The Painter

by Will Davenport

  She kept her face strictly neutral and nodded. Then, really to change the subject, she said, 'What's the room going to be used for when it's finished?'

  'Mostly for paintings,' he said. 'We're just negotiating with the Ferens, Do you know the Ferens?'

  'No.'

  'It's the art gallery in town,' Don put in. Amy tried to make out his tone. It seemed no more than neutral. His body language with Parrish was odd. There was nothing in the slightest bit subservient about it, quite the reverse. When Amy had walked in, he had looked like a teenager, defying a parent.

  'That's it,' said Parrish. 'Splendid place. We're hoping the curator might make available three or four paintings from the reserve collection. Things suitable for the period. The trouble is, of course, the room they're displayed in has to be like Fort Knox and this is the only one that seems to fit the bill. We could make it secure. The light's good in here, too. I've got my eye on a few seventeenth-century pieces that would suit the place perfectly.'

  'You know a bit about seventeenth-century art, don't you?' Don asked. Amy guessed what was coming next, guessed and resented it a little, him asking a question that should have been hers.

  'Not to any professional degree of course,' said Parrish, 'but yes, I suppose I do. I've studied the Old Masters and their life stories. It's an interest of mine. You can't really study the history of architecture and ignore the best source, can you? Interiors in paintings are such a strong part of the record.'

  'Well then, do you know anything about a painter called Harmanson Vanrin?' asked Don. 'He was Dutch.'

  Perhaps Don would lose interest, Amy hoped. If Parrish didn't know him, if he was just an unknown who had fallen into the dark hole of history then perhaps she could reclaim Amelia for herself.

  Parrish looked at him in surprise. 'Is that a trick question?'

  'No,' said Don, equally surprised. 'Why should it be?'

  'It just seems rather a strange thing to call the poor man.'

  'So you've heard of him?'

  'Of course I have,' Parrish said. He turned to Amy. 'Miss Dale, you can tell him, surely.'

  'Me?' Hell, Parrish knew him. Vanrin was someone and she knew for certain she had heard the name before. 'Oh dear. His name's familiar but I can't remember why.'

  'Did you study art history?'

  'Er, yes, I did.'

  'Where was that?'

  'At the Slade.'

  He seemed to be enjoying himself, 'So have you forgotten everything they taught you or are you just trying to confuse young Don here?'

  'No, I'm not,' said Amy.

  'Well, it's not Vanrin, not like that with the stress on the first syllable. It's van Rijn.' He spelt it out, 'R, I, J, N, and it's not quite Harmanson. His name was Harmenszoon van Rijn,' said Parrish, chuckling, 'Now, if I was to ask you if you'd heard of a painter called Buonarroti, what would you say?'

  'I would say er …' A retrieved memory came to her aid just in time. 'I would say that was Michelangelo's last name.' Half of an enormous idea was elbowing its way out of the dusty filing cabinets of her brain and she felt she was about to look rather foolish.

  'Exactly. So, van Rijn was a surname too. Born in Leiden in, let me see, 1606, I believe. Shared a studio with Jan Lievens then he moved to Amsterdam in 1620-something and stayed there until he died around 1669. Does that ring any bells?'

  Don and Amy stayed silent, but Amy was watching Parrish in an agony of uncertainty. It took her all the way back to being shown up in front of a class.

  Parrish looked at her expectantly, shrugged and continued trying to prompt her. 'He turned the technique of portrait painting on its head. Many people would say he was the greatest painter the world ever saw. Even those who don't agree would still put him in the top three or four.'

  'Why haven't I heard of him then?' asked Don, bluntly.

  'Because you haven't given the poor old fellow his first name,' said Parrish, 'Harmenszoon is his second name, his patronymic. It just means his father was called Harmen. He signed his paintings with his first name and that is the name by which he chose always to be known once he became famous.' He turned and looked at Amy, 'And that name was?' he said.

  'Rembrandt,' she said, and to her the word seemed to expand to fill the entire room, taking the air out of her lungs.

  Don pushed his goggles up on his forehead and she managed not to look at him.

  'Rembrandt?' he said in astonishment. 'Did er … did Rembrandt ever come to England?'

  At that moment, there were footsteps on the landing and the foreman stuck his head round the door.

  'Here, you two,' he said, 'I don't pay you to …' He saw Parrish. 'Ah, didn't know you were there, Mr P.'

  'That's all right,' said Parrish. 'Just having a little discussion about how we proceed in here. Don't worry, they'll be hard at it soon.'

  Hawk backed out and went to harass somebody else.

  'Thanks,' said Amy.

  Parrish was enjoying himself too much to let work get in the way. 'Did Rembrandt come to England? Ah! Well that's quite an interesting question. Now, first of all, there's a rather silly story saying he was here in the 1630s, all because he did some etchings of St Paul's Cathedral and one or two other English buildings, but nobody really believes it. They're not realistic. He very probably based them on somebody else's work.'

  'Why would he do that?'

  'Money, dear girl. He was the arch capitalist. He churned out those etchings, then he'd change them a little bit and sell them to the same collectors all over again. The man was a money-machine. Until later on of course, until he went bust.'

  Amy and Don spoke at the same time. 'Went bust?' But Parrish had moved on.

  'Now, I'll tell you something really odd,' he said, 'something I bet you didn't know. There's another story, not very widely known, which claims Rembrandt actually came to Hull later in his life. How about that?'

  'Hull?' Amy beat Don to it, but her voice sounded to her like someone else's, someone much younger and rather over-excited.

  'If you're interested, I think I've got the details back in town, in my office. You could pop in some time and look at them.'

  'Today? After work?'

  Parrish raised an eyebrow. 'If you want. I'll probably be there until about seven.'

  'Good,' said Don. 'We'll be there.'

  'Now, better get on, before I bring the foreman's wrath down on you. Let's have another look at these panels. This next one's very thin,' Parrish was pushing it gently in the centre of the panel with his hand. They watched him, worried that he might switch his attention to the repaired one next to it. 'Let's have a go at taking this one off and see if we can clean it up better. It's only pinned in, you see. If you lever the mouldings off very gently, let's say here and here, you should be able to get at the main framing. I think it's too dangerous to go on sanding them in situ, as it were.'

  He left them alone after that and when the door had closed, Don said, 'God almighty, I think we're in over our heads here.'

  'It's too late to go back.'

  'Think about it. Rembrandt might have been here, in this house. Rembrandt painted the family. What the hell was he doing here?'

  'I don't know, Don. Maybe we're going to find out.'

  'Supposing we find the paintings?'

  'Find them? Here?' Amy looked around at the bare walls. She could imagine what might happen if the builders got the idea something of real value might be in the house. 'Sadly I don't think that's likely. Is there anywhere in the house that no one's been?'

  'No, I don't think so.'

  'No attics? No cellars?'

  Don shook his head and in doing so, seemed to feel the weight of the goggles up on his forehead. He brought them down over his eyes quickly.

  'No cellars, definitely,' he said. 'I suppose there was an attic but they've had the roof right off so they must have cleaned it out.'

  'Have you been in all the rooms?'

  'No.'

  'Well, anyway,' said Amy. 'If we do
find them, it's halves, all right?'

  There was no overtime in their minds that evening. They changed quickly when work stopped and went outside.

  'Your car or mine?' Amy asked.

  'Yours.'

  'It's got very little suspension and almost no brakes.'

  'Well mine's got no wheels, no engine and no body.'

  This was a different Don, almost chatty.

  'You mean you haven't got a car,' she said.

  'Not at the moment, no.'

  His hand, thought Amy. That's probably why he's not driving at the moment. Stupid.

  Half an hour later, they were sitting in hard chairs facing Peter Parrish across his desk.

  'Won't be a minute,' he said, sorting papers into files. 'Got to keep the accountants at bay, eh? Wouldn't do to spend more than we've got on the old place.'

  He finished, looked around the desk vaguely and rooted through drawers until he found another fat folder.

  'Shall we do this over a drink?' he said. 'There's a pub I'd like Miss Dale to see.'

  'Please call me Amy,' she said, 'Miss Dale sounds like something you've done when you get a wrong number.'

  The White Harte pub was a ten-minute walk, tucked away down an alley off Silver Street, and age soaked right through its walls from the outside to the rooms within. Parrish ushered Amy in. Don hung back and peered in through the door before he stepped inside. Amy guessed it was a little too public for him.

  '1600s, you see,' said Parrish, 'The bombs spared it. Not a bad place, eh?' He put three beer glasses down on the table. 'There's a room upstairs they used to call the plotting parlour. It's where the city officials decided to close the gates to King Charles. Did you know that was the first open act of defiance in the Civil War? Just think, if our man Rembrandt was in Hull, he might have had a drink right here.'

  'Was he here?' Don asked. He had been jumpy all the way in from Paull Holme. There were no convenient disguises he could wear away from his work and the injury to his face was still livid.

  'I don't think so,' said Parrish. 'He's famous for never going anywhere. Just about every other painter worth his salt did the grand tour down to Italy. Not our Mr van Rijn and his chum Lievens, He'd hardly walk across the street unless he had to, but who knows?'

  'So what's the basis for the story?'

  Parrish opened the folder. 'All right, I'll try to keep it simple. It all stems from a man called George Vertue who was writing about fifty years after Rembrandt died. Our friend Vertue was the first real British art historian, you might say. He was an artist himself, an engraver, but what he's famous for is his notebooks. He went round writing up all the great collections of England, describing the paintings. It wasn't exactly plain sailing. There was a lot of blatant forgery and even the Masters themselves weren't above signing their students' pictures to squeeze out a bit more cash. The thing is, old George wasn't bad at his identification.'

  'So he saw pictures Rembrandt painted here?'

  'No, no. Well, maybe. We can't be sure, but that's not the point. No, Vertue met someone. In his notebooks, he says he met an old man called Laroon, another artist. Laroon told him that when he was a small boy, he had met Rembrandt in York. Vertue's quite definite about it. This man told Vertue that Rembrandt was living in Hull, painting portraits of seafaring folk and he even described one of the portraits. I haven't looked at the entry in the notebooks for years but he gave quite a lot of detail about it, you know, how it was signed, what the date was, what it said on the frame, that sort of thing.'

  'Where are these notebooks?' Don asked.

  'In London. Horace Walpole owned them and the Walpole Society had them all copied out in about 1900 so that people could use them for research. They've got copies in the library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.'

  'So why don't you believe it?' demanded Amy.

  Parrish shrugged. 'Well, it seems so out of character for a start. I mean, the man made a whole lifestyle out of staying in one place. Why on earth would he suddenly up sticks and come to Hull of all places? Then, there was something else. What was it? Oh, I know. Vertue says the dates on the portraits are 1661 and 1662. Now, it's certainly true that we don't know much about what Rembrandt was doing in '62, but we've got plenty of evidence showing he was busy in Amsterdam right through '61.'

  'And that's all there is to go on?'

  Parrish looked at Amy. 'You really want it to be true, don't you?'

  'It's a great story.'

  'Well, no. In that case, you'll be pleased to hear that's not all the evidence.' He shuffled through the papers in the folder, searching.

  Amy glanced at Don, who was looking at Parrish with a curious and unsettling expression. All at once she forgot about Parrish and Rembrandt and became poignantly aware of the table between her and Don, of the other people around and of the simplicity of her feelings. Here he was, the first man who had ever made her whole body sing with physical yearning for what he could do to her, and yet what was between them, the bond that should have been so simple, was already so tricky. He seemed to register the movement of her eyes and his face changed.

  Parrish found the right piece of paper. 'There was a book, written in the 1850s, I think, a history of Hull by James Joseph Sheahan. I find it very useful. Loads of detail on catastrophes, what house burnt down and when and which falling wall squashed how many people – that kind of thing. Gives you lots of evidence about the old buildings. He also lists all the famous people who have lived in Hull. Most of their names, I fear, have not stood the test of time. However, on page seven hundred and twenty-five he says, Van Ryn Rembrandt, the celebrated painter and etcher, practised his an at Hull for some time. He died in 1674, aged sixty-eight.'

  'That's all?' asked Don.

  'Yes,' said Parrish, 'and of course it's wrong because he actually died in 1669 aged sixty-three. Bit of a pauper's death, really. Nobody made much fuss.'

  'It's not much to go on, is it?' said Amy. 'I mean this man Sheahan, he could have got it from the first man, the one who wrote the notebooks.'

  'Ah, but did he? Where's your detective instinct? Vertue's notebooks weren't made public until 1900 when the Walpole Society printed them up, Sheahan wrote his book fifty years before that. How did he know? Sounds like two separate sources, don't you think? Either that or old Laroon told his story to a lot of different people.'

  'So who exactly was old Laroon?' asked Don.

  'Old Laroon? The man who told Vertue he'd met Rembrandt in York. He was another famous engraver, Marcellus Laroon, famous for the Street Cries of London etchings. Yes?'

  Amy had a dim memory of her mother's set of table mats. She nodded.

  'Laroon was a Dutchman himself,' said Parrish. 'He could only have been nine or ten years old when he says he met Rembrandt, That's why people tend not to believe the story, but his father was an artist too, so they might easily have recognized each other. I say, wouldn't it be fun if it was Rembrandt who taught Laroon how to etch?'

  'Yes,' said Amy, a little impatiently, 'but there was something else I wanted to ask you …'

  She never got round to asking her question. Whether Laroon recognized Rembrandt or not, at that moment, someone recognized Don.

  FIFTEEN

  Amy ran out of the pub into puddles which soaked her shoes in seconds. There was nothing outside but strangers and a thin rain falling. No sign of Don. Thirty seconds before, all had been well until a large, clumsy man tripped over Peter Parrish's foot, projecting a small wave of lager over Don's jeans and in the middle of his apologies, said, 'Hang on, I know you, don't I?'

  Don had mumbled something, bending down to mop his trousers, and the man, over-effusive with embarrassment said, 'Yeah, it's you, in't it? Remember me? Down at the what-do-you-call-it? The dock place? No, course you don't.' Under a fleece jacket, his tee-shirt hung outside his belly. He turned to Amy. 'I was there, you see. Delivering. It was me called the ambulance.'

  'Sorry,' Don had said, thickly. 'Got to …' And he was gone.<
br />
  By the time Amy reached the street he was out of sight. Left or right? Darkness was left, lights were right. She chose left and ran in her wet, flimsy shoes until she was in the old High Street among the ghosts, and thought she saw him ahead for a moment rounding the bend. At the next corner there were three roads he could have taken and she guessed wrong. She ran along one, then another, then the third until she knew he had gone, then she stood in the dark, with the rain running down harder and harder until the cold and the wet and the sheer difficulty of it all drove her back to the pub again. By that time there was no sign of either Parrish or the man who had spilt the beer, so she sat there, sipping a drink she didn't want, pressed against a radiator while she tried to dry out and all the time she was watching the door, hoping Don would walk back in through it. When that hope ran out, she drove back to Paull Holme, puzzled and worried, looking hard at every one of the few people walking in the suburbs of Hull. By the time she reached the flaring refinery, she had given up and the dark country lanes beyond it cut off that world of people and towed her out of town back to the nether world of Paull Holme. She drove in through the trees torn between relief and fear and as she got out of the car, she smelt tobacco smoke. There, under the canopy sheltering the saw bench, two cigarette ends gleaming in the darkness, both brightening in unison as the invisible smokers inhaled.

  A voice said, 'Howdy-do.'

  It was Dennis, by himself.

  'Why are you smoking two cigarettes, Dennis?' she asked.

  'So that anyone lurking out there thinks there's more than one of me,' he said.

  'No, really.'

  'Because I allow myself two fags every evening.'

  'But why together?'

  'Cos I'm dead weary and I want to get to bed. Anyway,' he said, 'you're not one to talk. You went off with two in the car and you've come back with one. Have you been careless?'

  She sighed. 'Something happened. We were in a pub. This guy said something to him and he just rushed off.'