Wings over Delft

by Aubrey Flegg

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘“Sir,” he said, “There is no creator, that is the face of God that you are looking at.”’

  This time Father really had carried Louise with him. She felt as if she were on the roof beside them, listening to their conversation as they crouched at the telescope. Dare she interrupt?

  ‘But Father, there must be a creator, we have a creation, therefore there has to be a creator.’

  ‘No, my love, remember your logic, remember your Aristotle? That is a circular argument. It is only because we use the word “creation” that we say there must be a creator. Think, if we use a different word, Nature, say, to describe the universe, then it no longer demands a creator; we would just say that it was natural.’

  ‘Well, someone made it!’

  ‘No, you have watched frost growing on a window, you have seen the trees break into leaf; they have their inner purpose, but no one comands: “Leaf, grow here.”’

  ‘But if there is no creator, where is God? Have we lost Him?’

  ‘No, my love, it is just that we have been looking for Him in the wrong place.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Like this.’ Father got up and tipped the telescope down; she thought he was going to train it on the road below, but instead he turned the tube around. ‘Here, Louise, come and look at this.’ She got up, ‘Stand back a bit, don’t put your eye too close.’

  ‘I can’t see anything. It’s the wrong way round,’ she murmured.

  ‘Look in the middle. See, a small disc of light?’ Then she saw it. There, miles down the tube, was a miniature picture. Something the size of an ant was moving in it. She looked up past the tube to identify what it was, and saw old Claes, from the powder store, searching back and forth for something on the road. She looked back down the tube. There were two things that looked like cabbages above the tiny figure. To her amazement she realised that these were the huge trees that overshadowed the Doelen.

  ‘But Father, I don’t understand! I can see what the telescope is doing, but who would ever use it this way?’

  ‘Exactly. But I think that this is what Baruch says we have done with God. God gave us a telescope – our brain – to see him with, but we did not like what we saw: nature, human love, human frailty, freedom to think. This wasn’t comfortable for us. We didn’t want to get close to life; we wanted to get away from it. So we turned the telescope around and pushed God out to the safety of heaven, where we don’t have to bother about Him.’

  ‘So that means that God is really just out there, in the town of Delft.’ Louise paused, tasting the new idea. ‘He is everywhere!’ An unexpected feeling of warmth spread through her. She smiled to herself. ‘I like that,’ she said, ‘it seems right, doesn’t it?’ No wonder Father had been drawn to that strange young man. She was drawn to him herself. She reached out and gently pulled Father’s beard. ‘I had to do that,’ she explained.

  ‘Why?’ Father asked.

  ‘Just so I could say that I had tweaked the beard of God.’ Then with a laugh, she twirled away, avoiding his smacking hand, and spun around till her skirts flew out.

  ‘You really liked him, didn’t you. Your Baruch?’ She said, as she spun back. Father took his time to answer.

  ‘I don’t know how long we spent, looking at the stars. Then we both just lay back against the warm tiles in the trough between the roofs and stared at the Milky Way turning silently overhead. It seemed to me as if he was working out his ideas even as we lay there. “I can see the answers,” he said once, “I can feel them, but they are useless unless I can prove them.” He has some crazy notion that he can prove his ideas, as if they were theorems in geometry.’

  ‘And write QED at the end?’ Louise suggested.

  Father chuckled. ‘I must suggest that to him, as we set out to prove. You see, Louise, you and I may seek the face of God, but Baruch Spinoza wants to cut steps in rock for us to follow.’

  Cupid

  Chapter 9

  On her next visit to the studio, Louise did not put on her green dress. Kathenka took it away carefully in its linen bag, to hang in her room ready for later sittings. At last Louise was able to sit in the chair that had been set so invitingly for her and to look around. When she sat down she realised, almost with disappointment, that the ‘room’ was not as real as it had appeared at first sight. What she had thought were tiles in the floor were just strings criss-crossing under the Turkey carpet. She asked Pieter about them and he laughed.

  ‘We will paint these in as tiles; attic boards would not be appropriate in the room of a “lady of science.”’ He was teasing her, but it was nice teasing. It didn’t make her feel inadequate as Reynier’s teasing so often did. ‘We will have to make the windows grander too,’ he said. ‘Stained glass, probably; they must balance the spinet on the other side. You must choose what sort of tiles you would like on the floor.’

  ‘Oh, black and white marble, please,’ she said, thinking of the hall in their new house. ‘But it is all so much work … so much preparation, just for me.’

  ‘Oh no, it really is important; the room, the furnishings, all must help to make the portrait. These things give messages about the subject of the portrait, symbols if you like, that hint at the subject’s interests and even desires.’

  ‘Desires?’ Louise asked, suddenly on the defensive; then instantly regretted it. He looked so stricken, as if he were about to come apart at the joints.

  ‘Well, sometimes we use what we know,’ he was flushing deeply. ‘The picture on the wall, for example – we tried a map, but it looked too gloomy, what with the globe and the books. Then Master suggested that,’ and he pointed uncertainly to a picture of a cupid, complete with bow and arrow, that was leaning against the wall. ‘But Kathenka said not. Then I thought of how the clouds had moved over the fields when we were up on the walls and I thought of the sea, so we borrowed that seascape from the Master’s room. It’s by Van Goyen.’ He smiled at her uncertainly, his hands turned out.

  She looked at him, remembering their time on the walls. She felt her colour rising and looked away. What was so attractive about this shambling youth, she wondered. She looked at the picture again. It was a seascape of greys and greens, broken only by the angular geometry of brown sails.

  ‘I like it,’ she said, but hoped that they would move Cupid to somewhere else.

  Father had left for the pottery, and the house seemed quiet and empty after his departure. Louise had done the chores that Annie insisted on her doing so that she would not become ‘spoiled’. Then she went, as she usually did, and sat with Mother for a while. It was Reynier who had sown in Louise the notion that she might have been responsible for her mother’s ill health.

  ‘You really mustn’t blame yourself,’ he had comforted her. ‘Your poor mother could have been caught in a shower at any time.’ It hadn’t in fact occurred to Louise that she might be to blame, but her ten-year-old mind was fertile ground for such suggestions, and she had delayed, looking for frogspawn. Even after all these years a feeling of guilt welled up in her as she held the translucent hand that rested on the covers. She longed for someone in whom she could confide; it had been such a relief unburdening herself to Kathenka. The trouble was, that after her discussions and arguments with Father, the girlish chatter of her friends about clothes, and hats, and ribbons seemed vacuous and boring. When they wanted to talk about boys they didn’t include her, as they automatically paired her off with Reynier.

  As Mother declined, Annie had assumed responsibility for Louise’s day to day life. It was a curiously lopsided upbringing. Once Louise had completed her tasks about the house, Annie would feel that her duty was done. From then on, Louise was largely left to her own devices, and would wander the town, making friends with anyone who would talk to her, pestering them with questions about anything from windmills to brewing ale. In only one other area did Annie try to exert her influence, and that was in religion. She was a strict Calvinist for whom God was a grim reality. Fath
er, on the other hand, would insist that Louise make up her own mind: ‘You can only believe the believable, my love,’ he would say, and in doing so he would quietly undo most of Annie’s efforts. However, there was one faith which Annie abhorred above all others: Catholicism. Here she gave no quarter, would listen to no argument, and was not above subterfuge. And she fought her case with facts. Many a night Louise’s bedtime story would be some gruesome detail of the Spanish Inquisition. If Louise had been naughty, she would be stood up in her window, which looked south, and be reminded that the Spaniards were only a few miles away, in the Spanish Netherlands: “… and we all know what they do!” Louise was genuinely scared and told Father nothing about Annie’s dire warnings.

  Mother’s cheeks seemed slightly less flushed today, Louise thought to herself, and her breathing was a little easier. But she tired very quickly, so, after settling her more comfortably on her pillows, she left her mother to her rest and went downstairs.

  Louise was restless and bored. She tried her lute, but it was out of tune – again – and when she carried it to the spinet in the parlour she found that that too was out of tune. Perhaps it was the lingering damp from the new plaster in the house. Her mind kept turning to the studio. Would it be very forward to go there without being asked? Eventually, her mind made up, she told her mother that she was going to the studio and was soon hastening through the sunlit streets to the Markt. Here she paused to get her breath back.

  She looked in on Kathenka, with the intention of asking her if it would be all right to go up, and then stood shifting from one foot to the other, offering to help her clean the bar, but hoping not to be taken up on the offer. Kathenka sent her off upstairs with a knowing smile. At the top of the stairs Louise tapped at the board door and listened for an answer. She inhaled the studio smells as they filtered through the door. She recognised linseed oil; that was used for mixing the paint, and then there was the sharp clean smell of the turpentine they used for thinning paints and cleaning brushes. Someone was hammering inside. The noise stopped, and she knocked quickly before it could start up again. This time the Master’s voice called out.

  ‘Come in!’

  She opened the door. Pieter was balanced on the top of a ladder, hammering a nail into the wall. She remembered their unsteady progress down the steps from the town wall and hoped he would be all right. ‘Ah, it is Mistress Louise.’ Pieter swayed on his perch.

  ‘Her room,’ as she thought of it, now looked more like a spider’s web. The Master, short and squat as a spider, was looking out at her from within a web of strings, while poor Pieter looked about as much at ease as a daddy-long-legs caught in the mesh. He emerged unscathed, however, and backed past her with a grin, paying out one of the pieces of string. He attached this to a pole, which, Louise guessed, represented the missing corner of the room.

  ‘Come, my dear, come. Ignore Pieter; he was going to play your part and sit for me, but he is no jewel. Today we set the jewel in the crown. Come and sit down. We must make magic, and later I will explain to you the wonders of perspective.’

  Louise adopted an approximation of her pose while the Master busied himself behind his canvas. She longed to see what he was doing. Sometimes he held up his paintbrush as if to preserve the angles of what he saw, sometimes he used a thread stretched between his hands. Twice he moved the easel. Then, when he was satisfied with that, he got her to move her chair to the right. ‘No, no, too far.’ Pieter came and knelt behind him. They conferred in whispers. At last he was satisfied.

  ‘Now, my dear, you may come and look. Careful of the easel!’ he warned, as Louise tipped one of its legs. ‘From now on, even if the canvas is moved, your chair and the easel must stay exactly where they are. I will show you why.’ The Master took her arm and guided her to where he had been kneeling.

  ‘Here,’ he said. She knelt down and stared at the canvas and tried to decipher what she was seeing. The Master’s crude sketch of her head and body throbbed from the canvas but now it seemed to be encased in a criss-cross of straight lines. She could recognise the network of Pieter’s tiles on the floor, but what were all these lines that appeared to converge on just one point, her right eye?

  ‘Ouch!’ she said. ‘You’ve stuck a pin in my eye. Why have you done that?’

  ‘Ah, so you’ve seen it. I hope it doesn’t hurt.’ The Master chuckled. ‘Ja, my child, that is where you will be, there where all those lines meet. The pin is where your eye will be, and where all eyes will go.’ He pretended to drop his voice. ‘Pieter is too dumb to understand, of course, you realise.’ Louise looked up. The boy was grinning. The Master went on. ‘Pieter now, he would paint you here, in the middle … but that is not Master Haitink’s way. No, that is too obvious, too like a portrait. I want people’s eyes to be drawn to you, but they must not know why. So I do with you what I did for the beggar at the Begijnhof gate. I put you in my secret place. Let me see if you can guess,’ he chuckled. ‘It is a place that is hidden to the casual eye, a place where all lines go but none are seen.’ He stopped, one eyebrow raised, delighted with himself.

  ‘It’s a riddle,’ Louise laughed. She could guess, but she wanted him to explain. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, kneeling at the canvas with his back to her, ‘look over my shoulder as I do this. I take my little thread and I stretch it from the pin. See, now it is parallel with Pieter’s tiles – here, and here, and here; now it is following the skirting board, now the windows. These are all lines that appear to stretch away from us; they are the ones that deceive our eyes so that the room appears to exist inside the canvas. When these lines have done their work – as tiles, as skirting boards, or as windows – they stop. But what if we draw them on, where do they go? The answer is here, to our pin.’ He swung the thread from line to line around the pin as he talked. ‘This point is called the vanishing point. The point where all lines go but none are ever seen. That, my dear, is where you will be. Because it is to here that the eye is drawn, as surely as a dog is to a bone.’

  ‘Now, my dear, your hand please, you must help me to get up.’ Louise helped him to his feet. She noticed Pieter’s amused expression as the old man dusted his knees. The Master glanced up: ‘Look at him, idling as usual. Come, children, I have work to do.’

  Toy Boats

  Chapter 10

  Weeks passed and Louise was happy. The Master seemed reluctant to start on her part of the portrait. He was, as he called it, ‘blocking in’ the base colours for the background, edging towards the charcoal lines he had drawn on that first day when she had frozen for him. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t required, but, having done her chores, she usually contrived to call in at the studio. Sometimes the Master would get her to sit while he made sketches of her in his notebook, but she felt that he was doing this more out of politeness than anything. When she got up to go, he would growl at Pieter: ‘Conduct Miss Eeden home, Pieter, and no dallying on the way back!’ If Pieter wasn’t ready, Louise would go down to help Mistress Kathenka in the bar or kitchen, or wherever she was needed. In that way it would happen that she was often still there when Pieter came down. Kathenka would then say that she would be happier if Louise had a proper escort for the short walk home. But the walks weren’t always short. They would start out and, by tacit agreement, Louise would allow Pieter to walk behind her, in the role of disinterested escort, while in the public Markt. But once they were away from the crowds, Louise contrived reasons for visits to the town walls, or walks down to the Oosterport, where they could stand on the bridge under the wide sky, breathing the air and escaping the feeling of being perpetually trapped behind high walls. As soon as they were alone she would take his arm and she would think again of her tiny reed boats and how they pulled each other together in the rain barrel; of Father and his Jewish friend, of herself and Pieter. The fact that she was drawn to Pieter was a scientific phenomenon, the fulfilment of a natural law. When she imagined lying back on sun-warmed tiles watching the heavens roll, it was Pieter,
not Father or Baruch, and certainly not Reynier, who was the unseen presence at her side.

  Leaning over the bridge at the Oosterport, she told Pieter about their new telescope. She found that he knew quite a lot about astronomy.

  One day he said: ‘It was when we were looking at the mountains on the moon through the Master’s telescope that he told me how Galileo had destroyed Aristotle’s theory of the heavenly bodies being perfect spheres.’ Silence. Pieter turned. Louise was looking at him. Something about it made him uneasy. He blundered on: ‘He n-n-noticed their shadows on the lunar surface …’ Louise put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side.

  ‘Pieter Kunst!’ she demanded. ‘Do you mean to say that all the time the Master was arguing with me for the divine truth of Aristotle’s outdated arguments, he was just pretending? Do you mean to tell me that you knew this, and that you looked on without saying a word while I, poor innocent that I was, was being so grossly deceived?’

  Now Pieter really did look as if his strings had been cut. She half expected him to collapse into a heap of arms and legs. It was too much for Louise; she threw back her head and sent a peal of laughter speeding down the Schiekanaal that startled jackdaws into flight from the gatehouse roofs. A surprised member of the watch emerged from the gatehouse, saw her, and scratched his head. ‘Oh Pieter!’ she said, as a relieved Pieter re-assembled himself.

  They talked about everything then: about astronomy, and painting, even about Spinoza and his strange ideas. Louise was never certain what Pieter really thought of these theories about God. He would ask her questions and even put her right when her arguments got lost in the sand. But when it came to his beliefs, his eyes would part-close, as they did when he was seeing pictures in his mind, and she would realise that he was thinking, as it were, with his artist’s eye, and she didn’t know how to follow him.