"The Painting"

It always gave Molly a shock to realise how little the museum changed from year to year. Returning here was beginning to feel like going back in time, simply arriving at the worn front step again and again at the same instant in her life.

This year something was different, though. Through a glass partition she could see into the curator's office as she walked in, and she glanced in as she always did -- in the last few years the ancient guardian of this tiny museum had started to recognise her, and had even raised a gnarled hand in greeting. Today the office was tenanted by a much younger man. He looked up with a friendly but blank smile as she walked past. Molly avoided his eyes, shuffled past with her hands in her pockets. She felt irrationally upset. How could they change things? This was supposed to be immutable, unchanging, the anchor point in a constantly shifting universe. She wondered briefly and morbidly if the bushy-browed old curator was dead.

Her feet took her unbidden to the same painting she always came to see. Molly could almost see the floor worn into a subtle groove along this path, she had walked it so many times before. She kept her eyes down until the last minute, as always, relishing the shock of lifting them to the painting -- it was a sort of delicious pain, something that tore into her and released a bittersweet sort of rush, a longing for something never had and a sense of loss of something long had and cherished all rolled into one. But this time she wasn't alone here, as usual. Her eyes, still downcast, met a pair of paint-splattered sneakers, and then travelled upwards along a none-too-clean orange overall to meet the quizzical glance of a young man leaning against the wall.

They stood looking at one another for a moment or two.

"What are you doing?" Molly blurted at last, when the silence stretched into being acutely uncomfortable.

He shrugged, apparently not finding the question in the least bit disconcerting.

"It's going into storage," he said easily, tossing his head in the direction of Molly's painting.

"Storage?" she echoed. The word was meaningless. This painting had to hang here, right here, or else the world would fly apart and Molly Cameron would no longer know who she was or what ideals she lived her life by.

"Yeah," said the young workman lightly. "Into the back room."

"Why?" Molly said, and to her chagrin felt tears gather in her eyes. She slid her gaze from the young man's face and on to the painting, but discovered that it was blurred and indistinct through the tears. She had been coming here since she was very young, to worship at this shrine; she knew every delicate detail of the painting, and yet now she could not quite see it clearly, and could not remember it.

"Search me," the young man said after a beat of silence.

He was distantly friendly, willing to wait until she had had her gawk to get on with the job. But get on with it he would, and Molly found herself hating him for it.

"Don't you have anything else to do?" Molly asked, nastily for her, knuckling her eyes. A few moments ago he was nothing to her, something she barely registered, did not even know was there. Now, all of a sudden, she found niggling small things about him to pin a sense of dislike on. The single earring which had flashed from beneath the lanky dirty‚blond hair hanging around his face, the shifty cast to his features that transformed the easy half‚smile he wore into almost a smirk...

"Eh?" this unexpected enemy said, sounding genuinely surprised. Then he seemed to take in her damp eyes, the clenched hands, the glance at the painting. "You like this one, don't you? Don't be upset -- they kinda change them round every so often, I'm sure it'll be right out again before you know it."

"But not there," Molly whispered. "It's been hanging there, just so, for years. For years! Even if they put it back, it'll be somewhere else...It'll be different. It means..."

"What?" he said. He was intrigued; this reaction to what seemed to be a relatively minor incident was wildly too strong.

Molly must have been radiating her distress, because in the next pause, while she fought to gain control of her breath, they were joined by the new curator, who approached wanting to know if there was a problem.

"You can't take it away," Molly said, clutching at his sleeve, at his authority.

He freed his arm with some distaste. "Madam," he said, with a commendable effort at not allowing that distaste to creep into his voice, "we do need to rotate our stock occasionally, it gives the place a facelift -- we can't just stay static forever..."

"But it's a museum. Museums preserve..."

"We thought we would use this gallery for an Impressionistic exhibition. We do have in our possession a genuine Manet..."

"But this is genuine. It's the only real thing you have..."

The curator stared at the offending painting with a jaundiced eye. "That?" he said. "That, Madam, is a certified fake."

The breath went out of Molly in a long sigh. "Fake?"

"It was originally supposed to be a genuine Luckenberg, but we've had it valued for insurance, and it's undoubtedly a fake."

"Who's Luckenberg?"

The curator stared at her loftily. "Lord Henry Luckenberg? He painted the landscape around here a lot, and an occasional portrait. That's why this painting was thought to be so rare. It's not his usual subject matter. But the lady was thought to have been Matilda, his bride -- she drowned after they'd been married for less than a fortnight, in Reedmere. But it's not Luckenberg at all."

"Does that matter?"

"What?"

Molly and the curator stared at each other in blank incomprehension of each other's worlds. It was left to the young workman to bridge the silence. The painting had been just a painting to him, a load -- something to be removed from this wall, taken into the storage area, and dumped there. Now he was looking at it and seeing it properly for the first time: a young woman veiled in white, with her eyes glowing blue and joyous behind the gauze, extending a fragile, pale hand towards that person whom she loved with all her being and who waited just outside the frame ready to receive her.

"That's not fake," the young man said abruptly.

Both Molly and the curator turned towards him, but he seemed to be oblivious of them. He stretched out a hand so that his fingers almost touched those of the young bride, and for a moment it seemed that her eyes were focused on him alone. "God," he said, "to have someone look at you like that. To know that it's possible. That's not fake. That's the realest thing in the world." Even as Molly watched, he began taking on the stretched, tense look she knew so well after watching it on her own face every morning for years when she looked into the mirror in the morning. He had gone from an unknown stranger to being the face of an unexpected enemy; now he was metamorphosing again, into a fellow sacrifice on an all‚too‚familiar altar.

"It's a painting," snapped the curator.

"It's a vow," said Molly. The young man turned to her, his own eyes too bright, nodding.

"You," said the curator suddenly, pointing at Molly. "I've seen you here before, haven't I?"

"I come every year," Molly said.

"Every year?"

Molly did not want to explain. This was hers, hers, and nobody else in the world had the right to know it. Not even the man with the power to take it from her, the petty autocrat glowering at her with his foot beating an impatient tattoo on the polished wooden floor. Especially not him. But then she glanced at the young workman, and something in the eyes of the youth she had come close to hating a moment ago gave her strength. Perhaps he was already lost. But maybe it was not yet too late...

"Today would have been my wedding anniversary," Molly said, very softly, so that both men instinctively bent forward to hear. "My... forty-eighth anniversary, as it happens. I come here every year on what would have been my wedding day... to find out why I couldn't marry Willie."

The curator was bristling again but the young workman was nodding as understanding dawned.

"You see," she said, "I could not do that." Her hand lifted briefly, helplessly, towards the painting and then dropped back to her side. "I could not look at him like that. I could not feel that. And if I could not do it on my wedding day... then I could never...." She wiped at her eyes again. "Today would have been my wedding anniversary," she said again, the words dying into a whisper, settling on the painting like a fine dust

She looked up at the painting again, as though hypnotised by it. The loving eyes on the canvas were both a blessing on what she had sacrificed -- renouncing what might have been less than perfect and holding out for that slice of heaven which the painting-bride promised could exist -- and a never-ending reproach which stretched through her lonely years, for letting go of something which might have given her an arguably imperfect, possibly flawed, but human happiness. The painting had been a riddle, and Molly was yet to discover whether she had got it right. And now it was going to be taken, even that -- years ago she had lost Willie at the command of the loving, lethal lady in white; now she was going to lose the lady herself. There had been no answers -- and now, very soon, there would be no question.

"Please..." she whispered, her hand fluttering towards the painting in a futile gesture of entreaty.

The curator frowned. "I'm afraid the decision is already been..."

Without waiting for him to finish, helpless, defeated, the old woman dropped her gaze and walked unsteadily out of the room. The curator stared after her, his hands limp at his sides, his mouth open. Then he tore his eyes away and looked at the painting again -- the hot blue eyes behind the veil, the reaching hand... He suddenly shivered. There was a wedding band on his own left hand, and he found himself staring at it, remembering his own wedding day, trying to remember how his bride had looked at him as they had stood before the altar. Somehow, and the very fact that this could happen almost terrified him, the memory of the event he had thought he would never forget had been swept from his mind. All he could think of was that it had not been, could not have been, the look on the face of the portrait bride.

"Take it," he said hoarsely. "Take it away and bury it somewhere, deep. Let nobody ever find it again."

"It isn't a fake," murmured the young man again, his own expression distant and distracted.

The curator turned away, hunched into himself. "That," he said, softly and distinctly, "is why it must go."

The eyes of the two men met briefly, uncomfortably, in a moment of shared understanding -- of each other and, perhaps too late, of the old woman whose life the portrait had ruled. Then the young man bit his lip, turned, lifted the painting down, and laid it gently face down against the wall, blinding the blue eyes behind the veil.

There was a faint shape on the wall, a trace of where the painting had hung untouched for years; the wall looked curiously bare without it, almost indecent.

And the room was suddenly full of shadows, and then it was full of light.