Tulip Fever

by Deborah Moggach

In the front room an oil lamp glows on the table. The chairs are covered with black cloth and the paintings are turned to face the wall.

  Willem stands, rooted to the spot. The blood drains from his body. Maria has died. He knows this is a stupid reaction. She is a servant; her death would not plunge a house into mourning. Besides, she is too young to die. The idea is unthinkable. The world, however, is full of strangeness. He can presume nothing anymore.

  It is, of course, the old man who has passed on. That is the obvious explanation. It must be recent. Maria and her mistress will be in mourning—if, that is, Maria still lives in the house. She has probably married and moved away months before. She may not even know that her old employer has died.

  All this passes through Willem’s head as he knocks on the door—diffidently, as a sign of respect. A long time passes. He knocks again, more loudly this time.

  Finally he sees movement inside the house. A flickering candle appears in the front room. Willem presses his nose against the windowpane. The old man, wearing his cap and dressing gown, looms out of the darkness and shuffles across the room. The candlelight burnishes his beard. There is the grind of bolts, then the sound of a key. The door is opened.

  Willem gathers his wits. “I am sorry to disturb you, sir. I have come to see Maria. Is she still in your employment?”

  The old man peers at him. “Who are you?”

  “I am Willem. I used to sell you fish. She is an acquaintance of mine.” He tries to swallow. “She is not dead, is she?”

  Mr. Sandvoort stares at him. “No.” He shakes his head. “No, she is not dead. Follow me.”

  Willem closes the door behind him and follows Mr. Sandvoort across the parlor, through the back room and down the passage. The old man pauses. “No,” he says. “It was my wife who died.”

  “Your wife?”

  Willem, stumbling on the steps, follows him down into the kitchen. Warmth and a smell of cooking greet him. The table is laid for two. Maria sits in the corner, washing a baby.

  She straightens up and stares at him. “Willem!”

  Her face lights up, then her expression hardens. Willem looks from her to the baby. For a mad moment he thinks that the baby belongs to her and the old man—the scene looks so domestic, almost as if they are married. His head spins.

  Maria rises to her feet. Her eyes are narrowed to slits. The baby dangles from her hands as if she is holding up a prize salmon. She starts wrapping it in a cloth.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks coldly.

  “I came to see you.”

  She looks at his clothes. “Where have you been?”

  “I joined the navy,” he says. “We docked tonight.”

  Mr. Sandvoort addresses Maria. “Are you all right, my dear?”

  She nods and sits down heavily. Willem perches on a chair. He feels unwelcome but he is not going to leave, not yet. He must say something to the old man. “I am so sorry, sir, that your wife passed away.”

  “She died in childbirth,” says Maria. “This is her baby. Her name is Sophia.”

  “Ah.” Willem feels uncomfortable. Maria is still looking at him coldly, through narrowed eyes. She doesn’t look pleased to see him at all. There is no ring on her finger but that proves nothing. She might be carrying on with this man illicitly; after all, she did the same thing with Willem. He feels a stab of pain. How rosy she looks in the firelight!

  Mr. Sandvoort clears his throat. “Shall I leave you with this young man, Maria? You will be safe?”

  Maria nods. She is still looking at Willem. Mr. Sandvoort leaves the room. They listen to his steps, shuffling away.

  “Why did you leave me?” Maria blurts out. “How could you do such a thing?”

  “Me? What about you?”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Because I saw you,” he replies. “With that man.”

  “What man?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  “What man?” Her voice rises. “What man? Where?”

  “I followed you that night. I saw you kissing.”

  “Kissing? What do you mean?”

  “Don’t lie, Maria—”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t understand you. Why have you come here, after all these months, if you’re just going to shout at me?”

  “I’m not shouting!”

  Her eyes fill with tears. “I thought you loved me.”

  “Of course I loved you!”

  “That was why you left me, was it? Because you loved me? You broke my heart, Willem.” She starts to cry.

  “All right,” he says. “If you love me, come away with me.”

  “What?”

  “Come away with me, now.”

  “Now?”

  “Marry me.”

  “But, Willem—”

  “You think I’m not rich enough? I’m not as rich as he is?”

  “As who is?” she yells.

  “I’ve got money—you want money, I’ve got money.” He fumbles in his pocket.

  “I don’t want money. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Show me you love me. Tell me you’ll come away with me.”

  “I cannot.”

  “See? You don’t love me.”

  “Willem, I can’t leave! I’ve got the baby.”

  “Get a nurse.”

  “I cannot. I have to stay here with the baby. You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I understand, all right—”

  “You don’t!” she shouts.

  The baby starts crying.

  Maria, her face pink, picks her up. “I cannot leave her, because she’s mine.”

  “What?”

  “She’s mine, you dolt. She’s mine, she’s ours. She’s yours !”

  The baby yells. Maria stares, distraught, at Willem. The baby is screaming now.

  Maria unlaces her bodice. Her blouse falls from her shoulders. She puts the baby to her breast.

  Willem stares at her as she suckles the child. Tiny fingers press at her flesh, as if playing a tune. The baby’s damp curls, plastered to its head, are shockingly black against Maria’s white skin. In the stunned silence he can hear a moist sound as the infant sucks; it is a secret, greedy sound, a sound of focused intensity. He has heard it before, with puppies. His mind works laboriously; he is trying to count back the months. Neither of them hears the door opening.

  “Are you all right, my dear? All that shouting—”

  Cornelis stops, in the doorway, and stares at Maria. The crying has ceased. In the candlelight Maria is naked to the waist. The old man stares at his baby, drinking at her breast.

  62

  Jan

  Hear my prayers, o Lord, and let my crying come unto Thee.

  Hide not Thy face from me in the time of my trouble.

  —PSALM 102

  Jan, Lysbeth and Mattheus have been searching the streets in three different directions. They are searching at random because nobody can guess where Sophia has gone. Lysbeth suggested she might have returned to her home in the Herengracht, to give herself up and beg her husband’s forgiveness. Jan cannot believe she would do such a thing. Mattheus has suggested she might be heading back to her family in Utrecht, but Jan cannot believe she would do this either.

  He hardly listens to their speculations because he knows what Sophia is going to do. That is the terrible thing. He knows her through and through; he knows her inside out. There is only one thing left to her now and it will just be a matter of time before he finds that he is right.

  Though what satisfaction can there be in being proved correct? When he returns to the house he finds Mattheus is already there. On the floor lies a sodden blue cloak.

  “I found it in the canal,” says Mattheus. “I pulled it out with a stick.”

  He says that there was no sign of a body.

  “We can go back and look,” he says. “But how can we order the canal to be dragged? How can we look for somebody who is already presumed to be dead?”
/>   63

  Cornelis

  For I have eaten ashes as if it were bread; and mingled my drink with weeping.

  —PSALM 102

  Cornelis is in a state of shock. He has suffered many blows in his life but now he feels as if his vital organs have been removed from his body. His frame barely supports him. Willem has poured him a glass of brandy, but Cornelis’s hand is trembling and he cannot raise it to his lips.

  His wife is alive. She has faked her death so that she can run away with the painter Jan van Loos.

  The words sound so unreal; they cannot sink into his brain. Maria is explaining it all over again. “Don’t be angry with me, sir. . . .” Her words echo, far away. “I know it was wicked, as wicked as anything can be, but please don’t punish me.”

  Should he be angry with her? He supposes so.

  Sophia has cheated him in a manner beyond all comprehension. He must be dreaming. He has fallen asleep in his chair. He will wake up to the simple grief of mourning.

  No person on earth would inflict this suffering on another person. What desperation could have driven her to it? She was his wife.

  She is his wife. She is alive. She is in the arms of this man, somewhere, she is living and breathing. They are laughing at him. The stupid old fool. What an idiot he is! They are kissing and nuzzling . . .

  “Where has she gone?”

  “I cannot say, sir.”

  “Where have they gone?” Cornelis shouts. The baby wakes and starts crying.

  “I shouldn’t have told you anything,” wails Maria. “She’ll kill me.”

  “I’m going to find her.”

  “Don’t, sir. She has gone away. You will never find her, sir. It’s best to think she is dead.”

  Cornelis gets to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” Maria asks, alarmed.

  Cornelis looks at the baby. Her little face is brick red; she is drawing breath for another yell. He wants to slot his finger into her mouth, to pacify her, but this suddenly seems too intimate. After all, she is not his child. Instead, he touches her cheek. “And I thought she was mine,” he says. “I thought she bore my nose.”

  CORNELIS HURRIES THROUGH the streets. Far away the ten o’clock trumpet sounds. The citizens of Amsterdam have shut themselves away for the night. How safe it once seemed, to blow out the candles and retire from the world. He is hurrying along the route his wife must have taken, on the way to her lover. A rat slips across the street and slides into the water. The canal stinks. Once he thought his city was so scrubbed, so safe, but she is rotten through and through. She is built on shaky wooden piles, which sink into the mud. These thin, narrow houses are just facades, as flimsy as paper; their faces are painted like whores, but what goes on within their long interiors? How easily these streets can all collapse and slide back into the slime; how could he have misled himself, all these years?

  One nightmare has been replaced by another. The horror of Sophia’s death has been succeeded by the greater horror of her being alive. The enemy did not lie outside his front door—it was not thieves, it was not the Spanish—the enemy lay within his own home. For how long had she been lying to him? When did she see this man—when Cornelis was at his work? Those evenings when she pleaded toothache or headache, did she flit through these streets then? Was she dreaming of him when Cornelis lay with her in bed, his arms around her? The treachery of this is too much to be borne, but it is worse—she has watched his pride as her belly swelled, she has smiled at his joy as she patted her padded stomach. And all the time she has been devising the most fiendish plan to deceive him. What a fool she must think he is; what a cuckolded idiot.

  Cornelis hurries through the streets of Jordaan. His lungs are bursting. His legs buckle under him but still he runs, his breath wheezing like bellows. He arrives at the Bloemgracht and stops outside the painter’s house. There is no sign of life. He gazes at the closed shutters on the ground floor. Behind those shutters he stood in the studio proudly gazing at his own portrait. He paid eighty florins to the very man who was ravishing his wife. The bed was in the room, near enough to touch.

  Cornelis batters at the door. There is no answer. He suspected this, but he had to come here—he has no idea where else to go.

  Something stirs in the darkness. It appears to be a body, curled up in the gutter.

  Cornelis bends down. The man blearily raises his head. It is the painter’s servant.

  “Where have they gone?” demands Cornelis.

  The moonlight shines on the man’s white face. It gapes at him. “W-w-who?”

  “You know whom I mean. Your master, Jan van Loos. Where has he gone?”

  The man’s moonface gapes. “I c-cannot say.”

  “Tell me!” shouts Cornelis.

  The fellow flinches, as if he is going to be hit. Cornelis takes some coins out of his purse. He drops them on the body; they land soundlessly. The man turns away, his face against the wall.

  “Tell me where they have gone.”

  The man is muttering.

  “What is it?” demands Cornelis. “You want more money?”

  The servant shakes his head. He mumbles something.

  “Speak up!”

  “I’ve d-done him wrong, sir. I’ve done him wrong once, I’m not going to make it worse. I beg you, sir—g-g-go away. Leave me alone.”

  The man pulls his cloak over his head. Whimpering, he curls up. He looks like a dog who refuses to budge from his master’s corpse.

  CORNELIS IS OVERCOME BY FATIGUE. He lowers himself to the ground, next to the shuddering bundle. The man appears to be sobbing.

  Cornelis, too, is an outcast. The walls that have surrounded him have been removed, brick by brick, and he is utterly alone. What can he do now? There is nobody to whom he can turn for help. Even the Lord can no longer offer him guidance.

  Shivering, Cornelis slumps against the wall. Down the street, men are stumbling out of a tavern. They shout their good nights into the darkness.

  He raises his head. He thinks: there was a boy. In the studio that day, there was a boy in the room—thin, pale . . . The man’s apprentice. He stood next to them as they looked at the painting. It is finely rendered, is it not? Your legs in particular . . .

  Who would know where to find him? Down the street a light is extinguished. The alehouse is closing for the night. Cornelis, his joints aching, climbs to his feet.

  64

  Jacob

  O my God, make them like unto a wheel: and as the stubble before the wind; Like as the fire that burneth up the wood and as the flame that consumeth the mountains. Persecute them even so with Thy tempest; and make them afraid with Thy storm. Make their faces ashamed, o Lord ...

  —PSALM 83

  In the Street of Knives the shutters are closed. The tools of slaughter and dismemberment are locked away, safe for the night, within the darkened cabinets. Upstairs the shopkeepers and their wives lie sleeping. They dream of the tight, silver belly of a herring. The knife slits it from gills to anus; the guts spill out. They dream that their fingers slide under a chicken’s skin, sliding in like fingers into a glove. The knife pierces the flesh; it eases in and loosens the thigh from the carcass. Night after night they dream of butchery, for this is their small world and they know no other. All day, across the alley, the cleavers glint at their fellow blades.

  In Jacob’s parents’ shop, however, a light glows in the back room. Surrounded by six candles and an oil lamp, Jacob is preparing to paint. It is a big canvas and his theme is an ambitious one: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Jacob is drawing the preliminary sketch. Jan’s wooden mannequin is propped in front of his easel. On his last day, in a small act of rebellion, Jacob stole it from the studio. He has posed the jointed doll in a posture of shame—head thrust forward, arm shielding the face. Eve will have her arms upraised in despair.

  Jacob still seethes with fury at his own expulsion. The treachery of it! His master has blighted his career before it has even
begun— how can Jacob pass his examination with nobody to teach him? Next week he will start tramping round other painters’ studios, but why should he be reduced to this? Jan has ruined Jacob’s future to slake his own foul lust. He has even painted the woman. When he was alone, Jacob pored over the canvases—Sophia’s breasts, her long white body . . . It made his body break out in sweat. He wants to take up one of these meat cleavers and hack the licentious bastard to pieces.

  Jacob picks up his chalk and starts drawing. He bites his lip in concentration. Adam’s stooped back, his wretched, naked buttocks . . . the face, glimpsed behind the shielding arm, will be a portrait of Jan, for it is his turn to suffer.

  Someone is knocking at the door. Jacob lifts his head. Who could it be, at this hour?

  Jacob hurries through the shop and unbolts the door of the shop. Mr. Sandvoort stands there. He looks highly distressed—sweating, gasping for breath.

  “Where has he gone?”

  Jacob leads him into the back room and sits him down. “Would you like a drink, sir?”

  Mr. Sandvoort shakes his head. Jacob knows who he is, of course. He is the husband of Jan’s mistress, the woman who at this very moment is packing up to leave the country.

  “How did you know I live here?” asks Jacob.

  “What?” The old man seems distracted. “Oh, I asked at the tavern.” He leans forward in the chair. His skin is gray and damp, his eyes feverish. “You must help me, young man. You are the only person who can help me. Where has he gone?”

  “Who?” asks Jacob, though he knows perfectly well.

  “Your master, the painter Jan van Loos. He has disappeared with . . .” Mr. Sandvoort swallows. “I have reason to believe . . . it’s imperative that I find out their whereabouts.”

  Jacob doesn’t reply. His mind is working fast.

  “I will pay you handsomely,” pleads Mr. Sandvoort.

  “I do not want your money,” says Jacob with dignity.

  “Do you know where they have gone? Were you—conversant with what was happening?”

  Jacob nods.