The Painter Read online

  That got me out of an old trouble into a new one. There were sailors on board. I could hear them working away at something down below inside the ship where a large hatchway gaped open. If they saw me and hailed me, the men approaching the wharf behind me would hear. An open door in the deck-house was the only choice so I stepped into obscurity, felt solidity disappear from beneath my feet and fell headlong down a stairway into a pile of sacks of flour. When I collected myself, I found a space behind the sacks into which I could squirm my way and bordering the space was a case of bottles.

  What would you have done, stuck there, waiting for the coast to clear? Exactly. That is why I found myself on this unexpected journey. Wine led to sleep and when the ship began to rock, sleep only deepened.

  The reasons why I do not travel? First and most important, it wastes time. There is a limit to the number of works I can complete in my remaining years and although it is not given that I should know that limit, it is there, like it or not. There is not one duty I owe to the world but I do owe myself the duty of extending my art to the uttermost boundary of its potential and that can be done only by practising it. As I get older I find increasingly that the white spaces in between things matter more and more. My painting is no longer about building up, it is about paring down, determining the minimum required. This is a new discovery which I must explore to its limits.

  The second reason flows from the first. I have to stay at home because that is where the answers lie, inside me and in the mirror I look in, not outside my windows. It is a lifetime's work to study the thickness of the air in my studio and how the moving sun changes that thickness throughout the day. Outside there is an infinity of confusion – too much for one man to handle in a million lifetimes. A man must limit the objects of his attention if he is to approach perfection.

  On this voyage I have already seen far too much, far too many possibilities, I may lose everything if I cannot get back home and find my focus once more.

  There is a third reason not to leave the house but it has nothing to do with art. As we have seen, outside, creditors may lie in wait for a man.

  The slow ride up this English river was the first and only part of the whole bloody, bloody journey I enjoyed at all. The first day, after dragging me from my sleep among the flour sacks, drenching me unnecessarily with salt water from a bucket and hauling me before this stiff martinet of a captain, a man I would judge to be ten years my junior and of no higher standing than me, they tried to make me work. It was soon clear to them that ropes and knots meant nothing to me at all and when they tried to make me climb the rigging, I could barely get off the deck. I was no more built to climb than I was to run. There was no respect for me at all from these men who measured me entirely by how well I knew their wobbly, wooden world. They gave me a brush, but what a brush. It was a scrubbing brush and they made me kneel down to scrub the deck. I have never, ever scrubbed anything in my life before unless you count scrubbing ground colour on to a canvas. One sailor and one only, the speaker of bad Dutch, would sometimes deign to tell me what the shouts meant. If I did not understand, the shouts only increased in intensity and the biggest of them, a bald man with a ring in his ear, dared to threaten me with a rope's end. Then there was the food. Oh God, the food. In my old house, my beautiful house on the Breestraat, we ate the finest food Amsterdam could supply and the gifts that turned up at my front door, gifts from those who hoped to be invited in, were often edible or drinkable, which was better still. Where I am obliged to live now we no longer eat so well, but all the same we eat like royalty compared to the slop they gave us on the ship.

  For reasons which were not at the time explained to me, but which became all too plain later, we first made passage to a harbour called Gottingbourg which was, I think, in the land of Sweden, a land from which to the best of my knowledge no art has ever come. There Captain Dahl would have tipped me ashore but for chance and but for the passenger's piece of paper.

  I saw the passenger for the first time when the crew were all busy with ropes and sails on the way in to the port and I seemed for the moment to be invisible to them. He emerged from a door under the high deck where the wheel was mounted on its pedestal and he talked animatedly to Dahl, waving a sheaf of papers. His fine clothes showed he was no sailor. If he had been a sailor, he would not have tried to grab the rail as the ship heaved with the same hand in which he held the papers and the wind would not then have whirled them down to whatever sailors call that part of the deck where the masts stick up out of the planking. I caught four of them, not by any special agility but by pure luck because they flew straight into my open arms while the rest of them were swept into the waves beyond. Three of the sheets, a heavy linen weave, were crammed full of handwriting in a flowery script but the fourth had just one line on it and I thrust that one into my pocket before anyone could see.

  The passenger's pleasure at receiving some of his pages back was overwhelmed by his sourness at the loss of the rest. He merely inclined his head at me with a penetrating look when I climbed the ladder to return them. He was a man of some thirty years, I judged, with an alert eye. Later on, when I measured his full stature as a rival for a great prize, I found him to be a full ten years older than that, but I would have to say that everything that man did, even his ageing, was not what it seemed. Chin down, in half profile, I thought – a sideways look with a single bright lamp lighting the socket of the eye from below – that would be the way to get him best.

  Extraordinarily far-sighted of me, to spot the suitability of the sideways look.

  I had no pencil, just this stolen sheet of his paper and the mate or the bo’sun or whatever the huge, roaring dolt with the bald head was called had far too much to do to keep an eye on me, so I climbed down to a quieter corner by the masts behind a great coil of rope and there my eye happened to fall on the little barrel of musket balls, tied in place in case of attack. When I rubbed a corner of the paper with a musket ball it left a dark silver trace. When I carefully cut one with my knife, I could split it into four parts like the quarters of an apple and use them to draw after a fashion.

  Now, I should admit that I had only once tried to depict a ship before in any detail, a history painting of the apostles in their storm, dramatic and reeking of the salt spray, it seemed to me. My efforts had been scoffed at by the mariners of Amsterdam who said all was a-fly or ahoo or aback or something else obscurely nautical and this and that were pointing in contradictory directions. They missed the whole point. I had studied boats in the docks but never before had the chance to draw one, if you like, from on board and my whole spirit was aching to release the pressure building up in me, the pressure of unfamiliar shapes all around, shapes escaping undrawn. On the high deck above my head, the captain and the passenger were still talking and for a moment they made their own composition, as perfect as any I could have devised. From my low perspective, they towered above, facing each other, the passenger holding up his paper towards the captain, eyebrows raised, pointing at some detail, while the captain himself, exuding implacable authority in his tiny wooden kingdom, stared past him across the sea. It was gone as soon as seen, but the inner eye, that part that can understand accidental perfection and hold it, entire, for weeks afterward, had trapped it. I sketched as fast as the musket ball would allow, wishing I had a copper plate and a drypoint for my work instead of this flapping, unsupported paper. Another thing: for the first time in my life, my own point of view, the certain, solid centre from which all else follows, had become an uncertain, far from solid place as the deck pushed me upwards then stretched me back down. My tools were awkward, the paper bent over my knee and the lead sometimes too hard for what I intended, but enough excuses. It took. It flowed across the paper with no need for correction, which was as well for I had no means to correct it. The precise pose was lost as soon as I began but the men obligingly stayed where they stood and from time to time their profiles were again raised and tilted to the right degree to capture them.

&nbs
p; After all the scurrying fuss that seems to accompany making any ship go where you want it to, we lay relatively peacefully, though still bobbing around, anchored at a short distance from the quay. That was when the captain leaned over the rail above me, shouted straight at me and beckoned with his hand for me to come up. I quickly shoved my paper in my pocket and did so reluctantly because it seemed to me that little good was likely to come of it. At the top of the ladder, I found myself facing the passenger and the captain together. The captain indicated me with his hand and said something to the other which ended in a harsh laugh. The passenger smiled but then his eyes went to my pocket and I knew, dismayingly, that a corner of the paper must be showing.

  'Is that another piece of my paper?' he asked, and he spoke his question to me in perfect Dutch.

  Before I could move, the captain had reached out and snatched it angrily from my pocket, smoothing it with his hands and tutting over the marks I had made. They exchanged incomprehensible, guttural words with each other then the passenger took the piece of paper from him, looked at it quickly then again for longer, staring at it.

  'You did this?' he asked me.

  'I did.'

  'It is good.'

  'It's better than that,' I said.

  'Ha!' he said, and looked at it again. 'Yes. I won't argue. Good does not start to tell the tale. It is superb. You are a maker of portraits?'

  'I have been,' I said.

  'From Amsterdam?'

  'Yes, and from Leiden before that.'

  'From Leiden? Really? Should I have heard of you? Are you Lievens? Are you Dou? No, they would not be stowaways, stinking of wine.'

  Bastard. I was not about to play his game.

  'I am van Rijn,' I said, and could tell immediately from his frown that he had never heard the name and that he felt diminished by that lack of knowledge. This was a man, I realized, who liked to know more than others around him.

  'First name?' he said and I found myself playing the game of advantage, where knowledge is a currency to be guarded. There was also the matter of the bankruptcy whose conditions, irrelevant until then, included a ban on leaving the city. Because I didn't want to give this man who knew his Dutch so well the pleasure of knowing my official label, I gave him my patronym instead. It was a test of sorts.

  'Harmenszoon.'

  I watched his face to see if he knew enough of Dutch customs to recognize that could only ever be a second name.

  He stared again. 'Harmenszoon van Rijn,' he said doubtfully. 'I am afraid your reputation has not reached our shores.'

  Then he shrugged and turned back to talk to Captain Dahl, showing him the paper which clearly held the interest of both of them. Eventually he turned back to me.

  'Do you paint as well as draw?'

  'As the sun outshines the moon.'

  'The captain is of a mind to offer you a choice,' he announced, and I realized it amused him. 'He says you owe money for your fare. He will cut his losses and put you ashore here to find your own way home or, if you prefer, you may come with us to Hull and do him a proper picture, a portrait. If it is good, he will see you get passage back to Amsterdam.'

  It seemed to be no choice at all. There were Hennie and Titus to consider. They would manage without me, the two of them, because they would have to. They would be worried, certainly, but they must be worried already and they would be a lot more worried if I were to die a pauper's death in this gloomy Swedish port, begging fruitlessly for rides from every passing ship. I looked across at the town. Gottingbourg had a disturbing, pagan look, ill-shaped houses of irregular wood painted in unlikely and unsettling colours, some ox-blood, some mustard, all wrong.

  'Can you get a message back to my home?' I asked. 'Just a note to say I am safe and will return, no more.'

  'We can leave it with the port captain,' said the passenger. 'Write it down.'

  So I said yes, I would come to Hull and in consequence matters improved a little. I was allowed a mattress in a small cot wedged into a tiny cupboard. We lay at anchor all the rest of that day, a stone's toss from the walls of the port, and very little was taken off or put on the ship to explain the need for our visit. There was a cross, snappy chop to the water which rattled and shook the ship and was apt to swirl a soaking sheet of spray over the deck when one least expected it. A few hours passed, my note was written and, I hoped, despatched. Orders were shouted again, sails were freed from their restraining ties and the anchor was hauled painfully up. It brought with it, to the delight of the crew, the rotted rib-cage of some huge creature. I hoped it was a whale but perhaps it was just a cow and I wondered if it was an omen. The two shapes, the bones and the anchor, entwined in that happy, random way nature has – that way which infuses the onlooker with delight that something can be so right. The ellipse of the anchor's base, which ended in fishtail-like flukes, was entangled with the ribs, a series of more delicate crossing curves. All I had to draw on with my remaining slice of musket ball was the painted wood of the locker next to me and when the mate saw what I was doing, he screamed English abuse at me and then stood over me while I rubbed it off.

  Another work of genius, lost for ever.

  The motion of the ship became quite malicious as we sailed out into the open ocean. At my successive houses I have usually had to reinforce the studio floor because my time is spent in a precise act of creation in which the tip of the brush I am holding has to be capable of adding not one whisker more or less of paint than I intend to exactly the right patch of canvas. My wrist is held in precise relationship to that canvas by the solid support of my maul-stick. When I first moved to our shack in the Jordaan, the whole floor would creak and shiver if anyone else entered the room so I had it taken up and rebuilt it on the largest beams I could find, even though Hennie fretted at the cost. Those beams came from some old ship that had stood a century's storms around the globe, but they were only just sturdy enough to make my floor sufficiently immobile for my needs. It has always seemed very probable to me that, left to myself, I would have become a habitual drunkard. It is in my blood from my grandfather. What has prevented me, what has stopped me from anything bar occasional excess, is the one single thing that frightens me more than any other. It is that I might lose that exact link between my hand and my eye. I need a still point in my universe.

  Ships' timbers may have given me solidity on land but ships at sea are not for me. I took my misery to my cramped cot and lay down to cherish it all the way across the German Ocean, As I said, I have never been a lightweight man and the cot was not a comfortable place to be, but it was better than the alternatives. I stayed in it for, so far as I could tell, three days of purgatory but woke in the early hours of this morning, at dawn's first crack, to find the motion quite changed and something which could almost pass as stability restored to the world.

  When I went up on deck, I thought for a moment that we had turned back to my home country. We were sailing at no great speed into a wide estuary and it had that same look that the Dutch coast possesses. To the right, which I understood from the morning sun just coming up behind us to be the north, a long spit curved out from the shore, marking the place where the German Ocean ceased and this wide cousin of the Rhine began. We sailed gently onwards, the sails filling and slumping and filling again with a crack as the wind puffed us along. The southern bank of this wide river was too far away to see clearly but it was full tide judging by the way the water stood against its northern bank and beyond that bank was a landscape which looked to my eyes in no way outlandish. I had quite unconsciously expected savages. It would have been no surprise to me at all to find mud huts with naked warriors painted blue. Instead, there were fields with neat drainage ditches and clumps of trees sheltering small farmhouses just as you might easily see beyond the walls of Amsterdam, There were windmills too, just as there are at home. I come from a milling family. We are called van Rijn because my family's mill was on that river, the foremost of the Rhine mills and, being the foremost, was called the Mill of
the Rhine. I looked at these mills with an appreciative eye. These English were perhaps not so different as I had always been led to expect.

  By and by, having seen only a few fishermen casting nets, we approached a point where the river seemed to end ahead of us and a cluster of masts at the limit of our vision showed the distant presence of a port. The captain was now feeling his way close in to the edge of the shore with a sailor in the bows shouting and splashing away with a weight on a line. Squinting ahead, I thought I could see a high church spire amongst the masts and understood then that, far from ending, the river swung away to the left around a long, wide bend with a town on the outside, northern border of that curve. It seemed we were going no nearer this port which still lay some way ahead. Instead, our previously inexpressive and immobile captain was waving and hallooing towards the shore for all he was worth. Looking where he looked, I saw, for the first time, the extraordinary house he was in the process of building.

  Two massive towers of dark brick stood at either end of it. They had their roots in a much more ancient time, those towers, as if built entirely for defence in a hostile world. The bricks of which they had long ago been made were in two colours, red and blue in bands, and what few windows opened into those towers were the sort from which an invisible archer might give you an unpleasant surprise. Between them, a new house had been built, joining the towers together like a delicate girl with one arm round each of her hulking brothers. That this central section was new seemed in no doubt. At one end, builders were still finishing the tiling of the roof and the timbers showed through, creamy yellow, so far untouched by time. This central range had many windows, their small panes catching the rising sun as if to make up for the unperforated walls of the twin towers. For a long time nobody stirred at the house, then a figure appeared, a man so far as I could tell, who stared in our direction and ran inside. All hands were called and sent below where a curious rummaging began amongst the cargo, covering some things and exposing others, preparing it seemed to me for some inspection in which it would be better if not everything was plain to see. In the midst of all this, they even set me to work again, dragging sacks from one place to another and, with the end of my voyage in sight, I did it moderately willingly. After what seemed a great deal of toil, I was summoned back to the deck. A boat was lowered into the water. The passenger, standing by the ship's rail, called to me.