The Painter

by Will Davenport

  It was quite a business, collecting that stuff between two roofing slates and stacking it where I wanted it, out of the way. The horse was clearly wondering why its excrement had suddenly become so interesting and wouldn't leave me alone for a moment. I was in constant fear of having my work ruined, especially when, possibly in a simple spirit of helpfulness, it decided that, if I liked its shit that much, I might want some more and let fly rather too close to the pan. I wanted white, not ochre so, as it lifted its tail, I hurled myself at its rump and managed to deflect its aim just enough. In the end, after shooing it away from the pan a hundred times, I had just what I wanted, as white a white as any I have ever seen. Now the perfect finishing touch would be just the right oil, because the linseed I had was just a little bit too coloured for my purpose.

  I went inside and was trying out this mixture and that on my palette when Amelia entered the room.

  'Goot mornink,' I said, because I had learnt that much English already.

  She raised her eyebrows in surprise and gave me such a smile as made me determined to learn some more, then she said something questioning and I was forced to shake my head to show I did not understand. She pointed and I saw that the column and its flowerpot had been moved into place. It was perfect. She sat in the chair and once more I had the delight of playing with her limbs, adjusting her shoulders and her hands and her arms just so. My heavens, it took a time to get right.

  'I need oil of walnut,' I said, and of course I used the Dutch word walnoot, having no idea of the English. 'That is what I need if I am to do you justice. This linseed is good as far as it goes, but there is too much tint in it for the white I am seeking.'

  She looked baffled.

  'Walnoot?' I said again, hoping perhaps the word sounded similar in her language. No response. I beckoned her out of her chair, mostly because it would be fun putting her back into her pose again, and, dabbing a brush on the wall next to the sketch I had already made there, drew what I thought was a pretty fair walnut.

  She got it then. She said the word for me in English. 'Worlnutt,' she said. It was very nearly the same word, walnut, walnoot. She had taken her time.

  'Walnut,' I said after her, and she laughed and nodded, then she affected puzzlement.

  I showed her the linseed oil and said, 'Walnut,' very emphatically. 'I need good, clear walnut oil,' and I must say, she caught on quickly. She nodded and mimed someone mounting a horse and trotting off.

  'Not me, please,' I said, tapping my chest and shaking my head and she laughed again. She went to the door and called out and gave instructions to the girl who came.

  'How long will it be?' I wondered aloud. 'I cannot proceed properly until I have it. Will it be here tomorrow?'

  She caught the sense of my question, beckoned me to the window and pointing at the sun, mimed one passage across the sky. One day. After that we mimed as furiously as children playing the guessing game, I eventually showed her that I could not paint without the oil but that there was something else we might do in the time available.

  'I wish to do some sketches of you,' I said, miming drawing, then I pointed up towards my room. 'In the tower, where there is just the right light. Yes?' I drew windows in the air and walked my fingers up imaginary stairs. 'Will you come with me?' I had my charcoal sticks and all that paper from York. I picked them up and beckoned her.

  There was a moment when she might have shied at the fence, the moment when we came to the tower doorway and she knew for certain, after the ambiguities of the mime, just where we were heading. My heart was in my mouth because if she, finding that improper, had turned back, then I don't think I could easily have made up the lost ground.

  She did pause for a moment, looked at the stairway and at me with a quizzical expression, then she began to climb up in front of me.

  TWENTY

  Wednesday, April llth, 2001

  After the cars had come back from the pub, after the book had slipped from her hand, disturbing her just enough for her to turn out the light, after slipping back again into the comfortable illusion that she was asleep in a proper bed in a proper room, Amy woke abruptly and totally, sitting up so fast that she bounced on the air mattress and almost fell over. Someone was dying. Someone right with her here in her room. Waves of gasping distress were pouring out of the darkness at her as if the time-soaked walls were giving out something they had long ago taken in. Drawn-out sobs, quivering with an overload of grief, assaulted her. Shaken, she flailed around for the light, whacked the bulb with her hand and groped for the stiff switch.

  There was only a wall to her right. She was alone. The sound was coming from the other side of the wall. The sound was Don.

  She got up, went to the door, then realized, just as she opened it, that she had nothing on. She wrapped a towel round herself in case anyone else was stirring, then she went out of the door and stopped, irresolute outside Don's. She tapped quietly but the noise went on, moan after moan, smothering her knocking. Her first thought was to protect him from the others, to stop him before he woke someone who might be less gentle.

  She turned the knob and pushed the door open and now she could see in the moonlight that he was lying on his bed, twisting and turning, his eyes tight shut.

  'Don?' she said. Nothing. She said it again a little louder. 'Don? Wake up. It's Amy. It's all right.'

  He went on making the noise, writhing, and she bent down to him and touched his shoulder and at that, he shot out one arm, hit her hard on the cheek and sat up as she fell backwards on the floor.

  'Go away!' he said, 'Get away from me.'

  'It's only me.' She was trying to sound calm though her eyes were stinging with tears of pain. 'It's Amy.'

  'Don't come near me. I'll have you. Get back.' He drew in two or three harsh breaths and woke up fully, looking down at her, 'What are you doing down there?' he said, confused.

  'You knocked me over.'

  'Me? Why are you in here?'

  'You were making terrible noises. I came to see if you were all right.'

  Don let out a long breath. 'I didn't know I was making a noise. What sort of noise?'

  'Dreadful moans. Were you dreaming?'

  'It's my hand,' he said, and she didn't think he was telling the truth. 'I get pains, I told you.'

  'Do you want the mirror?' If he needed a physical excuse for his distress, she was prepared to go along with that.

  'That would be good.' He still sounded like someone who had gone ten rounds in the ring.

  She found it propped against the wall and brought it to the side of the bed.

  'Shall I switch on the light?' she asked.

  'No,' he replied sharply. 'Moonlight's enough.'

  She dragged up the chair and sat holding the mirror for him as he held his undamaged hand to it, flexing the fingers and staring at the reflection. He said nothing for a minute or two, then he let his hand drop and lay back on the bed.

  She watched him, waiting, and in the end he said, 'It wasn't that.'

  'What was it then?'

  'It was yesterday.'

  'That's no surprise.'

  'Have you ever seen something that's burnt itself into your brain so deeply that whenever you shut your eyes it's there?'

  'No.'

  'It kept on happening. Each time you see it, your memory changes it just a bit.'

  'That's good, isn't it?'

  'I don't know. I can't trust it any more. I need to see it just the way it was.'

  'I understand.'

  'No you don't. That stupid ceremony. That was for them, not for me. Back in the same room. Telling everyone how it was and they haven't a clue. They don't know what happened, do they? And they were trying to tell me? Was that supposed to be nice for me?'

  'Heroes, You said it yourself. They need heroes.'

  'Heroes? Maybe it was me who had the saw. Maybe he was trying to stop me.'

  She couldn't help it. She gasped and he looked at her sharply as if she had fallen into some sort of tra
p he had laid. 'We both know that's what he told them,' he said challengingly. 'But he's mad and bad, isn't he, so they don't believe him.'

  'They wouldn't, would they?'

  'So where do you stand now, Amy? Are you going to go on listening to Dennis?'

  He was watching her in the dark and he wanted an answer.

  'Tell me about it, Don. I'll believe you if you just tell me.'

  It took him a long while and the silence that bulged into the room filled her ears but in the end he began to talk.

  'The main thing was the smell. I hadn't smelt that smell since the day he … Since then.'

  'Haven't you been back there?'

  'Yeah, I've been back there. It always smells of smoke and piss and disinfectant. They'd polished the floor for the event, that's what they'd done. And they'd polished it back then. It was just like being there again. Well, like it was before that bloody saw started up.'

  He was coming out of it, she thought. Talking was good.

  'It won't last, will it?' she said, reasonably. 'It's bound to come back but not like before. Maybe you should talk about it more.'

  'Who to?'

  'Haven't you had any therapy?'

  'Physiotherapy? Loads of it.'

  'No. Treatment for trauma.'

  'Head stuff? Someone saw me in hospital. She was useless. I couldn't trust her.'

  'You could trust me.'

  'There's only one person anyone can trust and that's themselves,' he said, 'I don't know you, I see you talking to Dennis and I just don't know you.'

  More silence followed, sharp silence filled with pain. That thing you do with the mirror?' she asked, to bring it to an end.

  She could just see him nod in the moonlight. 'You said you look at your good hand and it fools your brain.' Her voice sounded false to her. 'When I first came in, you were holding up the wrong hand, your hurt hand. Why?'

  He took the offer of truce. 'Curiosity,' he said quietly.

  'What do you mean?'

  'It stops the pain when I stare at my good hand so I thought, would it make that one hurt if I stared at the … the other one.'

  'Did it?'

  'I never found out. You came in.'

  'If you let me paint you properly,' she said, 'you can look at the picture. You won't need a mirror. Will you let me?'

  There was no answer but his breathing was easier in the silence that fell again. It didn't occur to her to move either towards him or away. She sat in the chair, listening to him breathing deeper and slower, falling asleep, as if she were a nurse with a dangerously ill patient. Time trickled away and there was the night and Don's breathing and no clue as to where it would end. Into Amy's head came Amelia and she knew Amelia must have been in this room. There was no room in her house she would not have been in. This tower was old when the rest of the house was new. What was it then? Servants' quarters or a storeroom perhaps? Amy tried her hardest to imagine Amelia in the darkness and found she could only imagine herself, in something vaguely old-fashioned, long and flowing. At that moment, she wanted to believe in ghosts, to summon up Amelia, She tried to find fear inside herself, to generate that first shiver on which fear might catch and form but fear wouldn't come. Half dreaming, she saw a woman in the room in a chair and a man who was painting her, not on to canvas but directly with brushes on to her face, adjusting the colour with tiny dabs at his palette until it flowed on invisibly. He stopped and held her face in his hands and worked the paint into her skin with his thumbs. Then she was the painter and Don was the subject and she was painting his injured face, and the contest was to make the scar disappear as she matched his skin with the oil paint. She put the palette down and knew that she needed to touch his face again, to run her fingers over his cheek and feel the ridge of the scar. I must do that, she thought, then I will know how to paint it smooth again so I can paint him back to life. That brought her to full wakefulness and she saw that the moon was shining brightly on his face as he lay asleep. Carefully, she inched her way out of the room and came back with sketch pad and pencil, then she began to draw him. There was nothing about him now that was wild or dangerous. He could have been a war-zone orphan who had stood too close to a shell-burst.

  Looking at him asleep, Amy tried to suppress the awareness that part of her was enjoying the ambiguity, the frisson of danger. Dennis's warnings had only made Don more attractive to her. So long as she didn't have to know one way or the other. Annoyed at herself, she took up her pencil but the first time she got the proportions of his head all wrong, too short from top to bottom and she rubbed it out with irritation. The second time was better, everything in the right place and the right proportion but it just wasn't Don, it was a sleeping cipher with a resemblance to Don at best. She knew she hadn't been brave enough with the scar. It was neither one thing nor the other, a faint pucker down the line of his cheek.

  Then she drew him older, trying to see the shape of the skull bones so she could shrink the flesh on them, imagining that glossy black hair greying and receding and the eyes turning watery. The man she drew had a touch of Dracula and when she tried drawing herself next to him at the same age, the two pictures stayed resolutely apart on the page.

  He groaned again and she got up from her chair and reached out to touch his shoulder. She stroked his arm and he made a different sound now, a questioning sound, and she wanted to cup that damaged face in her hands, knowing she could soak up his pain and take it from him. Aching to get into bed with him, she knew all she had to do was let the towel fall and slide in next to his warm back, putting her arms around him to soothe him. The memory of the last time, of the perfect fit of their bodies, the dropping of the barriers, filled her so that reaching that place again was only a motion away. Then the owl hooted, right outside on the window and in his sleep Don said, 'I'll get you. I'll kill you,' perfectly distinctly and the barriers stood between them in the dark, as real as steel.

  Waking in her own bed as the very first light was creeping over the horizon, she knew she would not go back to sleep so she put her overalls on and crept down to the dim kitchen to make herself tea. The house felt a different place, where there were no people. It seemed a moment for her to take stock but when she tried it was too confusing so she gave up and, mug of tea in hand, wandered around the deserted ground floor, glad to focus on something inanimate, predictable, taking it at her own speed.

  It wasn't the Dales who had closed up the old house ten years earlier. Parrish had told her that. There hadn't been Dales at Paull Holme since 1928. Another family had lived there after them. The rooms which had not yet been touched revealed the 1950s fireplaces they had put in to reduce the coal bills and the horrid wallpaper which covered up the decaying plaster on the walls. For all that, with her eyes half closed, she could still feel back towards the seventeenth century, towards the strong woman who had first made this her house, her creation. She went up the stairs to do a tour of the first floor where most of the work was going on, but there was less sense of a living house here. Almost every room was in a process of stripping-out except for one at the far end of the corridor which was locked.

  She came in the end to the room where she and Don were working. The ceiling would take another five or six days, she thought, looking at what she'd done so far. The half-exposed painting on the wall caught her eye and she knelt down in front of it. The brown lines were faint, just legs, a skirt and two pairs of feet but it did seem they had a fine quality to them, an extraordinary economy of style. Was that just because of what she thought she knew? Running her finger over the plaster, she thought to herself that there were not many people who could claim to have touched an unknown work by Rembrandt, then she looked at the barrier, the place where all those old layers of built-up paint covered the top half of the picture, down to the horizontal division where the panelling had saved it. Amelia was hiding under there. Amelia's head, maybe Amelia's face. She felt the edge of paint with particular care. It had that texture possessed by the rough edge of an oyster she
ll, where the creature has also built up its coating layer by layer. Underneath all that, Amelia lay.

  Seized by a sudden impulse, Amy went in search of a tool, and in an adjoining room, found just what she was looking for, a paint scraper with a blade like a tiny scimitar, a curved blade on one side and an angled edge on the other. Back at the wall, she chose a spot halfway through the thickness of the paint and carefully pushed the point of the scraper up into it, working vertically upwards from below. The paint's layers gradually separated under the pressure and by carefully wriggling the blade from side to side, she found she could eventually push it all the way in. Only the wooden handle was sticking out at the bottom and, with some trepidation, she twisted and levered it so that a sizeable section of the layered paint buckled and separated from what lay below. That made it easier. In only a few minutes she had cleared a large area down to that level. The question now was whether she could safely go further? The other question which struck her rather too late, was what would Parrish say when he saw what she had done? It was already too late to worry about that and in any case, she felt she had a right to do this, as if she were the guardian of the painting under the paint, Parrish would not cover it over again if he could only see what was there. At the very least, before she told him about all this, she desperately wanted to see what Amelia looked like, because she was quite certain it was Amelia lurking under there, just as she was certain that a Dutch painter called van Rijn painted it and that there wasn't more than one van Rijn.

  As she worked away at it, her mind kept going back to Don, to last night when it could all have been so simple. Amy wished she had simply got into bed with him, that she had gone over the heads of reason and intellect and simply let their bodies do the talking. There was a Don she yearned for, a Don who had answered all her body's questions. The other Don, the darker Don full of odd resentments, was only there if you talked him into being.

  Forty minutes later, at about six thirty, Amy was still squatting there, surrounded by a sea of paint fragments from an area of some six square feet that she had painstakingly levered, scraped and peeled apart. Now only a thin layer of paint still covered the top part of the picture. Realizing how stiff she was, she got slowly to her feet and the door opened behind her.