“I’m joking, Master Hans,” I said gently.
His discomfiture was allowing me to feel mistress of the situation, so much so that I even dared to put a reassuring hand on his arm. I liked the feel of muscle under my hand, and the start he suppressed at my touch. “I’ve seen you in the street. I knew you were here.”
Another wave of crimson. His mouth opened again, gasping for air.
Was he realizing for the first time that I might have been watching him watching me from the street for all those months? My confidence was growing; I felt almost playful as I watched him.
“Last night, you mean?” he spluttered, and now it was suddenly my turn to feel heat sweep over my face and body. I’d forgotten last night. Or, if I hadn’t quite forgotten it, I’d never have expected him to bring it up to my face. “In Maiden Lane? Was that you?”
“I . . . Last night?” I said faintly, playing for time. “Maiden Lane?” It was in my mind to deny it. Pretending things weren’t happening was coming to seem quite natural. But the eyes fixed on me were full of knowledge. And it didn’t seem in the spirit of this meeting to hide from the truth completely.
“Heavens. Was it you who stopped me?” I asked, trying a light smile. “And there I was thinking it must be a footpad. I was so scared I ran away without even looking . . .” It sounded unconvincing.
We both remembered staring into each other’s eyes.
“I was coming back from mass at St. Paul’s,” I went on hesitantly, feeling my way toward the truth. That sounded weak too. So I blurted, in an embarrassed rush, “and I’d heard somewhere that you were living there, so I took a look . . .” I was mortified by the delighted understanding that was dawning on his face now.
“You came to see where I lived?” he said, completely failing to whisper, so loud that a man passing by with a bottle of oil turned to look at us.
“You did that?”
“Well, I was intrigued that you’d been living just down the road for a year and hadn’t come to call!” I answered, nettled enough to feel safer going on the attack.
He nodded his head, then shook it, and scuffed the toe of one big boot against another. “Yes,” he said, with shame written all over him. “I know. I can explain . . . but you must think . . . you know, Erasmus wanted me to come straightaway . . . but I wanted to set myself up first . . . get myself straight . . . so you’d admire what I’m making of myself.”
His English was better than before. He even had a slight London twang. And I saw he’d learned at least a touch of English hypocrisy too: he wasn’t going to mention Father’s downfall. I felt my heart melt at the transparency of his wish to steer clear of that painful subject and whether it had affected his plans to see us after he got back to England.
“But I’ve come now,” he said, eager as a puppy, and his face lightened.
He’d suddenly remembered something, whatever it was that had given him the courage to come back to the street outside my home. “I’ve come, and I’ve got something to show you. Something I’ve done. A picture I’m proud of. I think you’ll like it. I hope you’ll like it. And your father.” He paused. “And your husband, of course,” he added unwillingly. He took a deep breath and stood up straight. “I want to invite you . . . all . . . to my lodgings to see it.”
I was awash with tenderness now. “We’d love to,” I said warmly, knowing that my smile was going to put just that look of bliss on his face. “Truly.”
He glowed, and the eyes fixed on mine were smiling. Then he recollected himself, as if our entire conversation had been a happy daydream he’d got caught up in and he was coming back to reality. He looked round, looked up at the sun, stepped back from me, and did a little bobbing bow, as if he were about to move hastily away.
“But, Master Hans,” I said, catching the meaning behind his movement, not wanting to end this conversation that was bringing back the ease of the old days with such painfully nostalgic force, “won’t you come in and take a glass of something with me? We have so much to catch up on after all this time. There’s so much I want to ask you about what you’ve been doing,” and I let my voice trail wistfully away. (Had I always known the flirtatious ways that seemed to be coming so naturally now? I wondered, catching myself.)
“I should be off,” he said hastily, with embarrassment making him suddenly boorish. He cast a queasy look at my front door. I was almost hurt until it occurred to me that perhaps he didn’t want to see the reality of my married life behind that door, a thought that brought a lump to my throat.
“Work,” he went on, staccato. “And I’ve kept you too long.” He was shuffling backward now, squinting up against the sun. “It’s good to see you, Mistress Meg,” he said awkwardly. “Sunday at noon?”
And before I could answer he’d flipped around and was striding off, planting one muscular leg after another on the flagstones at a speed that wouldn’t have taken much increasing to turn into a run.
I planned the Sunday visit carefully. I told John I wanted to go to mass with Father at St. Paul’s. I left my husband with Tommy at home. I told Father that John couldn’t join us at church because he was busy with his work. I only told Father about the plan to call in on Master Hans in Maiden Lane once we were shriven and on our way out of the churchyard.
I didn’t want to deceive John; but I thought Master Hans would be more at ease with just the two of us.
“Our old friend Hans Holbein!” Father had said, with his new quiet ness, though with every appearance of pleasure. “Now that’s a surprise.”
He must have known Master Hans had gone from making the portrait of Thomas Elyot, our friend, to painting almost every one of our foes in the Boleyn circle as the fashion for portraiture developed. But he didn’t make any further comment, just walked on humming under his breath in the intense July sunshine. He looked so pale in the fierce light that I remembered Dame Alice’s worries about the pains in his chest and his bad sleep.
I didn’t dare ask him to his face, though; I knew how he hated to lose his dignity.
Master Hans wasn’t exactly at ease. He was watching out for us on the street corner. His face lit up when he saw us, though he skittered round me without meeting my eyes before bowing enthusiastically at Father (but, I wondered, was he secretly noticing how Father seemed to have shrunk into himself, getting shorter and stringier and thinner in the face by the week, with gray in his strong black hair?). Master Hans only paused for a minute to bask in the glow of Father’s smile—which was still as powerful and golden and enchanting as ever—before hurrying us into his doorway.
I thought perhaps he didn’t want to be seen in the street with us. He lived in upstairs rooms at the end of a dingy staircase. There was silence downstairs, and no welcoming smells of cooking.
“They’ve gone out,” he said shiftily as he shepherded us up the stairs, “the old man and the boy who do for me. But they’ve left food for us in my rooms.”
There was a table with wooden platters groaning with bread and cheese and beef and a big jug of ale and a glitter of newly polished pewter, and a cloud of tiny wildflowers on wiry stems in another big jug.
Someone in this all-male household had made an effort to please. There was too much food for just three of us. However much Master Hans might wolf down, I was so nervous my appetite had gone completely, and Father, who’d always been abstemious anyway, scarcely ate a thing anymore.
Then I realized I was the only one who was looking at the food and worrying about the social arrangements.
Master Hans was worrying about his picture. “This is what I wanted to show you,” he said urgently, not bothering with politeness and pleasantries, getting his arm under Father’s elbow as we entered the room and drawing him straight to the room’s side wall, where, at this time of day, sunlight slanted through the open window. The painting took up almost all of it: a huge square thing on big wooden boards, bigger than the doorframe, taller than a man, propped up on a bench.
Father looked at the pict
ure glowing against that dingy wall. It showed two young men in court clothes, standing on either side of a table.
There was a long pause. I gazed at it too. Technically the painting was even more accomplished than the earlier pictures that I’d seen. But there was something new in it that I didn’t altogether like: less of Master Hans’s old, rich, straightforward simplicity; instead, some more subtle intelligence whispering stories beneath the surface that I could sense were there but couldn’t make out. The composition seemed crowded to me; the center piled with detail; and with a long, mysterious scar at the bottom, sloping sharply upward and to the right.
But I could see Father liked it. He was entering into the spirit of this game. He was puzzling out the secret stories in the picture. He moved to the far right of it. He squinted back down from there at the sloping scar, moving around until he found exactly the right place from which to view it. And suddenly he grunted with satisfaction.
He’d solved the visual puzzle.
“I see,” he said to himself, then, to me, “it’s a skull, if you look at it from here”—pause—“and if you look at it from here you can’t see anything much of the rest of the painting; the Frenchmen become shadows on the wall; like Plato’s cave.”
We all paused, and I could see come to each of us a wistful memory of Erasmus enjoying his favorite story, about the men in the cave believing the shadows on the wall to be reality, while only the philosopher who gets out of the cave sees the bigger truth.
Then, stepping back to look again at the painted astronomical instruments on the table, Father turned to Master Hans to say, “It’s about angles, isn’t it? It’s an astronomer’s painting.” Then he stepped back up to the painting to see the skull, stopped squinting downward and started looking upward at the same angle, with his eye following the natural upward diagonal in the portrait, from the hand of one sitter and upward along the sloping red slashed-satin arm of the other to . . . Now what was that behind the green Lenten curtain at the end of the upward diagonal? Father moved leftward.
I shuffled along behind him, drawn despite myself into the game.
It was a crucifix. In deep shadow. Almost invisible. Almost covered by the veil. As if it were Good Friday and the priest had just begun to twitch back the curtain.
Father paused again and looked at Master Hans with growing appreciation. “You’ve become an astronomer, Master Hans,” he said, and his voice was as relaxed as if five years hadn’t gone by since he’d last been in a room with the German and as if we weren’t all now in a room with hardly a word spoken between us to explain ourselves.
“And”—he gave Master Hans a searching look—“a theologian; and perhaps an astrologer too?”
Master Hans nodded. Father darted to the middle of the picture. He was eyeing the angle at which an arithmetic book showing a division sum under the German word dividirt was held open by a set square; and the very similar angle at which one side of an open hymnal in German was raised from the table by a bundle of four flutes.
“The same angle?” he said. Master Hans nodded, intent, delighted, watching Father’s quick mind work out answers. “And the same angle as the big lines taking you from the skull to the crucifix—your memento mori?”
Master Hans nodded again, almost bursting with excitement. They were almost hissing at each other now, lost in their play of minds.
“What angle is it?”
“Twenty-seven degrees.”
“And we’re to think of grief: Lent, and Good Friday, and Christ behind the curtain . . .”
Father wrapped one crooked arm around his waist, with the hand catching the elbow of his other arm. His second hand was cupping his chin. He was deep in thought.
Master Hans couldn’t wait. “Twenty-seven degrees was the altitude of the sun this Good Friday, in midafternoon, at the time Christ died,” he blurted. “The skull is a record of the shadows cast by that sun: not just the usual memento mori,” and he flashed a little shared-secret grin at me as he said “memento mori.”
Father smiled. A new smile. A degree of infectious joy to match Master Hans’s own. “This Good Friday. The Easter weekend when the Lady Anne was proclaimed . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence with the word queen, but he’d seen the secret sense of the picture: Master Hans was grieving as he was for the destruction of the common church and the darkness into which life was slipping. He’d portrayed the time of Anne Boleyn’s rise as the end of the civilization we knew.
“Yes!” Master Hans was saying, and unable to restrain himself any longer, like an errant schoolboy forgiven, or a friend, he stepped forward and clapped his big bear-paw on Father’s shoulder. “I knew you’d see.”
How had I thought the room dingy? The air was full of doves as we sat down to eat; the ale golden as honey. And suddenly we could talk, as we hadn’t been able to for months. The picture glowed before us, and Father and I went on hunting for elements of the games Master Hans had been playing—an inexhaustible stream of inventiveness. There were big thoughts, part of his idea that the times were full of foreboding and that civilized life was being torn apart by religious strife.
The marble floor looked like the Westminster Abbey pavement where kings were anointed, a marriage of heaven and earth; and there were magical hexagons at the top and bottom of the picture, a mathematical device signifying the otherworldly, and as Master Hans showed us when we didn’t understand quickly enough, the composition also contained a hidden astrology square of the dark planetary configurations on that day when Father’s fate had been sealed.
There were details too that struck me from time to time, making me so fond of Master Hans that once I had to choke on my bread and cheese and lean into my ale to hide my feelings. There was something endearing about the little hints of flattery to the Frenchman who’d commissioned him—Polisy marked as an important place in France on the same globe, say. And I loved the spelling mistakes his German pronunciation led him astray on: “Pritannia” for Brittany and “Baris” for Paris on the terrestrial globe.
“You were once going to come back and do some final alterations to our portrait, Master Hans,” Father said, stretching contentedly back in his seat, pushing away his wooden board. “Do you remember? But it was a long time ago, and I hardly like to ask you now. You’ve become a busy man. Perhaps you don’t have time . . .”
We all knew nothing more need be done to the painting. It didn’t need the lutes and chairs Father had once asked for. What he was really talking about was a tentative proposal for more meetings; a new friendship. And Master Hans glowed with the pleasure of it. He loved Father, I could see. He and Father made each other playful; gave each other ideas; were more alive together. And I loved him for bringing to Father—already somehow less shrunken, less gray, with less of an air of being away from this world—this renewed willingness to engage with happiness.
But then Master Hans’s face clouded with the returning memory of how things actually were nowadays.
“I would like to,” he said, but a little too carefully, “very much.”
He didn’t offer a date. Father didn’t ask. But I felt him shrink back into himself, wounded.
So, slightly surprising myself, I took charge. “You and I can work out a date between ourselves,” I said to Master Hans. “We don’t want to bother Father with details. We can write to each other. You probably have a lot of commissions, but maybe toward the end of the summer . . .”
He was still looking torn: wistful, but faintly alarmed too. And then it occurred to me that he might not want to be seen going to Chelsea, or for that matter to my house, in the middle of town, where everyone saw everything and the walls had ears. I should be sensitive to that.
“Maybe we could all go and stay with the Ropers? Margaret lives in Eltham now, near the palace,” I added, on a burst of inspiration. “It’s beautiful. Well Hall, it’s called. She’s making a wonderful Kentish garden. You’d love it.”
I’d been right. He’d been scared. But he wanted t
o see us. His face cleared. He beamed, and I was aware of Father’s shoulders relaxing.
“Yes. Eltham. We’ll write,” Master Hans promised, and he leaned forward, almost as if he were going to start clapping me energetically on the shoulder. “I’ll make a fortnight to do it. I’ll enjoy it.”
It was only after we’d left and Father had turned downhill toward the river and I was slipping back home with my hood up that I saw, with my mind’s eye, the other memento mori that Master Hans had also built into his picture: one so simple and elegant that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it straightaway, and one that represented the biggest homage to Father of all. Those strong diagonal lines radiating from the eye-level point at the right of the picture, downward to the skull and upward to the crucifix, met at the picture’s rightmost edge: in the purple-brown velvet coat of the French bishop. All those portents of doom connected with religious discord and political disharmony came back to the same point.
A mulberry-colored gown with a mulberry pattern. Morus; Father’s favorite pun on his own name. Holbein hadn’t forgotten us, even if he was trying to build a future in the other camp, with the people who had tomorrow in their grasp. What his picture was saying, over and over again, was: Remember More.
He didn’t see Father primarily as the burner of Protestants he’d briefly become, the man I’d hated. Master Hans’s vision was bigger and more generous. His picture was mourning the vanishing world of intellectual tolerance that Father had once been part of. Master Hans, for all his long absence and silence, was our true friend.
I was so uplifted by the way things had turned out that it was easy to tell John about the meeting and the picture. Decorously, tactful as ever, he asked no awkward questions about how I’d made contact with Master Hans in the first place. “I’m pleased it made your father happy,” he said, when I’d got my bubbly story out, and there was a hint of real pleasure in his sky blue eyes at the sudden lightheartedness in me.
John loved Father.
And he loved it when I could overcome all my ambivalence about the man who had raised me and be happy with him, enough that he could forgive, or ignore, the way I must have kept him out of my secret plan to put the two other men together again. I might not have been so generous, I thought with a pang. I’d overlooked that easygoing generosity at the heart of him for so long, once I’d started to feel uncomfortable with his anything-for-a-quiet-life lack of energy and ambition, his reluctance to question the things in life I felt were wrong. But now everything suddenly seemed simpler. We only needed a flash of joy to fill our lives with sunlight. The moment of ease we shared that day might have been fleeting, but it seemed to mark a change for the better.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman Page 39