The Painter

by Will Davenport

  It came to me with a huge sense of disappointment that this sitting could not follow its ideal course. If I couldn't understand her, what use could that confessional process be to me? When I painted Maria Trip, she talked her way out of her clothes in three sittings and all I had to do was make sympathetic noises when she told me of what her stepfather had tried to make her do with him in her mother's absence. Amelia gave a little gasping chuckle when she realized the pointlessness of what she had said and put her hand to her mouth.

  I smiled and just to respond in some way, I said, 'I wish I could speak your language, but alas, I am unlikely to learn it in the time available.' It was a lie. English sounded barbarous to me. I had not the slightest wish to learn it. Dutch had been good enough until now.

  She looked at me questioningly and, suddenly understanding what an interesting freedom this gave me, I said, 'If I could speak English, I would sing your praises. I would tell you how the touch of light on your cheek is a rougher kiss than its beauty deserves. I would tell you how hard I will have to work to make the paint flow as smoothly as your skin because I must break my habit and paint you as smoothly as a picture ever was painted, I would tell you how I am already quite convinced I have never seen such a fine-looking woman as you. If I could speak your language, that is what I would tell you.'

  She stared back at me with an expression that said she had understood more from the way I spoke than I had meant her to and I resolved that I must be careful. I made my voice as flat as if I were ordering groceries, risking only the occasional glance at her while I studied my canvas.

  'I know when you look at me, you look at an unknown man, a man who appears to you to be of no consequence, but there are ten thousand women in Amsterdam who would give up everything for the privilege of sitting where you are sitting. I would not let any single one of them take your place. In all my life, I have never before had to rise to such a challenge. If I can do you justice then your portrait will be a picture that all men will fall in love with as soon as they look at it,' I looked at the wooden panels on my easel with a measure of despair, wishing in a moment of weakness that they were after all canvas and four times the size because there is stuff you can do with a brush and canvas that board will not allow. You can work your passion in to the push and give of the canvas and leave on it the record of the raw emotion in your arm. My painting has for some years now been all about raw emotion, of trowelling and pummelling the paint on to the canvas so that it becomes the undulating topography of my emotions. This board was a stiff substitute.

  Her eyes followed me as I talked. I was arranging my palette, a job my students used to do for me, but here it required my fullest concentration. Dutch women are pretty much all the same colour. They tend to the blue grey shades as they get older and when they're dead they go white then eventually green like anybody else but any of my students could put together a good enough palette without even seeing the client. What you need on your palette for a standard Dutch face is red lake, vermilion, red ochre and light ochre, umber, coal black, green earth and one of the yellows. It goes without saying you also need an exceedingly fine lead white. Now, I have always believed in the purity you achieve by keeping your pigments to a minimum. I find if I try to combine more than five or six of these, I begin to lose that perfect control, I was struggling more than usual because back home, I know exactly what to expect when I start mixing, exactly how one pigment will mix with another. We had done well enough on our trip to York but there was much I had to learn about the English versions of my coloured friends. The ochres, in particular, were very grainy and did not mix in easily. Even if I'd had my own studio available to me, it would have been a hard job. This woman in front of me was a true challenge. I tried this and that, talking all the time.

  'No, that's not it. That's the colour for the clearest skin I have seen until now but it is still twenty shades away from your colour. I think I may have to mince you up and mix you into the oil. It's the only way to do it.'

  I got it in the end, the base tone at least, by taking unheard-of liberties with that pigment mixture which Lievens always liked to call nun's blush. I took an egg from the bowl I had requested, broke it, and stirred a little of the yolk into the mixture, working it until it ran like cream. Then I put brush to board and began to paint in the dead ground, the background colour, to lay the foundations for the most exquisite construction I had yet attempted.

  My stare now became a truly professional tool, with all my concentration focused on doing her justice, but I could still touch her with my eyes just as if my gaze was a willow wand reaching across to dimple her skin.

  'If we could talk, you and I, then I would ask you if there are many more like you in your family. Your mother must be a great beauty and your father the most handsome of men to have made you as you are.'

  She stared through me, oblivious. Thinking, no doubt, that I was speaking of the weather.

  I had the dead colour for her head done now and normally I would have sent my sitter away for a while because the ground for the body could be put in without her once I had the outline right. She did not know that, so she could sit there at my pleasure. I painted away in silence for some time and now I had the excuse for my gaze to travel down her body. Excuse is perhaps the wrong word. It was an absolute necessity that I should study that body. She wore a soft cloth, unlike anything they wear in Amsterdam, as sheer as silk but in texture more like cotton. It followed the demands of its weight. It rushed down from above, as if desperate to reach the floor, moulding itself to her flesh wherever that flesh intervened so that it could take the shortest path then precipitating itself straight down wherever her jutting curves left it unsupported. It was a waterfall of cloth tumbling from delicious points of woman flesh. I had to get it right and if that meant studying it, then so be it. I could see the effect on her as my eyes fed on the adorable complexities of her breasts, I have always been fond of ample women with ample breasts, breasts to be played with, pillows of breasts, but one had to be silent in the presence of these breasts. They had a subtlety of form and they came to a focus, a point almost, not a blunt buffer. Saskia, Hennie and even spiteful Geertge had admirable breasts but they might have been a different part of the anatomy altogether compared to these. As I ran my eye backwards and forwards, I could see from the corner of my gaze that Amelia's colour was rising with each pass, that her lips had parted slightly more, that her breath was coming faster and each time she exhaled a glaze of moisture appeared on those perfect lips.

  Not too fast, I thought. Oh for the confessional created by shared language. She would be desperate to talk, to distract those eyes of mine, to intercede for mercy. It was time to fill the silence so I would have to speak and I, of course, could speak of anything I chose.

  'I expect you would like to know about the women in my own life,' I said. 'Would you? They usually ask, my sitters, those who don't know. I have been married only once. You would have liked Saskia. She had spirit enough for a room full of girls. When I met her, she could have made Job laugh. The flash in her eye could set off a cannon. We needed nobody else, we two, and time stood still for us in reverent silence when we were alone. She was my great love.

  'What happened to her, do I hear you ask? Can you tell by my voice that something did happen? She died. Consumption consumed her and made her still prettier with its treacherous colours and I died with her because all of life changed. Every single bit of it. Someone loaded all the humour on to carts and took it away in the night. There was no joy anywhere. I painted the three worst pictures of my life that year, so bad that I cut them up and burnt them on the fire. I know the doctor thinks I killed her myself. He didn't say so but he kept telling me to keep her away from the fumes. There was acid in the house you see. For the etching. It is never very kind to the lungs.'

  I finished the dead colour for the walls behind her and mixed up something that would do for her clothes.

  'Saskia was rare. Do you know that? She was daring and br
ave and funny and respectable all at the same time. She came of good family, you know, so all those tedious solid citizens would forgive her the odd bout of high jinks and so by my nuptial relationship with her they would forgive me too. Then she was dead and I lost the goodwill that had come attached to her. I did something really stupid then. I turned for comfort to the nearest woman, a woman who had come into the house as a nurse, and she tried to take me for everything I had. Do you know that? No of course you don't. At least that part of my reputation is safe here. And then after that there was Hennie and she is a dear heart and she puts up with me, mostly but I mourn the death of all the fun and all the love and all the joy. I mourn.'

  I woke up to myself eventually, realizing I had been standing there silent, doing nothing and staring into space for heaven knows how long. Amelia had a strained expression on her face as if unsure whether to try to attract my attention. My God, I thought, remembering what I had done to her husband also. She probably needs to pee.

  'Finished,' I said, gesturing for her to get up.

  She understood and tried to stand but her legs seemed to have gone to sleep and I held out a hand to her. I pulled her to her feet and she came fast out of the chair, close to me, and I saw I still had not got the full measure of her extraordinary face, so I put up a hand to warn her not to move.

  'My hands must measure you. They must know you for the sake of the brushes,' I said, and I ran my fingers down each side of her face, then backwards and forwards over her brow, softly stroking each cheek and brushing the warm, wet lips.

  'What the hell do you think you're doing?' said a voice from the doorway.

  SEVENTEEN

  Wednesday, April llth, 2001

  Amy stared at the peeling sign, red on cream. 'The Drydock'. Whatever had happened, it had happened here and all these policemen were here because of it. Not just the police. There were others, old men in suits, young men in jeans, coming in and out, pointing, discussing, looking up and down the road. A search was in progress, that was clear, and the object of the search was equally clear.

  Somewhere in all this, Amy knew, lay the answer to the questions raised by Don's injury, by the deep division amongst the builders and by Dennis's distrust. She stood there, outside the building and outside all of these people's business, needing to know and unsure how to join in, then intuition took over. He hadn't gone far, she could sense that, and she put herself into his mind. Water. He would head for the water. To the right of the building, separating it from the mud-filled dock which gave it its name was a chain-link fence and the end-post nearest the building's wall was splayed slightly away. In the mud by it, she saw a fresh footprint and she squeezed through the gap. Another footprint pointed her down the side of the dock towards the river where a stone sea wall made up the river's edge, with the water a few feet below. The top of the sea wall formed a narrow ledge, hard up against the back wall of the Project. The remains of a great balk of timber, a cushioning fender for the ships that used to moor there, was still attached to the sea wall a few feet below the top and, sitting on it as though he did not greatly care whether its ancient fastenings gave way under his weight was Don, with his feet dangling over the water.

  'Oh Christ,' he said when he saw her. 'Don't you ever give up?'

  'They're all looking for you.'

  'And of course you found me.'

  'Look, Don. You can't stay here, can you?'

  He looked down at the muddy water. 'I can do anything I want.'

  'Tell me what happened. Please.'

  'Why the fuck should I? Do you know, I think I'd rather go in there and face them all.' He got to his feet and she was between him and the way back, balanced on the narrow ledge of stone above the fast-moving water. Looking at his face, eyes blazing, anger overcoming his habitual need to turn the scar away from view, she knew he would force his way past her even if by doing so, he pushed her in. She backed away to where the space widened out beyond the end of the building and followed him back through the gap in the fencing.

  'I'll come with you,' she called.

  He hardly paused. 'You might as well see the final act. I can't stop you, can I?'

  There were two policemen standing by the door of the Project when they came into view and they both lunged for their walkie-talkies. Don went straight towards them with Amy trying to catch up. One began to head him off, thought better of it and stepped back, but by that time, Don was in between them and through the door. Amy followed him into a large downstairs room, full of people, saw a barrage of flash bulbs and, to her astonishment, heard the whole crowd of them burst into thunderous applause.

  It was some sort of big, basic day-room, a place people would choose to sit only because the alternatives were much, much worse. The walls were pale pastel orange and festooned with posters about health care, benefit agencies and addiction services. Battered chairs had been pushed back against the wall. A table by the window carried the TV cameraman, shooting over the heads of the crowd who filled the entire room, most of them smartly dressed. A handful of the Project's clients stood out, eroded faces in borrowed suits. Behind another table at the other end stood a small group of people, watching Don's entrance. There was a lean old man with long silver hair, a woman wearing a heavy gold chain of office and a tall policeman with the braid of high rank on his cap. Don was handed and back-slapped through the crowd, past the other photographers to the front where an older woman came forward and hugged him. She had his eyes and nose and the way she led him to one side so that he could shelter his face as he chose proved she had to be his mother. Amy thought she was a good-looking woman, with a weather-beaten touch of the older Lauren Bacall about her. She'd have held her own next to Bogart. Then she realized with surprise that Peter Parrish was standing behind Don's mother. The man with the silver hair held up a hand and everyone fell silent.

  'It falls to me as chairman of the trustees of the Drydock Project,' he said, 'to welcome our good friend Don Gilby here today to receive our thanks and a gallantry award for the action he took here in this room three months ago. I know from his mother that he wants me to keep this short but I also know there are many people here who would not be at all happy if we didn't express our gratitude properly.'

  Don was looking at the floor.

  'On Saturday, August the twelfth of last year, young Don was paying a visit to this building to see his mother, our own greatly respected Ellen. Now as you will know, Ellen does not like to turn anybody away from this Project but during the previous week she had encountered serious and continuing problems with a particular client who had a long and troubled past history. I am unable to say much about the man in question, Vincent Williams.'

  Vin, thought Amy. This is Dennis's Vin.

  'Williams is currently on remand awaiting trial,' the man went on, 'although I am sure the management committee and trustees of this Project would urge the authorities to take into account his history of mental health difficulties combined with substance abuse when they come to decide how to deal with him. However, I am told that he has decided to plead "not guilty".' He looked around the audience as if that fact freed him from the need to go any further with his plea for sympathy.

  'Suffice it to say that when Don arrived, the man had been asked to leave the premises and that he had apparently done so. We now know that he had not gone far.'

  Don gazed even more intently at the floor. Amy, desperate to hear the details, felt she had got everything about as wrong as it was possible to be, a clumsy interloper in someone else's world, someone else's affairs. Don's disappearance had been nothing to do with her at all. If he was coming here all the time, why hadn't he asked the Hawk instead of getting her into trouble? She looked up and saw Don's mother staring at her and looked quickly away because there was a challenge in that stare which did not seem friendly. There were too many people, breathing too much air in that room. It was closing in on her.

  'The man in question, undoubtedly in a troubled state of mind, came across a grou
p of council workmen further down the road, dealing with a fallen tree. While they were distracted, he was apparently able to take from their vehicle a chain saw …'

  Amy's skin chilled. Two men near her were writing furiously in notebooks. Surely they couldn't print all this?

  '… and make away with it before they noticed it had gone. He returned at once to this building, started the saw and, it would appear, set about the first person he saw, our well-loved colleague Sarah Mulvaney who, as we know and deeply regret, lost her life in the attack.'

  He was silent for a moment and Amy could see he was struggling to fight back tears.

  'As Williams was making for the stairs, by the greatest of good fortune, Don happened to arrive in the building and without any regard for his own personal safety, threw himself on the assailant, forcing him to the ground and taking the chain saw from him. At this point, alerted by the noise, Ellen, who had been having a meeting with Mr Parrish in her office, came down the stairs and between them they were able to subdue the assailant. By this time however, in the course of the struggle, Don suffered severe injuries. He will bear the scars of those injuries for the rest of his life.'

  There was loud applause and still Don did not look up. He knows that, thought Amy. There was no need to say it. She saw Ellen staring at her son.

  It went on like that for a little longer, then came the presentation of the award and at that point Don had to get up and play his part, though he resisted all attempts to make him say something. He took some sort of plaque from the policeman, mumbled a 'thank you' and something else Amy couldn't hear then his mother, looking at him with concern, took his arm and led him upstairs. There was a chorus of concerned noises in the room, at which point the man with the silver hair stood up again.

  'Do help yourselves,' he called. 'There's a buffet laid out in the kitchen.'