The Painter

by Will Davenport

  'That journal you have,' she said, 'Amelia's journal. Could I borrow it for the night? Just to get the sense of it all?'

  'Of course,' he said. 'It's in the table drawer in the room where we were talking. Help yourself. It's mostly just the boring bits, I'm afraid.'

  'That's all right,' she said, not meaning it.

  Almost every day when Amy was a teenager, her mother would say, 'I don't know where she gets it from,' The remark would be accompanied by a dismissive flap of the hand and no love whatsoever, implying that it certainly did not come from her side of the family, thank you very much. That was true. Amy's father was to blame. The Dales may have been well-bred and lived in a large house, but they also had a stubborn gene which cropped up from time to time, a restless, inventive, unconstrained gene as capable of causing great mischief as of creating great beauty. If it had once been present in her father, then marriage had placed it under house arrest. To escape, he had turned into a compulsive joiner, signing up for membership of any organization that appeared to promise stability and lack of change, a man who marched in parades with a serious expression on his face.

  When Amy burst out of that restrictive chrysalis of childhood, she abolished half measures and became a fierce enthusiast for all that she liked and a sometimes-too-harsh critic of whatever – or whom ever – she disliked. lt was tough on men. Very few of them ever looked at her without imagining having that open-eyed gaze under the shock of blonde hair turned on them and only them. The men she left behind her, which so far had been all of them, tended towards a bemused and rueful resignation after she had left, finding that although they got a lot more sleep, the colours of the world had somehow dimmed. Once a man had met her, very few other women ever reminded him of Amy. More and more, she began to seek the company of people with dangerous hungers, dangerous looks.

  She was aware of the effect that she had on the men she met, but she usually chose not to dwell on it. As she walked back to the house, men began to emerge, their day's work done. As they came out, they stretched and shadow-boxed and chaffed and lit cigarettes as if this was what they did every day at the end of work, but Amy wasn't fooled. They were trying to look casual but there was too much posturing going on, too many darted glances in her direction as she approached. The word had gone round. This was a stage. They were the cast and she was about to make her grand entrance. Part of her, that deceptive, untrustworthy part, began to scan them, to note the way they moved, the way they looked, and if she found herself walking a little differently, her chest pushed out in front of her and her hips swaying a little more than usual, then that was entirely because of the bags over each shoulder, Dennis appeared from amongst them and they all fell back to make space as he took the bags from her.

  'Meet the blokes, Amy. Dodgy lot, all of them. You'll have noticed I'm the only one that's halfway good-looking.'

  He insisted on introducing her to each of them. There were three middle-aged joiners who could easily have been brothers, Wilks, Sandy and Tel. Nothing doing there. There was tough, tattooed Jo-Jo, who seemed to fancy himself as a ladies' man, and his shy mate, Scotch Jimmy, with Sean Connery's voice but nothing else. There was a sinuous Jamaican with a smile that melted her knees and a name that sounded like Gengko. He was the man who had looked down at her and smiled on the landing. Maybe it's him, said the awakening animal inside her. Maybe it's not, said her brain firmly. Then there was shaven Eric, the electrician, and four more who came too thick, thin and fast for her to remember anything more than smiles, ribald comments and some impressive physiques, and last of all, emerging from the house as if he didn't give a shit, there was Micky. Micky had it. Blue eyes, cropped hair, a fighter's build and a fighter's swagger. He looked great coming down the steps. It could be this one, she thought. Then he reached the bottom and it left him looking up at her, two inches shorter. He said, 'Nice to meet yer,' in a startlingly high-pitched voice and that was the end of that thought.

  'Come on down the pub, kid,' said Jo-Jo. 'Got some good grub there.' They were clustered round and she could feel the heat coming off them. Gengko gave her a wink.

  'I might join you later,' she said. 'I've got to sort out my stuff first.'

  'Hang about a minute,' Dennis announced to her and to everyone there. 'Stay for the entertainment first. I won't be long.' He went back inside.

  There was no sign of the scarred man in the black overalls.

  SIX

  Monday, January 13th, 1662

  I do not understand what the trick is by which you are meant to leave a small boat. In Amsterdam, the boatmen who take you across the river, which was the longest sea voyage of my life until now, do you the courtesy of holding on to you as you get in and out. They expect you to be a land creature and do not impugn your dignity for being out of your own element. I could not get my foot on to the first rung of the rope ladder which was hung hard against the side of Dahl's ship in a way which clearly required some special knack. There was nowhere for my toe to go. Instead, they seized me, lashed me up with rope and lowered me down the side like a lump of cargo before soaking me with spray from the blades of the oars as they rowed me to the landing stage.

  Finally they left me to fend for myself when it came to getting out of the damned thing.

  The other passenger, the Englishman, left the boat first without any assistance and made it look quite simple so why was it that when I tried to step after him, the boat tilted under me and then shot backwards as I lunged for the jetty, taking my feet with it, so that I pitched headfirst into filthy, muddy water?

  There was someone else with the passenger on the jetty and both of them roared with laughter as I surfaced, clinging to the leg of the jetty. I let fly some fine Dutch oaths before I remembered I was in the presence of a woman.

  'Enough of your foul mouth,' said the passenger as he helped pull me up on to dry planks.

  I had learnt a lot about dignity lately, mostly by losing so much of it, but at that moment I needed the absent cloak of reputation around my shoulders more than at any other time. In Amsterdam, they know my reputation. They know the reduction in my circumstances is but a temporary effect. Those who matter to me, which is not many, understand that my reduction is due entirely to my artistic integrity in the face of fashion and not to any diminution of my skills. My art, my backbone, is as strong as ever and it supports me in the public eye. Here on the edge of this English river, I had nothing but my dripping, dirty outward appearance to force a space in these people's minds.

  Unexpectedly and for the first time in a long age, I wanted to make a good impression and that was all because of the woman who had stopped laughing and was now looking at me curiously. I was looking back at her. Do you know how it is when a new form challenges your long-held standards of what counts as beauty? My one and only Saskia had always been my ideal. Poor, dead Saskia. Hennie was a later comfort and in that same pure Dutch mould as Saskia. A pleasing roundness in the set of the face, the bones well buried in the flesh. The trick of painting that sort of beauty is all in manipulating the curving play of light, so that the eye can make the hands feel that fleshy, cupped plumpness.

  This woman had cheekbones. She was neither old nor poor and in Amsterdam only the old and the poor have cheekbones. By God, she wore them well. They took my eye and led it sliding down that sleek skin all the way to her mouth. I am used to lips that are crowded into a pucker by the billows of flesh around them. Her lips were full and wide with a cat's pointed chin below. The eyes were large and wide-set and stared at me, half in mirth, half in horror it seemed. That gaze had no foolishness in it. This was a woman used to weighing up a situation.

  Now I am not just an Amsterdam simpleton as some people might insist. I did not study in Italy when I was young, as clever people think one should. That is why I paint like me and not like anyone else. For all that, I have looked long and hard at other great painters' work. I even owned many of those works until bankruptcy robbed me of them. It was once my great pleasure to attend
the auctions and bid the price the pieces deserved. I did it for the good of painters everywhere. The public needs to be reminded what a good painting is worth. Anyway, the beauty of rounded flesh has been well explored in those paintings since it is usually the wealthy who wish to have themselves painted. Only in the Byzantine tradition have I seen such upward-stretching as I now saw before me in this woman's face and figure. Only there have I seen such elongation and that technique was perhaps more to do with having the image hung high up on the wall above you so that the gaze foreshortens it to more normal proportions. It is something so many painters forget, that a painting needs to be painted according to where it is hung, the height and the distance from the observer. I'm getting a little too fancy here. I drew a Susanna once, a thin woman with angles to her face, but beauty had scored a near-miss there so that she was no more than gaunt.

  The point is this, Byzantines or no Byzantines, I had never seen a woman like this before. Not ever.

  'Make a bow,' said the passenger abruptly. 'This is the captain's wife.'

  I obeyed as best I could, observing that the passenger's eyes were fixed on this unearthly woman. They did a lot of talking then, the two of them, almost all of it incomprehensible to me except for the odd word. I heard 'Dahl' from his lips and 'Marfel' from hers and 'Amsterdam' shockingly mispronounced. They ignored the fact that I was standing there dripping wet until I sneezed, then the woman looked round at me and said something in a tone that suggested apology for her lack of attention.

  An hour later, I was mostly dry and swathed in unlikely borrowed clothes. Someone, and I suspect it was one of the crew of builders who were all around the house, had been persuaded to give up some itchy woollen leggings, a stained vest and a brown, smock-like garment which covered me to the waist. They were not nearly fine enough to have belonged to Dahl and not nearly as fine as the clothes I had taken off which really needed only some careful washing to show once more what sort of man I was. These clothes were a little too small for me and their owner must have been a common man. Nobody with fine skin and a bit of money in his pocket would have tolerated such ill-tempered cloth for a moment. Around the smock, I strapped my own belt, still damp but nowhere near as damp as my shoes. There was no choice. I had nothing else for my feet so I squelched along, a sensation I particularly loathe.

  I was delivered to a room, if that was what you could call it. It was at least a space to myself, not under the new roof where the servants dwelt, but to one side in the ancient tower which formed the upriver end of this strange building. My chamber was high up in the roof of the tower, with just a straw mattress, a chair and a stool for furniture. It had windows to let some light in but it was not a room I would ever have chosen. They left me alone there and the sense came to me of just how far I have fallen. My house was a fine, fine house, the envy of Amsterdam, well-lit by daylight through all its tall windows. I had a fine studio with perfect light but if I sought any other light for a particular purpose, it was always to be found somewhere in that house. I could paint whatever I wanted in that house, whatever the time of day. That house was mine by right and to have to watch it sold from under me was more than a man should be asked to bear. It hurts to see this place of Dahl's because I can see the pleasure a man would take in the daily realization of his dream, of the setting up in wood and brick and glass of his palace. Does he take such pleasure? He seems a lumpish man to me, an authoritarian dullard. Someone does. I could see on my way up through the house that there is an artistry at work here. Whoever is in charge of it has an eye for form and colour. Could it be the wife? How did Dahl deserve so fine-boned a woman? I must sing for my supper by painting him and I can already see how he will wish to be painted, head thrown just slightly back, nose held high, evidence of his status on the wall behind or on the table at his side. Probably a gold chain around his neck and some navigator's instrument, an astrolabe or some such in his hand. I could do it now without even looking at him again, except that is something I never do.

  When I was dry, my door opened without a knock and the passenger, Marfel, came in.

  'Are you ready?' he said.

  'For what?'

  'You must come with me to town. We have to get what you need. You must start work.'

  'Already? Must I? I don't see how I can. My subject is not here.'

  The man furrowed his brow, 'He will be back tomorrow or the day after. He is a busy man. We must be ready for him, Sailors do not like to be kept waiting.'

  'Is there a shop in this town of yours which can supply the tools of an artist's trade?'

  'Of that I am not sure. Tell me what you need.'

  'Pigments. White lead, bone black, carmine, earths of all sorts, tin yellow, vermilion, umber, ochre and a few more. I need brushes. I will need palettes. Above all I need fine canvas and the size to prepare it. Will I find that in your town?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Are there other painters there?'

  'I never heard of any.'

  'We had better go and see this benighted town.'

  'It is not benighted,' he said. 'It is the fine town of Kingston upon Hull and I have the honour to represent it.'

  What pomposity.

  I followed him down the stairs and out to a back yard where the builders were putting up a scaffold, lashing the poles together this way and that. One let his pole fall and it nearly brained my companion who exclaimed and struck out at him. I looked ahead to see what sort of conveyance we were to ride in with some anticipation because it is only on rare occasions that I travel in any sort of carriage. In Amsterdam I walk to those few places to which I need to go. Anyone who wants to be painted still has to come to me.

  All I could see in the yard was a pair of horses and neither of them was attached to anything.

  'That's yours,' said the passenger, pointing at a huge, black animal which was rolling its eyes at me with its ears laid back.

  'I can't ride that,' I said. 'I have not ridden any horse for the last thirty years and I wasn't any good at it then.'

  'You can't ride?' he said, dumbfounded. 'You must be able to. It's easy.'

  'No it isn't. It's only easy if you can do it. I can't.'

  'There's no other way to get there,' he said. 'Come on, I'll get you up on it.'

  It took him and three of the men, one holding the horse's head and the rest shoving and pushing, until first of all I was hanging over the horse's back with my head one side and both legs the other, then clinging to its mane while people wrestled my feet into the right places and then finally I was sitting upright for a terrifying moment, a hideous distance above the ground. That only lasted until the beast, which had had enough of me, shuffled suddenly sideways and I fell on top of the smallest of the men which was lucky for me and a little less lucky for him.

  In the end they brought me a donkey and my feet were near enough the ground to feel it was almost like walking. There was no saddle, just a thick cloth tied on to its back and rope loops for my feet. I didn't even have to steer. The passenger held it on the end of a rope and persuaded it, much against its better judgement, to pick up its feet and lurch after his horse at an ungainly trot. It brayed all the way and I felt like braying too because my arse has rarely hurt so much. It took a very long time to get to the town and I should have been in no good humour at all but for the fact that I had something to occupy my mind, a shining vision and a growing ambition.

  I have never wanted to paint a woman so badly before.

  Dahl's portrait held not the slightest interest for me. I could do it in my sleep without testing myself or learning anything new in the process. There was no money involved as such, simply my passage home, and I already knew I did not want to go home until I had painted his wife. Painting is a way of claiming, of making someone your own. When I shared a studio in my birth town, before I went to Amsterdam, I shared it with another such as myself who, or so he believed, was better blessed in his visage and physique than me. The women who came to me for their portraits wou
ld sigh when he came in but I had the trick of it and he did not. He would impress himself upon them and it would sometimes work. I would make them press themselves on me and it would work unfailingly.

  There was a girl called Cornelia whom I will always remember. She was the young wife of a corn merchant who knew my father well far too young to be married to such a foul old rogue. He sent her to me when Jan, who shared my studio, was away and I took my time over her. I was in no hurry at all. I spent the first three sittings just painting in the ground, the dead colour, so that she could see the ghost of her form appearing and no more. If you keep almost quiet but not entirely, that is if you just say enough to make speech possible, the studio becomes a confessional, especially with young women. They start to tell you how it is with them, and with Cornelia it was not good. She had little choice in her marriage and he was cruel to her. By the fourth or fifth sitting, I was well into the face and taking care to make her even more appealing than she was. The poor girl needed reassurance so badly. At the end of the sitting, she would say, 'You are too kind, I am not so fair,' and I would say, 'I have not yet done you justice. Give me time.'

  There is a look a girl gives when she starts to speculate on how union with you might be and it was that look I began to paint into her portrait. It would never do for her husband to see it, he would recognize it immediately for what it was, but paint is paint – the thicker the better and I could make her chaste again long before he saw it. I painted that look and I made her shape her face just so, and as she did so, with her eyes wide and her mouth just that little bit open, the lower lip pushed forward, so the look began to produce what should have been its cause rather than its effect.

  She began to love the way I was making her look and to look more and more like it even when I did not tell her to. She started to talk to me obliquely of her bedroom fears, of how each night she prayed her goat of a husband would drink himself insensible until morning. She did not flinch in the slightest when, in the interests of fully understanding the curve in her cheek and form of her lips, I would stroke her face gently between my hands. By the time I had finished her face, she would be so eager to start our sittings that I would hear her hurrying footsteps in the street five minutes before she was due.