Seeing the painted house-timbers of the town and the boats in the harbour, I knew that there must be paint to be got, easy enough, in Perpignan.
Having agreed, though unwillingly, that the old faded sign was unworthy of the good wine he sold, the landlord sent his potboy with me to show me where to get what I needed, and to make sure that I did not cheat him and run off with the money.
So, I painted my first shop sign.
I settled down to work, with the old sign rubbed down and propped against the wall, with the walnut oil and my couple of brushes and my shells of colour. (I had bought my pigments ready-ground and only requiring to be worked up with oil, which is a thing no painter should do; but I needed time and practice to work out how to grind my colours one-handed, and meanwhile I needed to eat.) And oh, but I was feart! It was so long since I had last put brush to board, and though the old love had woken in me, there was no saying whether I had yet the old skill. Lacking that, I should just have to paint up the sign as it had been before, and be content with that. Only I should not be content, for the loss in me would be not just the loss of my new bonnie plans, but something deeper and more sore.
But with the first brush-strokes I knew that all was well. The old skill was rusty with lack of use, but it was still there… I laid on a background of a dark blue-green, the colour of a clear sky at twilight seen from a lighted room, and against it painted a wreath of twisted stalks and leaves in solid black, and set my seven stars among them – white, with yellow hearts to them, like white roses in a garland. It was clumsy work, and I was beginning to know by the end of it how often a painter uses his left hand without even knowing that he is doing so. But the thing was bonnie enough in its way.
The landlord was inclined to grumble that nobody would recognise the new sign; but his fat wife wept at sight of it and said that it was a garland of stars for the Mother of God. I had not thought of it that way, but if it pleased her, where was the harm?
And it got me another sign to paint, for Monsieur Dupont, a crony of the landlord’s and a shoemaker by trade. I struck the same bargain with him, and painted him a fine pair of buckled shoes with high red heels, such as I had seen often in London Town, three-four years ago.
And then, with enough pigments in small membrane-covered pots for at least two more signs, I took to the road, for I had no mind to spend more time within a bugle-call of the regiment.
I painted my way across France, teaching myself the craft as I went, and discovering how best to carry it out one-handed. More than a year it took me, painting shop signs for the most part, though from time to time somebody would ask me to paint their dog, and once it was a village bull, and once a girl on the bottom of a wine cask. And there were times when I had money to jingle in my pocket, and times when I came uncomfortably near to starving. More than a year, come to think of it, for it was March when I changed the rags of my French soldier’s coat for the rags of a decent brown on that I had found hanging on a blackthorn bush, its owner busy at the spring sowing in the field beyond, and crossed the border into what they used to call the Spanish Netherlands, by a suitably lonely woodland track, no one seeking to bar my way.
Life was more difficult after that, making my way through a countryside that had been fought over for the past five years, and was being fought over still, in a fitful way, though I kept well clear of the guns. Nothing of that was part of my life any more. But it seemed strange after my years with the French, with Spain and the Low Countries and the England of Orange William for the enemy, to be in a world to which France and King James’s England were the enemy after all.
I minded my tattered French coat that I had left hanging on a blackthorn bush, and away past that, far, far back, till I seemed to catch the waft of hawthorn flowers, and the light bitter mocking of Alan’s voice: ‘The De’il’s greeting to ye, Hughie lad, here’s turning your coat with a vengeance!’
But I was not turning my coat; I was one of the Wild Geese, whose loyalties are not bounded by frontiers. I had followed Claverhouse, and I had followed James for Claverhouse’s sake, and now King James’s service was closed to me, and I went to find another life for myself in the only way that I knew.
Life was more difficult also, for the very simple reason that I did not know the language and must get along as best I could by shouting and dumb-show. But once across the second border into the Dutch Republic, I found help that I had not expected, though I suppose I might have done so if I had thought, for in the sea-port towns there were Scottish and English merchants and seamen. It was good to hear my own tongue again. And if any of them guessed that I was one of the Wild Geese, they asked no questions, but set me on my way.
And so at last I came to Utrecht, and to Silver Spur Street, and found the third house above the kirk, with the swans carved on its gable, and asked the feather-bolster-shaped serving maid who opened to my knocking at the door, was Mynheer Cornelius van Meere at home.
She stared at me as though I were the Man in the Moon, and when I repeated the question, made shooing gestures at me that were understandable in any language, and would have shut the door in my face. But at that moment, luckily for me, another woman came across the hall behind her, and paused to ask a question. The two spoke together quickly in their own tongue, the maid holding the door still half-closed. Then it opened a little wider, and the maid, with a disapproving sniff, moved back a pace, though remaining ready to give support if need be, and the other woman, who was clearly the mistress of the house, took her place in the doorway.
She asked me something – I suppose it was my business; and I repeated my own question again.
She stood and looked at me, like a bright-eyed robin, her head a little on one side, and I saw that she understood no more English than her maid did. Fool that I was, because Mynheer spoke English, I had thought that his wife would, too. ‘Cornelius van Meere,’ she said, and nodded, and waited again; and I thought that maybe, just maybe, she might know my name. Mynheer had said all those years ago, that if ever I changed my mind I was to come to the house with the carved swans, and if he was from home, his wife would take me in until he returned. So, if he had meant it, and he had meant it, he would surely have told her all about me, told her my name.
But it was all a long time ago.
I slung my bundle higher on to my shoulder, and made her a small bow with my hand on my chest, and said, ‘Hugh Herriot,’ and waited in my turn.
I saw blankness in her face, and then questioning, and then a small struggling memory. And the memory opened like a flower.
‘Hugh Herriot,’ she said; and then flinging the door open wide, ‘Com!’ And as I came in over the scrubbed white step, she put out a hand to my free arm and found only an empty sleeve to my ragged coat; and I saw her plump kind face flinch with shock, and crumple. But I was too tired to mind. Then she was shooing the maid off in her turn, calling behind her into the depths of the house, a quick string of guttural words in which I could make out only three, ‘Cornelius!’ and my own name, and she was thrusting me across a wide dim hallway.
And then, not quite sure how I got there, I was in a room with black-and-white tiles on the floor; a very cool calm room through which the light seemed to wash like water into every corner; standing with my bundle at my feet. And Mynheer, looking more than ever like a toad in a vast curled wig, was pumping my hand up and down between both of his.
‘Hugh!’ he said. ‘Hugh – after all these so many years!’
And suddenly my mouth felt dry. It was so many years, as he said; too many years to leave an offer lying and then try to take it up again, expecting it still to be there. I said nothing, and in a little he stood back and looked at me. ‘And zo you change your mind,’ he said, as though it was only last week that we had spoken of the thing.
I swallowed against the dryness of my mouth. ‘If you will still take me, Mynheer.’
And after a troubled moment, he said, ‘Can you still paint, my Hugh?’ He was not surprised by my arm, som
ewhere in that stream of words his wife must have told him. But I could see that it might raise problems.
‘I’m right-handed,’ I said.
‘Ach, that I know. Lacking an arm you will contrive; but there are other things to cut off the gift – the flow – the fire.’
I shook my head. ‘I have painted my way across France – shop signs and the like, and learned to grind my own colours one-handed as I came, but whether I can still paint as ye mean it, I do not know.’
‘We shall find out,’ said Mynheer, seemingly from rather a long way off, through the fog of weariness that was gathering about me. ‘But first you must eat, and then you must sleep; and then tomorrow we will talk of many things such as how you came to be painting your way across France and whether you can still paint other things than shop signs.’
And so I ate and slept, and next morning answered a great many questions over a hot thick bowl of chocolate – I had never tasted chocolate before. And then Mynheer took me up to a long light room at the top of the house, where two apprentices were already at work, one grinding colours while the other was preparing a canvas, and at the far end a big canvas stood on its easel, covered with a cloth. Mynheer spoke to them, and they went on with their work. Then he showed me where the pigments and oils, the pestles and mortars and grinding slabs were kept, the spare pieces of board for sketching, and all the ordered chaos of brushes in jars and the like, and said, ‘Now paint.’
‘What would you be having me paint?’ I asked.
‘Whatever you please. But you will grind and work up your own colours first.’
He went away; and the two apprentices left me alone, as I make no doubt they had been ordered.
I looked round the room to see what I should paint. There was a bowl of fruit on the table, the dense glowing rind of oranges contrasting with the thin old-woman-withered skin of long-biding apples; there were striped and feathered tulips in a crystal jar that caught the light from a nearby window and focused it in a silvery blot at the heart of its own shadow, on to the white cloth on which it stood. There were three peacock’s feathers in a narrow-necked jar of translucent green porcelain.
I considered them all as I began to grind my pigments, holding the mortar between my knees as I had learned to do.
But when the colours were ready, I began to paint from my inner eye the gaunt hands of an old beggar-woman lying in her black lap, with a sprig of almond blossom between the fingers.
I worked all day, until the light began to fade. And then I came back to myself, and stood back to see what I had done.
And it was bad. It was so bad that I could have put my head on my knees and wept. The brush in my hand was still loaded with paint, and I made to slash it across the painting, but suddenly Mynheer’s hand came down on my wrist. I had not heard him come, and had no idea how long he had been standing there behind me.
‘Do not spoil it,’ he said.
But it seemed to me that there was nothing there to spoil. “Tis not what I saw,’ I said, “tis not what I saw.’
‘It never is,’ he said, half sadly, half amused. ‘Even when you do not choose a subject that would tax Rembrandt – and let us admit that neither you nor I are Rembrandt – it never is. If you are to become a painter, Hugh, you must accept that always there is a falling short between the vision and what we poor mortals make of it. You must accept it, but you must never cease to strive against it. When you think that you have captured the vision whole and perfect, when you become satisfied with your work, that is when you will cease to be a painter.’
‘I’ll never be a painter,’ said I.
‘You will, and maybe a better one than I – when we have got rid of all the bad habits that you have picked up with too much sign painting.’ His voice ran up, and cracked in exasperation, ‘Got in Heaven! Have you had hands of your own for – what, twenty-two, twenty-three years? And still you do not know how a thumb bends into its socket? Ach veil, that can vait till tomorrow. Clean up those brushes and the palette, and come down to supper. The other two vill haff begun without you.’
27
Autumn in Utrecht
TWO AND A half years later I got my first commission – the wife of a small merchant who could not or would not afford Mynheer’s price.
Mynheer told him that he had a journeyman in his studio who could paint nigh on as well as himself, and since he was only a journeyman, at half the fee. I should have been grateful, but I was not, for I had seen the woman. She had a fat foolish face like a bun with small dead currants in it for eyes; and I said so.
‘If you paint landscape or bunches of pretty flowers,’ Mynheer told me, ‘you can choose for yourself your own subject, trusting to God that you will be able to sell it and so continue to eat afterwards. If you are a portrait painter you can occasionally, ferry occasionally, do the same. But for the most part you will paint people who come to you with the price of the portrait in their hand: and occasionally, ferry occasionally, that will be one with a face such as Viscount Dundee, but more often it will be one with a fat foolish face like a bun with small dead currants in it for eyes. Then you will set yourself –’ his voice was rising to a roar – ‘to find what, if anything, lies behind the fat and the foolishness! I have said that you will wait upon Mevrow de Fries at two o’clock on Tuesday.’
So at two o’clock on Tuesday, I waited on Mevrow de Fries and began to work on my first commission.
Aye, it would have been a momentous day in my life, if that had been all. But it was to be a day when, light or dark, kind or cruel, life gathers itself together in a kind of peak, and comes crashing down in a new pattern.
Mevrow wished to be painted with her little dog in her lap. It was a fat and foolish little spaniel, but she loved it, and in return it gave her the love that I think she lacked from Mynheer de Fries. And when I had cleaned my palette and brushes and made all ready for the next day’s sitting, and was on my way home in the early dusk, I found myself thinking of Caspar, and away back through Caspar, of many other things and places and people…
News trickled through to us in Utrecht from time to time, and so I knew that the Earl of Balcarres had escaped to France. And I knew that the bairn, Jamie, had died in that black Covenanting house of Auchans, only a few months after his father at Killiecrankie. Dundee’s only son, and Jean’s. Poor Jean. I knew that less than two years ago she had married again – Colonel Livingstone, when he was released into banishment with his health broken after all those captive years under the death sentence, and they were somewhere in the Low Countries now. How could she, I wondered, she that had been wife to Claverhouse? I had wondered that so often. Eh well, it could not hurt Dundee, seven years in his grave at Blair.
I fell to wondering where in all the Low Countries they might be. I had half heard that they were in Brussels before the French bombardment; but now… There was a tightening in my belly, for wherever my lady Jean was, there surely Darklis would be also; and the foolish fancy woke in me that they might be here in Utrecht as well as any other place, and I might meet her round any corner of the cobbled street. I did not think of her so often these days, but suddenly the feel of her was so close to me that it was as though in another moment I would be able to conjure her up out of the shadows.
A fresh spattering of autumn rain in my face brought me out of my day-dream; and I realised that I must have been dawdling, for here I was but just passing the Castle of Antwerp Inn, no more than halfway home, and the candle-light from the open-shuttered windows beginning already to be reflected in the still waters of the canal.
And there I had to stop for a few moments, late or not, for they were loading peats for the winter, swinging the great creels of it up past the lighted windows on ropes and pulleys from the projecting gable beam for storage on the turf-floor under the roof, and a couple of creels were blocking the narrow way. I mind noticing that the rain – and there had been a deal of rain in the past week – had damped the turfs through, so that there was not so much dust
flying around as there generally is at such times, but it had made the stuff heavy to handle. I suppose that was why they were still at it, shouting directions and the odd curse to each other, so late in the evening.
They shifted the last two creels, and I dodged past and went on my way.
A few hundred yards further on, a bridge crossed the canal and in the fading light and the shadows of the poplar trees that lined the bank at that point, I was quite close before I noticed that a woman in a dark cloak was leaning over the balustrade, watching the water and life of the barges tied up alongside; a moment more before I realised that she had a wee dog with her. Her hood was pulled forward and I could not see her face; but I think I knew, in that moment, without seeing…
In the same instant the dog let out a sudden piercing whine; and then a shower of shrill, half-joyful, halfdesperate barking, and tearing its leash from her hand, came flying along the bank towards me, ears, tail and leash all flying behind. And the woman looked up, startled, so that her hood fell back, and I could see her face.
Then Caspar was clamouring and scrambling at my knees, and even as I stooped to greet him, he swerved and darted back to the woman on the bridge, then came tearing back to me again. And so kept on, weaving a kind of shuttle of joy to and fro between us while the distance shortened as I walked forward, not hurrying – somehow it did not seem a time for hurrying.
The woman never moved at all, until I came beside her on the bridge. Then she said, ‘Hugh,’ and nothing more.
‘Darklis!’ I said, ‘Darklis! – Darklis! . . .’ and having begun to say her name, did not seem able to stop. But Caspar was scrabbling at my knee and wailing for my attention, and I squatted down to greet him. I could not be making him a pocket of my hands to bury his nose in as I had used to do, so I cupped the one hand I had under his muzzle, and saw as he thrust into it that his muzzle was feathered with white. I gathered him on to my knee while he licked my face from ear to ear, singing like a kettle in his old way.