Wings over Delft (9 page)

On her next visit to the studio, Louise did not put on her green dress. Kathenka took it away carefully in its linen bag, to hang in her room ready for later sittings. At last Louise was able to sit in the chair that had been set so invitingly for her and to look around. When she sat down she realised, almost with disappointment, that the ‘room’ was not as real as it had appeared at first sight. What she had thought were tiles in the floor were just strings criss-crossing under the Turkey carpet. She asked Pieter about them and he laughed.

‘We will paint these in as tiles; attic boards would not be appropriate in the room of a “lady of science.”’ He was teasing her, but it was nice teasing. It didn’t make her feel inadequate as Reynier’s teasing so often did. ‘We will have to make the windows grander too,’ he said. ‘Stained glass, probably; they must balance the spinet on the other side. You must choose what sort of tiles you would like on the floor.’

‘Oh, black and white marble, please,’ she said, thinking of the hall in their new house. ‘But it is all so much work … so much preparation, just for me.’

‘Oh no, it really is important; the room, the furnishings, all must help to make the portrait. These things give
messages
about the subject of the portrait, symbols if you like, that hint at the subject’s interests and even desires.’

‘Desires?’ Louise asked, suddenly on the defensive; then instantly regretted it. He looked so stricken, as if he were about to come apart at the joints.

‘Well, sometimes we use what we know,’ he was flushing deeply. ‘The picture on the wall, for example – we tried a map, but it looked too gloomy, what with the globe and the books. Then Master suggested that,’ and he pointed
uncertainly
to a picture of a cupid, complete with bow and arrow, that was leaning against the wall. ‘But Kathenka said not. Then I thought of how the clouds had moved over the fields when we were up on the walls and I thought of the sea, so we borrowed that seascape from the Master’s room. It’s by Van Goyen.’ He smiled at her uncertainly, his hands turned out.

She looked at him, remembering their time on the walls. She felt her colour rising and looked away. What was so
attractive
about this shambling youth, she wondered. She looked at the picture again. It was a seascape of greys and greens, broken only by the angular geometry of brown sails.

‘I like it,’ she said, but hoped that they would move Cupid to somewhere else.

Father had left for the pottery, and the house seemed quiet and empty after his departure. Louise had done the chores
that Annie insisted on her doing so that she would not become ‘spoiled’. Then she went, as she usually did, and sat with Mother for a while. It was Reynier who had sown in Louise the notion that she might have been responsible for her mother’s ill health.

‘You really mustn’t blame yourself,’ he had comforted her. ‘Your poor mother could have been caught in a shower at any time.’ It hadn’t in fact occurred to Louise that she might be to blame, but her ten-year-old mind was fertile ground for such suggestions, and she
had
delayed, looking for frogspawn. Even after all these years a feeling of guilt welled up in her as she held the translucent hand that rested on the covers. She longed for someone in whom she could confide; it had been such a relief unburdening herself to Kathenka. The trouble was, that after her discussions and arguments with Father, the girlish chatter of her friends about clothes, and hats, and ribbons seemed vacuous and boring. When they wanted to talk about boys they didn’t include her, as they automatically paired her off with Reynier.

As Mother declined, Annie had assumed responsibility for Louise’s day to day life. It was a curiously lopsided upbringing. Once Louise had completed her tasks about the house, Annie would feel that her duty was done. From then on, Louise was largely left to her own devices, and would wander the town, making friends with anyone who would talk to her, pestering them with questions about anything from windmills to brewing ale. In only one other area did Annie try to exert her influence, and that was in religion.
She was a strict Calvinist for whom God was a grim reality. Father, on the other hand, would insist that Louise make up her own mind: ‘You can only believe the believable, my love,’ he would say, and in doing so he would quietly undo most of Annie’s efforts. However, there was one faith which Annie abhorred above all others: Catholicism. Here she gave no quarter, would listen to no argument, and was not above subterfuge. And she fought her case with facts. Many a night Louise’s bedtime story would be some gruesome detail of the Spanish Inquisition. If Louise had been naughty, she would be stood up in her window, which looked south, and be reminded that the Spaniards were only a few miles away, in the Spanish Netherlands: “… and we all know what
they
do!” Louise was genuinely scared and told Father nothing about Annie’s dire warnings.

Mother’s cheeks seemed slightly less flushed today, Louise thought to herself, and her breathing was a little easier. But she tired very quickly, so, after settling her more comfortably on her pillows, she left her mother to her rest and went downstairs.

Louise was restless and bored. She tried her lute, but it was out of tune – again – and when she carried it to the spinet in the parlour she found that that too was out of tune. Perhaps it was the lingering damp from the new plaster in the house. Her mind kept turning to the studio. Would it be very forward to go there without being asked? Eventually, her mind made up, she told her mother that she was going to the studio and was soon hastening through the sunlit streets to the Markt. Here she paused to get her breath back.

She looked in on Kathenka, with the intention of asking her if it would be all right to go up, and then stood shifting from one foot to the other, offering to help her clean the bar, but hoping not to be taken up on the offer. Kathenka sent her off upstairs with a knowing smile. At the top of the stairs Louise tapped at the board door and listened for an answer. She inhaled the studio smells as they filtered through the door. She recognised linseed oil; that was used for mixing the paint, and then there was the sharp clean smell of the turpentine they used for thinning paints and cleaning brushes. Someone was hammering inside. The noise stopped, and she knocked quickly before it could start up again. This time the Master’s voice called out.

‘Come in!’

She opened the door. Pieter was balanced on the top of a ladder, hammering a nail into the wall. She remembered their unsteady progress down the steps from the town wall and hoped he would be all right. ‘Ah, it is Mistress Louise.’ Pieter swayed on his perch.

‘Her room,’ as she thought of it, now looked more like a spider’s web. The Master, short and squat as a spider, was looking out at her from within a web of strings, while poor Pieter looked about as much at ease as a daddy-long-legs caught in the mesh. He emerged unscathed, however, and backed past her with a grin, paying out one of the pieces of string. He attached this to a pole, which, Louise guessed, represented the missing corner of the room.

‘Come, my dear, come. Ignore Pieter; he was going to play your part and sit for me, but he is no jewel. Today we
set the jewel in the crown. Come and sit down. We must make magic, and later I will explain to you the wonders of perspective.’

Louise adopted an approximation of her pose while the Master busied himself behind his canvas. She longed to see what he was doing. Sometimes he held up his paintbrush as if to preserve the angles of what he saw, sometimes he used a thread stretched between his hands. Twice he moved the easel. Then, when he was satisfied with that, he got her to move her chair to the right. ‘No, no, too far.’ Pieter came and knelt behind him. They conferred in whispers. At last he was satisfied.

‘Now, my dear, you may come and look. Careful of the easel!’ he warned, as Louise tipped one of its legs. ‘From now on, even if the canvas is moved, your chair and the
easel
must stay exactly where they are. I will show you why.’ The Master took her arm and guided her to where he had been kneeling.

‘Here,’ he said. She knelt down and stared at the canvas and tried to decipher what she was seeing. The Master’s crude sketch of her head and body throbbed from the
canvas
but now it seemed to be encased in a criss-cross of straight lines. She could recognise the network of Pieter’s tiles on the floor, but what were all these lines that appeared to converge on just one point, her right eye?

‘Ouch!’ she said. ‘You’ve stuck a pin in my eye. Why have you done that?’

‘Ah, so you’ve seen it. I hope it doesn’t hurt.’ The Master chuckled. ‘Ja, my child, that is where you will be, there
where all those lines meet. The pin is where your eye will be, and where all eyes will go.’ He pretended to drop his voice. ‘Pieter is too dumb to understand, of course, you
realise
.’ Louise looked up. The boy was grinning. The Master went on. ‘Pieter now, he would paint you here, in the
middle
… but that is not Master Haitink’s way. No, that is too obvious, too like a portrait. I want people’s eyes to be
drawn
to you, but they must not know why. So I do with you what I did for the beggar at the Begijnhof gate. I put you in my secret place. Let me see if you can guess,’ he chuckled. ‘It is a place that is hidden to the casual eye, a place where all lines go but none are seen.’ He stopped, one eyebrow raised, delighted with himself.

‘It’s a riddle,’ Louise laughed. She could guess, but she wanted him to explain. ‘Tell me.’

‘Look,’ he said, kneeling at the canvas with his back to her, ‘look over my shoulder as I do this. I take my little thread and I stretch it from the pin. See, now it is parallel with Pieter’s tiles – here, and here, and here; now it is following the
skirting
board, now the windows. These are all lines that appear to stretch away from us; they are the ones that deceive our eyes so that the room appears to exist inside the canvas. When these lines have done their work – as tiles, as skirting boards, or as windows – they stop. But what if we draw them on, where do they go? The answer is here, to our pin.’ He swung the thread from line to line around the pin as he talked. ‘This point is called the vanishing point. The point where all lines go but none are ever seen. That, my dear, is where you will be. Because it is to here that the eye is
drawn, as surely as a dog is to a bone.’

‘Now, my dear, your hand please, you must help me to get up.’ Louise helped him to his feet. She noticed Pieter’s amused expression as the old man dusted his knees. The Master glanced up: ‘Look at him, idling as usual. Come, children, I have work to do.’

Weeks passed and Louise was happy. The Master seemed reluctant to start on her part of the portrait. He was, as he called it, ‘blocking in’ the base colours for the background, edging towards the charcoal lines he had drawn on that first day when she had frozen for him. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t required, but, having done her chores, she usually contrived to call in at the studio. Sometimes the Master would get her to sit while he made sketches of her in his notebook, but she felt that he was doing this more out of politeness than anything. When she got up to go, he would growl at Pieter: ‘Conduct Miss Eeden home, Pieter, and no dallying on the way back!’ If Pieter wasn’t ready, Louise would go down to help Mistress Kathenka in the bar or kitchen, or wherever she was needed. In that way it would happen that she was often still there when Pieter came down. Kathenka would then say that she would be happier if Louise had a proper escort for the short walk home. But the walks weren’t always short. They would start out and, by tacit agreement, Louise would allow Pieter to walk behind her, in the role of disinterested escort, while in the public Markt. But once they were away from the crowds,
Louise contrived reasons for visits to the town walls, or walks down to the Oosterport, where they could stand on the bridge under the wide sky, breathing the air and escaping the feeling of being perpetually trapped behind high walls. As soon as they were alone she would take his arm and she would think again of her tiny reed boats and how they pulled each other together in the rain barrel; of Father and his Jewish friend, of herself and Pieter. The fact that she was drawn to Pieter was a scientific phenomenon, the fulfilment of a natural law. When she imagined lying back on sun-warmed tiles watching the heavens roll, it was Pieter, not Father or Baruch, and certainly not Reynier, who was the unseen presence at her side.

Leaning over the bridge at the Oosterport, she told Pieter about their new telescope. She found that he knew quite a lot about astronomy.

One day he said: ‘It was when we were looking at the mountains on the moon through the Master’s telescope that he told me how Galileo had destroyed Aristotle’s theory of the heavenly bodies being perfect spheres.’ Silence. Pieter turned. Louise was looking at him. Something about it made him uneasy. He blundered on: ‘He n-n-noticed their shadows on the lunar surface …’ Louise put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side.

‘Pieter Kunst!’ she demanded. ‘Do you mean to say that all the time the Master was arguing with me for the
divine
truth
of Aristotle’s outdated arguments, he was just
pretending
? Do you mean to tell me that you knew this, and that
you
looked on without saying a word while I, poor
innocent that I was, was being so grossly deceived?’

Now Pieter really did look as if his strings had been cut. She half expected him to collapse into a heap of arms and legs. It was too much for Louise; she threw back her head and sent a peal of laughter speeding down the Schiekanaal that startled jackdaws into flight from the gatehouse roofs. A surprised member of the watch emerged from the
gatehouse
, saw her, and scratched his head. ‘Oh Pieter!’ she said, as a relieved Pieter re-assembled himself.

They talked about everything then: about astronomy, and painting, even about Spinoza and his strange ideas. Louise was never certain what Pieter really thought of these theories about God. He would ask her questions and even put her right when her arguments got lost in the sand. But when it came to his beliefs, his eyes would part-close, as they did when he was seeing pictures in his mind, and she would realise that he was thinking, as it were, with his artist’s eye, and she didn’t know how to follow him.

On one of their walks, they found themselves near the Begijnhof gate. Here they found the old beggar; he still
remembered
Pieter – and Kathenka’s special brew – and greeted them like a king and queen. The streets were deserted as they made their way home. Louise slowed to let Pieter catch up. Then they both looked up at the leaning tower of the Oude Kerk. Puffy white clouds scudded across the sky and Louise gazed until it seemed that the clouds stood still, and the spire appeared to be tipping over on top of them. She fell back against Pieter, laughing, and let him hold her lightly while she blinked the illusion away. She
glanced up at him and noticed that his eyes were far away, perhaps capturing the scene for some future occasion.

Thinking of the little boats jostling in the rain barrel, she asked, ‘Pieter, do you like me?’ It seemed such a simple question; she just wanted to know – part of her research into small boats. She was dismayed when a stab of pain crossed Pieter’s face. The arm that was holding her stiffened until it felt like a piece of wood, and he politely returned her to her feet. When he spoke, his voice had a harshness and a tightness that she could not understand.

‘Yes, Miss Louise. I like you very much, but you forget your situation; it is time that you were home.’

That night, Louise went over the incident again in her mind. What was it about her question that had affected Pieter so deeply, and what had he meant by ‘her situation’? Could he mean Reynier? She fell asleep while pondering the answer.

Annie brought the letter in to her, and hovered while Louise opened it. ‘It’s from Master Reynier,’ she said approvingly.

The letter ran to several pages.

Louise felt her anger rising.

Louise blinked. This was a new height of eloquence for Reynier, but she had to smile. When, she wondered, would Reynier discover that the Parthenon was in Athens, and not in Rome? She was still smiling at the thought, when she looked up and caught the very satisfied
expression
on Annie’s face. She sighed and finished the letter; it had taken some weeks to find its way from France. So, Reynier really wouldn’t be returning until the autumn. She sat back with her eyes closed for a moment, a sensation of reprieve flowing through her. Italy seemed wonderfully far away. She could feel herself relaxing; a wicked little thought crossed her mind. She looked up at Annie, who was watching her complacently, hands clasped in front of
her. Louise tucked the letter into her bodice.

‘Annie,’ she said, innocently. ‘Reynier is off to the
Mediterranean
. It’s stiff with pirates, you know. Can you imagine Reynier as a galley slave?’

‘Oh! Mistress Louise!’ The little nurse’s face trembled. ‘We must trust in God for his safe return. At least he’ll be among Christians in Italy, even if they are Catholics.’ Louise felt no remorse at teasing Annie; she had no right to stay watching her while she read Reynier’s letter.

Since their altercation in the hall, they had reached a state of armed neutrality. Annie approved of the studio and the Master: ‘such a courteous gentleman’. Pieter was
conveniently
dismissed as a mere servant, and Louise did her chores and divided her time between her mother’s bedside and the studio. It was time for her to go there now. She bent to put her sewing things into her basket and then paused halfway as a thought struck her. How had Annie known that Reynier was going to Italy? She had mentioned the Mediterranean, but not Italy. Louise looked across at Annie, busily hemming a linen skirt, and wondered.

There was no answer to her knock. Louise eased the studio door open quietly and tiptoed in. They were both there, crouched in silent concentration over the canvas. It had been taken down from the easel and was propped on a sloping stand set on a bench where it got good light from the north windows. Louise could feel their intensity. She stepped across silently, and stood, enthralled, watching the
Master at work. Now everything he did seemed controlled and compact. She thought back to the sometimes hectic sketching that he had done on her first day. In his left hand he held, not just his palette, but a long polished stick with a pad on the end. Pieter had called it a maulstick, but she hadn’t understood how it was used. Now she saw it as part of the slow rhythm of his work. First came the careful charging of the brush, hardly more than a whisker on a slender handle. Then, in a single, slow, precise movement, the Master would lean forward, and the padded stick would come to rest on the edge of the canvas. Using the stick to support his wrist, he would carefully feather in a tiny dab of paint and then rock back. She watched this metronome movement without stirring, until eventually the Master straightened himself.

‘Ja! Pieter,’ he announced triumphantly, ‘we have the
colour
right this time. If Miss Louise were here would she not kiss the old man on the cheek in appreciation?’ He cocked his head to one side expectantly. Louise didn’t accept his invitation but clapped lightly. The Master sighed, ‘Too old, too old. You try, Pieter.’

The work went on. Neither of them paid her the slightest attention after that. Only the occasional low-voiced
consultation
broke the silence; the quiet activity closed around her like a cocoon. She began to think of all her privileges: her new house, her wealth, the green silk dress that she had hardly worn, and she asked herself what she was doing to deserve all this? She thought with irony of her demand to be painted like the beggar at the Begijnhof gate when a
tenth of what she would inherit could house and feed all the beggars of Delft for life. And also there was Father, who could be free to do his own fine work, like these two craftsmen, if the potteries merged. So that too was in her gift. She remembered also – a little guiltily – how Reynier was sailing on dangerous seas just to give her a chance to make up her mind about marriage to him. How could she atone for all this? If only she were Annie … Annie always knew what was right and what was wrong; God told her. The words of a recent sermon came to mind, ‘Brethren, there comes a time when we all must make that leap of faith. Leap brothers, leap sisters, leap into the arms of God!’ She
would
marry Reynier when he came back in the autumn. The time was shrinking, but autumn was still a long way away.

Day by day, Louise watched her face emerge from the canvas. It was as if she were inside the canvas, wiping an ever-widening spy hole in a frosted window and peeping out. She wanted to wink at herself. Her right eye appeared first, bright and curious. Gradually the spy hole in the frosted glass widened; another eye appeared, then an eyebrow. Things went well for a while. The Master would hum while he worked, and Pieter would be in attendance. If she wasn’t sitting for him, the Master was happy to let her watch. But gradually the summer heat became oppressive. It bore down on them, and the atmosphere in the studio became uncertain. The Master would get her to sit long
hours for him, but she noticed that even though he changed position, picking up brushes and putting them down, he often did nothing. Then, in a flurry of determination, he would charge his brush, lean forward, the brush would hover above the canvas, then his hand would fall to his side and he would sit back with a groan. The portrait was not going well. Her whole face had emerged now. There was no question about a likeness; it was the face that looked out at her each day from Mother’s mirror in the hall. But it was lifeless; even she could see that – so like – but so lifeless.