The Flanders Panel (5 page)

… While Van Huys does not wholly reject the embroidery, jewellery and marble of the court painter, the family atmosphere of his paintings and his eye for the telling detail mark him as an essentially bourgeois artist. Although influenced by Jan Van Eyck, and above all by his own teacher Robert Campin (Van Huys makes clever use of both these artists’ techniques), his is a serene analysis of reality, his way of looking at the world a very calm Flemish one. But he was always interested in symbolism, and his paintings are packed with parallel readings (the sealed glass bottle or the door in the wall as signs of Mary’s virginity in his
Virgin of the Chapel,
the interplay of shadows in the interior depicted in
The Family of Lucas Bremer,
for example). Van Huys’s mastery lies in his incisive delineation of both people and objects and in his approach to the most testing problems in painting at the time, such as the plastic organisation of surface, the seamless contrast between domestic half-light and bright daylight, the way shadows change according to the nature of the material on which they fall.

Surviving works:
Portrait of the Goldsmith Guillermo Walhuus
(1448), Metropolitan Museum, New York.
The Family of Lucas Bremer
(1452), Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
The Virgin of the Chapel (c.
1455) Prado Museum, Madrid.
The Money Changer of Louvain
(1457), private collection, New York.
Portrait of the Merchant Matteo Conzini and His Wife
(1458), private collection, Zurich.
The Antwerp Altar-piece (c.
1461), Pinacoteca, Vienna.
The Knight and the Devil
(1462), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
The Game of Chess
(1471), private collection, Madrid.
The Ghent Descent from the Cross (c.
1478), St Bavon Cathedral, Ghent.

By four in the morning, her mouth rough from too much coffee and too many cigarettes, Julia had finished her reading. The story of the painter, the painting and its subjects were at last becoming almost tangible. They were no longer just images on an oak panel, but living beings who had once occupied a particular time and space in the interval between life and death. Pieter Van Huys, painter, Ferdinand Altenhoffen and his wife, Beatrice of Burgundy. And Roger de Arras. For Julia had come up with proof that the knight in the painting, the chess player studying the position of the chess pieces with the silent intensity of one whose life depends upon it, was indeed Roger de Arras, born in 1431, died in 1469, in Ostenburg. She was absolutely convinced of that, just as she was sure that the painting, made two years after his death, was the mysterious link that bound him to the two other people and to the painter. A detailed description of that death lay on her lap, on a page photocopied from Guichard de Hainaut’s
Chronical:

And so it was, at the Epiphany of the Holy Kings in the year of our Lord fourteen hundred and sixty-nine, that when Master Ruggier was taking his customary walk along the fosse known as that of the East Gate, a crossbowman posted there did shoot him straight through the heart with an arrow. Master Ruggier remained in that place crying out for his confession to be heard, but by the time help came, his soul had already slipped free through the gaping mouth of his wound. The death of Master Ruggier, a model of chivalry and a consummate gentleman, was sorely felt by the French faction in Ostenburg, the faction he was said to favour. That tragic fact led to many voices being raised in accusation against those who favoured the house of Burgundy. Others attributed the vile deed to some affair of the heart, to which the unfortunate Ruggier was much given. Some even said that Duke Ferdinand himself was the hidden hand behind the blow, carried out by some third party, because Master Ruggier had dared to declare his love for the Duchess Beatrice. The suspicion of such a stain pursued the Duke to his grave. And thus the sad case was concluded without the assassins ever being found, though it was murmured in porches and in gossip shops that they had escaped under the protection of some powerful hand. And so it was left to God to dispense justice. And Master Ruggier was handsome of form and face, despite the wars fought in the service of the King of France, before he came to Ostenburg to serve Duke Ferdinand, with whom he had been brought up in his youth. And he was mourned by many ladies. And when he was killed, he was in his thirty-eighth year and at the height of his powers…

Julia switched off the light, and as she sat in the dark with her head resting on the back of the sofa, she watched the glowing tip of the cigarette in her hand. She couldn’t see the picture opposite, nor did she need to. Every last detail of it was engraved on her retina and on her brain. She could see it in the dark.

She yawned, rubbing her face with the palms of her hands. She felt a mixture of weariness and euphoria, an odd sense of partial but exhilarating triumph, like the presentiment you get in the middle of a long race that it is still possible to reach the finishing post. She’d managed to lift one corner of the veil and, though there were still many more things to find out, one thing was clear as day: there was nothing capricious or random in that painting. It was the careful execution of a well-thought-out plan, the aim of which was summed up in the question
Who killed the knight?,
a question that someone, out of expediency or fear, had covered up or ordered to be covered up. And whoever that person was, Julia was going to find out. At that moment, sitting in the dark, dazed from tiredness and lack of sleep, her head full of medieval images and intersecting lines beneath which whistled arrows from crossbows shot from behind as night fell, Julia’s mind was no longer on restoring the picture, but on reconstructing its secret. It would be rather amusing, she thought as she was about to surrender to sleep, if when all the protagonists of that story were no more than skeletons turned to dust in their graves, she were to find the answer to the question asked by a Flemish painter called Pieter Van Huys across the silence of five centuries, like an enigma demanding to be solved.

Lucinda, Octavio, Scaramouche

“I declare it’s marked out just like
 a large chessboard!” Alice said at last.
Lewis Carroll

The bell above the door tinkled as Julia went into the antiques shop. She had only to step inside to find herself immediately enveloped by a sense of warmth and familiar peace. Her first memories were suffused by the gentle golden light that fell on the antique furniture, the baroque carvings and columns, the heavy walnut cabinets, the ivories, tapestries, porcelain, and the paintings, grown dark with age, of grave-faced personages in permanent mourning, who, years before, had watched over her childhood games. Many objects had been sold since then and been replaced by others, but the effect of those motley rooms and of the light gleaming on the antique pieces arranged there in harmonious disorder remained unalterable. Like the colours of the delicate porcelain commedia dell’arte figures signed by Bustelli: a Lucinda, an Octavio and a Scaramouche, which, as well as being Julia’s favourite playthings when she was a child, were Cesar’s pride and joy. Perhaps that was why he never wanted to get rid of them and kept them in a glass case at the back, next to the stained-glass window that opened onto the inner courtyard of the shop, where he used to sit reading - Stendhal, Mann, Sabatini, Dumas, Conrad - waiting for the bell announcing the arrival of a customer.

“Hello, Cesar.”

“Hello, Princess.”

Cesar was over fifty - Julia had never managed to extract a confession from him as to his exact age - and he had the smiling, mocking blue eyes of a mischievous child whose greatest pleasure lies in defying the world in which he has been forced to live. He had white, immaculately waved hair - she suspected he’d been dyeing it for years now - and he was still in excellent shape, apart from a slight thickening about the hips. He always wore beautifully cut suits, of which the only criticism might be that they were, strictly speaking, a little daring for a man his age. He never wore a tie, not even on the most select social occasions, opting instead for magnificent Italian cravats knotted at the open neck of a shirt, invariably silk, that bore his entwined initials embroidered in blue or white just below his heart. He had a breadth and degree of culture Julia had never met elsewhere and was the most perfect embodiment of the saying that amongst the upper classes extreme politeness is merely the most highly refined expression of one’s scorn for others. Within Cesar’s social milieu, a concept that might have been expanded to include Humanity as a whole, Julia was the only person who enjoyed that politeness, knowing that she was safe from his scorn. Ever since she’d been able to think for herself, Cesar had been for her an odd mixture of father, confidant, friend and confessor, without ever being exactly any of those things.

“I’ve got a problem, Cesar.”

“Excuse me, but in that case,
we
have a problem. Tell me all about it.”

And Julia told him, omitting nothing, not even the hidden inscription, a fact that Cesar acknowledged with a slight lift of his eyebrows. They were sitting by the stained-glass window, and Cesar was leaning slightly towards her, his right leg crossed over his left, one hand, on which gleamed a valuable topaz set in gold, draped nonchalantly over the Patek Philippe watch he wore on his other wrist. It was that distinguished pose of his, by no means calculated (although it may once have been), that so effortlessly captivated the troubled young men in search of exquisite sensations, the painters, sculptors, fledgling artists whom Cesar took under his wing with a devotion and constancy which, it must be said, lasted much longer than his sentimental relationships.

“Life is short and beauty transient, Princess.” Whenever Cesar adopted his confidential tone, dropping his voice almost to a whisper, the words were always touched with a wry melancholy. “And it would be wrong to possess it for ever. The beauty lies in teaching a young sparrow to fly, because implicit in his freedom is your relinquishment of him. Do you see the subtle point I’m making with this parable?”

As she’d openly acknowledged once before when Cesar, half-flattered and half-amused, had accused her of making a jealous scene, Julia felt inexplicably irritated by all those little sparrows fluttering around Cesar, and only her affection for him and her rational awareness that he had even‘ right to lead his own kind of life, prevented her giving voice to it. As Menchu used to say, with her usual lack of tact: “What you’ve got, dear, is an Electra complex dressed up as an Oedipus complex, or vice versa…” Menchu’s parables, unlike Cesar’s, tended to be all too explicit.

When Julia had finished recounting the story of the painting, Cesar remained silent, pondering what she’d said. He didn’t seem surprised - in matters of art, especially at his age, very little surprised him - but the mocking gleam in his eyes had given way to a flicker of interest.

“Fascinating,” he said at last, and Julia knew at once that she would be able to count on him. Ever since she was a child that word had been an incitement to complicity and adventure on the trail of some secret: the pirate treasure hidden in the drawer of the Isabelline bureau - which he sold to the Museo Romantico - and the story he invented about the portrait of the lady in the lace dress, attributed to Ingres, whose lover, an officer in the hussars, died at Waterloo, calling out her name as the cavalry charged. With Cesar holding her hand, Julia had lived through a hundred such adventures in a hundred different lives, and, invariably, in each of them what she’d learned from him was to value beauty, self-denial and tenderness, as well as the delicate and intense pleasure to be gained from the contemplation of a work of art, from the translucent surface of a piece of porcelain to the humble reflection of a ray of sunlight on a wall broken up by a pure crystal into its whole exquisite spectrum of colours.

“The first thing I need to do,” Cesar was saying, “is to have a good look at the painting. I can be at your apartment tomorrow evening, at about half past seven.”

“Fine,” she said, eyeing him cautiously. “It’s just possible that Alvaro will be there too.”

If Cesar was surprised, he didn’t say so. He merely made a cruel face with pursed lips.

“How delightful. I haven’t seen the swine for ages, so I’d be thrilled to have an opportunity to send a few poisoned darts his way, wrapped up, of course, in delicate periphrases.”

“Please, Cesar.”

“Don’t worry, my dear, I’ll be kind… given the circumstances. My hand may wound, but no blood will be spilled on your Persian carpet… which, incidentally, could do with a good cleaning.”

She looked at him tenderly, and put her hands over his.

“I love you, Cesar.”

“I know. It’s only natural. Almost everyone does.”

“Why do you hate Alvaro so much?”

It was a stupid question, and he gave her a look of mild censure.

“Because he made you suffer,” he replied gravely. “I would, with your permission, pluck out his eyes and feed diem to the dogs along the dusty roads of Thebes. All very classical. You could be the chorus. I can see you now, looking divine, raising your bare arms up to Olympus, where the gods would be snoring, drunk as lords.”

“Marry me, Cesar. Right now.”

Cesar took one of her hands and kissed it, brushed it with his lips.

“When you grow up, Princess.”

“But I have.”

“No, you haven’t. Not yet. But when you have, Your Highness, I will dare to tell you that I loved you. And that the gods, when they woke, did not take everything from me. Only my kingdom.” He seemed to ponder that before adding, “Which, after all, is a mere bagatelle.”

It was a very private dialogue, full of memories, of shared references, as old as their friendship. They sat in silence, accompanied by the ticking of the ancient clocks that continued to measure out the passage of time while they awaited a buyer.

“To sum up,” said Cesar, “if I’ve understood you correctly, it’s a question of solving a murder.”

Julia looked at him, surprised.

“It’s odd you should say that.”