The Folding Star

by Alan Hollinghurst

  Then, when a year had passed and another spring had come, word reached the Castle of the Knight's return. He had ridden to Jerusalem and prayed for God's forgiveness at the Holy Sepulchre itself. Within the day he would greet his Lady, and their union would be blessed with children.

  When he heard this the Chaplain was filled with fear: his heart was so eaten up with his love for the Lady, however wicked it might be, that he had never given thought to the day when the Knight should come back. But the Lady was joyful and filled with God's blessing, and rose up proudly, for she knew that when her husband returned not only would her womb flower but her heart too be lightened of all her sufferings at the hands of the false Chaplain, and the Chaplain would be banished for ever.

  Now the Chaplain came to her humbly and begged her for God's love to say nothing of the treatment she had had of him. But she said that in God's eyes no sin was hidden, and that all should be known. He fell upon his knees as though he were praying to the Mother of Christ Herself and implored her with tears in his eyes to keep tight the secret of his great love. But all she said, as she had said to him a thousand times, was "No", and "I cannot".

  Seeing this, he withdrew silently, and came to her again meekly at the day's end, at supper-time, and offered her a beaker of good Burgundy wine to drink. And she drank it joyfully, as a health to her husband, and to the child that should be hers. And not a moment had passed before she fell to the floor, crying out with her hand upon her heart; for the false Chaplain had poisoned the wine with an ichor drawn from a toad's brain, that she might not tell the Knight of his wickedness, and never more be her husband's if she might never be his. And as she lay there a footstep was heard on the stair, and the Knight entered laughing and calling out for his wife; and when he saw her there he took her in his arms and she looked on him and then she died. And the false Chaplain said a blessing over her and prayed for her soul.

  I looked out of the window at the drifting gleam of the rain against the purple brick of the gables opposite. The limes had lost their leaves now. My thoughts about the ragged injustice of the story dissolved into the inhospitable weather, with its calm and comforting insistence we should stay inside—a frisson of childish safety. I turned back to the crackling quarto with its precious powder-blue wrappers and enormous margins, and then read Paul's comments on the three illustrations to the False Chaplain. He pointed out how the theme of constancy was one which recurred in Orst's work, and the disturbing way in which the artist seemed to admire the constancy of the Chaplain's obsession with the Lady, more than that of the Lady's love for her husband. She was the focus of all the engravings, white-faced, pale-eyed, swirled in her own hair—a premonition of the Jane Byron figure. The first picture was simply an icon of her, though formally displaced, her head at the top left-hand corner, the rest filled with the oscillations of her hair and the vertical plunge of her gown. In the second she was sewing with her (oddly similar) women and the dark folds of the tapestry lifted in their hands set off the mystic pallor of her face as she paused and stared. In the third she lay on the brink of death in a kind of skewed pieta, the wings of the Knight's cloak sheltering her; his face, though, was out of the picture and the black figure of the Chaplain rose exaltedly behind, with upraised hands and eyes. It was a very fin-de-siecle subversion of an old tale going back to the thirteenth century, and found beyond Flanders in French fabliaux and Italian collections. Its unusual ending attracted Orst, and he had simply had his way with it, giving a hint of perverse sexual triumph to the shaven phallic upright of the priest, and the supine surrender of the female, lips parted, eyelids lowering over eyes that still cast an ecstatic light.

  Note too the use of the fortified tower of St Vaast as a basis for the sketch of a castle which forms the cul-de-lampe: a word that disturbed me for a moment, Luc being a backward offering of cul, Luc's cul a dream palindrome—the two round cheeks of it and the lick of the s between: I was nonsensing and spoonerising it in my mouth all day long. I paused to note the publisher's colophon, achevé March 13, 1897: Editions Guillaume Altidore, and the monogram, a Secessionist GA conjured into a hoop, that I had passed by unsuspectingly amid the exquisite discretion of the cover. "So," I thought, closing the book and laying my hand on it. It felt very remote from Luc, but at the same time gave me the illusion of closeness to him, a share in the glamour of the family history he felt so surprisingly proud and bitter about. My love-struck need for shapes and portents was eased by the curving together of two stories.

  "Have some lunch here," suggested Paul a bit later. "Lilli's away, we'll have to throw ourselves on the mercy of the fridge." We went through the door between the houses and into their austere little drawing-room, still coloured for me by an obscure sense of social discomforts, of embarrassments probably only I remembered. "As you must have realised, she's very much a country person. She goes off once a week to her sister-in-law's farm and stays the night. Even when she goes for a walk it's along the edge of the town, so that she can smell the fields."

  "Having grown up on the edge of a common I know what she means. I smell the meadow in the street, as Tennyson says." I picked up the Flemish Post from the kitchen table, and while Paul looked worriedly at various dishes in the fridge, read about the kidnap of an industrialist's son: there was a sullen photo-booth snap you knew you could never recognise him by.

  "It's a wintry day, isn't it, let's have some wine."

  "Yes please." This was almost slatternly by Paul's standards. "I see the Légendes flamandes were published by Guillaume Altidore, who I now know was the great-grandfather of my other pupil."

  "Of course, I'd forgotten that."

  "He was telling me all about the family's decline." And my hand shook as I lifted the glass from the table.

  "I suppose they have rather declined. I expect you've seen their old house, just near here? It's offices now, no one could live in a house that big." He stuck a finger in something and licked it. "I'm afraid Martin Altidore's no good—the boy's father. And the mother's rather pathetic, isn't she? I had a difficult time over one of her altar-cloths. As secretary of the Antiquarian Society I had to write and say we didn't think it appropriate."

  "Poor woman. I'm not surprised though." I recalled her ironic first reactions to the name of Echevin.

  "The Altidores were always marked by eccentricity, or whimsicality. And I dare say the combination of that with immense wealth was not a very sound . . . recipe. Unlike this curried chicken salad, I suppose it is. Let's eat." He went out into the hall and warbled "Marcel!" up the stairs in a sweetly silly way. There was a distant impression of dropped objects and going to the lavatory.

  "I gather your last lesson went well?" he said.

  I was still thinking of the Altidores, and my last lesson with Luc came back to me with a twinge. Then "Oh, yes, fine. Yes, he's getting much more confident." (Was he? Really he seemed much the same to me, but relations between the three of us depended on this pleasing fiction.)

  "What is the Altidore boy's name?" asked Paul when we had all sat down. As always I found it difficult just to bring it out—it was heralded by such inner flutterings and gongings.

  "He's called Luc," said Marcel.

  "Now did Luc tell you about his much older forebears, in the sixteenth century, for instance? They were more interesting in a way. One sees how the family fortunes have gone up and down, very wealthy in the fifteenth century, then, as you know, the old sea-canal silted up and most of the money-makers moved out. They stayed on, living on the past, as their prosperity slowly declined. It was only with the Congo business that they suddenly shot up again, I believe, and that wasn't for long."

  "Luc's father seems fairly well-heeled."

  "Luc's father sold a Memling. To Japan."

  "Ah."

  "A Nativity specially painted for his ancestor, for the altar of the private chapel of a guild, a kind of noble confraternity of which he was a member. There was an outcry—a private sale, no one knows how many millions. I'm sorry,
my dear Edward, but the man is a barbarian."

  What an impressive and senior gust of anger. I tended to forget that Paul was twice as old as me, he had a lifetime's lead on me. Still, I did rather lust for Martin, both in himself and in the reflected glow of my longing for his son.

  "She's got lots of money," said Marcel, with his mouth full.

  "I'm wandering," said Paul. "Anthonis Altidore was the very odd one. He had the fantastic idea that he was a direct descendant of St James the Less, our Lord's brother—or, as I've always thought it should be, half-brother. Still, he went to great lengths to establish the thing historically, he was obsessed with genealogy and employed teams of antiquaries to draw up bogus family trees—at least I assume they were bogus, one imagines some pretty murky areas around, say, the third century. And he collected innumerable relics—the usual bones of course, you know, could be a bit of old dog, and I believe a tongue, and various memorabilia, part of his cloak and a wooden staff that is still in the Cathedral, if you know where to look."

  "How very funny." I knocked back my wine, getting out of control on all this Altidore adrenalin. The thought that Luc might actually be related to Jesus Christ was slightly unnerving.

  "The obsession seems to have stuck too. When you go to Brussels you can see an early Van Dyck painted for it must be Anthonis's grandson. Actually it's a Holy Family, bringing in St James the Less, a little unconventionally—You can tell him by his very splendid moustaches, the head is apparently a portrait of Altidore, who was very proud of his bristly . . . excrescences."

  "They're all incredibly vain," I said, with a treacherous thrill.

  "The boy used to be very good-looking, I met him once," said Paul. I had to put down my knife and fork.

  "I suppose he is in a way," I conceded.

  "I felt so sorry for his poor mother, who was having to cope by herself, when that business blew up on the ship. I think that's what may have turned her colour sense."

  "Arctic Prince," said Marcel.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Arctic Prince was the ship. Orgy on Arctic Prince."

  "Darling, it didn't say that. Actually Altidore managed to keep it out of the papers almost entirely." Paul looked with amused reproval at his son. "Marcel knows all about it from his, I'm not allowed to say girlfriend, friend, Sibylle de Taeye, the daughter of the Minister of Culture, who is something of an Egeria to young Luc, I gather." And Marcel blushed as he had weeks before when I'd blundered into this patch. Of course she wasn't his girlfriend—he was up against some pretty stiff competition if that was his idea; he was blushing to have his fantasy disclosed.

  "She's not my girlfriend," he said.

  "She is very sweet to you though, isn't she?" said Paul optimistically.

  "No she's not!" said Marcel, and a big tear gathered in his eye. I thought, just you wait till your next lesson. The vocabulary of the orgy. You're going to tell me everything just as you had it from Sibylle.

  Later I was reading about Edgard Orst's now demolished villa, which had stood so conspicuous and so secretive on the edge of a suburban housing park. Paul had given me an English journalist's account of a visit to it in 1904:

  We were privileged last month to be received by M. Edgard Orst at the Villa Hermes, his splendid new residence-cwm-atelier, whose designs our readers will no doubt recall from their publication in these pages some little while since. Indeed, the house has been three years in the building, and though M. Orst has regretted the delay, it cannot be denied that every detail of the structure and its appointments speaks of the most especial care in both design and execution; the artistic visitor will be bound to exclaim with us, "How should it have been done sooner?"

  In external appearance the Villa is tall and somewhat forbidding, its severity of openings and the plainness of the elevations, however, being mitigated by the fine patterns that are scored into the stucco along the coigns and lintels, the whole being given the most delightful brightness by virtue of being painted a dazzling white. Atop the foremost gable, of course, stands the figure of the alert young deity whom M. Orst has invoked as the guardian of his house—an admirable piece in bronze gilt from his own studio.

  Arriving a little before the appointed time, and having dwelt on the exterior, we rang the bell and were obliged to wait for some minutes before the opening of the door. This door itself, let it be said, is a thoroughly imposing one, massively enriched with nails and fine furniture; and it gave rise to not a few reflections on the solitude into which M. Orst has chosen to retire, and on the strength, so to speak, of the fortifications which he has thought necessary to protect that solitude from an undeniably curious world. For in M. Orst, unlike other artists of the "Symbolist" school—we think of that exquisite dramatist of the impalpable, M. Maurice Maeterlinck, with his avowed enthusiasms for the beer-hall, the velodrome, and the ring—in M. Orst, we say, we find the aesthete par excellence. As we stood at his door on that April morning (and in a light rain that had just begun to fall) we were at once in possession of the gauge of his claim to be considered the doyen of all the artistic recluses of our time. It was for us to ponder at what cost to his seclusion, and so to his art, an invitation like our own might have been made.

  Our readers will know something of the unhappy circumstances that have befallen this remarkable painter in the years since his last exhibitions in London, and will be in a position to understand the dictates, in his life as in his art, of a heart, and an eye, subjected to so violent a shock: his has been, in the words of one of his contemporaries, "un veuvage precoce"—a premature widowhood, indeed; and one that has imposed upon him its own high and unwavering demands. There are those (a few in Belgium herself, though more, we admit, on our own neighbouring shores) who continue to question M. Orst's standing in the first rank of modern artists; and some who are all too ready to consign his productions to the midden of depravity, along with those of M. Felicien Rops and one or two others, to be spoken of only as one speaks of the art of the criminal or the madman. To be sure, that M. Orst's paintings—and his admirable sculpture in plaster and gesso, not to mention his abundant work on the stone—have value as testimony to a fertile mind subjected to pressures of exceptional severity, cannot be denied; what we do deny, absolutely, is the inherent unworthiness of his subjects or of the dark sensibility which all his work reveals.

  Some thoughts such as these, as we say, passed through our mind as we waited at the doorway of the Villa Hermes; which, in due course, was opened by a young woman in a pale costume (reminiscent of the hygienic dress of Ancient Greek maidens, and styled according to M. Orst's own design), who indicated to us to enter. We gave our name, and she withdrew soundlessly—we had already been apprised that all the servants of the house are encouraged not to speak, and to make themselves understood, as far as is possible, by gesture.

  We found ourselves detained in the long and somewhat sepulchral vestibule, which runs to the full depth of the house, and off which open various small rooms. At a number of these a curtain was drawn back to reveal a fragment of an Attic frieze, displayed on a high plinth, or a drawing from the hand of Giovanni Bellini or Sir Edward Burne-Jones. In all the rooms of this ground floor, it should be said, the windows are either placed too high to permit one to see out or else are filled with coloured glass, which serves to create a magical play of symbolic light.

  The young housemaid returning and beckoning to us, we left the hall and climbed an imposing flight of shallow stairs which brought us at once to a domed ante-chamber, in which a most beautiful bronze figure of Andromeda, chained to her rock, is reflected in a marble pool. Through an archway beyond we were able to glimpse, between curtains of fine old brocade, the lofty space of M. Orst's studio. In front of these curtains runs a curious brass rail, somewhat like that in the sanctuary of a church, which ensures that no one enters unless at M. Orst's express wish; in which case a mechanism causes the barrier to retract into the wall.

  Being so favoured, we pressed forward into thi
s principal room, which indeed occupies the full height of the back of the house, with the exception of the basement, which on that side is reserved for household offices. We can say at once that the impression of the studio, with its great north window and the accumulation of magnificent and exceptional works displayed on its walls against the sympathetic background of antique tapestry, was superlative. But our closer and more prolonged inspection of the pictures was deferred by the arrival of the painter himself, who stepped forward and greeted us most cordially, as a friend, he was pleased to say, from a country he had long held in especial regard. It was a sign of that regard that he wanted at once to have news of acquaintance of ours in England, and that he seemed content to talk of those bygone days quite as if we had no other purpose in being there. Our fear of disturbing him at his work proved groundless; he was finely dressed and did not, as so many artists do, advertise the nature of his craft by appearing in a pigment-daubed smock and with his palette on his thumb. Indeed, it is said that M. Orst has never been observed at the easel by any stranger.

  He led us into the dining-room, whose white walls formed a fitting background to a cycle of his paintings on the theme of the Seasons of Life; it was here, over a generous collation, that he spoke to us of his feelings about the Villa he has built as a shrine to his own calling. It was only in the course of designing it, he said, in the incessant small changes to his plans, in the conjuring of the perfect solitude from light and space and the exact positioning of objets d'art, that he had worked out to his own satisfaction what it meant to him to be an artist, and what the life of an artist, once so impetuously embarked upon, might in the end demand of him. It was not hard, under the spell of his gently modulated delivery and pierced by the momentary glint of his sharp eye through a heavy pince-nez, surrounded, what is more, by some of the most striking products of his genius, to feel the incontrovertible hand of his particular destiny.