. Using her hat for a shield, she kissed him, just a quick, soft touch of her lips on his, but it stirred him. "Home is right here, silly," she whispered. "Wherever we are."

"Ah." Of course. "As long as we're together, we're home."

"That's it."

Beneath their feet, the ship's bow carved through the water like a sharp knife, cutting into the future. The past was its glittering white wake, and he and Sydney teetered above it on the thin line of the present. It should have been frightening—everything before them was unknown. It would have frightened the lost man.

But Michael was found. And he was already home.