'Chin up, head a little more straight. Hands clasped so.'
I have to admit I set out to make this picture with the minimum of effort necessary. Nothing in it moved me, not even the payment due. It seemed more like a ransom demand than a payment, as it was quite clear he would have to ship me back home eventually if only to ease the expense on his household. There was no pleasure to be found in my palette which was laden with a gritty, unappealing burden of paint. Wrestling it on to canvas would have been hard enough, but the 'give' of canvas helps to break down any lumps you don't want. You can pummel and push them into submission. Smearing this lot on to board was going to be horrible and it was quite clear to me that the strange mixture of pigment available from the narrow range on sale in Hull, added to the earths and other substances I had discovered in and around the house, was extremely unlikely to stand the test of time.
To tell the truth, I wasn't too bothered. It had to do a job, this picture, that was all. For once, I was prepared to compromise. I would make up for the shortcomings of the paint. It had to look good enough to pass the test of Dahl's approval so, quite cynically, I attended to certain points in the presentation of my subject that would be likely to please him. The jaw became a shade more jutting, the jowl was diminished, the hair receded a little bit less. I turned the clock back a few years for him, seeing that perhaps the difference in age between him and his extraordinary wife might be something to which he was a little sensitive. I judged that difference to be perhaps fifteen years. That made him, shall we say, the middle point between her and me. Nobody would ever judge me by this picture. I wasn't going to sign the end-product if I could help it unless he made me. If he did make me, then I would use the name I had given him. There was little likelihood that it would ever damage my reputation. Any passing connoisseur could peer at that signature for a very great deal of time and still have no idea who had painted it. The paint was likely to turn sludge-brown and peel off inside a year and, frankly, I didn't really give a toss.
To pass the time, I decided to talk to him, and I watched carefully to see how much Dutch he really knew.
'It's a shame you don't understand my language,' I said, 'because I would like to have told you how hard I find the arrangements here.'
I marked the twitch of his eyebrow.
'You take me for a street vagrant, but I am highly respected – one of the most sought-out portrait painters in Holland. You sit there as if I were the servant and you were the master, but at home I have always had servants to command.' Almost always, anyway.
I saw his brow furrow. He wasn't following this. I picked more simple words and I spoke in a flat voice as if to myself.
'Do you know? I have never in my life been fed so badly. Your food is an insult.'
He swallowed. Bull's-eye. I went on talking as if ruminating to myself. 'Now I do admit that lately things at home have been more than a little awkward and a bankrupt has to accept certain compromises in his life. In my case, however, one must understand that being made bankrupt was not in any way a reflection on the quality of my art. I paint now better than I ever did before, but not in the way they like, that's all.'
How true that was. My Julius Civilis for the Town Hall is magnificently barbaric. It is only the malicious pygmies of the city council who did not see that. They want me to return their paltry fee. How am I going to do that? I can't have it back. It won't even fit through the door of my damned studio now, Hennie thinks I should cut out the middle pan to sell and chuck the rest away. God's unspilt blood. Am I reduced to that? Bloody hell.
All at once I was contemplating the reality of my own ruin. Nothing to do with money. What I found myself facing for the very first time was the prospect of the end of my art. If fickle fashion had passed me by, who would I paint for? For myself? To paint in a vacuum, in a world of one, there was a frightening prospect. Would my brush still want to move?
I came back to myself with a start. At some point I had completely forgotten he was there. He sat transfixed in his chair, with the expression he might wear if he were facing all the pirates of Dunkerque.
'Sorry,' I said, and then in English because I had heard Marvell say it several times in Hull and its meaning had been quite clear, 'Dooscuze me.'
I went back to work in silence and despite the terrible paints, the odd unbalanced brushes and the forgotten feeling of wood beneath them instead of canvas, something unexpected happened. In recent years I have discovered the wonderful things that happen when you build up the paint, layer upon layer so that the light careers off its slopes and facets and gives you better depth than any smooth painter can aspire to. It takes me days to do that normally, days of experimentation and subtle addition until finally you get to a picture you could pick up by the nose. This horrible, lumpy stuff I had mixed up, using rancid linseed oil and a whole range of substances whose identity I could only guess at, went on to the wood like plaster on a wall. I was moulding it, not painting it. By the end of that first day, a blind man could have told me what it was a picture of just by feeling it.
Rather magnificent, in its own peculiar way.
I painted on until Dahl could clearly stand it no more. He got up out of the chair with a desperate look on his face and mimed eating. I think he wanted a piss but couldn't bring himself to perform that particular mime. He motioned for me to sit in the chair he had just vacated. A while later, long enough for a smoke but not long enough for a screw as Lievens used to say, a serving woman pushed the door open with her ample bottom and set a large square tray on the table. Cold ham, a capon's leg, pickles and a slab of something sliced and yellow that quivered at the touch but tasted sweet and pleasant. A jug of wine washed it down, two slices of fine bread with a very superior cheese provided the final touch, Dahl's Dutch did not go very far, but just far enough. Life was looking up.
We painted all the rest of that short day until the light faded and I put the brush down for the last time, wiping it on my smock, which I realized from the expression on Dahl's face was in fact his smock after all. He got up and came to my side to look at the picture, staring hard at it while I stared at his face.
'Not finished,' I said in slow Dutch. 'More time. Tomorrow and tomorrow.'
He nodded.
Got you, I thought.
Then he went to the door and called, 'Amelia, Amelia.'
My memory of her was two days old, not counting the magical ghost dancing in the meteor's flash. In those two days I had painted her picture in my mind in a score of different ways, magnificently as Diana or Minerva, sensually as Danaë or as Bathsheba, even as Flora, though I paid for that thought with a terrible pang of guilty grief, because my Saskia had been my Flora and always would be. Those mind paintings were nothing against the reality of the woman who came in through the door, smiling at her husband and glancing for the briefest moment at me. Simply by walking into that room, she drove the Furies back off the lawn, I knew I would paint her as herself and that painting would indeed, as Marvell suspected, challenge me to find new ways of expressing the way the flesh can make a face distinct. I didn't care who paid for the painting and I didn't care who saw it apart from her and me. She went to the easel and I moved aside to give her space and they stood side by side staring at it, she with the tip of one delightful ringer to her parted lips. I saw something there I had to catch so I went quickly to my paint, took the thinnest brush and, because I had no other surface on which to paint, I drew them in outline on the plaster of the wall. My brush moved as fast as I could make it, knowing this intent, natural and sensuous pose would last only seconds. I used an ochreish brown simply because it was the nearest colour on the palette and, though I say it myself, I got them. Well, I should say I got her, because she was in front of him and all you could really see of him was his head peering past her. I roughed in the shape of the canvas and gave him a sketchy outline. That was all he deserved.
Only when they stopped looking at the canvas did they notice what I was doing and Dahl said somethin
g angry when he saw what had happened to his wall. She stopped him, did Amelia, with a hand on his arm and a word in his ear and then a comment which sounded wondering and I suppose he was suddenly able to see it for what it was, a finished thing in itself and of itself, I dabbed yellow on the brush and, to show off, enclosed the picture in four perfectly squared lines. Amelia laughed and to hear that laugh again, I took more paint and turned my crude frame into something more ornate with folds and mouldings and curlicues, all of brown and yellow paint. I think, as happens so often, my sense of time dissolved into the task because when I finished it, I turned to find them still standing there, watching, but shifting just a little from foot to foot.
They left and Amelia took the final rays of sunlight with her so that I wondered how I would survive the evening without her or the sun, but I did not wonder for long because the plump servant came back carrying a set of clothes and indicated that I was to put them on. She pointed downstairs and made motions with her hands and her mouth, then appeared to want to assist me in the matter of dressing. She was a substantial and curvaceous piece of womanhood, not at all unlike Hennie in recent years in her general build, and she was quite clearly game for whatever should ensue as she made great play of holding the clothes up against me and running her hot hands all over my chest and thighs on the pretext of trying them for a fit.
Well, at any other time in the last fifteen years, I would have had her skirts over her head in a flash and even now, half of me wanted to do that – the lower half, of course. The game of cushioned thumping was but a buckle of the knees away. The upper half of me had a different idea, a new idea, obtained through the eyes, of what it was that fired the prick's enthusiasm. What I suddenly wanted for the first time ever was bone wrapped only thinly in flesh. Jehovah, I thought, I had better get this out of my system or there will be no woman in Amsterdam I shall ever want again.
I dismissed her and she left, scolding me incomprehensibly, and then I wished I hadn't sent her away because the breeches she had brought failed to meet around my waist by half a hand-span. In consequence, I had to tie them across with a kerchief and cover the dangerous gap by letting the shirt-thing hang loose over the breeches. With a sort of coat which bit me under the armpits and brought out an unseasonable sweat in seconds, I trod cautiously down the stairs, wondering if I were the butt of a practical joke. If so, the company below were too polite to draw any attention to it, although Dahl did look me up and down in a startled way as I made my entrance.
There were three people in the room. The first one on whom I fixed my eyes was Amelia, and she wore a gown of the most superb blue, a lapis blue, toned down by just the slightest greening touch of yellow. Its greatest marvel was that where it hung in folds, the shadow thickened and purpled it in the most enthralling way. Her hair was long and uncontained and set a backdrop to the sheer and sculpted lines of those marvellous cheeks, Dahl hovered next to her, darting his eyes around the room as though checking for loose rigging or misaligned sails. Between every glance his gaze alighted, with some displeasure, it seemed to me, on the remaining man who was deep in conversation with her. It was, inevitably, Marvell.
Dahl cleared his throat and said something to Marvell, in which I caught the word 'limner'. I had heard him use this word before, always, it seemed, in connection with me.
'Ah yes,' said Marvell, dragging his attention away. 'Mr van Rijn, how gratifying that you are able to join us.'
'Will you thank my hosts,' I said. 'Also for the loan of this clothing which, I fear, I am of the wrong proportions to do full justice to.'
'Yes, of course,' said Marvell, and did nothing of the sort, 'Now, they have asked me to tell you that they are most impressed by the portrait.'
'How can they be? It is not finished.'
'They are people of discernment and it is already clearly on the way to excellence,' Marvell said smoothly. 'So much so in fact that Captain Dahl is most happy that you should undertake the portrait of his wife as a companion piece on terms that you and I may now discuss.'
I pretended to study Amelia as if for the first time, with my eyebrows raised, thinking furiously. Clearly the competition was to remain a secret.
'There would be matters to be arranged,' I said.
'Captain Dahl has anticipated that,' said Marvell. 'He believes a price of fifteen pounds would be possible for a work of the highest quality.'
'That was not what I meant,' I said. 'Mistress Dahl's skin colour requires an altogether more extensive palette. Impossible with the materials I have here. We must send away for them.'
'I don't need to send away for special ink when I write poems,' he said sarcastically.
'The words would sound the same,' I said neutrally.
'I have made some enquiries already,' he said. There is a merchant in York, I believe. York is not too far to go.'
Oh please, I thought. Not by donkey. He read my mind. 'The carrier goes there in three days. We can ride with him.'
'How much is fifteen pounds in real money?' I said.
'One hundred and fifty guilders.'
'Absurd, In Amsterdam, my customers line up to pay six times that.'
'But you are not in Amsterdam and your customers here are not lining up, except for these two.' He seemed to be considering but I already knew what he was going to say. 'I will make it more profitable for you,' he said. 'Just a whim as I said before, a contest. I will add another two hundred and fifty guilders in Rix dollars if you do it well enough. Does that improve your mood?'
'Three fifty,' I said.
'Three hundred.'
'Agreed.'
He turned and announced, I am sure, my consent to paint Amelia Dahl without bothering to translate the rest of our negotiation and we moved to the table to be met by a very acceptable meal of sturgeon followed by a powdered goose. I hugged the occasion and refilled my plate whenever the chance arose. There was a canary wine to go with it, a sweeter wine than we see at table in my own town, and from time to time, Marvell let me in on the conversation and it was all about him. They talked endlessly of his plan to set a lighthouse on the curling bank which blocked the entrance to their great river and then even more endlessly of the potential of a very large mud bank nearby which the shifting tide was gradually drying out into good earth.
'It will be valuable to whoever grabs it for their use.' Marvell remarked to me, 'and I think we must try to forestall the man who has his mind bent that way at present. This Gilby, my fellow Member for Hull, has designs on it. It would make a fine site for a house and I see no reason why it should be regarded as fair game for the first to seize it.'
'You want it?' I said.
'I want a house on the Humber,' he said. 'I want a beautiful house, a place where the Muse will feel at home, a place befitting a Member of Parliament,' He was looking around him as he said that, staring at the remarkable harmony of that room. It was clearly unfinished, but the walls had been coloured in a deep terracotta, an Italian shade, and there was a scumbled gilt being applied around the window frames that set it off to perfection. Amelia saw me looking and smiled, and I realized this was her canvas, her blank sheet, perhaps the only one she was allowed. I saluted her with my glass and caught a scowl from Dahl.
'Just such a house,' said Marvell, musing. It became abruptly clear to me that, Gilby or no Gilby, the new island was not the whole point. Paull Holme was the house he wanted, this house.
All good things come to an end and the moment came when roll-tobaccos were passed around to be lit and I had hopes that our fair lady would move to play the instrument, a kind of clavier, I believe, which stood in the room.
Instead it was Marvell who took command of it and inflicted on us some dreary songs, thrown out in a wavering falsetto. I used the occasion to look after Amelia as much as I could as she and Dahl stared at Marvell, I thought I was unobserved, but she caught me in the act and gave me the sudden, secret and unexpected smile of a conspirator.
When I thought the evening could dip
no further, Marvell proved me wrong. He produced some of his sheets of paper from a pocket of his coat and began to intone with the cadence of verse. I discovered what I already suspected during those next interminable minutes, that the only thing worse than bad verse is bad verse in a foreign language. The bottle of canary taunted me from just beyond my reach. At the end, the other two clapped their heads off, then Amelia said something to Marvell who turned to me and said, 'She entreats me to translate my verse for you.'
'No, no, there is no need. I caught the measure of it regardless of the meaning.'
Nothing would stop him. 'It is about the blessed state of nature and I call it The Garden,' he said, 'and the verses I have just written begin with, let me see now, can I make it rhyme in the Dutch? This is not a part of our contest, you understand. I will just give you the rough sense.'
'Don't concern yourself, I can imagine it,' I said, but he hummed and hawed and thought hard, with facial expressions to demonstrate his creativity, and then came up with something appalling about twines and vines and lace and place and suchlike until blessed, blessed Amelia broke in with a laugh and said something that distracted him utterly.
He answered her in an animated manner, then begged my forgiveness. 'Our hostess wishes to play the name rhyme game,' he said. 'She begs me to enquire of you what your first name may be. Please forgive me but if you told me before, I have forgot it most utterly.'
I was still damned if I was going to tell him my real name. 'I did tell you before,' I said. 'I told you it was Harmenszoon.' That was true. I had told him that before so that made it only one lie.
TWELVE
Monday, April 9th, 2001
Dennis intercepted Amy on her way to take a shower. There were two temporary showers in the bathroom on the top floor. Both were occupied and Dennis was forming a one-man queue outside them with a towel wrapped round his waist. He held up a hand to stop her in the corridor and bawled, 'Ladies present!' at the top of his voice.
The Painter Page 13