It was one of the headmaster’s ways of honouring his father’s memory. His dad had been a policeman in the Dutch capital all his working life. It was his practice to be a Good Samaritan for holidaymakers without funds or a place to sleep. Fortunately, Nina was as equally well disposed to strangers.
No sooner had he swung his light blue 2CV back onto the road than Maarten asked where we were heading.
‘Forests and hills,’ said Alice from the back. ‘We thought it would be good to find a different Holland.’
At breakfast that same morning, the ordinary actions of pouring her a coffee or passing a slice of bread began to restore a familiarity. After making love neither of us so much as spoke a word, but fondly kissed and then fell asleep in each other’s arms. Sitting down to eat at that table covered with a green polka-dot cloth, I was somehow not quite able to look her in the eye—noticing, instead, a small hole in the short sleeve of her white lace-trimmed blouse.
‘Jesus, let’s get out of here,’ she’d said.
‘Why? What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, don’t be so coy. You know as well as I do it feels all wrong. Let’s go out into the countryside somewhere, where things will be cheaper anyway.’
‘What about Ann Frank’s House and the Flea Market?’
‘Another time.’
‘Only place I know is Arnhem …’
‘Fine,’ she said, ‘that’s fine.’
‘Perhaps we’ll try to get to Arnhem,’ she called from the back seat of Maarten’s brand new 2CV.
‘It is a good idea,’ Maarten confirmed.
He looked about thirty, with straight hair parted in the centre and swept behind the ears; he spoke with a faint American accent.
‘Please will you come to have lunch at our place?’
Alice leaned forward and prodded me in the side.
‘Thank you, we’d love to,’ I said.
When we arrived, Nina and two of their friends were drinking coffee in the tiny back garden of their maisonette. Whispering in English might have seemed rude, so we sat silently sipping from the cups offered us. Despite the luck of being taken up into the local society, I couldn’t help feeling a pang at being separated from our intimate solitude. There were so few days in which things could go right. It was just after eleven o’clock when Jan and Lieke rose from their deckchairs and said goodbye in perfect English. Maarten then offered to show us the sights while his wife prepared a simple lunch. Nina—whose other language turned out to be French—was making a suggestion to her husband.
‘Yes, good,’ said Maarten. ‘Our friend Jan is driving towards Arnhem tomorrow morning. We would like you to stay for dinner and spend the night here. This afternoon we will go swimming. If you will stay, I shall telephone Jan and ask him to come here tomorrow.’
‘You’re both so very kind,’ Alice replied.
Maarten led us back through the open-plan living room, neat and sparse, with its Turkish rug and modernistic furniture. The 2CV stood parked in its bay beside a small grass patch with a few flowers growing outside.
‘I will show you Volendam—and Edam where our famous cheese is made,’ he said.
Maarten drove through the outskirts of Purmerend, the Verhagen’s dormitory town. We were motoring along a straight, tree-lined road, tall narrow trunks rising high into the air. It was just like that famous Hobbema landscape. An enormous grassy bank rose up to the left.
‘You would like to see the Ijselmeer?’
Maarten pulled onto the roadside and stopped the car. We all struggled up the steep green slope. At the summit, brilliant blue water stretched as far as you could see. The strong sunlight of that Sunday in early September glittered across tiny wavelets to the water’s edge a few feet beneath us. There were thick-wool sheep sheltering in the shade of trees and enjoying the wind of that choppy expanse of lake, down by the waterline. In every direction, white sails fluttered and billowed. Spinnakers filled like maternity dresses. Cleats and halyards tinkled. Booms swung with the tillers’ motions. Pennants of every colour flapped at mastheads. Yellow and orange lifejackets leaned over sides, or ducked and bobbed as the yachts changed direction, stretching onward and onward as if to infinity.
Maarten beamed with pride. The water and sails were completely hidden from the road—as if this man-made lake created to express self-esteem and love had been fearfully concealed from the everyday world of windmills, tilled land, grazing cows, and polder wrested from the
sea …
A cold wind was blowing at Volendam. We stepped out to look around, but contented ourselves with staring briefly across the turbulent waters. Maarten proposed trying some rollmops, so we divided one between us, then scurried back to his buffeted blue car.
Maarten was explaining how the land had been wrested from the sea, earth drained and made fertile. He described how the new republic used to protect itself against invasion in the seventeenth century by breaking the dykes, and restoring the ground once each threat passed. We were gazing out across the carefully tended, irrigated fields, the natural and the human seeming to collaborate so intimately, white sails gliding through the landscape—for the water they sailed on was concealed behind earthworks.
‘What subjects do you teach?’ Alice asked.
‘In my school there are only five teachers and we all teach every subject.’
‘That must be difficult.’
‘No,’ Maarten replied, ‘the children are very young and we are telling them the simplest things.’
‘How old are the pupils?’
‘They are from four to seven years,’ he said. ‘Would you like to see my school?’
‘Yes, please, if it’s possible,’ she was saying.
‘Of course it is possible, I am the headmaster.’
He drove quickly back between the flat fields of black and white cows and white sails. Maarten, being a headmaster, must be older than he looked, I thought. His car was once more approaching Purmerend.
‘Our town is a new development,’ he continued. ‘It has been built because it is so difficult to find a place to live in Amsterdam. There are many young couples like ourselves and you see there are many children in our town, and they come, all of them, to my school.’
The car turned in through open gates and came to a halt on a small tarmac apron before the single storey brick building. Maarten unlocked the door and stepped inside. It was an infant school like any other, yet being his guests we couldn’t but see it differently, presented through the calm, enthusiastic narration of our host.
‘Do you have problems with discipline?’
‘Oh no,’ Maarten replied, ‘and if there are some problems of behaviour we always ask the parents of our pupil to come and speak with us at the school.’
‘Do you ever use corporal punishment?’
‘No, never, in Holland, is it permitted. We have a rule never to touch the pupils. It is also best not to be alone with the pupil if you criticize them. I always leave the class door open.’
We followed the headmaster into one of his schoolrooms, its walls decorated with the children’s paintings of simplified houses and trees, one with a big black sun in the sky. And this would be the mummy and daddy with tube-like bodies, thin stick arms and legs, the hands and feet like bunches of bananas, enormous heads and large, expressively misshapen features—one with each tooth careful picked out in a smile. Here again were the images of love and fear, as if from a COBRA exhibition; so the land flourished and the sea was kept at bay behind walls; these children were themselves the blossom of such needs.
But why did the Verhagens have no kids? Perhaps they were waiting till they could afford it, or maybe they just couldn’t. Yet there seemed no such sadness between them. They were still young. There was plenty of time for them still too. It was not, of course, a thing to ask, so I let the thought slip from my mind.
In the dunes at Bergen-aan-Zee, we remained a moment still, watching Maarten and Nina’s heads bobbing up and down in the sea. The shoreline stretched away in a flat arc before us. To the right of the defile where we stood, sand crested into hillocks topped with coarse pale grass. These sloped down shallowly almost to the distant sea’s edge. A ramshackle booth was selling ice creams.
‘Want one?’ she asked, fishing in her purse for some coins.
Choices in one hand, footwear in the other, we set off into the streams and pools of the tide run and wide curving beach ahead. The waves came foaming over wrinkles in the harder sand, then the water would halt and pause, before, as though reluctantly, being drawn back into the undertow, leaving tiny burdens of sand, pebbles, or bladder wrack behind. Gentle sucking noises rose from our left and right feet in turn. Alice’s white cotton trousers, rolled up below the knees, flapped against the goose pimples of her calves as she strolled along.
Perhaps it was the relaxation and calm of that moment’s wind-refreshed peace. We had found such contentment and generosity by chance, and now life seemed to slope easefully away like the shoreline itself. While she walked, Alice’s feet dug up tiny granules of the sand that stuck between her toes and on her bright red varnished nails. White frills of foam slid forward up the beach in intersecting flounces. Then don’t ask me how but I let the baseball boots slip from my fingers. They dropped directly into the tide and began to fill with water. I bent down to snatch them from the sea before the socks stuffed inside were completely wet through and, as I did so, the remains of the ice cream toppled off the end of its cone, hitting the beach, and making what looked like the last traces of a sand castle washed away by waves.
‘Oh you silly thing,’ she said, as I blushed and bit into the cone.
The Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller was separated from heath-land and pine forest by rows of specially planted trees. The Dutch bikes we had hired didn’t have brakes on the handlebars. To stop or slow down you had to press backwards on the pedals. It wasn’t easy to get used to the idea. Trying to squeeze the nonexistent brakes on the handlebars, there had been one or two unnerving moments in traffic through the suburbs of Arnhem as we rode out the afternoon before. Dropped off at a crossroads by Maarten and Nina’s friend Jan, we got ourselves stranded with hardly any traffic somewhere near Nijmegen, and after a while decided to give up and take the bus for Arnhem. At the tourist office in the terminus, there was a poster advertising a modern art exhibition, so we decided on the spot to hire bikes as recommended and ride out to see for ourselves. First of all, though, we headed for the banks of the Rhine to take a look at the town’s famous bridge-too-far.
As a plaque informed us, we had reached the site of the battle thirty-one years minus a few weeks after Montgomery’s notorious error of judgment. In the shadow of the bridge that had replaced its fought-over span, bombed soon after the failed attack, we ate a picnic lunch of bread and sliced sausage meats from a nearby delicatessen, and studied the free tourist map.
There, on the riverbank, was the last time that Alice and I ever spoke of you. I know I was trying to keep you out of my mind, trying to concentrate upon the present so as not to risk spoiling it with the ghost of a comparison, a stab of guilt or remorse. But as she reiterated, and with again what appeared my best interests in mind, she really didn’t believe you were the right person for me: too much the would-be manager, sentimental, materialistic … as she more or less spelled out. Yet although I could see bits of your character and behaviour in lights such as these, her portrait didn’t exactly coincide with that of the girl graduate caught up inside me forever.
‘Oh, I don’t know …’ I said.
‘No, I think you do,’ she replied.
The broad Rhine was flowing on past us, sunlight glinting across its waves, a laden barge coming up under the bridge. Moments such as these were what I had worked all those months at the National to experience.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’
She gave me an unconvinced, quizzical look, and I tried to smile it away. Doubtless, she’d meant it for my own good. As I say, she had woken up in New York; now she wanted me to wake up too. And of course it’s what I was trying to do, but there beside the water’s glitter, I must have dozed off for a moment. Next thing I knew, she was giving my arm a gentle shake, suggesting, as I opened my eyes, that time was getting on and, if we were going to go and see that art gallery, we ought to set off and find ourselves a place to stay.
So, back on our brakeless bikes through Arnhem’s scarifying traffic, we headed towards the forests. Reaching the tiny village of Otterlo as darkness was falling, we found there were only a couple of private guesthouses recommended in the brochure, and freewheeled around its few streets to take a look. In the vestibule of what seemed the most homely, she suggested we stay for a couple of nights.
It was on a bright Tuesday morning, after the usual breakfast, when we set off into the Hoge Veluwe national park to find that art gallery. Gliding along avenues through forests of firs, she was following the signs along a road called the Houtkampweg. I was pursuing her flurried hair and broad back in the wind-ruffled pale yellow vest far lighter than her tan.
Suddenly we were approaching a deep glade within the trees. Expanses of plate-glass shone with reflections of the sky. White clouds were breezing across each segment formed by the grid of concrete beams. Inside, the rooms gave one onto another in a procession of plain white walls. There were few other visitors moving round those spaces, figurative sculptures moving on armatures fixed to a rail above each invaluable item, before which they steadily paused.
The first piece we stopped at was called Bride (1893). I leaned forward and read that it was by Jan Thorn Prikker.
‘Not exactly a household name,’ I said.
‘One to conjure with,’ she came back.
Next to its art nouveau swirls there hung a greenish-yellow painting by Odilon Redon, The Cyclops (1898-1900), showing the head and shoulders of Polyphemus gazing lovingly and one wide-eyed into a glade where a naked Galatea lay sleeping.
‘Creepy,’ she muttered, and moved quickly on.
Beyond the numerous works by Belgian pointillists, whom in those days I didn’t have time for, were three canvases by Juan Gris hanging in a row: Glass and Bottles of 1912 was clumsy in its handling, the paint a thickly applied impasto, its transitions stiff or blurred, the faint traces of lime green and pink failing to transform a dull bluish-grey tonality. Next to it was Playing Cards and Siphon, painted on panel in 1916. Landscape-format, the composition was formed as an oval with the area beyond that shape painted black, a black also appearing in the oval forming what looked like a set of intersecting shadows. There you could read most of Le Journal and pick out a cup, a glass, paper, the playing cards, a siphon and the table on which they rested. The intersecting parts of its grey oval, abutting crisply delineated representations and abstract shapes on the black rectangular support were no longer inventories of objects but a single whole composed of passages, outlines, and aspects. The third, Siphon and Fruit Dish, completed four years later, had a mellower and more wavering design, its moss green and turquoise patches contrasted with the overlapping areas of black and white.
‘Lovely textures,’ she said, in response to an appreciative humming sound, before moving on to admire the polished flanks of a torso by Brancusi.
‘Isn’t it sensuous?’ she exclaimed.
Now she was moving on to the gallery’s classic Mondrians—the paint of their matt white, red, blue, or yellow rectangles cracked in places and brushed with a dusty patina. She found them rather disappointing. We both preferred the earlier Composition 10: Ocean and Pier (1915) where the horizontal and vertical lines in black on a white ground appeared to shimmer like the waves at Bergen-aan-Zee.
‘Practically Op art already,’ she said.
Then there was a Still Life with Cow’s Skull (19
29) by another Dutch artist called Charley Toorop—the dark shadows and sharply delineated objects reminiscent of a Georgia O’Keefe. Turning to mention something about her Girl Friday job with Will, the photographer chap, I found her nowhere to be seen.
‘What do you think of this?’ asked her voice, disembodied and echoing in the silent spaces beyond a further white wall. Across the room and round a corner in shadow, a larger picture was displayed.
‘Nudes in the Forest (1909-1910): by Léger … never have guessed it was one of his.’
‘Early work,’ she whispered.
There were some whitish-grey tubes on the left, representing the trunks of trees, looking like lampposts after a car’s ploughed into them. The red-brown striped spatulas would have to be hands. Various lumps and blocks appeared in the foreground, and one figure had arms raised high above his head, the hands together as if chopping wood. Other sections of body, looking like rusty spare parts for the Tin Man, were interspersed with muted green domes that must be forest foliage.
‘Isn’t it meant to be a study of volumes?’ she said. ‘I think he said the picture was “a battlefield of volumes”?’
‘Didn’t know you were a Léger fan.’
‘Lots of things you don’t know about me,’ she said, murmuring out of reverence for the surroundings. ‘Anyway, I’m not exactly what you’d call a fan.’
‘Certainly a bit of a tussle … he’s obviously been wrestling with it here.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ she said, stepping up closer to study the pentimenti.
Next to it was The Typographer (1919) by Léger too, his name signed in printed capitals—bluish-grey ovoids, red shapes like containers, some bits of lettering, and a fragment of the typographer’s hand.
‘Have to say I prefer that oval Gris back there …’
‘Le jour de Léger est arrivée peut’être!’ she announced with an air of mysterious knowledge.
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