Tulip Fever (37 page)

She reappears in one of his masterpieces, now hanging in the Dresden Museum. It shows a still life: an onion lies on a porcelain plate, its papery skin half peeled. Cards and dice are scattered on the tablecloth, and an open book reveals a page in Latin script:
We played, we gambled, we lost
.

In a vase is one tulip: white petals blushed with pink, like the flushed cheek of a woman who has just risen from her lover’s bed. On a petal there is a dewdrop. The woman’s image is reflected there. You need a magnifying glass to see her; she appears to be trembling . . . like a dewdrop, her time is short before she vanishes forever.

67

Maria

Little boats should keep the shore; larger ships may venture more.

—JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

Maria, in her past life, dreamed that she changed places with her mistress. She dressed up in her blue jacket, with the white fur trim, and paraded in front of her own reflection. At night she dreamed that her mistress was drowned and that she, Maria, inherited this great house on the Herengracht and swam with her children through its rooms.

Now her dreams have been realized. Others have died so that she can live. Sophia has been missing for six years now, presumed drowned. Mr. Sandvoort never returned. In all but name the house now belongs to Maria. She has two children, both girls, and her husband, Willem. It is 1642 and they are sitting for their portrait in the library with the checkerboard floor.

Through the colored panes of glass the sun shines on Willem, in his black jacket and breeches, and on the ivory luster of Maria’s dress. Her daughters Sophia and Amelia sit, straight-backed, on chairs. Their King Charles spaniel lies at their feet. They, too, crave immortality and will hang in the Mauritshuis in The Hague:
Unknown Man, his Wife
and Daughters by Jacob Haecht 1620–1675
(Signed and dated 1642). For Jacob has become a fashionable portrait painter, noted for the meticulous detail of his brushwork. He will never be a great master; he will not scale the heights of Jan van Loos, but he will please his public.

As he paints them, Jacob asks: “What happened to the old man—Mr. Sandvoort?”

“Who knows?” replies Willem. “All we’ve heard are rumors.” News from the East Indies takes months to travel and is notoriously unreliable. “Some say he died of the yellow fever.” Willem, who has put on weight and become a little pompous, flicks a speck of dust off his jacket.

“I don’t believe it,” says Maria. “I heard that he set up home with a beautiful native girl.”

“Who told you?” asks Willem.

“Just someone I met.” She pauses, relishing their attention. “It’s said that he still lives with her in sinful pleasure, for he has never solemnized their union—in fact, he has never set foot inside a church.”

“Is that true?” asks Willem.

“
I
believe it,” replies Maria. “Doesn’t he deserve some happiness?”

“Don’t smile,” says Jacob. “I’m painting your mouth.”

He paints for a while in silence. The girls shift in their chairs; their dresses rustle. The dog has fallen asleep.

“I painted him six years ago,” says Jacob. “I painted most of him. Do you remember?”

Maria nods.

Jacob looks at the little girl. “His daughter resembles him, do you not agree?”

Maria grins. “You think so?” She bends down to stroke the little girl’s hair. “I don’t.”

“Sit still please,” says Jacob sharply.

68

Jan

The days of man are but as grass: for he flourisheth as a flower of the field. For as soon as the wind goeth over it, it is gone: and the place thereof shall know it no more.

—PSALM 103

It is a blustery morning in September 1648, rinsed and shiny. Jan is walking to the market to buy some food. His kitchen is empty; he has been shut away in his studio, working like a man possessed, and has lost all track of time.

Emerging into the dazzling day he blinks in the sunshine. Stall holders flap their arms at scavenging dogs; hawkers shout their wares. A chestnut mare plants her hind legs apart, raises her tail and releases a torrent of streaming urine onto the cobblestones. How sturdily alive she looks! Her shiny haunches, damp with sweat; her flaring nostrils. She snorts, groaning with satisfaction, as she relieves herself. This is her life; there is no other. The horse is untroubled by fears of mortality.
Mankind’s hopes are fragile glass
and life is therefore also short
. Little does she care.

Jan himself has no fear of death. Twelve years earlier, when Sophia died, he, too, ceased living in this world. He closed that door and opened another, a world he creates in his paintings. This is his reality, the stillness of his still lifes, and when he steps outside it startles him to see people bustling to and fro, going about their business. It still surprises him, after so many years, that the world carries on so heedlessly without her. Babies are born; piles are driven into the mud of the Damplein for the erection of the great Town Hall of Amsterdam, which will be a monument to civic pride and a cause of wonderment in all who will behold it.

Sophia’s life has been stilled but she still inhabits his heart. He talks to her and feels her holding her breath to listen. Her immortality lives within him and within his paintings, for he paints her reflection trapped in the curve of a glass. She has a life, still, in his still lifes. And he has no fear of death for he has survived what, at the time, felt like extinction. In fact, he will live to be sixty-one (
Jan van Loos
1600–1661
), the span of this Golden Age, and his greatest work has yet to be painted. On this windy day in September, however, he is simply struck by the sunlight on the metallic scales of the heaped-up herrings. How could they be dead when they gleam so brightly? Does it matter that they have died if, when an artist paints them, they will become alive again?

Jan stops at a stall and buys an apple. Later, he remembers this moment. He bites into the apple; the juice spurts. Nearby lie some spilled entrails; a crow stands there, one claw planted on them while it pulls the glistening guts with its beak. Jan is remembering when he was a boy, how he watched his father beating silver into shape, its brightness glinting in the murky workshop. He thinks of the twin sheens of fish and silver platter, and how he misses his father, who has been dead for many years.

As he munches the apple he is aware of gray shapes moving across the square. They move like shadows for they are nuns from the convent and have but a spectral existence, like a lost memory of their own lives, in this world. There is one Catholic convent in the center of the city, a closed order impenetrable to outsiders. Behind its walls the nuns have delivered themselves up to God; they spend their days in prayer. When they emerge their faces are veiled in black.

One nun walks a little apart from the others. There is something familiar about the way she moves—her tallness, her hesitancy. In the wind, her habit billows about her slender body.

He gazes at her. She is separated from him by the milling shoppers. She stops dead. She stands transfixed, like a startled deer, her hand gripping the crucifix that hangs around her neck.

At that moment the wind blows the veil from her face. Just a glimpse—that is all. Then she veers away and slips through the crowd.

Jan stands there, frozen. A hand is thrust in front of his face. “May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

Jan fumbles in his purse. Can he believe his eyes? Does she live still; could it be possible? Or has dreaming her into life, into paint, so possessed him that he can no longer separate art from illusion?

While scrabbling for coins Jan’s attention is distracted. When he looks up, the nun is gone. This gray, hooded figure—a ghost, in her final disguise—she has disappeared, as if she is simply a figment of his imagination.

About The Author

Deborah Moggach is the author of twelve previous novels. She lives in London.

TULIP FEVER
A Dial Press Trade Paperback Book

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by William Heinemann.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by Deborah Moggach.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-042048
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press