'No,' I said. 'It is not yet you. It only has the promise of you. It may never be you. All hangs in the balance. What is greatest is only achieved by the greatest risk.'
When it began to grow dark, I walked to the church and did a lightning-fast sketch of its broken bones against the sky. I thought by this I would have an excuse for happening upon that crumpled poem on the back of which, because paper is paper and not to be wasted, I now made a second sketch of the aspect from the river side. When I got back to the tower, with hopes of all but no expectation of anything, I saw a tiny dancing light at my window and sprang up the stairs to find that same phalanx of candles and Amelia wailing, composed and with the look of the Sphinx on her.
'Where were you?' she asked.
'At the church, drawing it,' I replied.
'May I see?'
'Of course,' and I gave her the second sketch, poem side upwards.
She looked at the paper in open surprise, then turned it and studied the sketch, nodding. Without any other response, she turned it back again and I saw her lips moving as she read. 'Where did you find this?'
'In the graveyard, all crumpled in a ball. It was useful. Why, what is it?'
'Marvell's first attempt at his entry in our contest,' she said straight.
'How did it get there?' I asked.
'It is a first rough try,' she said. 'I expect it angered him. Imperfection of any sort does do that to him.'
'Will you tell me what it says?' I asked.
'It is a man entreating a woman to waste no time in loving him because all flesh rots and we do not have an eternity before us,' she said.
'And is it done well?'
'It is done half well, I have found fault with it and suggested some improvement. He says in a day or two it will be better.'
'You would help him win the contest?'
'Listen, Dutchman, I will help you too if I think your picture lacking. Have you not understood at all? We must all three strive for the very highest achievement in this.'
Her eyes outshone the candles and I had a glimpse of a deeper mystery than I could fathom. I looked at the paper again.
'But he has thrown it away. How can he write it again?'
'He carries it in his head. Now, enough of Marvell, unless you are prepared to haul up the white flag already. Do you need to draw me again?'
'More than ever.'
'Why?'
She was taunting me, the damned woman. She was ready for it because she was wearing that same cotton garment again, the dress which I knew could drop to the floor with a twitch of her fingers.
'Because I can't touch you. My eyes can measure you as best they can but it is my fingers that hold the brush and it is my fingers that are best qualified to capture the real Amelia. My eyes must work five times as hard as my fingers for the same effect.'
She nodded and the cotton crumpled to the floor again and in soft yellow candlelight she could have been carved from butter. It might have been what I most wanted but it was torture. It was the breasts I needed to draw. In the formal portrait, her clothes kept confusing me into giving her Dutch breasts. I was using a fine brush and thinned brown paint but she was watching me too hard.
'Read me the poem,' I said.
'You won't understand it,' she said. 'Why?'.
'I can hear its rhythm at least,' I replied. I wanted to put her mind somewhere else, to recapture that transported air she had displayed last time.
She began to read and of course it made no sense, but it made sense to her. It made a terrible and sensual sense. As she read it in a low and husky voice, I could hear it reaching inside her and it was like watching someone else make love to her. A faint flush spread over her face and I moved closer to examine her expression, the expression of someone starting to feel the first fluttering promise of their climax to come. Damned poem. I tried to get that expression, tried and failed because when I had barely begun she broke off from the poem and said, 'Now. Now you can touch me. Just my breasts, that is all,' and went back to start it all over again at the beginning. 'Had we but …'
Oh, I touched her. I ran my professional artist's hands over and around those perfect breasts and her eyes half-closed and her voice slurred and God almighty, I wished that vain bastard Marvell had written another fifty stanzas because she came to the end, stopped, opened her eyes wide and stepped back from me.
'Tomorrow, then,' she said, dressed, and was gone.
I was up at first light that day and I worked and worked at the dress and the line of her breasts and the soft skin of her neck until I knew I needed her there for the final seduction of the face. When the door opened, it was not Amelia, it was Marvell, and before I could stop him he walked rapidly behind me to study the picture.
He whistled. 'Extraordinary,' he said. 'Remarkable. One would think you had known her for years, old man.'
'Not so old.'
'That look on her face. However did you catch that look?' he said. 'I know it well but I did not think she wore it more generally.'
'I paint what I see,' I said tersely. That is what I see when she looks at me.'
'Is it, now? And how far from completion is your portrait?'
'It may be finished tonight,' I said, 'or again, it may not.'
'I have to go to the town on Trinity House business,' he said pompously as if I should fall to my knees in awe. 'I will be back at dusk, I very much look forward to seeing it.' He went as far as the door. 'Oh, and by that time I expect to have my own entry in our contest ready. I will write a fair version of it in town today and I have a Dutch version for your ears too, so that you may understand and accept the judge's decision.'
'I am writing one in English myself,' I said.
That stopped him. 'In English? How can you? You don't speak the language.'
'I listen. I pick up words here and there.'
'Why don't you write it in Dutch? You would find it hard enough to write a poem in a language you do know.'
'No, I am happy in English,' I said. 'I have the first line and I think it sounds very fair.'
'Let me hear it.'
I struck a declamatory pose. 'Had I but vurld enuff ant time,' I said and he swore an oath, slammed the door and left.
Amelia came in a minute later and closed the door behind her. 'What did you say to Marvell?' she said. 'He rushed past me without speaking and galloped his horse straight over the new grass.'
'I can't think,' I said. 'Perhaps he smelt his flesh starting to rot.'
It was a harmless enough start to the day, just my bit of fun but that was not how Marvell saw it, not at all.
It was some time since I had painted such a small portrait and its completion, as a result, leapt up on me quite unexpectedly. In the late afternoon, I made a tiny adjustment to the corner of Amelia's right eye, touched in a little white highlight on the side of her nose and stood back to see that it was done. By heavens, if I'd painted at that speed for the past few years, I would have been a whole lot richer.
'You may get up,' I said, and she went through the pretence, because the door was open, of not quite being sure what I said.
I went to close it. 'It is time for you to see,' I told her. 'I want you to get up and I will lead you round to it with your eyes closed. All right?'
'Yes,' she said and now she was in my power again.
I lifted her under her arms, so that I could feel those breasts against my wrists, then took her small soft hand and led her to the front of the easel.
'You may open your eyes very slowly,' I said.
I watched her face as they opened and saw the dawning wonder and the faint flush. 'Am I like that?' she said. 'Do you see me like that? Am I so beautiful?'
'At least.'
'My lips look wet to the touch. Are they wet? Is it the paint that's not yet dry?'
'They will still look wet when the paint is dry. Do I win?'
She looked at me and she was open and moved and vulnerable, a woman to whom one huge tribute had been paid, knowi
ng another was on its way.
'It beats his first effort,' she said, 'but will it beat his second?'
'No poem he writes can diminish what I have done,' I said. 'I know you Amelia as well as anyone can know you in so short a time. I claim the first part of my prize.'
I was close to her and I reached out, took her head between my hands and kissed her on the mouth, and she seemed to move towards me in response but before the matter was entirely beyond doubt, the door crashed open. Amelia sprang back, screamed something which started with 'Save me,' and Dahl, backed by Marvell, rushed in through the door and laid about me with his stick.
So there I was at the moment of certain victory, beaten and aching, ejected from that house after a night locked into my room by Dahl and jeered at by Marvell, All the next morning I was kept there with neither food nor drink however much I shouted from the window, and in the afternoon, bloody Marvell came to tell me my fate.
'You're to be put on a ship, old man,' he said. 'There's a cart taking you to Hull and two men to make sure you don't stray away.'
'What is happening downstairs?' I said.
'Downstairs. Should I tell you?'
'If you don't, I may succeed in making Dahl understand there were two entries in our competition.'
'She has told him everything,' said Marvell. 'She has told him that she only consented to the portrait to please him and that she found you a repulsive and vexatious rogue from the first.'
'She did not,' I exclaimed.
'Oh but she did,' said Marvell. 'It was only her natural sweetness and kindness that let you think she looked on you with any favour.'
'You say that because you want her. It is not true, I shall tell Dahl about your poem.'
He laughed. 'You! Tell Dahl? How? His Dutch is not up to that I promise you.' He put his face close to mine. 'If you open your mouth I will have you whipped.'
'You can try.'
He gave me a sour look. 'It will be the ruin of Amelia. That might make you pause.'
'What you claim is not true,' I said, because it struck at something so near my very centre that I knew I must deny it. 'She did not find me repulsive. These are the words of a jealous man. I have been with her. Just the two of us together. I know how she was with me.'
'You do not have to take my word,' he said. 'She keeps a journal in which she writes her daily thoughts. She has now shown that journal to her husband to prove to him the truth.'
'To defend herself more like. Did he know she kept the journal?'
Marvell nodded, then smiled a cruel smile. 'He did.'
'So of course she would tell the story in it that he would like to read.'
I had fallen into Marvell's trap. Now he sprung it.
'Stop fooling yourself, you filthy old man. What Dahl did not know was that she kept a day-book also, a rough notebook for when those thoughts arose. He had no knowledge of it. Now she has shown him that, too. He is quite persuaded. Would you like to hear what she said about you? What she really thought? Oh, I know how she sometimes likes to lead men on. She probably made you feel you were a God, did she not? She loves the game, does Amelia. She would have taken you to the edge of heaven then delighted in casting you down to hell. She despises you, old man. Let me tell you what she wrote.'
I did not assent, but he told me anyway.
Oh Lord. There came to me as I listened that savage moment when a man is forced to see himself through someone else's eyes and may never look at himself in the same way again. I need this good mirror and this canvas in front of me now to search this face of mine to see if it is really true that all the pans I thought I knew have fled. Young Rembrandt, are you gone? Were you ever there? The boy I knew who's in me still is no longer there for other eyes to see. Is there nothing of him left in this old flesh? I fear this glass because what I see in it may lead me to despair and what I thought might be the finest flowering of my manhood in that attic room has turned out to be its epitaph. I will remember her words, her bloody words until the day I die.
Shit.
I need to paint myself again, to inspect myself with new eyes and record any change I find. At Paull Holme I painted the best portrait I will ever paint and it has been debased by circumstance into a tawdry thing. For all I know, it may already be ashes on Dahl's fire. I would have brought it with me if I could. Why did she play such a game? She had me fooled. It was all to spur Marvell and his poem, and probably his hands and possibly his prick by now. All a vicious game.
It should not matter what others think of what I paint. There is that tale I often told my pupils when they asked what was great art, the old tale of the young Apelles who wanted to be reckoned the best painter in the world but knew that the reputation of Protogenes stood in his way. He sailed to Rhodes to see the other artist for himself and found him not at home. When asked by one who was there to leave his name, he took a brush and simply painted the finest of fine lines across a board that stood upon an easel. Protogenes, returning, saw the line and knew who his visitor must be, but took up his brush and painted a thinner line down the middle of the first, Apelles returned with Protogenes once more away and divided that line in turn by a line so thin that it brought the contest to an immediate end.
It comes back to me as I stand here before my vacant canvas that there is another tale of a simple proof of artistry from three centuries ago when the Pope sent out an emissary to find a painter fit for St Peter's. The messenger came in the end to Giotto, having collected sample works from many others on the way. Asked for a picture to take away, Giotto simply took a brush and with a twist of his wrist, painted a perfect circle in one movement. The messenger, failing to see the point, took it with him in anger, but the Pope understood Giotto's message straight away and knew him for the best artist in Italy.
I stare at myself in the glass and a man I have never seen stares back and the honesty with which he looks at me is a lesson to me. This gaze of his strips me to my bones and they are the bones of an old man who had not learnt to welcome age. Now I will welcome it. My years have made me the best painter the world has seen and I will show them that. I pick up my brush and with no effort at all, I describe the lines of two perfect circles on the canvas as the background. When people look at this they will know me for what I am.
TWENTY-NINE
Sunday, April 15th, 2001
There was a problem with the door for all the rest of that day. Either that or a problem with the frame, depending on whether you believed Tel or the Hawk. Either way, they spent a great deal of time discussing it, and then a great deal more time trying to fix it, meaning that there were people coming and going in the room right to the end of the day. Amy might have been pleased to know that Amelia and the painter had experienced an identical problem in that same room with the servants passing through but, not knowing, all she felt was extreme frustration that the folded papers from behind the panel had to remain hidden, and undiscussed. Something happened in the forced silence, A fresh complicity grew up between her and Don, shared looks, a shared excitement, building and building.
When the Hawk finally looked at his watch, grunted and said that was about it for the day, Don was out of the room in an instant, muttering, 'Your room, five minutes,' to Amy as he went by. She ran upstairs after him, changed quickly and threw a cloth over the painting on her easel as he came in through the door. He was carrying two mugs and four cans of beer on the tray, Dennis's tray, but that seemed nothing but old history now and what lay before them pushed everything else to the back of her mind.
'Are you ready to read it?' he asked.
'More than ready,' she said. 'Think what it must mean. She took these pages out of the day-book. She hid them behind the panels so that nobody would find them. That could only have been because what's in them is the truth and she couldn't let anybody else see it, ever.'
'I suppose it would have been easy enough before the panelling was finished,' Don suggested. 'Safer maybe than burning them because someone might have caught her halfw
ay through.'
'How could she take the sheets out of the day-book without Dahl noticing there was a gap?'
'Easy,' said Don. 'I had a look at it before we gave it to Parrish. It's bound in sets of sheets, four at a time folded over double to make eight pages for each set. There were eleven of those sets all stitched together. Eleven's an odd number, isn't it? There must have been twelve originally. She cut this set out really carefully, then she must have written it all out again in the rest of the book so that she could tell a different story as if she'd written it that way from the start. Dahl would have to believe her, wouldn't he? These were supposed to be her first rough notes.'
'I'll read it, shall I?'
'Go on.' He poured them both a beer.
'All right. This first page is dated Friday January the twenty-fourth. Here goes: This night, I acquiesced to the limner's wish to draw me as I truly am, without which, he says, he cannot expect to capture my nature with his brush. He was amazed by what I did, and I was moved that he, who has seen so many women, so many rich beauties and painted so many of them as naked as they were born, was struck into a state of ecstasy. Despite his age, being of greater years than Marvell, he maintains a manly gravity and thereto a quality I fear Marvell does not possess of utter dedication to his art where Marvell spreads himself thin between his venal politicking, his grand projects and his poetry. For all that, Marvell has excelled himself with his verse though I have chid him for some ugly rhyming and the childlike brickbats it does cast against the art of painting. He says he will amend this to my suggestion and the result will be the greater for my complaint. The limner, in the practice of his art, acquires a purpose which diminishes his years and shapes his features almost to nobility. I find myself moved toward him so that Marvell's intended prize may well be his instead and I shall take great pleasure from it. Marvell will be here when the limner is gone should I award also a second prize.'
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