by Clare Clark
It startled him when the music stopped. Matthias turned Emmeline in a final sweep to end the dance, but she did not step away from him. Her body seemed hardly hers. Blurred and breathless, she gazed up at him like someone woken from sleep.
‘You see?’ Matthias said softly. ‘You can dance.’ Taking her hands, he led her back to the sofa where Julius was sitting. Gently, as though he was giving him a present, he put her hands in Julius’s. Then, cupping their joined hands in both of his, he kissed her gently on the cheek. His hair brushed Julius’s face. ‘Now all you have to do is to teach Julius.’
There was a dazed silence, as though the dancing had cast a spell over them all, as though somehow it had melted their edges, blurring the three of them into a single being. As though it had reduced the world to this one perfect room.
‘I have to go,’ Matthias murmured. ‘But you two? You should dance.’
He slipped away silently. Emmeline smiled dreamily at Julius, her hands still in his. ‘We should dance,’ she said.
Her voice was liquid, an invitation. Julius looked at her dark eyes, her white throat, the curve of her breasts beneath the shimmer of velvet, and, discomfited, he rose and crossed the room to the French windows. Outside on the balcony the night air was cool, soft indigo, the moon no more than a sliver of silver. Below him in the darkness the trees drifted, cloudy with blossom. It was very quiet. Then, softly, a single cello began once again to pick out the first chords of Chopin’s waltz.
‘Van Gogh was right, night is more alive and richly coloured than the day.’ Emmeline leaned against the balustrade beside him, her arm brushing his. Then, twisting around, she levered herself up to sit on the curved iron rail.
‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll fall.’
‘I won’t. Not unless you push me. You’re not going to push me, are you?’
‘Accidents happen.’
She laughed softly, her fingers playing with the key that hung around her neck. As the music drifted through the open window she curled her bare feet around the balustrade to steady herself and, holding on to the rail with both hands, leaned backwards, tipping back her head to stare up at the stars. Julius’s gaze trailed like fingers from her chin to the dent at the base of her throat, along her delicate collarbones to the deep V of pale skin between her breasts. His breath quickened.
‘“I dream of painting and then I paint my dreams”,’ Emmeline murmured. ‘Do you think there really are pink stars like van Gogh says?’
‘There are when he paints them.’
Her smile deepened. Pulling herself up, she looked at him. Her dark eyes gleamed. Then, with a small push of her hands, she slipped down from the balustrade, her body against his, her hands sliding up to press against his chest. Julius told himself he should step away but he moved closer, inhaling the smoky clove-and-cinnamon scent of her. He had not known he was so full of yearning. He wanted to devour her, to cram her into himself until she filled up the raw hole inside him. His fingers found her neck, pushed up into her hair, his thumbs caressing the line of her jaw. She arched herself against him. In the darkness she was not a child. Bending his head, he kissed her, tentatively at first and then ardently, greedily, his teeth grazing her lips, and as she reached her arms around his neck he crushed her against him, one hand against the slippery silk of her coccyx, the other cupping the back of her skull, until there was no space between them, nothing but the dance and the star-spattered dome of the sky.
XIII
His hands on the mantelpiece, Matthias stared into the empty grate. Julius felt sick. He could not understand it. He thought of the way she had slowly unfastened the buttons of her jacket, her Correggio smile as she slipped it off her shoulders and let it fall. Underneath the jacket she wore nothing at all.
‘Perhaps I should go and see her,’ he said, dry-mouthed. ‘Talk to her.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Matthias snapped. ‘That’s the very worst thing you could do. She’s very upset. These accusations—if she is serious about contacting your wife’s lawyers she could do terrible damage. We have to be very careful.’
Julius sank his head into his hands, his fingers pressing against his closed eyes. He tried to recall a moment when she had resisted him, when she had hesitated, but all he could remember was her abandon, her head thrown back as though he was a god or a ghost, a force she could not see.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ he whispered. ‘Why would she say it was like that?’
‘She’s seventeen, Julius. You’re the first man she has ever kissed.’
‘She told you that? Then she’s lying. Surely you see that she’s lying?’
Matthias said nothing and the realisation was like gooseflesh, shrivelling Julius’s skin. Matthias did not believe him.
‘It’s not true,’ he insisted. His voice was shrill. ‘You have to believe me, I could never—if she had asked me to stop, if she had said anything, I would have stopped, but she didn’t. It was what she wanted.’
‘She’s a child, Julius. How could she possibly know what she wants? Look, it was a telephone call, that’s all. She was barely coherent. I’ve agreed to go and see her later at her hotel, I’ll talk to her, all right? In the meantime, she’s promised not to do anything stupid.’
He did not turn around. He cannot look at me, Julius thought, and he put his hands over his face so that he would not have to see.
Matthias returned to Meierstrasse the next afternoon. He refused tea, refused even to sit down. His expression was grim. He told Julius that while Emmeline Eberhardt had not yet written to Luisa or her lawyers, she had refused to promise that she would not. There was less than a fortnight till the divorce hearing.
‘I don’t understand,’ Julius said wretchedly. ‘Why would she make these kinds of accusations? What can she possibly stand to gain?’
Matthias’s face hardened. ‘She showed me the bruises, Julius.’
Julius stared at him. ‘What bruises?’
‘The bruises on her wrists from where you held her down.’
‘But that’s impossible. I never hurt her—I couldn’t. You have to believe me.’ When Matthias said nothing Julius grabbed his shoulder, pushing it roughly. ‘Jesus, Matthias, why aren’t you listening to me? I didn’t do it. She’s lying, can’t you see?’
‘Let go of me, Julius,’ Matthias said coldly. Immediately Julius dropped his hand, pressed it against his forehead.
‘I’m sorry, I—I just can’t believe this is happening to me. I mean, bruises? Jesus.’ He looked pleadingly at Matthias, who looked away. ‘She’s making it up, don’t you see? I don’t know why she is but she’s making it up.’
‘Right.’
‘Don’t say it like that. You know me better than anyone, you must know that I could never do something like that. Christ, Matthias, you have to listen to me.’
‘No.’ Matthias wheeled around, his eyes hard. ‘For once, Julius, you have to listen to me. This is what you are going to do. You are going to write to Fräulein Eberhardt and beg her forgiveness—’
‘For what?’ Julius cried. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I didn’t do anything! It was her, she was all over me!’
‘For God’s sake, shut up and listen. You will beg her forgiveness. You will make her a gift of the van Gogh drawing you keep in your desk drawer, the girl in the jacket. You will insist she keeps it, as a token of both your esteem for her and your profound regret. You will swear never to see her again.’
‘Or what, she goes to Luisa’s lawyers? That’s blackmail, Matthias.’
‘No. It’s contrition.’
‘But that drawing—I can’t . . .’
Matthias stared at him stonily, his mouth thin. ‘Can’t what?’
‘It was her,’ Julius stammered. ‘She started it. She wanted me.’
‘So you say. But she says she did not. You want her to tell her story in court?’
Julius leaned dizzily against the back of a chair. He had not thought it was so simple a matter to tip th
e world off its axis.
‘And if I do it you’ll help me?’ he asked. ‘You’ll talk to her?’
‘I’ll help you. But only this way, is that clear? Leave the letter and the drawing with Fräulein Grüber. I’ll send someone to collect them this afternoon.’
‘You can’t stay?’
‘I already told you, I have to be somewhere.’
‘You’ll come back tomorrow, though, won’t you? Once you’ve spoken to her?’ Julius could hear the whipped-dog abjectness in his voice but he could not help himself. He could not let Matthias walk away from him like this, as though everything was finished. Matthias shrugged.
‘I’ll write,’ he said.
‘If you’re busy I can come to you.’
‘I won’t be in Berlin tomorrow. I’m going away for a while.’
‘What do you mean, a while?’
‘Two weeks, maybe three. Does it matter?’
Julius stared at him. ‘But I thought, with the hearing—’
‘Jesus, Julius, it’s not my fucking divorce.’ The anger was sudden and startling, like something breaking. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Wait!’ Julius stumbled after him into the hall. ‘Matthias, wait.’
For one swooping nightmarish moment, before he caught his arm, Julius thought he saw Matthias smile. Then he turned, shaking Julius off, and his eyes were hard.
‘I didn’t rape her,’ Julius said in a choked voice.
Matthias’s expression did not soften. ‘I looked up to you, Julius. I trusted you. I thought you were the finest, the most principled man I had ever known.’
Julius’s shoulders shook. He was weeping. He put his hands over his face, but he could not stop it. He was filled with a terrible certainty that if Matthias walked out now he would take the last of what was good in Julius with him.
‘I’m telling the truth,’ he whispered. ‘I swear it.’
‘Just as you’ll swear in a court of law when you divorce your wife?’
Julius let his hands fall. Matthias was staring at him, a terrible kind of triumph in his gaze. ‘How can I ever believe you now?’ he demanded and, turning, he walked out of the house.
XIV
Julius wrote the letter, enclosing the drawing as Matthias had instructed. There was something almost calming in the pain of it. He did not know how it was that Matthias knew about Harald Baeck, or even if he knew; when he tried to recall Matthias’s face in that moment he could not summon it, but he knew that this was his punishment, that even though he was innocent of the crimes Emmeline Eberhardt accused him of, he was guilty. When he closed his eyes he saw Baeck’s grey face, the shake in his hand as he swallowed his brandy. He gave the letter to Fräulein Grüber and told her she could go home. He waited until he heard her leave. Then he locked the door of his study and got steadily, determinedly drunk.
The next morning when he stumbled downstairs the study was immaculate, all traces of the previous evening wiped away. The whisky decanter was full, the drawers of his desk neatly arranged.
The wall, however, they had not managed to clean. He had wanted colours, had hunted for them frenziedly, tipping drawers out on to the floor, searching for cobalt blue and its opposite orange, for the thick deft line of seasick green that defined the bridge of Vincent’s long nose, but in the end he had had to make do with a fountain pen and, when that refused to flow, a stub of charcoal pencil. He had made a poor fist of a likeness. His Vincent was lopsided, his features clumsy and ill-proportioned. The nose was too small and too high. The eyes, by contrast, were much too big, their round irises gleaming pewter where the pencil was thickest, layers of it, over and over. They squinted blankly, unfocused, unseeing. Deranged. The hair and beard were wild scrawls.
At some point he supposed he must have tried to rub it off. He could see the pink streaks of the India rubber where it had smudged the charcoal into smears. Julius stared at the mess he had made and the too-big eyes stared back at him, into him. A mad self-mutilating messiah, a nail piercing his forehead.
Julius closed his eyes. His head was splitting. He could smell the sweetish stink of himself, the sweat sharpened by the stale reek of alcohol. Sinking into a chair he thought of Vincent, exhausted and grim, painting himself for the first time as a madman in defeat. By then there was no hope left. He had fought with all his strength but the illness was stronger than him. The fits would only grow more violent, more frequent. He knew it and it terrified him. He could see the fear when he looked at himself, in his eyes and in his skin, sucked back against the bone, so he painted it, and he painted the courage too because what greater courage was there, to want with all one’s heart not to see and still to go on looking?
The next day a letter arrived from Matthias. It was brief and formal. The matter was taken care of. There were only two conditions: that Julius promised never to contact Emmeline again and that he say nothing to Elvira. As far as Emmeline’s mother was concerned he was still in loco parentis. There was no address, only a postmark on the envelope: Lörrach, a city near the Swiss border.
Julius wrote back to the gallery on Moltkestrasse. He did not know what else to do. He said that he accepted the conditions, that he would be forever grateful to Matthias for what he had done. I know I am not the man you believed me to be. I will be sorry for that as long as I live. I wish I deserved your forgiveness.
He did not know if the letter was sent on. Matthias did not reply. The days grew hotter, the nights hotter still. One morning he received a cutting from the Frankfurter Zeitung sent anonymously in the post. In the article Walter Ruthenberg expressed his full support for the Dix. I was wrong, he wrote. However hard it is to face, we cannot and must not hide from the truth. Julius tore it up. That night he lay on the bed that had been Luisa’s, the window thrown open to the stifling darkness, and stared up at the ceiling. A tomcat had taken up residence in a nearby garden. All night it howled at the moon, all its desires distilled to a spine-shrivelling high C. In the morning Julius asked Fräulein Grüber to cable Luisa in Munich and tell her he had changed his mind. He would meet her while she was in Berlin.
‘The Tiergarten,’ he said. ‘The boating lake. She’ll know.’
He saw her before she saw him. She was wearing a pale green linen coat and a little straw hat that perched above her right ear. She had cut her hair. As he walked towards her she turned, a gloved hand shielding her eyes from the sun. She looked immaculate, plaster-smooth, like a mannequin in a shop window.
‘Julius,’ she said. ‘I’d begun to think you weren’t coming.’
Julius forced himself to smile. He knew as well as she did that he was exactly on time. ‘You look well,’ he said.
‘Thank you. You look exhausted. But then you always did work too hard.’
‘I’m fine.’
They stood side by side at the water’s edge. On the other side of the lake a boy in wire-rimmed spectacles was carrying a magnificent wooden boat. Even with its sails down it was almost as big as he was. Julius thought of the Noah’s Ark, Noah and blue-eyed Mrs Noah standing together at the top of the gangplank.
‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said.
‘What a coincidence. There’s something I have to tell you too.’
‘I’d rather hoped you would allow me to speak first.’
‘As usual, you mean? Well, go on then. I’m all ears.’
‘I’m dropping the petition.’
Luisa jerked her head round to stare at him. ‘What?’
‘The petition, I’m dropping it. It will mean a delay, the hearing will have to be postponed, but I’ve spoken to Böhm, he’ll move things as quickly as he can. If you agree, the process is quite straightforward. We won’t even need to be there.’
‘You mean you’ll plead guilty, you’ll accept adultery?’
‘It’s the simplest way.’
Luisa was silent, looking out over the water.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last. Her voice was wary. ‘Why now?’
‘Because in two weeks it will be too late.’
‘I thought you thought you were going to win.’
‘I’d rather lose than win that way.’
Luisa laughed disbelievingly. ‘Seriously? A conscience, after all this time?’
‘Isn’t it time one of us had one?’
Luisa did not answer. In the shade of the ice-cream kiosk the boy put his boat on a bench and began carefully to raise the sails.
‘Of course there would have to be conditions,’ he said.
‘What conditions?’
‘I want to see Konstantin.’
‘On what terms?’
‘Alternate Christmases and a month in the summer. Longer if he wants it, when he’s old enough to decide for himself. I want to know him, for him to know me.’
Luisa pursed her lips. Then slowly she nodded. ‘Very well.’
‘It would have to be in writing. A binding commitment.’
‘And the van Gogh?’
‘It goes to him. A trust in his name. You won’t be able to touch it.’
‘You’d give Konnie the van Gogh?’
‘I hope he’ll decide to keep it, but he can sell it if he wishes, once he’s of age. My father’s money allowed me to live as I chose. I want my son to have that too.’
Luisa gave a stunned laugh. ‘I’m speechless.’
‘As for alimony, my current financial situation is—awkward. You would have to consent to limited support, at least for the present.’
He expected her to protest. Instead she nodded. ‘All right.’
‘If you consent to proceed on those terms, we have an agreement.’
‘My goodness.’ She laughed again, then shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t. It’s just—this isn’t exactly how I expected things to turn out.’
On the other side of the pond the boy lifted his boat, the sails like white wings against the brilliant green of the trees. Then, kneeling, he set it in the water.
‘Just one more thing,’ Julius said. He fumbled in his pocket. ‘This belongs to Konstantin’s ark, it got left behind somehow. Perhaps you could take it back for him.’