The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Fritz asked the Hausherr whether he might find a portrait painter to come to the house, at his expense, to make a likeness of Sophie as she really was. It would be necessary for him to stay a few days to make sketches, but the portrait could be finished in the studio.

  ‘I daresay it will turn out, after all, to be at my expense,’ said Rockenthien that night to his wife. ‘I am not sure that, at the moment, Hardenberg is earning anything.’ He himself had never earned anything either, except for his irregularly paid wages as an infantry captain. But he was of course securely married to a wife with a very good property of her own.

  30

  Sophie’s Likeness

  FRITZ wanted to find a young painter. He wanted one who painted from the heart, and he settled on Joseph Hoffmann from Koln, who had been recommended to him by Severin.

  Hoffmann arrived at Gruningen in late summer, when the roads and the evening light were still good, carrying his knapsack, his necessary, his valise, brushes and portfolio. His fee was to be six thaler, which Fritz intended to meet by selling some of his books. Fritz himself was not at Gruningen, having set himself to work immoderately hard, though he intended to come as soon as possible. The painter was late, because the diligence was late. The Rockenthien family were already at table. All were introduced, but it had not occurred to them to wait for him.

  The servants had already brought in the soups, one made of beer, sugar and eggs, one of rose-hips and onions, one of bread and cabbage-water, one of cows’ udders flavoured with nutmeg. There was dough mixed with beech-nut oil, pickled herrings and goose with treacle sauce, hard-boiled eggs, numerous dumplings. It is dangerous - on this, at least, all Germany’s physicians were agreed - not to keep the stomach full at all times.

  Good appetite!

  A towering Alp of boiled potatoes, trailing long drifts of steam, was placed in the exact centre of the table, so that all might spear away at it with outstretched silver forks. Rapidly, as though in an avalanche, it subsided into ruin.

  ‘I don’t want you to look at me now, Herr Maler,’ Sophie called across the table. ‘Don’t study me now, I am about to fill my mouth.’

  ‘Gracious Fraulein, never would I do such a thing in the first few minutes of acquaintance,’ said Hoffmann quietly. ‘All I am doing is glancing round the table and assessing the presence, or absence, of true soul in the countenance of everyone here.’

  ‘Ach Gott, I should not think you are often asked out to dinner twice,’ said the Mandelsloh.

  ‘I will offer you some advice,’ said Herr Rockenthien, leaning forward to help himself to potatoes. ‘That is my elder stepdaughter. Don’t answer her, if what she says offends you.’

  ‘Why should it offend me? I think that the Frau Leutnant is very probably not used to artists.’

  ‘We know Hardenberg,’ said the Mandelsloh. ‘He is a poet, which is much the same as an artist. It is true that we are not quite used to him yet.’

  Both the Hausherr and his wife were ‘from the land’. They were country people. The painter Joseph Hoffmann had been born and brought up in a back street of Koln. His father had been a ladies’ shoemaker who had taken to drink and lost any skill he once possessed. Hoffmann had come to the Dresden Academy as a very poor student and was not much more than that now, making a living by selling sepia drawings of distant prospects and bends in the river with reliably grazing cattle. After his sorties into the country he would hurry back to the reassuring close greasy pressure of his home town. Here at Schloss Gruningen he felt a foreigner. He could not eat these vast quantities, he had never formed the habit, and he could not make out who most of the people at table were. But he did not allow this to disconcert him. This is my time, he thought, and I shall seize my chance. The world will see what I can do.

  He had determined to paint Fraulein Sophie standing in the sunshine, just at the end of childhood and on the verge of a woman’s joy and fulfilment, and to include in his portrait the Mandelsloh, her sister, the soldier’s wife, likely to be widowed, sitting in shadow, the victim of woman’s lot. He intended to ask them to pose for him near one of the many small wayside monuments, put up to the memory of local landlords and benefactors, which he had noticed on the way to Gruningen. They acted as landmarks and were used as scratching-posts by the cattle. The lettering on the monument would be seen, but, because of the way the light fell, not clearly. The pressure of these ideas, which urged themselves upon him with the force of poetry, caused him to lay down his knife and fork and to say distinctly, without the least reference to the loud voices around him.

  ‘Yes, there, exactly there.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Frau Rockenthien, who saw him by now as one more object for compassion.

  ‘I should like to paint your two daughters near a fountain - sitting on stone steps - broken, time-worn stone. In the distance, a glimpse of the sea.’

  ‘We are some way from the sea,’ said Rockenthien doubtfully. ‘I would say about a hundred and eighty miles. Strategically, that will always be one of our problems.’

  ‘Strategy does not interest me,’ said the young painter. ‘Bloodshed does not interest me. Apart from that, what does the sea suggest to you?’

  But to no-one present did it suggest anything, except salt water. Indeed none of them, except Rockenthien, who had once been stationed with the Hanoverian Regiment at Ratzeburg, had ever seen it.

  Frau Rockenthien said peaceably that when she was young, sea air had been thought very unhealthy, but she was not quite sure what doctors said about it nowadays.

  31

  I Could Not Paint Her

  THE whole household wondered how Sophie was to be kept sitting still for the necessary length of time. The miniaturist, an elderly relative, had not required her to keep still at all, but had made do with tracing her shadow on a piece of white pasteboard. Hoffmann, however, made only a few sketches on the wing - Fraulein von Kuhn running, Fraulein von Kuhn pouring milk from a jug. He appeared, after this, to go into a kind of trance, and spent much time in his room.

  ‘Heartily I wish Hardenberg were here,’ said Rockenthien. ‘This painter is welcome among us, and I thought we had done pretty well in giving him one of the top-floor drying rooms for a studio, but I can’t say that he seems at home. The women, however, must manage these things.’ By ‘the women’ he meant, of course, the Mandelsloh, but she had little patience with Hoffmann. ‘He has been trained, I suppose, as a cobbler is trained to mend shoes, or a soldier to shoot his enemies. Let him take out his pencils and brushes, and set to.’

  ‘Yes, but perhaps he can’t get a likeness,’ said Rockenthien. ‘It’s a trick, you know. You can’t learn it, you’re born with it. That’s how these fellows - Durer, Raphael, all those fellows - that’s how they made their money.’

  ‘I don’t think that so far Hoffmann has made much money,’ said the Mandelsloh doubtfully.

  ‘Again, that’s the trick of it. They have much more money than they let on, that’s to say, if they can get a likeness.’

  Sophie was sorry for Hoffmann, and the instinct to console which she inherited from her mother led her to ask to see all the drawings which he had brought with him in his portfolio and to praise everything in turn, and indeed she did consider them as marvels. Finally Hoffmann sighed. ‘You, too, have studied drawing, I am sure, gracious Fraulein. You must show me what you have done.’

  ‘No, that I won’t do,’ said Sophie. ‘As soon as the drawing-master was gone, I tore them all up.’

  She is not such a fool, thought Hoffmann.

  Sophie’s Diary:

  Tuesday September 11

  Today the painter did not come down in the morning for breakfast. My stepmother sent up one of the menservants with his coffee, but he said through the door, namely that he wished to be allowed to think.

  Wednesday September 12

  We began pickling the raspberries.

  Thursday September 13

  Today was hot and there was thunder and nothing happened a
nd Hardenburch did not come.

  Friday September 14

  Today no-one came and nothing happened.

  Saturday September 15

  The painter did not come downstairs, to drink schnaps with us.

  Sunday September 16

  The painter did not come to the Lord’s service with us.

  Monday September 17

  My stepfather said, is that painter fellow still upstairs, let us hope he has not got any of the maids to bed with him.

  Anxious to see whether this was the case, George commandeered a ladder from the stables and propped it against the painter’s window, open to catch what breeze there was. Such a thing would have been impossible to imagine at Weissenfels. On the other hand George, unlike the Bernhard, would never have gone through a visitor’s luggage.

  A stable lad was told to hold the ladder steady, and George shinned up. ‘Do you see anything?’ bawled the lad, with whom George shared most of his activities.

  ‘I’m not sure, it’s dark inside. Hang on, Hansel, I think I can hear the bedsprings creaking.’

  But Hansel lost his nerve and did not hang on. The ladder toppled sideways, slowly at first, then sickeningly faster. George, bellowing for help, had the sense to jump clear, but fell with the back of his head on the flagstones. The brass buttons on the tails of his jacket rang against the stones, and a moment later his head struck them grossly, like an unwanted parcel. He was lucky only to break a collar-bone, but was not present when the painter, on the next day, left Schloss Gruningen.

  Waiting forlornly in the vestibule, Hoffmann, again with his valise, portfolio, brushes, and necessary, was seen off with genuine kindness by Rockenthien, who said, ‘I am sorry you have not found it possible to do more, Herr Maler. You must allow me to recompense you for the time you have spent.’

  ‘No, no, my commission was from Hardenberg, and I shall explain myself to him. In any case,’ he added firmly, ‘you must not think I am without resources.’

  This confirmed Rockenthien in his conviction that painters knew a trick or two, and he felt less uneasy. ‘I am sorry you had to stay so much upstairs. But they sent up whatever you wanted, eh? They fed you, eh?’

  ‘I have received every hospitality,’ said Hoffmann. ‘I should like to wish Master George a rapid recovery.’

  George was soon up and about, but furious that while he had been laid up, Hansel had been given a good beating by the head coachman, and was to be dismissed. Against the head coachman’s decisions nobody, and certainly not the Hausherr, dared to make any representation. ‘There is no justice in this house,’ George cried. ‘This artist had failed entirely to paint my sister, and yet he receives nothing but compliments. As for Hansel, he only did what he was told.’

  ‘No-one told him to let go of the ladder,’ said the Hausherr.

  Weissenfels was on Hoffmann’s road back to Dresden. Although he never took much to drink, he felt by that time in need of a stimulant, and when the diligence halted he got down and went into the Wilde Mann, where he found Fritz.

  This is not what I wanted, he thought, and yet I must explain myself at some time. Fritz threw his arms round him. ‘The portrait-painter!’

  ‘I came here because I thought that if you were in Weissenfels at all, you would be at your house, and I could not face meeting you.’

  ‘Don’t look so wretched, Hoffmann. I have already had a note from Sophie herself, no less, and I know that you have not finished the portrait or even begun it. Shall I send out for schnaps?’

  ‘No, no, a glass of plain beer, if you are so good.’ Hoffmann never took anything strong, fearing to follow the same road as his father.

  ‘Well, let us talk. You have surely made sketches?’

  ‘I have, and they are yours if you want them, but I am not satisfied.’

  ‘Evidently it can’t be easy to draw my Sophie. But do you know the engraving from Raphael’s self-portrait in the third volume of Lavater’s Physiognomie?.’

  ‘Yes, I know it.’

  ‘And do you not think that the Raphael is the image of my Sophie?’

  ‘No,’ said Hoffmann. ‘Except for the eyes, which are dark in both cases, there is very little resemblance.’ His mind became steadier as he sipped at the dreary Einfaches, which resembled the water in which beans have been cooked.

  ‘Hardenberg, I hope you do not doubt my skill. I received eight years’ training in Dresden before I was even admitted to the life class. But the truth is that I have been defeated by Fraulein von Kuhn. At first I was concerned with the setting - the background - but very soon that no longer mattered to me. It was the gracious Fraulein who puzzled me.’

  ‘The artist’s feeling justifies him,’ said Fritz. ‘That must always be true, for art and nature follow the same laws.’

  ‘That is so. Pure sensations can never be in contradiction to nature. Never!’

  ‘I don’t altogether understand Sophgen myself,’ Fritz went on. ‘That is why I required a good portrait of her. But perhaps we shouldn’t have expected that you -‘

  ‘Oh, I can see at once what she is,’ Hoffmann broke out recklessly. ‘A decent, good-hearted Saxon girl, potato-fed, with the bloom of thirteen summers, and the coarser glow of thirteen winters.’ He overrode whatever protest it was that Fritz had begun, or rather he ignored it in the intensity of his wish to be understood. ‘Hardenberg, in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether it is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent. There is a question being asked, a different question for every entity, which for the most part will never be put into words, even by those who can speak. It is asked incessantly, most of the time however hardly noticeably, even faintly, like a church bell heard across meadows and enclosures. Best for the painter, once having looked, to shut his eyes, his physical eyes though not those of the spirit, so that he may hear it more distinctly. You must have listened for it, Hardenberg, for Fraulein Sophie’s question, you must have strained to make it out, even though, as I think very probable, she does not know herself what it is.’

  ‘I am trying to understand you,’ said Fritz.

  Hoffmann had put his hand to his ear, a very curious gesture for a young man.

  ‘I could not hear her question, and so I could not paint.’

  32

  The Way Leads Inwards

  FRITZ did not risk taking the painter to the Kloster Gasse, where he would surely say something to his parents about Sophie. There was no alternative to seeing him off from the Wilde Mann when the diligence left for Koln.

  He did not want to go straight home, but walked a little way out of the town and into a churchyard which he knew well. It was by now the very late afternoon, pale blue above clear yellow, with the burning clarity of the northern skies, growing more and more transparent, as though to end in revelation.

  The entrance to the churchyard was a large iron gate, with gilt letters on it, intertwined. The municipality of Weissenfels had intended to run to an iron fence as well, but at the moment the gate was set in wooden palings which more or less served to keep the cows in the pastor’s front yard away from the graves. Knee-deep in the presbytery dungheap they watched the passers-by without curiosity. Fritz walked among the grass mounds which were now, with the green alleys between them, almost disappearing in the rising mist. As in most graveyards, there were a number of objects left lying about - an iron ladder, a dinner basket and even a spade, as though work here were always in progress, and always liable to be interrupted. The crosses, iron and stone, appeared to grow out of the earth, the smaller ones struggling to get as tall as the others. Some had fallen. You could not say that the churchyard, which was a place for family walks on public holidays, was neglected, but neither was it well kept. There were weeds and a few geese. Stinging insects from the dungheaps and from God’s acre joined in triumphant clouds in the strong sickly air.

  The creak and thump of the pastor’s cows could still be heard far into the burial gro
und where the graves and the still empty spaces, cut off from each other now by the mist, had become dark green islands, dark green chambers of meditation. On one of them, just a little ahead of him, a young man, still almost a boy, was standing in the half darkness, with his head bent, himself as white, still, and speechless as a memorial. The sight was consoling to Fritz, who knew that the young man, although living, was not human, but also that at the moment there was no boundary between them.

  He said aloud, ‘The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards.’

  When he got back to the Kloster Gasse, with the impulse to tell somebody about what he had seen, Sidonie immediately asked him who was that man who had been talking to him with so much feeling at the Wilde Mann - Gottfried had seen them - Oh, so it was the poor painter! - Why poor? Fritz asked - Gottfried had given it as his opinion that there were tears in his eyes. Well, Erasmus asked, has he done the portrait? No, Fritz said, he has not been successful. He had done his best to forgive Erasmus. They never, in the ordinary way of things, discussed Sophie. He regarded his brother as an obstinate heathen.

  ‘Are there no sketches?’ Sidonie asked.

  ‘Yes, a few,’ Fritz told her. ‘But they are a kind of notation only - a few lines, a cloud of hair. He declares she is undrawable. What distresses me is my ring, for it was to have a smaller version of the portrait inside it, when it was ready. Now I must content myself with that misbegotten miniature.’

  ‘You can’t leave that ring alone,’ said the Bernhard, who had come in, silent-footed, from school. ‘Always engraved and re-engraved. It would be much better plain.’

  ‘You have never seen it,’ said Sidonie. ‘None of us has ever seen it.’ She smiled at her eldest brother. ‘I daresay after all that you are not sorry to think that your Sophie is undrawable.’