TWENTY-FIVE
Friday, January 24th, 1662
In the dark, Paull church smelt of death. When a building burns, the smell may stay for years, but there was something else in the wind as well, as rank and rotten as the crawling contents of an opened grave. It was to be a night of corpses, that night.
I am approaching an age where the desires of the flesh will eventually stiffen the member a little less often and I understand in myself the urgent need to dance the double dance with a few more young partners before that moment comes but, by Christ's death blood, this is different. This woman commands and compels me and could make me do anything to have her! In my foolishness I thought I could lead her blindfolded to that sweet, wet moment and now I find she has been leading me by the nose all the time. She is her own woman entirely and I must play her game by unfamiliar rules. To lose the opportunity of opening her is unthinkable. To lose it by artistic failure to that prating Marvell would be unbearable.
When I left the house, I was groaning with desire. To have her there in my room, to talk to her as I had and discover she had understood every naked word of it, then to have her leave in effortless control, having neither slapped my face nor laid down, opened to my yard, for the consummation. Unbearable. Me, not in command, told I was a contestant in a covert duel, poem versus portrait and for what prize? For her? Was that what she meant? Marvell meant it, but did she? I told her that I wished to paint her as she really believed herself to be, leaving the ambiguity to her, and what did she do? She just gave me a melting, secret smile, wriggled her shoulders before she went back down the stairs and threw that ambiguity straight back in my face. All the rest of that day, I studied my sketches and drew her as Bathsheba, naked on the bed, the first thin Bathsheba I ever drew but I could not get it right, could not get the feel for that flesh. Every inch of my body knows the curves of normal women, of Dutch women, of big women, but I needed to cup those breasts in my hands. To teach my brushes I needed to feel that narrow waist with my fingers because those fingers would not believe what my brain was telling them about the shape of her. The Bathsheba who emerged from that muddle was half Dutch, half Amelia, a Bathsheba whose husband would have survived because David would have walked straight past her without a second look. I gave up, went downstairs to see if there was any Genever to be found and caught the briefest sight of someone leaving by the front door, just a glimpse of a figure disappearing with the door closing and I knew from that brief glimpse that it was Amelia.
I followed her outside and she was away like a wraith into the darkness. I went carefully along the track after her and the moon showed her to me by the white of her dress, moving through the saplings they have planted by the lane and then on down that lane. She was further ahead of me now but I could see her clearly because the clouds had blown past the moon and she shone in its light.
The night was almost silent. A pale bird glided over me and shrieked once. It might have been an owl. After all, what do I know or need to know about birds? On the river to my left there was a dim lantern, moving along high up off the water and a cast of the moon, showing silver sails, painted a ship for me. The creak of its rigging and the rattle of ropes in its blocks carried across the water. I could hear Amelia's footsteps, so I walked with care lest she should also hear mine. I could think of nowhere she might be going so recklessly into the night, alone. The village? Why? Then I considered that perhaps she had word her husband was returning from the city and she was on the road to meet him. I dismissed that as absurd immediately. Knowing something of Dahl, I could be quite sure he would take it very amiss to find his wife trudging in her indignity in dangerous darkness.
Some time passed on that hard, cratered road which tripped me three times. Twice I merely stumbled but the third time I fell and lay there, winded, expecting to hear Amelia's challenge from ahead, but she was far enough in front by now not to hear. When I got to my feet again, I could no longer see her moon-white shape ahead. This was not as I expected because the lane was in plain view all the way to the village and so she should have been visible, but she was not. That was when the church showed itself against the silver river and I knew that she had turned aside into the churchyard. In another minute, I was at the gate myself and almost called her to avoid alarm, but I was too uncertain of her purposes to take that risk, so I crept in at the gate, not without a small feeling of fear.
I saw a ghost once.
I was drawing a murderess, hanging on her gallows. She was a Dane and she hung there between the gallows posts and the axe she had used hung next to her. One arm and shoulder were a little raised by the rope passing beneath them so that she hung in a hunched position. AS I finished the drawing, I saw her, as clear as day, take her axe with the other hand, cut herself free and drop down. That was one of her. The other still hung there. This less substantial version came towards me with a horrid, vacant stare and as I was unable to move, sure that my own last moment had come, walked straight through me leaving me as cold and clammy as a corpse myself. This came back to me in great and unwanted detail in that place because the church was a ruin, its walls alone standing, and it was not a comforting place to be. Against the sky I could see some of the burnt rafters were still in place but moonlight showed me the pile of rubble and wrecked woodwork which filled the nave and that smell assailed me, charred wood and something horrid, long dead. If ghosts were to be found anywhere, this seemed the most likely place.
I stood undecided, ready to cut and run and then I heard quiet, living voices beyond the building: two voices, a man and a woman. There were bushes concealing the corner of the church towards my right and it was in the moon shadow, so I crept round that comer between the bushes, making no more noise than a fieldmouse. Ahead, by the boundary of the churchyard, in amongst the furthest gravestones I saw a bench with two figures sitting upon it, close but not touching. The nearer was undoubtedly Amelia and in another breath, when I heard his voice, I knew that the farther was Marvell, and I wished him dead, I also wished for the first time that I spoke English but instead I had to rely on intonation, on tone of voice to glean some understanding of what was happening in front of me. The smell was stronger here than ever. Something dead was very close immediately upwind of me.
In the clean air beyond, Marvell was arguing, urging something, that was clear. Amelia was amused but confidently assertive of a counter-view. This exchange lasted some time and seemed to end in compromise. An agreement of some sort was made and when Marvell appeared to continue to press a further point, Amelia, one hand raised, subdued him with peremptory ease. Then there was a change in both their stances. Amelia withdrew a little and half turned towards him. Marvell sat more upright and cleared his throat.
Oh poxes, I thought, he's going to bloody read her his bloody poem. He's finished it or at least he has a draft to try out on her. He's trying to win the competition in advance.
A silence fell and then he began and I strained my ears to make sense of it, to absolutely no avail. All I can say for sure is that it started with a singularly ugly word, 'Hadwyburt'. I said that to myself a few times as he banged on, so that I could attempt to find out its meaning later, though who could I ask? Neither Amelia nor Marvell for sure. By the holes in Christ's side, that man couldn't deliver a poem straight, he had to wave his hands about and let his voice wander up and down all the registers known to man. It was a profoundly horrible experience but I realized to my alarm that Amelia did not seem to share that view. The moon showed me her profile and she seemed fascinated by what he had to say. The gap between them was slowly closing as she was drawn in by whatever these words were that he was using as his bait.
When their silhouettes closed to only a hand-span apart I thought it was time to intervene. Groping around me, I found a lump of masonry within my reach fallen from the church wall, and I seized it and chucked it off to one side. It bounced off a gravestone with a satisfying crash and brought Marvell to an abrupt halt. Got you, I thought.
They bo
th said something at once, questioning, equally alarmed, Marvell got to his feet, then sat down again. Pleased with my success, I chucked another lump into the bushes beyond. They were both on their feet now. I didn't know whether they feared it was Dahl or a corpse crawling from an open grave, though the smell supported the latter best. I didn't have to do anything else because the owl or whatever it was did it for me. From somewhere up in the remains of the tower came a wailing scream of perfectly human misery. Marvell called out a challenge. The owl chose not to answer. Amelia now seemed to be giggling. Marvell made some sharp rebuke and she did not like that at all. She said something questioning on a rising note then something dismissive on a very final falling cadence and then she got up, walked towards the other end of the church and vanished around it. In a few more seconds, I heard her at the gate and then her footsteps faded up the road towards the house.
Marvell called after her, 'Amelia, Amelia,' but she did not even look back. He stood there uncertain, crumpled his poem in sudden fury and hurled it away. Then he turned and came straight towards me and I shrank down into my bush. He took the road towards the village where I thought perhaps he had left his horse and I waited a long time in my bush to make quite sure that he had gone. When I was certain that I was finally alone, I emerged from my hiding place and stepped straight into the source of the smell, which rose, appallingly redoubled, as my foot burst through the swollen, slimy, crunching thing. It had probably been a dog. It was now all over my foot. I found clean grass, as far away from the foul thing as possible, and I wiped my shoe on the grass again and again. This had the effect of making the grass stink as badly as my shoe without any apparent counter-effect on the shoe and it left me in a considerable dilemma. I took off my shoe, abandoned it on the ground and hopped over to sit down on the bench where they had sat, in order to consider the matter.
I now had an unexpected problem. Amelia must have smelt the smell, I could smell it from here and it was a smell you would not quickly forget. If I took that smell back with me to the house, she would recognize it and surely she would know I had been in the churchyard. That was something to be avoided. Casting around for anything that might help, I found the crumpled paper Marvell had thrown away and considered using that to rub my shoe before deciding it might have some other more important purpose. Smoothing it out, I folded it and put it in my pocket.
I tried everything that graveyard had to offer, large leaves, a sweet-smelling herb that simply added its quiet voice to the deafening shout of the stuff on my shoe, then it gradually dawned on me that only a prolonged soaking stood any chance of getting rid of it and with the umber Humber not much more than a field's width away, there was no shortage of water in the vicinity. I put the stinking shoe back on my foot and headed for the river, encountering many natural obstacles along the way, such as hedges, fences, molehills and bramble patches, stumbling straight into most of them because a large cloud had obscured the moon. The tide was in, which was a mercy because I had not considered what I would have done if faced by a sea of mud. There was a stony spit jutting into the water and tiny waves were washing over it. Standing on the flattest stone I could find, I pulled off my shoe, narrowly avoiding tumbling into the water as I did so, bent down and swished it backwards and forwards in the ripples. It smelt even worse. Soap and a scrubbing brush might have made an impression on it but all I had for my trouble was a wet, stinking shoe instead of a dry, stinking shoe. The moon sailed out of the cloud's back entrance and in its light I saw a bundle in the water, bobbing sluggishly in towards the beach. It grounded and I saw the waves roll it gently back and forth. Buoyed up by the hope that it might be a parcel of scrubbing brushes and soap sent to me on the tide by a sympathetic creator, I set off towards it and realized on closer approach that it was something even better. It was a corpse. A corpse with shoes on. The creator has a sense of humour, it would seem.
You might think I was no better off, exchanging animal putrefaction for its human equivalent, but that corpse had no smell. It had dissipated into the water. I will not dwell on the state of the thing. Probably it had not been in the water more than two or three days but that was enough. The shoes came off a bit too easily is all I will say. They were plain leather buckets, not at all unlike my own and they pinched a bit but that was quite possibly only because they were wet. The fellow, because the gaping trousers showed despite the fishes, nibbling that a fellow it was, had a belt with a purse on it, for which he clearly had no more need. Having no money of my own, it seemed entirely reasonable to check it for any contents. This was not a simple matter because although I had thought to begin with that he was very fat, I soon realized by the way his belt cut into his stomach that this was merely the product of the build-up of gases. I am not squeamish, not in the slightest, but I had no wish to have these shoes ruined in their turn by some terrible explosion of whatever lay within.
I was very careful indeed about twisting the catch to open that purse and my care was rewarded because inside there were six gold coins and four rix dollars besides. However he had happened to end up in the river, it was no footpad who tipped him in there, that was clear.
There was a large log higher up that beach and I sat on it, looking at the fellow bumping around there in the shallows, thinking how much I would like to draw him. I have painted dead bodies on several occasions. I still have a collection of pickled arms and legs, dissected and opened out by van Wesel who knew all there is to know about what makes our limbs move. You might even say that I owe my early success in Amsterdam to a dead body. A man called Pieterszoon got me in to paint him when I was new there. He was a useful man to know, though I have to say you would not want to spend an evening's drinking with him. Narrow-minded about everything and especially in religious matters, he considered himself to be the ultimate flowering of the human condition. When he was made Professor of Anatomy of the Amsterdam Surgeons Guild, he thought the world would be grateful if he arranged to leave behind him a portrait of himself as paragon. I don't think he knew half what van Wesel knew about what matters under the skin, but he wanted to show just how much he could lord it over his colleagues so the portrait had to be of him instructing them – performing a dissection, no less. He even wanted me to paint it during the course of a genuine dissection. Imagine it. Those things were bear-garden events. They came along at rare intervals and the public flocked to them. The doctors would be down there on the stage, snipping and cutting away and the public would be drinking and eating and carousing high up on the banks of seats, with hardly a clue what was happening but cheering every time something got snipped off or another organ was displayed.
I painted him as I knew he would want, in hard focus wearing his hat and a wise look, holding a didactic hand half-raised while he poked the other into the corpse's open guts. Seven other lesser members of his guild clustered round looking extremely impressed by the great man's actions. Sickening really, but my goodness he paid a lot for it. Not only that, but when it went on display, the crowds flocked to it as if seeing a painting of a dead man's guts was very nearly as good as seeing the real thing. After that the commissions poured in and I suppose that was what decided me to stay in Amsterdam when I had at least half a mind to go back to Leiden.
Of course, no one knows him as Pieterszoon any more and that's down to this ball-wrenching tulip business which has hit my fellow Dutchmen deep in the purse entirely because of their own cupidity. When there was still money to be made in them, these tulips were carved and painted all over Pieterszoon's house and he liked it when they started calling him Doctor Tulp, as if it made him into the mysterious essence of beautiful excellence that the flower had become. So it was that the painting became The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp and my fortune, for a while, was made.
It may sound a roundabout train of thought to have gone through my mind while I was staring in the darkness at a floating corpse, but it had a great deal to do with the competition facing me, a competition I was now utterly determined to win. First of all
it made me think once again of how I would portray Amelia and I knew that my old idea was entirely wrong. No painting of parted lips and glazed eyes could fool her into feeling the lust that it anticipated. She was not an innocent, not in any way, but she needed to keep up the pretence of being one for, on that pretence, her entire life here in this large house with this husband of hers continued to depend. To some extent then, that was how I would paint her, beautiful enough to stir a lion, innocent enough to tame a unicorn. That was how she wished to be seen. Oil paint is oil paint however and the expression in an eye or a pair of lips can be changed with two hours' brushwork. The layers of my paintings contained many different aspects of the same subject as I built them up. That always pleased me because nobody worth knowing is just one person and my portraits contained all those variations under the surface. They are thick with the complexities that lie under the skin. Along the way to that final version I might still experiment with the bedroom look, just to see what response I would get.
That wasn't all that the bobbing corpse brought to me. The doctor's anatomy lesson brought me back to this question of Amelia's own anatomy and how I was supposed to do justice to its mysterious composition. She had the measure of me. I was quite sure I would get away with little more in the way of feeling her face and her shoulders, let alone the mysteries lower down which were what I both wanted and needed to know with my hands and with more than my hands.
Something like despair hit me on that cold log where I sat with my feet in a dead man's shoes. I could get the outer form of her clothing, for sure. That was nothing. Unless I knew what lay inside, how could I be sure I had the fullest potential from it, how could I know that those lithe limbs could not twine themselves into something even more guaranteed to melt the frostiest viewer's caution?
The Painter Page 31