Owen considered a moment. It had been a long time since anyone had asked him what he liked rather than what he intended, preferred, inherited, or meant to do with the rest of his life.
“History paintings,” he revealed. “Battle pieces, naval scenes. Copley, when he is good. Anything with movement and consequence in it. The Death of Nelson. The Battle of Trafalgar. That sort of thing.”
Aurelia tilted her head slightly. “Of course. “You are exactly the sort of man who would admire cannon smoke and dying admirals.”
“That is very severe,” he frowned. “Especially since you have not yet heard my reasons.”
“Then I am prepared to improve my opinion if your reasons are sufficiently noble.”
He looked back toward the dark marine print on the wall, though he hardly saw it.
“I do not know that they are noble. Only that such paintings attempt, at least, to show the cost of things. They do not always succeed. Often, they sentimentalize too much, or clean what ought to remain ugly. But at their best they remind people that battles are not lines in a dispatch or triumphs in a newspaper. They were lived by men and suffered by them.”
Her eyes brightened at his words. “You think they tell a version of it. Or at least, they try to.” He paused, not wishing to remain too long on any subject which might allow old fears to creep back in. “And what would you defend with equal seriousness?”
Her eyes moved, not to the battle print, but to a small landscape hanging nearer the window: a river beneath a lowering sky, all soft light and distance. It was by no means remarkable, but it was still peaceful.
“Landscapes,” she said. “Always.”
He might have expected it. There was something in her that suited open skies and thoughtful distances better than crowded rooms.
She rested her fingers more lightly on the stem of her glass now. “I like paintings that do not demand too much from the viewer. Landscapes simply are what they are. A field does not flatter itself. A storm does not pretend elegance. A river is not improved by being called heroic.”
He smiled slightly. “No, only flooded.”
That won him a soft laugh. “And besides, there is truth in landscape too. Light, weather, distance, season, those things may be romanticized, certainly, but the best painters do not romanticize them. They observe.”
“Observe,” he repeated.
“Yes. They look properly.”
Owen felt something in him still at the phrase.
They look properly.
That, he thought, was precisely it. Perhaps more than taste joined their answers. He had spoken of war paintings because they mattered when they resisted false glory. She spoke of landscape because it mattered when it resisted false prettiness. They had chosen different subjects, perhaps because life had given them different territories to understand, and yet the instinct beneath the choice was much the same.
“You think our tastes prove us opposites,” he said.
She glanced at him. “Do they not?”
“You tell me.”
Aurelia considered him with the slightest narrowing of her eyes. “You choose battle. I choose countryside. You admire violence rendered honestly. I admire peace rendered honestly. I should say that suggests very different lives.”
“It suggests different scenes,” Owen agreed to disagree. “Not different principles.”
That seemed to arrest her for a moment.
He went on, more slowly now, because he had the odd feeling that what he was trying to say mattered, though he could nothave explained why. “If what you value in landscape is truth, then I do not think we differ so much at all. We only look for the same thing in different places.”
Her gaze remained on him.
“The same thing?” she asked.
“The real thing,” he told her. “Not the polished version arranged for drawing rooms.”
He sensed that she understood him more quickly than most people did and he, in return, understood something of her which had little to do with gowns, family introductions, or the accepted categories by which a room like this sorted human beings.
