The Flanders Panel (4 page)

“You amaze me, Professor,” Julia said, looking at him with open astonishment. “I mean that picturesque image of the warrior in the battle. You were the one who always said that imagination is the cancer of historical rigour.”

Alvaro burst out laughing.

“Consider it poetic licence, in your honour. How could I forget your fondness for going beyond the mere facts? I recall that when you and I…”

He fell silent, suddenly uncertain. His allusion to the past had caused Julia’s face to darken. Recognising that memories were out of place just then, Alvaro hurriedly back-pedalled.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice.

“It doesn’t matter,” Julia replied, briskly stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray and burning her fingers in the process. “It was my fault really” She looked at him more calmly. “So what have you got on our warrior, then?”

With visible relief, Alvaro plunged back into familiar terrain. Roger de Arras, he explained, had not only been a warrior, he’d been many other things besides. For example, he was a model of chivalry, the perfect medieval nobleman. In his spare time he’d been a poet and musician. He was much admired in the court of the Valois, his cousins. So the word “preux” fitted him like a glove.

“Did he have any links with chess?”

“There’s no mention of any.”

Julia was taking notes, caught up in the story, but she stopped suddenly and looked at Alvaro.

“What I don’t understand,” she said, chewing the end of her pen, “is what this Roger de Arras would be doing in a picture by Van Huys, playing chess with the Duke of Ostenburg.”

Alvaro fidgeted in his seat with apparent embarrassment, as if suddenly gripped by doubt. He sucked on his pipe and stared at the wall behind Julia’s head, with the air of someone waging an inner battle. Finally, he managed a cautious smile.

“I’ve no idea what he’s doing there - apart from playing chess, that is.” Julia was sure that he was looking at her with unusual wariness, as if he could not quite put into words an idea that was going round and round in his head. “What I do know,” he added at last, “and I know this because it’s mentioned in all the books on the subject, is that Roger de Arras didn’t die in France, but in Ostenburg.” After a slight hesitation, he pointed to the photograph of the painting. “Have you noticed the date of this painting?”

Puzzled, Julia said: “Yes, 1471. Why?”

Alvaro slowly exhaled some smoke and uttered something that sounded like an abrupt laugh. He was looking at Julia as if trying to read in her eyes the answer to a question he could not quite bring himself to ask.

“There’s something not quite right there,” he said finally. “That date is either incorrect or the chronicles are lying, or else that knight is not the Rutgier Ar. Preux of the painting.” He picked up a mimeographed copy of the
Chronicle of the Dukes of Ostenburg
and, after leafing through it for a while, placed it in front of her. “This was written at the end of the fifteenth century by Guichard de Hainaut, a Frenchman and a contemporary of the events he describes, and it is based on eyewitness accounts. According to Hainaut, our man died at Epiphany in 1469, two years
before
Pieter Van Huys painted
The Game of Chess.
Do you understand, Julia? Roger de Arras could never have posed for that picture, because by the time it was painted, he was already dead.”

He walked her to the university car park and handed her the file containing the photocopies. Almost everything was in there, he said: historical references, an update on the catalogued works of Van Huys, a bibliography… He promised to send a chronological account and a few other papers to her as soon as he had a free moment. He stood looking at her, his pipe in his mouth and his hands in his jacket pockets, as if he still had something to say but was unsure whether or not to do so. He hoped, he added after a short pause, that he’d been of some help.

Julia nodded, feeling perplexed. The details of the story she’d just learned were still whirling round in her head. And there was something else.

“I’m impressed, Professor. In less than an hour you’ve completely reconstructed the lives of the people depicted in a painting you’ve never studied before.”

Alvaro looked away, letting his gaze wander over the campus. Then he made a wry face.

“The painting wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to me,” he said. Julia thought she detected a tremor of doubt in his voice, and it troubled her. She listened extra carefully to his words. “Apart from anything else, there’s a photograph in a 1917 Prado catalogue.
The Game of Chess
used to be exhibited there. It was on loan for about twenty years, from the turn of the century until 1923, when the heirs asked for it back.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, now you do.” He concentrated on his pipe again, which seemed about to go out. Julia looked at him out of the corner of her eye. She knew him, or, rather, she had known him once, too well not to sense that something important was preying on his mind, something he couldn’t bring himself to say.

“What is it you haven’t told me, Alvaro?”

He didn’t move, just stood there sucking on his pipe, staring into space. Then he turned slowly towards her.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I just mean that everything to do with this painting is important.” She looked at him gravely. “I’m staking a lot on this.”

She noticed that Alvaro was chewing indecisively on the stem of his pipe. He sketched an ambivalent gesture in the air.

“You’re putting me in a very awkward position. Your Van Huys seems to have become rather fashionable of late.”

“Fashionable?” She became tense, alert, as if the earth might suddenly shift beneath her feet. “Do you mean that someone else has already talked to you about him, before I did?”

Alvaro was smiling uncertainly now, as if regretting having said too much.

“They might have.”

“Who?”

“That’s the problem. I’m not allowed to tell you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not. It’s true.” He looked at her imploringly.

Julia sighed deeply, trying to fill the strange emptiness she felt in her stomach; somewhere an alarm bell was ringing. But Alvaro was talking again, so she remained attentive, searching for some sign. He’d like, he said, to have a look at the painting, if Julia didn’t mind, of course. He’d like to see her, too.

“I can explain everything,” he concluded, “when the time is right.”

It could be a trick, she thought. He was quite capable of creating the whole drama as a pretext for seeing her again. She bit her lower lip. Inside her, the painting was now jockeying for position with feelings and memories that had nothing whatever to do with it.

“How’s your wife?” she asked casually, giving in to a dark impulse.

She looked up, mischievously, and saw that Alvaro had stiffened and seemed suddenly uncomfortable.

“She’s fine,” was all he said. He was staring hard at the pipe in his hand, as if he didn’t recognise it. “She’s in New York, setting up an exhibition.”

A memory flitted into Julia’s head: an attractive blonde woman in a brown tailored suit, getting out of a car. Just fifteen seconds of a rather blurred image that she could only barely recall, but which had marked the end of her youth, as cleanly as a cut with a scalpel. She seemed to remember that his wife worked for some official organisation, something to do with the Ministry of Arts, with exhibitions and travelling. For a time, that had facilitated matters. Alvaro never talked about her, nor did Julia, but they felt her presence between them, like a ghost. And that ghost, fifteen seconds of a face glimpsed purely by chance, had ended up winning the game.

“I hope things are going well for you both.”

“They’re not too bad. I mean not entirely bad.”

“Good.”

They walked on a little in silence, not looking at each other. At last, Julia clicked her tongue, put her head on one side and smiled into the empty air.

“Anyway, it doesn’t much matter now,” she said and stopped in front of him, her hands on her hips and a roguish smile on her lips. “How do you think I’m looking these days?”

He looked her up and down, uncertainly, his eyes half-closed.

“You look great. Really.”

“And how do you feel?”

“A bit confused.” He gave a melancholy smile and looked contrite. “I keep wondering if I made the right decision a year ago.”

“That’s something you’ll never find out.”

“You never know.”

He was still attractive, Julia thought, with a pang of anxiety and irritation that made her stomach clench. She looked at his hands and eyes, knowing that she was walking along the edge of something that simultaneously repelled and attracted her.

“I’ve got the painting at home,” she said in a cautious, noncommittal way, trying to put her ideas in order. She wanted to reassure herself of her painfully acquired resolution, but she sensed the risks and the need to remain on guard. Besides - indeed above all else — she had the Van Huys to think about.

That line of argument helped at least to clarify her thinking. So she shook the hand he held out to her, sensing in that contact the clumsiness of someone unsure of how the land lies. That cheered her up, provoking in her a malicious, subterranean joy. On an impulse that was at once calculated and unconscious, she kissed him quickly on the mouth - an advance on account, to inspire confidence - before opening the car door and getting into her little white Fiat.

“If you want to have a look at the painting, come and see me,” she said, with equivocal nonchalance, as she started the car. “Tomorrow afternoon. And thanks.”

She knew that, with him, she need say no more. She watched him receding in her rear-view mirror, as he stood waving, looking thoughtful and perplexed, the campus and the brick faculty building looming behind him. She smiled as she drove through a red light. You’ll take the bait, Professor, she was thinking. I don’t know why, but someone, somewhere, is trying to play a dirty trick on me. And you’re going to tell me who it is, or my name’s not Julia.

On the little table, within easy reach, the ashtray was piled high with cigarette ends. Lying on the sofa, she read until late into the night. The story of the painting, the painter and his subjects was gradually taking shape. She was reading avidly, alert to the smallest clue, driven on by her desire to find the key to the mysterious game of chess that was still being played out on the easel opposite the sofa, in the semidarkness of the studio, amongst the shadows:

… Released from vassalage to France in 1453, the Dukes of Ostenburg struggled to maintain a difficult equilibrium between France, Germany and Burgundy. Ostenburg’s policy aroused the suspicions of Charles VII of France, who feared that the duchy might become absorbed by powerful Burgundy, which was trying to establish itself as an independent kingdom. In that whirl of palace intrigue, political alliances and secret pacts, French fears grew with the marriage, in 1464, between Ferdinand, the son and heir of Duke Wilhelmus of Ostenburg, and Beatrice of Burgundy, niece of Philip the Good and cousin of the future Burgundian duke Charles the Bold.

Thus, during those years, which were crucial for the future of Europe, two irreconcilable factions were lined up face to face in the court of Ostenburg: the Burgundy faction, in favour of integrating with the neighbouring duchy, and the French faction, plotting for reunification with France. Right up until his death in 1474, the turbulent government of Ferdinand of Ostenburg was characterised by confrontation between those two forces.

She placed the file on the floor and sat up, her arms round her knees. The silence was absolute. For a while she remained motionless, then she got to her feet and went over to the painting.
QUIS NECAVIT EQUITEM.
Without actually touching the surface, she passed a finger over the hidden inscription, covered by the successive layers of green pigment that Van Huys had used to represent the cloth covering the table. Who killed the knight? With the facts Alvaro had given her, the phrase took on a dimension which here, in the painting only dimly lit by a small lamp, seemed sinister. She placed her face as close as possible to that of
RUTGIER AR. PREUX.
Regardless of whether or not he was Roger de Arras, Julia was convinced that the inscription referred to him. It was obviously a kind of riddle, but she was puzzled by the role the chess game played.
Played.
Perhaps that’s all it was, a game.

She had an unpleasant sense of exasperation, like the feeling she got when she had to resort to the scalpel to remove a stubborn layer of varnish, and she clasped her fingers behind the back of her neck and closed her eyes. When she opened them, there was the profile of the unknown knight, intent on the game, frowning in grave concentration. He had clearly been an attractive man. He had a noble demeanour, an aura of dignity cleverly suggested by the colours the artist had chosen to surround him. Furthermore, his head was placed exactly at the intersection of lines known in painting as the golden section, the law of pictorial composition that classical painters from the time of Vitruvius 0nwards had used as a guide to the proportions of figures in a painting.

The discovery startled her. According to the rules, if Van Huys had intended, when painting the picture, to highlight the figure of Duke Ferdinand of Ostenburg - who, given his rank, undoubtedly deserved this honour — he would have placed
him
at the intersecting point of the golden section, not to the left. The same could be said of Beatrice of Burgundy, who had in fact been relegated to the background next to the window, at the right. It was reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the person presiding over that mysterious game of chess was not the Duke or the Duchess but
RUTGIER AR. PREUX,
who just might be Roger de Arras. Except that Roger de Arras was dead.

Keeping her eyes on the painting, looking at it over her shoulder as if fearing that someone in it might move the moment she turned her back, she went over to one of the book-crammed shelves. Bloody Pieter Van Huys, she muttered, setting riddles that were keeping her from her bed five hundred years later. She picked up Amparo Ibanez’s
Historia del Arte,
the volume on Flemish painting, and sat down on the sofa with the book on her lap. Van Huys, Pieter. Bruges 1415-Ghent 1481.