Honeymoon in Paris: A Novella

French. ‘They placed wet paint on wet paint – the first artists to do so! – so that they could move the colours like this …’ He gesticulates wildly. The children are rapt. A cluster of adults stops to listen too.
    ‘And this painting caused a huge scandal when it was shown! Enormous! Why was the lady wearing no clothes, and the gentlemen were dressed? Why do you think, young sir?’
    She loves the fact that eight-year-old French children are expected to debate public nudity. She loves the respect with which the attendant addresses them. Again, she wishes David were here because she knows he would have felt like this too.
    It is several minutes before she realizes how many people have poured into the series of rooms and that it has now become stiflingly crowded. She keeps hearing English and American accents. For some reason they annoy her. She finds herself irritated suddenly by small things.
    Keen to escape, Liv ducks away, through one, two rooms, past a series of landscapes, until she reaches the less popular artists, where the visitors are sparse. She slows now, trying to give these lesser artists the same attention she gave the big names, although there is not much that draws the eye. She is about to look for the way out when she finds herself in front of a small oil painting, and there, almost despite herself, she stops. A red-haired woman stands beside a table, laden with the remains of a meal, wearing a white dress that may be some kind of undergarment; Liv can’t tell. Her body is half turned away from view, but the side of her face is unobscured. Her gaze slides towards the artist but will not meet it. Her shoulders are hunched forward with displeasure, or tension.
    The title of the painting reads: ‘
Wife, out of sorts
’
.
    She gazes at it, taking in the exquisite limpid quality of the woman’s eye, the points of colour on her cheeks, the way her body seems to suggest barely suppressed rage, and yet a kind of defeat too. And Liv thinks suddenly:
Oh, God.
That’s me
.
    Once this thought has popped into her head it will not be dislodged. She wants to look away but she cannot. She feels almost winded, as if she has been punched. The painting is so strangely intimate, so unsettling
.
I’m twenty-three years old, she thinks. And I have married a man who has already put me firmly in the background of his life. I’m going to be that sad, quietly furious woman in the kitchen whom nobody notices, desperate for his attention, sulking when she doesn’t get it. Doing things alone and ‘making the best of it’.
    She sees future trips with David: herself, flicking through guidebooks of local attractions, trying not to show her disappointment when, yet again, there is some important work thing he cannot miss.
I’m going to end up like my mother. She left it too late to remember who she actually was before she became a wife.
    Wifey.
    The Musée d’Orsay is suddenly too crowded, too noisy. She finds herself pushing her way downstairs, going the wrong way through the advancing crowds, muttering apologies as she meets the resistance of shoulders, elbows, bags. She slips sideways down a flight of stairs, and weaves her way along a corridor, but instead of heading towards the exit, she finds herself beside a grand dining room, where a queue has started to build for tables. Where are the bloody exits? The place is suddenly ridiculously full of people. Liv fights her way through the art-deco section – the huge pieces of organic furniture grotesque, overly flamboyant, and realizes she is at the wrong end. She lets out a great sob of something she can’t quite articulate.
    ‘Are you all right?’
    She spins round. Tim Freeland is staring at her, a brochure in his hand. She wipes briskly at her face, tries to smile. ‘I – I can’t find my way out.’
    His eyes travel over her face –
is she actually crying? –
and she’s mortified. ‘I’m sorry. I just – I really need to get out of here.’
    ‘The crowds,’ he says quietly. ‘They can be a bit much at this time of year. Come on.’ He touches her elbow, and steers her along the length of the museum, keeping to the darker rooms at the edges where fewer people seem to congregate. Within minutes they are down a flight of stairs and exiting onto the bright concourse outside, where the queue to enter has grown even longer.
    They stop a short distance away. Liv pulls her breathing back under control. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, looking back.