The Painter

by Will Davenport

  'Oh? He'll come back when he chooses.'

  'What's it all about, Dennis?'

  He sang it back at her. 'What's it all about, Den-nisss …' on a rising falsetto. 'I expect he'll tell you if he wants to.'

  'Why don't you like him?'

  She couldn't see his face but she sensed him shifting in the darkness. 'We've got a deal here, Amy. We try not to talk about it. A lot of blokes together in a small space, it's not a good idea to get all stirred up. That's when accidents happen. Anyway, somehow I don't think I'd be preaching to the converted.'

  'Come on. He's not here. I need to know. How did he get hurt? It was a saw, he said. Was it this saw?' As she said it, she realized it couldn't have been. The man in the pub said it was down in the docks. He'd called the ambulance down in the docks.

  Dennis gave a short laugh. 'You wouldn't get a little cut off this saw. Dead, that's what you'd get.'

  'You didn't. I didn't like that last stunt. Why did you do it? Were you showing off because I was there?'

  'Don't tell me how to survive, love. Construction's a hard business, I'm the court jester. That gets me through most of the time but not always. Once in a while someone will still try to pull my head off. There's times with blokes like these when you need to earn a bit of respect, to do something they wouldn't do. Protection.'

  'I see. But what about Don? What sort of saw was it?'

  'Chain saw. You'd be better off asking him.'

  'What's between you two? I want to know, Dennis. It matters.'

  'You don't want to know. Once I've told you then you're on one side or the other. You can't be on both.'

  'I can try. Bloody tell me, Dennis.'

  He sighed. 'Be it on your own head. My sister Maggie, she's got this kid, Vin. He's never been quite right. Then he started using this and that. Speed and a bit of blow, then he started using himself as a pin cushion. Remember when you picked me up? I'd been over Darlington way, seeing Maggie. The boy's here, in Hull, banged up. He's on remand.'

  'What did he do?'

  'Ah well, that depends.'

  'On?'

  'On whether you're on Don's side or on his side. It's Pandora's box, Amy. You sure you want me to open it?'

  'Yes.'

  'The fact is, there was Don and there was Vin and there was a chain saw.'

  He fell silent. Amy frowned in the darkness.

  'And there was an accident?'

  'Oh, no. Whatever it was happened, it wasn't an accident. Look, you ask Don. That's the best thing, but whatever he tells you just do me a favour, okay?'

  'Okay.'

  'You just remember that Vin tells it differently, the other way round, but Vin's a druggie, isn't he? Vin's got a few screws loose, hasn't he? No one's going to listen to Vin when there's big brave Don around.'

  Whole new dimensions full of malice engulfed Amy. 'Did Vin have something against Don?'

  Dennis didn't reply straight away. When he did, his voice was very quiet. 'He didn't even know him. All he did was try to stop him. Look love, I can see how it is with you and Don. You're in over your head, aren't you?'

  'Well, up to my knees.' She tried to laugh and couldn't.

  'Just be very, very careful. I've done my best. I can't do anything more. Me, I'm off to bed. You coming?'

  'Yes,' she said.

  'Yippee,' he said. 'First time anyone's said that for three weeks.'

  He'd drawn a line under it. The conversation was over.

  'Behave yourself,' she said.

  'How? Well or badly?'

  Amy went to bed because there was nothing else to do. For the first part of the night she dreamt disturbing dreams. In the early hours, she got up and went to Don's door. It was open just a crack and she listened for breathing for a long time before she risked pushing it open further to see his bed was empty. She sat down on the unmade bed for a few moments then, remembering vividly how his body had felt the last time she was there, she lay down and pulled the rug around her.

  In the morning, she woke with a start, her nostrils full of the particular smell of Don, to find she was still alone in his bed. Downstairs, washed and dressed, she did her best to slip around the edge of the breakfasting men, smiling and passing on as she ate on her feet. She went up to the first-floor room and she had just started to paint when Don walked in and put down his tool bag.

  'Morning,' he said, as if nothing at all had happened. He was bending over the tool bag, speaking with his back turned.

  'I looked all over the place for you last night. I got soaked.' It sounded angrier than she wanted it to.

  'I had to go,' he said.

  I'm not playing that game, she thought. I'm not going to ask him why he had to go or what the man in the pub meant or what happened with Dennis's nephew. I'll let him come to me, like taming an animal.

  'I borrowed a couple of books off a friend. Look.' He reached in the bag. He seemed as calm as calm could be. They were books on Rembrandt and she knew they were his white flag, his bridge back to her. 'We could check them out after work,' he said. 'If he was here, it's big news, isn't it?'

  She could imagine sitting on the bed with him, reading. Being there with him, in a universe of two with the bed beneath them was all she wanted at that moment.

  'Maybe.' She turned her attention back to the ceiling, determined to show no further signs of interest in the events of the previous evening.

  He was carefully removing another section of the panelling which seemed unlikely to stand up to the sander's attentions. She could hear him working away at it, easing out the ancient fixings and cautiously parting the panel framing.

  Then she heard complete silence, not just an absence of speech or an absence of manual activity but the total silence of someone who had stopped breathing. It lasted three or four seconds, then there was an exhaled 'aah' and she looked down to see Don staring fixedly at the wall.

  'What is it?'

  'Come down and see.'

  Crouching side by side they stared at the wall revealed behind the panelling. Down to the top of the panelling, the wall had been covered in thick layers of cream paint. Years of redecoration had built it up so that it lipped out over the plain, ancient plaster behind the woodwork. How many years, Amy wondered, feeling the thickness of the lip? There on the pale, dusty plaster were a faint series of lines, almost obscured by a grey sheet of cobwebs. Using her fingers, trying not to touch the dry-as-dust surface of the plaster, Amy gathered the cobwebs, twining them like insubstantial spaghetti and they pulled away, anxious to clasp her fingers.

  What was underneath became clear.

  It was the bottom half of a simple picture painted straight on to the wall. Two people from the waist down, the one in the foreground wearing a long pleated skirt, one foot splayed out to the side. Behind her, the suggestion of a man's legs, the feet very solidly on the ground. In front of them was the bottom corner of something rectangular and around it all on the three visible sides, was a frame painted on the plaster, squared off inside and with freely drawn curlicues outside in yellow and brown. The lines had a vigour in them and even without the top half, they held the eye.

  'Who are they?' Don's voice was gruff, his question a demand as if he had the right to an answer.

  'It's Amelia,' said Amy with complete certainty.

  'You don't know that. There's not enough to tell.'

  'She's behind there,' said Amy, 'All the rest of her. Her face, everything. It's all behind there.' She was pointing at the fat build-up of paint above the top line of the panelling where the infinitely thin outline, mere microns of fragile brown, was buried under fossil layers of obliteration.

  'Can we get the paint off?'

  'Can we? No. Could an expert? I don't know. I shouldn't think so.'

  'We'll have to show Parrish,' said Don.

  'I'll go and see if he's around.'

  He was just parking his car outside when she went downstairs and he was greatly interested in what they had found.

  'Pre
cisely datable,' he said, peering at it, clutching the bulging folder which seemed to go everywhere with him. 'Absolutely extraordinary. We can tell the date within weeks. Fascinating.'

  'Within weeks? How?' asked Amy.

  'The journal. Amelia's journal,' said Parrish. 'Haven't you read it?'

  'I've skipped through it.'

  'Would you be very kind and go and get it?' She left the room and for an unthinking moment found herself heading towards her bedroom to get her precious find. She stopped short, aghast at the thought of what would have happened if she had handed Parrish the ancient day-book when he was expecting the transcript.

  As it was, he took his modern notebook from her with just as much reverence as if it had been the original and began to leaf through it.

  'Here,' he said, 'No, it's somewhere. Where is it now? Yes, third week in January. She talks about the plastering and the limner. He must be a plasterer, I think, or perhaps a painter, using lime-wash. Perhaps it should be "limer". Then she says this: To my surprise, my husband directed the man to put into place the panelling which we did bring from the Hull house which was before that in the great room at Linscot before the fire. This to be done while we are in full course in the room. This has occasioned much choler in the timer who opines that the lightness of the room will be spoiled by it. There you are. They put those panels in only a few weeks after they plastered the room. In fact the limer is still working in the room.'

  Don looked at him sharply. 'My mother got it right,' he said. 'That's meant to be limner, not limer. A limner is an old word for painter.'

  Parrish looked at the book again. 'Either way, they were still decorating the room.'

  'No, he wasn't a house painter.' Don looked sideways at Amy for a fraction of a second. 'A limner is a portrait painter. That means he was painting her in here. He was painting Amelia. He must have done this painting on the wall. Maybe it was like a sketch to show her how it was going to look.'

  'Limner?' said Parrish, doubtfully, clearly unused to being corrected on seventeenth-century wording by Don.

  'She got it right, I promise,' said Don. 'I looked it up.'

  'Anyway, that proves the painting was done in 1662,' said Amy. 'Nobody would have moved the panels since, would they?'

  'There's no reason to suppose they have.'

  'Could we get the rest of the paint off?'

  'That would be a very expensive business,' said Parrish. 'I can't see the committee agreeing to that one. Not unless it turned out to be someone very significant. Perhaps it's your friend Rembrandt.' He chuckled at his own joke, Amy and Don didn't. Instead, they stared at the lines on the wall.

  'Speaking of whom,' said Parrish, 'I waited a few minutes when you two did your disappearing act.'

  'Oh, I'm sorry about that,' said Amy, feeling it should really be Don apologizing.

  'No, no, that's all right. You had your reasons. Anyway I had to put off that tiresome man who spilt his beer. He kept on at me, so I went back to reading my file. Something to hide behind, you know how it is. I needed a bit of protection and while I was reading, I suddenly remembered van Loon.'

  'And he is?'

  'A good question. Hendrik van Loon. Ostensibly, he was the great-grandson, nine times removed, of Rembrandt's doctor, one Joannis van Loon. He published a book in the 1930s which he claimed was an account of Rembrandt's life.'

  'It's not real, I assume,' said Amy, 'judging by your tone.'

  'Who knows?' said Parrish. 'It's written in mock seventeenth-century language but I don't think it rings true. Have you read Pepys's diaries?'

  'No.'

  'You should. Marvellous stuff. Same time exactly but very different to our van Loon. Anyway, it's a clever book and it's stuffed with background details which fit the facts. Tries a bit too hard, you might say.'

  'I don't suppose it mentions Hull?' asked Don lightly.

  'Ah! Well,' said Parrish, and he stretched the syllable out to command their full attention. 'As a matter of fact, it does, so there's a surprise. I've photocopied the page for you.' He pulled a sheet of paper out of his folder. 'Now, this comes from the foreword to the book, which is dated 1669. Van Loon starts off explaining that they had just buried Rembrandt the previous day. A pauper's funeral. He'd wanted to be buried in his wife's grave, poor old Saskia, but he'd forgotten that he'd sold it and the bones had already been dug up and thrown away. Anyway, then the doctor meets a poet friend of his and together they bump into a sea-captain in a coffee house. Listen to this:

  'I told him I rarely visited this part of Amsterdam at that hour but that I had happened to cross the dam on my way home from the funeral of a friend.

  ' "And who might that be?" the poet asked, "for I am not aware that anyone of importance has died."

  ' "No," I answered, "I suppose not. He died quite suddenly. Yet you knew the man. It was Rembrandt van Rijn." '

  He looked at me with slight embarrassment.

  '"Of course I knew him," he said, "a very great artist. I could not always follow him and he thought very differently from me on many subjects. For one thing, I don't believe that he was ever truly a Christian. But a great painter, nevertheless. Only tell me, Doctor. Are you sure it was not an impostor? For Rembrandt, if I recollect, died five years ago. He died in Hull in England." '

  Amy interrupted. 'Bloody hell!' she said. 'How do you explain that one?'

  Parrish smiled, 'Wait. It gets better. "He died in Hull in England,"' he went on, ' "He had gone there to escape from his creditors. That is, if I remember correctly."

  ' "Hull?" interrupted the captain. "Hull, nothing! I know all about that fellow. It was he who had that quarrel with the dominies about his servant girl. But he went to Sweden some six or seven years ago. I have a friend who sails to Danzig and he took him to Gothenburg in '61 or '62. He told me so himself so I know it to be true."

  ' "Nevertheless, my good friends," I answered, "Rembrandt died last Friday and we buried him this morning."

  ' "Well," said the good-natured captain, signalling to the waiter to bring him a third gin and bitters, "we all have to die sooner or later and I'm sure there are plenty of painters left."'

  He stopped.

  'That's extraordinary,' said Amy. There must be something to it.'

  Parrish shrugged. 'Perhaps van Loon read the Vertue notebooks. Who knows? All these people could be feeding off the same ancient lie. That's the trouble with this sort of history. Perhaps old Laroon's mind was wandering. Perhaps he met an impostor who pretended to be Rembrandt, It might be as simple as that and the consequences go on and on echoing right the way down to the present day. Anyway, the story doesn't want to go away, does it?' he said. He looked at each of them in turn with an intent gaze.

  'I realize there's one thing you've managed not to tell me,' he said.

  'Which is?' Amy asked.

  'Which is why you got interested in it in the first place? Why you asked me that odd question about the man when you knew only the wrong half of his name? How did Harmenszoon van Rijn come into your life in such a way that you didn't realize who he was?'

  Amy realized, far too late, that while he might look like affability personified, Parrish was no fool. She might have admitted the existence of Amelia's day-book then, but whether she liked it or not, there was someone else to consider now. The day-book was part of the thread binding her and Don together and she didn't want to break that thread. In the short silence which resulted, the conspiracy was driven accidentally deeper.

  'Come on,' Parrish said, giving them each an oddly serious look. 'You two seem to be sensible people. I wish you'd tell me what this is really all about.'

  The silence went on too long and she had to break it because Don wasn't going to. 'There's nothing really to tell. It's all a bit silly,' she said. 'If we come across anything that stands up, you'll be the first to hear.'

  Parrish stared at her, weighing her up, and under that gaze she felt acutely uncomfortable, then he seemed to come to a decision.

&n
bsp; 'Do that,' he said. 'I promise not to laugh. Whatever you're up to, young Amy Dale, you don't strike me as silly and I've known this young man here for long enough to know he's no fool. Anytime you want to talk, I'll be very happy to listen. Now, you'd better get on before I get us all in trouble with the Hawk.' He paused, irresolute, looking at the wall. 'We'd better get some protection over that while we decide what to do, I'll sort something out.'

  He left the room and to Amy's astonishment, Don rounded on her.

  'I don't tell lies,' he said, 'and I don't like being involved in your lies.'

  'What lies?' she said.

  He imitated her voice, higher and with what seemed to her to be an unfair parody of an affected accent she didn't think she had. 'There's nothing much to tell. It's all too, too silly.'

  'What the fuck was I supposed to say, Don?' she snarled at him. 'I didn't notice you leaping in with a full explanation. He's your old family friend, not mine,' Once Amy got started, an intoxicating cocktail of chemicals, brewed up by her own anger, took over to push her ever further than she would have chosen to go. 'You kept quiet. I had to say something. Anyway I haven't noticed you being too honest lately.'

  'Meaning what?'

  'Meaning maybe you should face up to the fact that you got hurt and it's not the end of the fucking world. You're hiding. You should try facing it, not rushing off every time anybody tries to talk to you. It's pathetic. I think you should …'

  He didn't wait to find out what she thought he should do. She found she was talking to an open door and the chemical flood went with him, leaving a sick residue of embarrassed guilt. She stood, feeling a crater form in her stomach. That was territory she had told herself not to step into. She stared down at the lines painted on the wall without seeing them and then, when she did take notice of them, the appalling thought that the picture might yet be covered back up without anyone else knowing who might have painted it didn't stop her giving the wall a vicious kick.

  When the Hawk looked in half an hour later, she was up on the scaffolding, painting grimly, and when he said, 'Where's the lad to, then?' all she answered was, 'I don't know.'

  Ten minutes later he was back.