The Swan Thieves

She watches Olivier paint.

They are standing on the beach in the afternoon light, and he has begun a second canvas: one for morning, one for afternoon. He is painting the cliffs and two large gray rowboats the fishermen have pulled far up onshore, their oars stowed inside, the nets and cork floats catching an elusive sun. He sketches first with burnt umber on the primed canvas, and then begins to mass in the cliffs with more umber, with blue, a shadowy gray-green. She wants to suggest that he lighten his palette, as her teacher once told her; she wonders why this scene of shifting lights and sky looks to Olivier so somber underneath. But she believes that neither his work nor his life can change much now. She stands in silence beside him, about to set up her own work, her folding stool and portable wooden easel--delaying, observing. She wears a thin wool dress against the chill in the afternoon's brightness, and over that a heavier wool jacket. The breeze catches at her skirt, the ribbons of her bonnet. She watches him bring the churning water partly to life. But why doesn't he put more light into it?

She turns away and buttons her smock over her clothes, arranges her canvas, unfolding the clever wooden stool. She stands before the easel as he does, instead of sitting, digging her boot heels in among the pebbles. She tries to forget his figure not far away, his silver head bowed over the work, his back upright. Her own canvas is already washed a pale gray; she has chosen this one for afternoon light. She puts in aquamarine, a heavy smudge on her palette, cadmium red for the poppies on the cliffs to the far left and right, her favorite flowers.

Now she gives herself thirty minutes by the watch on her chain, squints, holds the brush as lightly as she can, painting with wrist and forearm, quick strokes. The water is rose-colored, blue-green, the sky nearly colorless, the stones of the beach are rosy and gray, the foam at the edge of the waves is beige. She paints in Olivier's dark-suited form, his white hair, but as if he stands at a great distance, a minor figure on the strand. She touches the cliffs with raw umber, then green, then with the red specks of poppies. There are white flowers as well, and smaller yellow ones--she can see the cliff both up close and far off.

Her thirty minutes are gone.

Olivier turns, as if he understands that her first pass over the canvas is finished. She sees that he is still working slowly across an expanse of water, has not yet reached the boats again or even the cliffs. It will be a careful piece, controlled and even beautiful, and it will take days. He steps near to see her canvas. She stands staring at it with him, feeling his elbow brush her shoulder. She is conscious of her skill, as seen through his eyes, and of the painting's flaws: it is alive, moving, but too rough for even her taste, an experiment that fails. She wants him to be silent, and to her relief he doesn't interrupt the rumble of the waves on the heavy gravel, the wash of stones rolled over and out to sea. Instead he nods, looks down at her. His eyes are permanently reddened, a little loose around the edges. At that moment, she would not trade his presence for anything in the world, simply because he is so much closer to the edge of it than she is. He understands her.

That evening they eat with the other guests, sitting across from each other, passing the dishes of sauce or little mushrooms. The landlady, serving veal to Olivier, says that a gentleman has come by that afternoon to ask if she had a famous painter there, a friend of his from Paris; he left no card. Is Monsieur Vignot famous? she asks. Olivier laughs and shakes his head. Plenty of famous painters have worked in etretat, but he is hardly one of them, he says. Beatrice drinks a glass of wine and regrets it. They sit in the main parlor, reading, with a mustached English guest who rustles the papers from London and clears his throat over something he sees there. Then she puts her book down and tries to write a second letter to Yves, without much success; her pen seems not to like the paper no matter how many times she dips and blots. The landlady's mandarin clock strikes ten, and Olivier rises to bow to her, smiles affectionately out of his wind-reddened eyes, seems about to kiss her hand but then does not.

When he has gone upstairs, she understands: he will never invite more from her. He will never visit her in private, will never propose that she visit him, will never make another move that a gentleman and relative should not. He will initiate nothing. The kiss in his studio was his first and last, as he promised; her kiss on the station platform was her own responsibility, as was their kiss on the beach. Both took him by surprise. He means this restraint as a gift, she is certain--a proof of his respect, his care. But the result is a cruel dilemma; whatever happens she must effect herself and live with later. Whatever they experience together will spring from her own desire, her comparative youth. She cannot imagine knocking on his door upstairs. He has left her a trail of bread crumbs, like the boy in the fairy tale.

Later, she hardly sleeps, in her white bed, watching the curtains move a little where she has left a window open to the menace of the night air, feeling the town around her, hearing the Channel maul the shale on the strand.