'It's not exactly noisy here.'
'There's the road. I don't want cars interrupting me.'
Amy almost pointed out that you could lie down for a five-minute nap in the middle of this road and have a very fair chance of survival but she went along with him.
'All right. Maybe we'll find a flat gravestone.'
There was no need. There was a brand-new bench at the far side of the graveyard looking towards the river. In the moonlight, Amy saw it had a brass plate screwed to its back, in memory of some newly dead parishioner no doubt. They sat down at either end and there would have been space for a third person between them.
'There are two things I need to tell you,' he said quietly. 'Amelia's day-book. I think we –'
'Can I hear the poem first?' she said gently.
She could see him looking at her in the moonlight and that was it, that was the moment at which she knew just how to paint him, not in daylight but just like that with the scar like a splash of silver on his cheek, war-paint for a night god and the eyes masked in darkness – the treacherous, ambiguous eyes simply bypassed.
'Stay just like that,' she said, drinking in every detail of the way he looked. 'I've got you. I've finally got you.'
In this silver light he could hold her gaze and as if he knew what she had in mind, he said, 'I saw a moonbow tonight.'
'You saw it too,' she said, delighted. 'Is that what you call it? It was extraordinary.'
'It's what I call it. I don't know if it even has a name. I didn't know there was such a thing.'
'Did you know that was what I was thinking about?'
'Was it?'
'That's how I'll paint you. The moon beau.' She knew how he would hear it and he shook his head, not understanding.
'Does that mean you'll paint me in the dark?'
'Maybe. Come on, the poem.'
She was expecting to be disappointed, expecting the same halting delivery he had given to his reading from Amelia's day-book, but what she got was measured, practised and as keenly felt as if the poet himself had been sitting on that bench.
He started again from the beginning.
'Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Should’st rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.'
Above their heads, somewhere up in the tower, an owl hooted and Don stopped.
'That's not all of it, is it?' Amy asked, not wanting him to.
'No, far from it. Are you sure you want to hear it all?'
'Every word. "By the tide of Humber". I can't think of a better place to hear it.' Amy moved towards him, laid her head on his shoulder and his arm slowly came around her as if, for a moment, the matter had been in doubt.
'Ready?' he asked.
'Yes.'
'But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place.
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, white the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew.
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.'
He fell silent and his hand stroked her shoulder. His hand. His damaged hand.
'That is the most powerful poem I know,' he said, 'but I don't think you need telling.'
They kissed, then stopped and looked at each other in the moonlight. She heard a car coming up the road from the village. The waves of the poem carried on the tide of his voice still washed over her. In that quiet place, staring at him, her doubts disappeared entirely.
'Do you know,' she said from the centre of deep peace, 'it seems so stupid now.'
'Tell me.'
'Out there on the road, I was frightened.'
'What of? Ghosts?'
'Of ghosts and of you.'
'Me? Why would you be frightened of me?'
'I felt Dennis there. I let my imagination run away with me. I thought he was telling me something.'
'I don't get it.' He sat more upright. 'What was he telling you?'
When she'd started to tell him it had been an intimate disclosure of an absurd thought but now it was too late to stop and his response, the stiffening of his body and his voice, made her wish she had never started.
'I imagined it.'
'What was it?'
I'll get it out of the way, then we can laugh, she decided. She tried to convey the absurdity of it with her voice. 'I thought maybe he was telling me you pushed him into the saw.'
The car came past, its headlights spraying through the bushes and lighting his face as he stared at her, and in his eyes for just a fraction of a second, she thought she saw that same stark, savage look she had seen before, the look the fieldmouse sees as the hawk takes it. Then the darkness slid back in the car's wake and it was just Don staring at her curiously.
'Not again. First Jo-Jo, now you,' he said and his voice had returned to normal. 'It's just nonsense.'
She looked at him in the moonlight and his eyes were soft. 'I know it is.'
'Why did you think it?'
'I don't know. Just something that happened in the dark.'
'Like you said, he was just a nice old bloke.'
'I saw you out there this morning, standing by the saw.'
'What did you think I was doing, checking out the scene of the crime in case I'd slipped up?'
'You crossed yourself. I didn't know you were religious.'
'Superstitious. Everyone believes in something, don't they? I wouldn't like to say what it is.'
She needed to get back to safer ground, 'Forget it. I just had a thought. What if Amelia is the Coy Mistress? Maybe this is Marvell's poem for the contest.'
He laughed and tousled her hair with his hand and the atmosphere went halfway back to being all right again.
'You,' he said. 'I don't know. If it didn't happen at Paull Holme then it's not real to you, is it? You want it all to be about Rembrandt and Amelia.'
She batted his hand away. There was a contest. Amelia says so. It was between Rembrandt and Marvell, between a picture and a poem and she had to judge it. I think maybe that was the poem and I'll tell you something else. I think she was the prize.'
'That's just wild guesswork,' he said. 'I'm pretty sure Amelia loath
ed the painter.'
'No,' said Amy. 'Only in the journal. Anyway, what did you want to say? You said you had something to tell me.'
'Oh yes, I do,' He thought for a minute. 'Look, it's about the day-book. I think it's time to give it to Peter Parrish.'
Amy stiffened. 'Why? We're still reading it.'
'When you were in your room, I decided I'd read another page.'
'By yourself? Without me there?'
'I know. I was … I was feeling cross. Anyway, I found the rest of the pages are much more stuck together than the ones we've opened so far. You know how it's all balled up at the bottom corner? It's not nearly so easy from here on. I got one more open but the corner came completely apart, We're going to ruin it if we go on the way we are.'
Paull Holme without the gradual revelations of the daybook seemed a bleaker place to Amy.
'Are you sure?'
'Am I sure that's the right thing to do? Yes.'
She recognized there was truth in what he was saying even if she resented his trying to make the decision for her. 'Did you read that page?'
'Yes. That's why I know what Amelia really thought.'
'No,' said Amy, more alarmed that she might be wrong about Amelia than she had been at the prospect of handing over the book.
'Don't worry,' said Don, 'I knew you'd want to know what it said so I wrote it all down.'
He took out of his pocket a tiny torch and a folded piece of paper and he straightened it out.
'It's dated Monday, January the twenty-seventh. Listen to this: Today has brought more indignity than I have had to suffer ever in my life before. The limner, in setting the final touches to his work, did require that I attend upon him to see it in its fulfilment. For that purpose alone I took myself to his room, where otherwise nothing he might say would prevail upon me to go, to satisfy myself that the work was such that would please my husband on his return. This, despite the state of disgust with which the man fills me at his loutish bearing, foul smell and goaty aspect. It has been a constant burden to counterfeit pleasure during the unendurable hours the work has taken. I will not dwell on what now took place but to say that at the moment when I cast my eyes upon the work and was searching for a way of speaking that would convey my deep distaste at it, the limner hazarded a move of such unwarranted familiarity that I was rendered incapable of resistance to it. In this most awkward moment I was delivered by the providential return of my dear husband, one entire day before he was expected, brought early, I think, by Marvell's urging who, dear friend that he is, did foresee the danger so that my husband, upon entering the … That's it, that's where the page ends. The next one's stuck like glue.'
'Oh God, can you imagine it?' said Amy, distraught. 'What happened? Dahl walked in on them, just as the painter grabbed her. Why does she suddenly hate him? She didn't hate him before,' She didn't want Amelia to hate him now.
'Let's go and find out,' Don answered. 'It should be in the one my mum typed out, shouldn't it? It should be in the journal. She would have considered it a bit more and written it out neatly. Have you still got it?'
'Yes, it's in my room. But it's going to be the edited version, isn't it? The cleaned-up version for Dahl's eyes?' Half of her wanted to say let's go, but the other half wanted to stay and see if she could recapture that simple powerful feeling the poem had produced. She was caught between two Dons. 'Is there any rush?' she asked.
Don, standing up, looked down at her. 'There's one more thing I want to show you back there at the house.'
'Which is?'
'I can tell you what colours he used for Amelia's portrait.'
That got her up.
At the house, he took her first to the room where they were both working and turned on the light. The last panel he had taken off had revealed the usual expanse of grey cobwebs, but since she had been in the room he had wiped the cobwebs away.
'There,' he said, 'as bright as day.'
Towards the top left-hand corner of the exposed rectangle of old plaster, partly obscured by the panel still in place to the left and partly by the thick paintwork above, were a series of bright splashes, crescents of colour.
'What do you think?' he asked, kneeling down in front of them.
She stared at them, then reached out to touch.
'He cleaned his brushes on the wall,' she said. 'Look at the colours. Red, pink, yellow and look at this one, the purest flesh tone. I'll tell you something. When we look at that paint there, we're looking at the colour of Amelia's skin.'
He had brought this as a gift to her to match the day-book and it made them equal partners in the matter for the very first time.
'Can you be sure?' he asked. 'Why the wall? It seems like vandalism.'
'He was carried away, Don. The painting occupied him totally. Maybe he'd dropped his rag. The wall was the nearest thing and there was no time to lose. The picture in his head was burning its way on to his easel, don't you see?' The way
Don's picture is burning in me, she thought. Don's face in the moonlight. 'Anyway,' she added more prosaically, 'they were halfway through putting the panelling in the room, weren't they? He knew it would be covered up. It didn't matter where he wiped his brushes.'
She stood up and reached down towards the wall.
'He would have been standing here.'
'Not sitting down?'
'No, I don't think so. The marks would be lower, wouldn't they? Do you see, all he had to do was just turn to the wall and wipe them up and down. Don, I'm standing exactly where he did and this is where I'm going to stand to paint your picture, too.'
'So where was she?'
'I'll tell you in daylight. Somewhere just about there. Listen, do you mind starting early tomorrow?'
'How early is early?'
'Half past six. In here. Just so I can get the basics right.'
'I thought you said you didn't need me for this picture?'
'I might not once I get going. Only for the start and finish. You know, a lot of the time it's just a matter of getting the right thing in the right place.'
'And the right place is where he painted her?'
'That's not what I meant, but can you think of a better one?'
'No.'
'I'll go and get the journal,' said Amy. 'Let's find out what happened.'
They could have read it in the intimacy of her room or in his and the strong chemistry vibrating once again around them would have tipped them rapidly into another naked embrace, but Amy had a sense of just how high the stakes now stood and knew that it would be easy to spoil everything. She was once again caught in the dilemma of the graveyard, pulled in contrary directions by her passion for and her puzzlement about this shifting man. They sat on the floor in the big, harshly lit room where they worked and she read what Amelia's journal had to say about Monday, January the twenty-seventh, 1662 and the day that followed.
'It's almost word for word the same,' said Amy, scanning the first page in disappointment. This day has brought more indignity … the state of disgust … She calls him slovenly, ugly, plebeian. Oh yes, she says, he has in a small succession of days turned the clothing my husband has, of his good heart, given to him into the most filthy of rags, all fouled with paint and I know not what else. Then it's the same again down to where her husband comes in: So that my husband on entering the chamber put all at a wonderful loss, occasioning great alarm in the limner and great sorrow in me that he should see me so demeaned. He dealt the limner a blow with his stick across the top of his head which brought him low and then did sweep his works to the ground. At first he seemed struck quite mute but then grew increasingly out of order, his voice coming back to him and did reproach the limner most bitterly, saying he would be driven from the house and set into the first ship that could be found. Marvell took the limner away, saying he would see to all and then my husband felt to reproaching of me so that I was hard put to defend myself against him though I foreswore any inconstancy on my own part. He took himself to another chamber and I
to our marriage chamber where I found myself considerably out of sorts and in consequence I could not sleep all night. That's the end of that entry, then it's the following day, Tuesday the twenty-eighth. She says, I have resolved to show this, my journal to my husband that he may see through my eyes what I have been put to by this limner, whom he brought first to our house and that I have done nothing but what my husband instructed in the matter. I have resolved also that I will reveal to him even my own day-book which he knows nothing of before now so that he may see clear what thoughts sprung from my head at first thinking on to the page. In this, it is my hope that he will see how once the limner did amuse me and then did soon disgust me and how I tried all ways to cover this from my husband so as to fulfil the task he had put the limner to perform. The limner is gone from here with Marvell to the port to take ship. His room is to be smoked clean land his daubs to be covered entirely with panels The work he has finished hangs in the balance. My husband's first inclination was to have it burnt on the fire but he owns that the merit of a work may sometimes exceed the purpose of he who performed it. I however cannot look upon it without a shiver of disgust. Amy leafed through the next few pages. 'Not another word about it. A bit more about Marvell, then she starts banging on about how dreadful the builders are. Would you believe it?'
'What exactly about Marvell?'
'It's in March. Marvelt came by boat to bid farewell and joined ship in the stream for the United Provinces where he says he must away with a most high mission to perform. Not a lot more.' She went on leafing rapidly through. 'The house gets finished, then a storm blows some tiles off. Oh wait, listen to this: The twenty third day of April. It is clear to me this day that my husband's greatest hope is fulfilled and that I am with child. When he returns from his voyage, I will tell him and all will be well between us again. That is my most devout hope. Well, well. Dahl's going to be a daddy at last.'
'That's your ancestry, Amy. Don't forget, those are your genes. God, I wonder where that picture is.'
'Not here, not in the house. Maybe not even in existence any more. Perhaps it got burnt after all. Perhaps all that paint just came off, the same way it did off Dahl's.'
'No, that can't be right,' Don said. 'Look at the wall. That's the paint he used for the second picture, Amelia's picture. It's still on the wall, isn't it? It would still be on the picture.'
The Painter Page 33