The Painter

by Will Davenport

  They both knelt down again, looking at the streaks of pigment.

  'Tomorrow, I'll take that next panel off,' said Don, 'then we'll see all the colours he used. I bet there's more.'

  'Tomorrow's Sunday. Don't we get one day a week off?'

  'We're working Sundays now. The Hawk spread the word. There's lost time to make up.'

  That seemed a bleak thought to Amy. Dennis dies and all it amounts to is more overtime.

  She had to bang on Don's door at six thirty next morning, even though she had spent half the night awake, working on the composition, sketching, mixing narrow palettes of blacks, blues and greys for the effect she wanted.

  She put a chair where the dawn light from the windows struck it just right and she stood next to the old brushmarks on the wall.

  'That's where she was and this is where he was,' she said, 'I wish I could paint like him as well as stand like him.'

  'I thought you might come in last night,' he said. 'Why didn't you?' There it was again, for just a moment. That look she couldn't bear.

  'I was tired,' she said. 'Too much going on,' She had thought of him just beyond the wall during her moments of wakefulness and she had almost gone to him but in the dark, the doubt had gained the upper hand over the passion. 'You could have come to me.'

  'You might have thought I was coming to murder you.'

  She couldn't bear that look.

  'Close your eyes,' she said in a moment of inspiration, 'Keep them closed. I need to do them later.'

  That was the way. She worked rapidly away at it until she was happy with the pale paint outline on her canvas.

  'All right,' she said in the end. 'You can take a break.'

  He opened his eyes, stood up from the chair and eyed the back of the canvas uneasily and she realized just how reluctant he was to see what she had done.

  'Come on,' she said, 'have a look. It's nothing at this stage. Just outlines, that's all.'

  He came around behind her, suspicious then clearly relieved and interested.

  'What's that?' he said, pointing.

  'It's going to be the bench in the graveyard.'

  'And those are gravestones?'

  'That's it.'

  'Cheerful.'

  'You wait. It's all a matter of how the moonlight works. I'm going to do a bit more to it. Why don't you get us some breakfast?'

  'Orders, orders.'

  'Yup. My order is a bacon sandwich and strong coffee with two sugars.'

  He laughed and her heart soared at the sound.

  At eight thirty, the Hawk opened the door.

  'Is that work for me you're doing on that easel?' he asked, 'Or is it something else, cos if it's something else, I'm not paying.'

  'I'll start now.'

  'You do that.'

  Amy climbed the scaffolding to carry on where she had left off and Don started on the next panel. Fifteen minutes later, Parrish arrived.

  'Good morning, you two.'

  'Good morning. What are you doing here on a Sunday?' Amy asked him.

  'The same as you. Overtime,' said Parrish, 'except I don't get paid for it. I have a meeting with your Mr Hawkins. How's it … my word, what have we here?'

  He went straight to the brushmarks on the wall.

  'More of your painter's work?' he asked Amy.

  'I think so, don't you? Someone who knows ought to take a look at that.'

  'Yes,' said Parrish, 'particularly when I tell you that the word on the oak panels from the other painting is that they are almost certainly seventeenth century and what's on them is an animal size of exactly the right sort made, amongst other things from boiled rabbit skins. It was certainly a seventeenth-century painting. There's no doubt.'

  'There's also no doubt that what we've got here is seventeenth-century paint. It's behind the panelling so it has to be, right?' said Amy.

  'Well, yes, indeed. Now my man who knows says those panels are very much the size and shape used by the only known Hull painter of the time, Nathaniel Wilkinson, so he's wondering if our mystery painter might not be Wilkinson. There's very little of his work surviving and one would have to say it isn't terrifically good.'

  Don was carefully pulling the framing for the next panel away from the wall and they could see more streaks of darker coloured paint behind it.

  'Terribly exciting,' said Parrish. 'Reminds me of that story of Heron's. Did you ever hear it?'

  'Patrick Heron? The painter?' Amy asked.

  'Yes, he was down in the south of France after the war and he came round a bend on the coast road and he suddenly realized he was looking at a Matisse painting, the er … I think it was Route sur le Cap d’Antibes. There it was, just as Matisse painted it. Anyway Heron realized he could get himself into the exact same position that Matisse had painted it from, pressed almost up against the rock face. While he was standing there, for some unknown reason, he lifted up the vegetation that was growing all over the rock and there, caught in a little crack, were all these palette scrapings. The very colours Matisse had used, still there after twenty or thirty years.'

  'Twenty or thirty?' said Amy. 'That's nothing. These are, what, 340 years old?'

  'Remarkable. It would be wonderful to know for certain who we're dealing with, wouldn't it?' said Parrish.

  'Amy,' said Don, 'why don't you take Mr Parrish up to your room and show him the box and what was in it?'

  'What?' said Amy, stung by the sharp tone in his voice and aghast at the way he was forcing her hand.

  'Please?' said Don. 'Will you just do it my way?'

  'What's this box?' said Parrish, so she had no choice but to take him up the stairs.

  'Is he all right?' asked Parrish, when they were out of earshot. That's the real reason I looked in. Ellen asked me to. She's very concerned.'

  'Mr Parrish, I …'

  'Peter, remember.'

  'Peter, I don't know any more. Sometimes I'm close to him and sometimes he frightens the hell out of me.'

  She was expecting Parrish to be concerned and reassuring. She wanted him to tell her that was absurd. Instead he looked at her in silence for a moment, then said, very quietly, 'I know what you mean.'

  'Do you?'

  'I couldn't say anything to Ellen of course, but yes, I do. To be quite honest, most of the time I think of him as a desperately hurt young man but just every now and then I wonder.'

  'What do you wonder?'

  He shook his head as if he'd gone too far.

  'You must tell me,' she insisted. 'What do you wonder?'

  'If he's been doing the hurting.'

  There it was, out between them in quivering words, first Dennis then Parrish.

  'I shouldn't have said that.' He sounded tired. 'Don't take any notice of it. You have to make up your own mind.'

  She nodded. Up in her room, she showed Parrish the box and the fragile book inside it and read him a little of what it said. He was gratifyingly astonished.

  'My goodness,' he said, 'what a find, and you say it's different to the journal?'

  'It's what she really thought,' she explained. 'It's got the story of the painter in it, but it's not in a good state. I think it's going to need a lot of work to get the pages apart safely.'

  'Oh don't worry,' said Parrish, taking it in his hands as if it were holy, 'It's going to get that all right. I'm amazed. When did you find it?'

  'The other day, I was waiting for the right opportunity to tell you.'

  Back downstairs, Don had the panel completely off and they could see the full extent of the painter's brush cleaning, swept clear of cobwebs. Parrish, highly excited, went to telephone his friend and as soon as they were alone, Amy rounded on Don.

  'Why did you talk to me like that?' she demanded. 'I felt really insulted.'

  Something in the way he looked made her stop.

  'What?' she said.

  'I had to get him out of the room, that's all. I couldn't think of another way.'

  'Why?'

  'Because of wh
at I could see behind the panel.'

  'Brushstrokes?' she said. 'He's seen them, anyway.'

  Don crossed over to his bag and pulled something out.

  'Not brushstrokes,' he said. 'This.'

  It was a sheaf of folded paper and Amy felt a rush of excitement as she recognized the age, the texture and the colour.

  'What is it?' she demanded.

  'We'll have to see,' said Don, 'but I've got a pretty good idea that it's what Amelia Dahl really wrote in her day-book.'

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Amsterdam, Friday, March 14th, 1662 (February 22nd in Hull)

  I have lost twenty days of the rest of my life. The calendar they keep across the sea turned nearly three weeks of my future into so much smoke. You might say I gained that same twenty days by going there but I did not know that at the time so I wasted them.

  Balls. I've lost far more than that. I have lost the sustaining belief that I am young. It is a slender thing, belief, and its disappearance has hurled me headlong into the ranks of the old.

  This discontinuity, this business of going away and coming back again is extraordinarily dangerous. I was wise not to try it until now because it obliges you to look at everything afresh. I have studied myself in the mirror day after day after day from the moment I first began to paint but the same face has always stared back at me, the changes in it too small to see, slower than the hour hand of a clock.

  Not now. The face I saw in the mirror this morning was thirty years older than the one I had expected.

  It is time for an act of bravery, so I am standing before a great canvas again in my own studio, with my own maul-stick and my own brushes. The mirror is set up and all is ready, but I am not sure where to start.

  Hennie and Titus were glad to have me back, until that is I began to impose my will on the house and they politely but firmly told me they had done very well without me, had even got on a little more smoothly in my absence. They had certainly, they both said pointedly, spent far less money than usual. I submitted rather too easily because I had been three entire days at sea on that heaving tub. The captain, may sharks devour him, had me lowered into a fishing boat for the passage to shore. It would be no tragedy if he and all his crew were wrecked on the remotest reef. There was a grey coast on the horizon where he claimed Amsterdam lay but I did not trust him at all and it was a relief to hear the fishermen in the boat speaking good, honest Dutch. That vile captain already had my gold coins off me by force even though I know Marvell had paid my passage in Hull with Dahl's money.

  How did I come to be in that boat? By the basest of actions.

  When I entered my tower room to find it ablaze with candlelight and Amelia sitting there, when she stood up, asked if it was bright enough, then let her dress fall to the floor, an exultant rush made every organ in my body swell to bursting and I knew where we two were going now. She stood there, studying her effect on me, not in any sly way – more like a feral animal judging her situation and mine and seeking some advantage under the natural rules which transcend our brittle human codes. If I'd had any knowledge of the future then I would have thrown her out, dowsed the candles and gone to bed but when Priapus is in the ascendant, there is no sense to be found in men.

  I stared at her, drinking her in, understanding in a rush just how her shoulders sloped into her breasts, how the ribs narrowed to a tiny waist, how the small stomach rounded perfectly down to a delicate mound of Venus between thighs that Michelangelo gave only to boys. It became clear to me for the first time that it is the frame and not the flesh which matters, that I had spent years painting women who were too fat and that what was now in front of me was as near to perfection as I would ever be able to imagine again. And do you know what else?

  For the first time in my life I worried about my belly, my thighs, that wattle hanging under my chin which grew gradually more pendulous. Against the flesh of the women I had known until now, they were just a matching cushion. Not here.

  'What is this?' I asked her.

  She looked down at herself, then up again, and smiled. 'It appears to be me,' she said. 'Is that not what you wanted?'

  I took an involuntary step towards her and she held up a hand, still smiling, damn her.

  'No,' she said. 'You may touch me with your eyes only tonight. The contest is on and this may help you win it. Marvell knows me well already. It is only fair that I let you see me as you asked, as I really am.'

  Marvell knows me well? What did that mean? It could not mean what I feared because what would be the point of the contest if it did?

  'I will draw you now,' I said, 'but that may not be enough.'

  'We will see,' she answered. 'My husband will be five more days away.'

  The only way I could keep my hands and my raving mind in check was to see her in small parts, to draw just that part there, or there, the way the parts of her aligned. There were no acute angles in her. Where, in a Dutch woman, flesh would have folded over, pressed surface to surface by the weight of it, in her the skin turned and climbed and fell in gentle curves, each surface a subtle wonderland through which I searched with my brush and my charcoal stick, probing and defining. She let me hold up a candle and inspect her minutely with it. I needed to see those places which had a form I had never quite painted before, the lower bulge of each breast and how it met the ribs below leaving no hidden fold, the muscle sheet at the inner summit of her thighs and the wonder that lay between. The sweet smell of her caused my head to swim as I made my tour of inspection and I sighed with desire.

  What would happen, I wondered, if I simply put the candle down and took hold of her? There she was, there was I and there was the bed. Why didn't I? I'll tell you, it was not respect for her rules, or for her wishes which seemed to me to be a little different to her rules. There was enough doubt there to leave the outcome uncertain. My lust was such that her rules had no sway over me at all, nor perhaps her wishes. It was Marvell. It was the contest. It was my certainty that my picture could beat his poem, that this was the competition my entire life had been heading towards and that if the prize was taken too early, the matter could never reach that point of judgement.

  It came close though, and she knew it. She was enjoying this. She was aroused but whether by me or by the power she wielded over me in that room, I could not tell.

  I moved around behind her and, God's bollocks, that side was just as sweet. She would need a soft mattress to be comfortable in the love act, having no cushions of her own. Crossing her arms and putting her hands on her shoulders, she looked back at me and she was fully cognisant of the effect that had. I knew I could paint her for the rest of my life. There was no pose I wanted to miss. Amsterdam could have been in the far Americas for all I cared at that moment. This woman demanded a dozen pictures but the contest called for just one. The portrait would be the best I had ever done and it could not, should not, be done in my usual manner. There was no time for the layers of paint to dry so I could not demand sitting after sitting as was my way. More than that, the thick plasticity I usually found essential would be out of place here. This was no Amsterdam burgher's wife with aged crannies to catch the candles and illuminate all the interesting hints of morbidity. This woman was all about smoothness, about the light which glowed through that perfect skin. She was translucent and I would fix her shape on my flat board by my utter skill in flesh tones and in the play of light, not by the depth of my paint. She would live for ever in my painting and I would win. It was not just Marvell I had to beat after all. There was her sense of her own artistry to take into account. I had to be worthy of her.

  I crept in close to look at her earlobe, fighting the impulse to drop everything in my hands and to reach around and cup those breasts. She moved, not me. She moved slightly back and her neck met my face and my lips but the lightning crackle of that touch lasted no time at all. She stepped away, bent down, giving me another pose that would only have done for the most lewd of my etchings, slipped on that damned self-satisfied cotton ro
be and went to the door.

  'In the morning, then?' she said. 'Downstairs?'

  The smile on her face as she left seemed to carry no other implication than that she was pleased with herself.

  When she had gone, I strode up and down amazed and in the hot grip of the most anxious and unsettling lust I could ever remember. Marvell must not win. In my pocket was the paper he had balled and thrown away. I took it and smoothed it, looking at it in the candlelight. I did not understand a word but I could now see that it started with three separate words where I had heard one, 'Had we but …' What was I up against? Were these hieroglyphic scratches of any artistic merit? Not knowing the scale of my task, I decided, would simply spur me on.

  The next morning Amelia was her other self. Cool, gracious, not understanding a word I said, with servants constantly passing through the room. I had a tantrum when it became clear the carpenters fully intended to keep installing the panelling while I worked. They had already covered half the wall. My walnut had gone, and the sketch I had done of the two Dahls looking at his portrait was half covered over. I made a point of standing close to the wall, closer than I would have liked, to prevent them working right behind me and so, frustrated in their task, they left with an ill grace.

  Amelia sat there, demure and lovely, as pure as a nun, bewildering. Now I had every excuse to touch her, to arrange her and I contrived a pose which was what you might expect in all respects but two. I tilted her head a little more to one side than might have been considered the normal mode because I knew what was happening here was far from normal. It had a suggestion of the coquette but more of a suggestion of somebody who was on wry and knowing terms with the world. Then there was the mouth. Relaxed, closed, it was no good. In my studio, on my terms, I would have found the words to open her lips a little into that sensual smile. Here, that was barred to me so instead I used my fingers, moulding her mouth just so.

  'Like you were kissing,' I said, and she pretended not to understand, which simply gave me the chance to touch her lips all over again.

  Although it is me who says it, I excelled myself that first day. By the end of it, what was taking shape on the board already had a shimmering beauty to it. It was the way a half-sighted old man would have seen Amelia, or a lover looking through tears. I would not yet let her see. The thin paint, with the walnut oil and the egg to smooth it, dried fast. That night, I fretted in my room, hoping she would come back with her candles but she did not. Instead bloody thrice-damned Marvell came to the house and I heard them out on the terrace talking and laughing. Marvell and Amelia with no chaperone. I could have gone down to spoil their fun but instead I watched and bided my time, ready to appear between them if he dared to read her any more poems. The second day got the picture to that point where bad painters stop and good painters start. Inch by inch, I was breathing life into that face on the board. The door was kept open throughout as servants brought us jugs of this and plates of that. At the end of the day, she closed the door and murmured, 'May I see it?'