This time I persuade the Land-Rover to let me share the driving. It agrees to stop at the end of the track, in the midst of the cans and bottles from the overturned dustbins, and check that there’s no avenging angel tearing down the hill before we turn out in an orderly manner in the direction of London. Soon we’re swooshing through the last dregs of the lake in the dip by the wood where Kate and I found the dead tramp … turning out on to the Lavenage road … passing Busy Bee Honey … moving on into the country that always seemed so suspiciously unreal to Kate and me before everything else got even more unreal. What we were missing, perhaps, was simply the authentic smell I’m now enjoying inside the car, of dirt and dog and oily rags and leaking petrol. And in the mirror, now I’ve adjusted it, no sign of pursuit – only Helen, in her new black chador, trotting submissively at my heels.
The one thing I’m missing to complete my satisfaction is some reassurance that my picture hasn’t been found and seized. I try to put it out of my mind, since there’s no way of knowing. Just as I’m joining the motorway, though, a sudden loud electronic burbling, somewhere around my left knee, makes me jerk the wheel wildly to the right, though fortunately the car stolidly ignores this ill-considered suggestion. I fumble under the dashboard, and locate a grimy mobile phone.
It’s Laura, of course.
‘He’s gone,’ she says. ‘And don’t worry – he didn’t find it. I kept moving it from room to room behind him.’
‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘Wonderful. Thank you.’ Though what I’m trying to imagine now, of course, is how she managed to drag it around like that, and how much of the painted surface got knocked off in the process. Also, what the price of her co-operation is going to turn out to be.
‘That was Georgie, by the way,’ she says. ‘His younger brother. They don’t get on.’
‘You don’t say?’
‘Things got much worse after you’d gone – he went off in a tremendous rage. He took a great piece out of his hand with the crowbar getting the breakfast-room open. He’s coming back with writs and things … Listen, I’ve got to be quick – Tony keeps coming in and shouting about all the burdens he has to bear. I just wanted to let you know that the dog’s safe and sound … Hold on … Sorry, I’ll call you back.’
The dog’s safe and sound? It’s the dog picture she’s hidden for me? My skill at deceit seems to be taking over – I’ve even deceived my own accomplice. Not to mention myself – because what’s happened to my picture while Laura was busy hiding the wrong one? He’s found it, obviously! He’s taken it! An exit to somewhere’s coming up. I turn off and pull up on the edge of the ramp, gazing at the phone, waiting for it to ring again, ready to … I don’t know … turn round and go back, pursue brother Georgie across England …
I’ve snatched it up even before it’s completed the first note of its burble.
‘Sorry about that,’ says Laura. ‘This brother’s going bananas, too. Martin, listen …’
‘What about the other three?’ I interrupt with insane casualness. ‘Did his brother find them?’
‘He’d given up looking by then. He was just trying to stop the bleeding.’
My anxiety subsides a little. But if he didn’t find them…
‘They’re still out in the shrubbery?’
‘I think Tony’s hidden them away with the pheasant chicks.’
Oh, my God. How are pheasant chicks housed? In the warm and the dry, presumably. How warm? How dry? Is there any check on the humidity …?
‘Now, Martin, listen to me,’ says Laura. I listen. ‘You’re going to need money, aren’t you?’
‘Money?’
‘For whatever you’re doing with the pictures. I just wanted to say that I’ve got a bit, not much, but he doesn’t know about it, and if you wanted it …’
First Kate, now her. My anxiety’s overtaken by shame.
‘That’s very sweet of you,’ I say, ‘but it’s all taken care of.’
‘Well, don’t forget, if you get any surprises. Where are you now?’
‘On the motorway.’
‘I wish it was me with you instead of Helen,’ she says wistfully.
I try to work out a judicious reply, but the task seems to be beyond me.
‘Shall I tell you when I first knew what my fate in life was going to be?’ she says. She sounds serious. ‘When you explained that it was Erwin someone.’
Not true, of course. She didn’t foresee for a moment what was going to happen. I feel a pang, though. It all seems a very long time ago now, part of some lost prelapsarian world.
‘Erwin Panofsky,’ I remind her.
She laughs. ‘You’ve done it again,’ she says.
So I have. ‘I’ll be back at the beginning of next week,’ I tell her.
‘Martin!’ she cries, as I try to switch off the phone. ‘Martin!’
I wait. She’s serious again. What now?
‘I’ve given up smoking,’ she says shyly.
I drive on towards London, full of uneasy foreboding. I thought friends is what we were going to be – innocent, uncomplicated friends. Or at any rate accomplices – innocent, uncomplicated accomplices. Now suddenly she’s offering me her life savings and giving up smoking. The same question as before comes back to me: I her or she me? I her, by the look of it, after all. But now it’s beginning to seem even more alarming than the converse.
And what about the competition? I’ve a head start on my rivals, but how long’s it going to last? How long before brother Georgie comes back with his writs? How long before Quiss cycles over for another look around? I don’t think he’s seen the Merrymakers yet. But he’s seen something that’s caught his interest. I can’t do anything until the bank gets clearance for the mortgage increase, which is supposed to be on Monday. But then there’s nothing that brother Georgie can do until he can get his lawyers into action, and even the omniscient Quiss will want to check current prices while he’s in London during the week before he makes any offers. If I can get Helen valued at Sotheby’s on Monday … If I can find a dealer to pay spot cash … If I can get the rest of the cash from the bank … If I can arrive back at Upwood with my hands full of crackling banknotes on Monday night …
I come round the great bend above Edgware, and London opens out in front of me. Slowly my fears begin to recede, and my hopes once again get the upper hand. Everything’s possible! Laura’s miles away behind me. So’s Kate, so are my enemies, so’s normal responsible life. And here’s me, hitting town with the most beautiful woman in the world.
Yes, after all the preparation and delay, after all the anguish and study, the great abduction’s finally occurred. The lady’s loaded into the boat. The die is cast, the mighty enterprise is under way. Sparta’s falling astern. Ahead lie Troy and immortality.
Hard Cash
The Spanish troops left the Netherlands in 1561, amid general rejoicing, three years before Bruegel painted The Massacre of the Innocents – Kate’s right about that. But she’s wrong in telling me that this means the picture doesn’t allude to them. Why should Bruegel have forgotten them? Why should anyone have forgotten them? Their behaviour had been infamous, and they went only after years of outrage and agitation, only after the most strenuous political efforts by William of Orange, only after it was made a condition for granting Philip’s ‘Request’ for the three million gold sovereigns. Had the peoples of Holland and Belgium stopped thinking about the German Occupation by 1948? Kate’s being absurd. She’s simply repeating what most of the commentators on Bruegel have said. They’re all absurd. I feel like throwing them across the room. They none of them seem to have used their common sense. They’ve all put their noses up against the surface of the panels and squinted at the details with myopic literal-mindedness. They don’t stand back and look at the general sense of the pictures in the context of the times.
They’re all iconographers. What this problem needs is an iconologist.
It’s Sunday. I’m sitting in our flat in Oswald Road going through
all the books once more at the kitchen table, trying to make good my pledge to Kate before tomorrow morning, when I go out and sell Helen, and take almost the very last step before I’m totally committed. Though why I should be so scrupulous about Kate’s feelings I’m not sure, because the more I think about what she said, and about all the massed choir of art historians who sang the same tune before her, the angrier I become. How can they not see what’s in front of their eyes? How can they be so wrong?
Meanwhile, Helen sits on the other side of the table, occupying considerably more of the room than me and myself and the table together, still with that unshakeably indifferent expression on her face, still with her right arm raised in mild concern. I’ve taken her out of the wet black plastic to let her dry out and breathe a little. She seems none the worse for her elopement apart from smelling rather strongly – she’s acquired the rancid dirty-hair smell of sheep, that attaches itself to everything they come into contact with.
What she’s mostly concerned about now, I think, is not her personal hygiene, or her exposure to the weather, but the suspicion that she’s even less covered by our household insurance than she is by her dress. It’s worrying me, too. This is a moderately high crime area, and our policy, I imagine, requires that any individual item of value has to be specified. By the time I rushed back from the shops on Saturday afternoon I was convinced that I’d find she’d taken off again with another suitor already, leaving me with £20,000 odd to find. My one reassurance is that it would take a whole team of burglars to get her out of here. It had plainly not struck the Victorian architect who designed this house that its occupants might one day want to hang a canvas covering 42 square feet, in an elaborate gilt frame, in one of the upstairs rooms. I had to ask Midge, of course, to help me get her in. But we also needed her boyfriend Alec, her son Jeremy and the Japanese couple in the basement. Midge crushed a finger against the newel post on the stairs, and won’t be able to type for some time, though when she can she’ll have her best column yet.
Now I’ve got to get the poor old soul out again tomorrow morning. I’ve also got to run to the window every few minutes to see if the Land-Rover’s still outside, since I have a feeling that the baler twine holding the tailgate shut may not be proof against the more sophisticated sort of car thieves we have in London.
And when I think of what the rest of tomorrow’s going to be like, manoeuvring all this lot around the West End … I’m pleased to have a quiet day at home with her first. I’m getting quite fond of her, as a matter of fact. She’s a peaceful person to be with, after the last week or two. She hasn’t made any alarming advances to me, or announced she’s given up smoking. Her silence isn’t pointed, in the way that Kate’s was when I rang her last night and told her humorously that I was sitting at the table here gazing into Laura’s eyes – a silence that continued even after I’d explained that ‘Laura’ was a slip of the tongue for ‘Helen’.
Another of Helen’s virtues: she hasn’t got any art historian friends of hers to come and buy her behind my back. Also, she isn’t a closet Catholic, and she hasn’t tried to tell me that the troops in the Massacre aren’t Spanish! Anyway, even if they aren’t it doesn’t make any difference to the sense of the picture, because after the Spanish had gone there was still the local mounted gendarmerie, the Bandes d’Ordonnance, ready to put down religious or political dissent. It was detachments of this security police, together with a company of the Duke of Aerschot’s regiment, that rounded up the victims for mass execution in Valenciennes after the crowd rescued Faveau and Mallart from burning. That was in 1562, after the Spanish troops had gone, probably just two years before Bruegel painted his Massacre. Do you really think that he hadn’t made the connection? That everyone who saw the picture didn’t make it in his turn?
I look at Helen. She says nothing; there’s nothing she can say.
There are more troops in The Adoration of the Kings. Why? There are none in the Bible story. More again in The Procession to Calvary, wearing the red coats of the gendarmerie. A complete army in The Suicide of Saul, painted in 1562, as the new campaign of religious persecution got under way. This is another iconographic rarity – the Saul of the Old Testament, falling on his sword because the crushing of his nation by its enemies the Philistines has reduced him to despair. Are you trying to tell me that the Netherlanders looked at that and didn’t think of their own nation, also crushed by its enemies?
There’s another army marching up into the mountains in The Conversion of Saul. This is the other Saul, the Saul of the New Testament, and his accompaniment by an army on his journey from Jerusalem to Damascus is exceedingly odd. In Acts 9, where the story’s told, there’s no mention of either mountains or army. Saul was trained as a rabbi, not a soldier, and he’s on his way to Damascus (‘yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’) accompanied only by unspecified ‘men which journeyed with him,’ and bearing letters from the High Priest to the local synagogues authorizing him to arrest Christians.
But in 1567, the year when the Conversion was painted, there was an army marching through the mountains. It was the Spanish army under the command of the Duke of Alva, on its way through the Alps from Italy to put an end once and for all to dissent and rebellion in the Netherlands. Alva was a reasonably good model for the unconverted Saul. According to Motley, ‘the world has agreed that such an amount of stealth and ferocity, of patient vindictiveness and universal bloodthirstiness, were never found in savage beast of the forest, and but rarely in a human bosom. ‘Like Saul, he was coming with orders to extirpate heresy. Like Saul, he was bearing letters from higher authority – what Motley calls ‘a whole trunkful’ of blank execution warrants, already signed by the King. I can’t see in Bruegel’s picture any indication of the two thousand specially enrolled prostitutes who were travelling with the Spanish troops, but perhaps they’re further back in the column, or perhaps Bruegel didn’t know about them. But if God had taken the hint he’d surely have struck the Duke of Alva down at the roadside, just as he did Saul, and converted him into a Protestant.
Glück agrees that the theme of the picture may have been suggested by Alva’s approach, but other commentators are scathing about any explanation so vulgarly obvious. I wonder what the Spanish security services in the Netherlands thought. I’m sure they were too sophisticated to fall into any simplistic interpretation themselves, but they must have been a little surprised at the coincidence – and a little anxious lest local malcontents and agitators made something of it.
Or go back to the Calvary. The crucifixes waiting for Christ and the two thieves aren’t the only engines of execution set up on the muddy hillsides that bright spring morning – the landscape’s studded with gibbets, and with those cartwheels on top of poles on which victims were exposed and left to die. Never mind what Bruegel’s intentions were – what did his Spanish and Netherlandish contemporaries think the scene represented, at a time when five thousand or so people were being executed each year by a variety of means? What did they think when they turned to another landscape of gibbets and wheels in The Triumph of Death, with one victim actually being beheaded in front of them? What came into their minds, in a land where so many towns were to be sacked and subjected to mass reprisals, when they lifted their eyes to the horizon of the Triumph and saw it prophetically smudged with the smoke of one burning town after another?
Once you start seeing it, the apparatus of persecution, and the allusions to oppression, leap out at you from almost every picture. Another Flemish village in winter, like the one in the Massacre – and how often it’s winter in these pictures painted during the long winter of Spanish rule! – is the setting for The Census at Bethlehem, at an earlier stage of the story of the Nativity. Why are Joseph and Mary, together with the rest of the population of Flanders, going to Bethlehem to be counted? Because ‘it came to pass in those days, there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.’ It also came to pass, from the
mid-1550s onwards, there went out successive decrees from Philip II to the same effect; inquisition, occupation and taxation – these were the three heads of oppression that the Netherlanders rebelled against.
Scholars furrow their brows over the mysteries of Two Monkeys. Heaven knows why. There sit the two dejected creatures, in chains, in what looks like part of a dungeon, with Antwerp in the background, and the shells of what scholars identify as hazel nuts scattered around them. To my eyes they’re almonds, but even if they’re not, hazel nuts are Barcelonas, and in either case they come from Spain. They’re the trifling return for which the wretched pair have traded their liberty.
All right – look at the people in these pictures. The Triumph of Death, bottom left: a king being shown the fatal hourglass by a skeleton, and gesturing helplessly in his death throes as another skeleton dressed as a soldier helps himself to a barrel of gold coins. Next to him: a cardinal, dying in the arms of a stick-like figure of death who’s also wearing a cardinal’s hat. All resemblance to any real person, living or dead, as it used to say in the front of novels, is purely coincidental. All the same, there weren’t all that many cardinals around for this one to coincidentally resemble, and only one king. So Granvelle, who’d got his round hat only the year before this picture was painted, must have wondered if there wasn’t just a bit of a secret tease in it. How he must have wished Philip could have been there to enjoy the joke with him.
I suspect that Granvelle smiled, too, in spite of himself, at Dulle Griet, or Mad Meg, a crazy old biddy staggering out of hell with her pinny full of the swag she’s looted from its unfortunate inhabitants. I’m sure he didn’t suppose for an instant that this had any reference to his nominal boss, Margaret, Duchess of Parma, Governor of the Netherlands, and the hell she ruled over, but he must have speculated what others might think – you know how people’s minds work!
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