Portrait of an Unknown Woman (58 page)

 
          
I was awash with tenderness now. “We’d love to,” I said warmly, knowing that my smile was going to put just that look of bliss on his face. “Truly.”

           
He glowed, and the eyes fixed on mine were smiling. Then he recollected himself, as if our entire conversation had been a happy daydream he’d got caught up in and he was coming back to reality. He looked round, looked up at the sun, stepped back from me, and did a little bobbing bow, as if he were about to move hastily away.

 
          
“But, Master Hans,” I said, catching the meaning behind his movement, not wanting to end this conversation that was bringing back the ease of the old days with such painfully nostalgic force, “won’t you come in and take a glass of something with me? We have so much to catch up on after all this time. There’s so much I want to ask you about what you’ve 
been doing,” and I let my voice trail wistfully away. (Had I always known the flirtatious ways that seemed to be coming so naturally now? I wondered, catching myself.)

 
          
“I should be off,” he said hastily, with embarrassment making him suddenly boorish. He cast a queasy look at my front door. I was almost hurt until it occurred to me that perhaps he didn’t want to see the reality of my married life behind that door, a thought that brought a lump to my throat.

           
“Work,” he went on, staccato. “And I’ve kept you too long.” He was shuffling backward now, squinting up against the sun. “It’s good to see you, Mistress Meg,” he said awkwardly. “Sunday at noon?”

 
          
And before I could answer he’d flipped around and was striding off, planting one muscular leg after another on the flagstones at a speed that wouldn’t have taken much increasing to turn into a run.

 
          
I planned the Sunday visit carefully. I told John I wanted to go to mass with Father at St. Paul’s. I left my husband with Tommy at home. I told Father that John couldn’t join us at church because he was busy with his work. I only told Father about the plan to call in on Master Hans in Maiden Lane once we were shriven and on our way out of the churchyard.

 
          
I didn’t want to deceive John; but I thought Master Hans would be more at ease with just the two of us.

 
          
“Our old friend Hans Holbein!” Father had said, with his new quiet
       
ness, though with every appearance of pleasure. “Now that’s a surprise.”

 
          
He must have known Master Hans had gone from making the portrait of Thomas Elyot, our friend, to painting almost every one of our foes in the Boleyn circle as the fashion for portraiture developed. But he didn’t make any further comment, just walked on humming under his breath in the intense July sunshine. He looked so pale in the fierce light that I remembered Dame Alice’s worries about the pains in his chest and his bad sleep.

 
          
I didn’t dare ask him to his face, though; I knew how he hated to lose his dignity.

 
          
Master Hans wasn’t exactly at ease. He was watching out for us on the street corner.
  
His face lit up when he saw us, though he skittered round me without meeting my eyes before bowing enthusiastically at Father (but, I wondered, was he secretly noticing how Father seemed to have shrunk into himself, getting shorter and stringier and thinner in the face by the week, with gray in his strong black hair?). Master Hans only paused for a minute to bask in the glow of Father’s smile—which was still as powerful and golden and enchanting as ever—before hurrying us into his doorway.

 
          
I thought perhaps he didn’t want to be seen in the street with us. He lived in upstairs rooms at the end of a dingy staircase. There was silence downstairs, and no welcoming smells of cooking.

           
“They’ve gone out,” he said shiftily as he shepherded us up the stairs, “the old man and the boy who do for me. But they’ve left food for us in my rooms.”

 
          
There was a table with wooden platters groaning with bread and cheese and beef and a big jug of ale and a glitter of newly polished pewter, and a cloud of tiny wildflowers on wiry stems in another big jug.

           
Someone in this all-male household had made an effort to please. There was too much food for just three of us. However much Master Hans might wolf down, I was so nervous my appetite had gone completely, and Father, who’d always been abstemious anyway, scarcely ate a thing anymore.

 
          
Then I realized I was the only one who was looking at the food and worrying about the social arrangements.

           
Master Hans was worrying about his picture. “This is what I wanted to show you,” he said urgently, not bothering with politeness and pleasantries, getting his arm under Father’s elbow as we entered the room and drawing him straight to the room’s side wall, where, at this time of day, sunlight slanted through the open window. The painting took up almost all of it: a huge square thing on big wooden boards, bigger than the doorframe, taller than a man, propped up on a bench.

 
          
Father looked at the picture glowing against that dingy wall. It showed two young men in court clothes, standing on either side of a table.

 
          
There was a long pause. I gazed at it too. Technically the painting was even more accomplished than the earlier pictures that I’d seen. But there was something new in it that I didn’t altogether like: less of Master Hans’s old, rich, straightforward simplicity; instead, some more subtle intelligence whispering stories beneath the surface that I could sense were there but couldn’t make out. The composition seemed crowded to me; the center piled with detail; and with a long, mysterious scar at the bottom, sloping sharply upward and to the right.

 
          
But I could see Father liked it. He was entering into the spirit of this game. He was puzzling out the secret stories in the picture. He moved to the far right of it. He squinted back down from there at the sloping scar, moving around until he found exactly the right place from which to view it. And suddenly he grunted with satisfaction.

           
He’d solved the visual puzzle.

           
“I see,” he said to himself, then, to me, “it’s a skull, if you look at it from here”—pause—“and if you look at it from here you can’t see anything much of the rest of the painting; the Frenchmen become shadows on the wall; like Plato’s cave.”

           
We all paused, and I could see come to each of us a wistful memory of Erasmus enjoying his favorite story, about the men in the cave believing the shadows on the wall to be reality, while only the philosopher who gets out of the cave sees the bigger truth.

 
          
Then, stepping back to look again at the painted astronomical instruments on the table, Father turned to Master Hans to say, “It’s about angles, isn’t it? It’s an astronomer’s painting.” Then he stepped back up to the painting to see the skull, stopped squinting downward and started looking upward at the same angle, with his eye following the natural upward diagonal in the portrait, from the hand of one sitter and upward along the sloping red 
slashed-satin arm of the other to . . . Now what was that behind the green Lenten curtain at the end of the upward diagonal? Father moved leftward.

 
          
I shuffled along behind him, drawn despite myself into the game.

 
          
It was a crucifix. In deep shadow. Almost invisible. Almost covered by the veil. As if it were Good Friday and the priest had just begun to twitch back the curtain.

 
          
Father paused again and looked at Master Hans with growing appreciation. “You’ve become an astronomer, Master Hans,” he said, and his voice was as relaxed as if five years hadn’t gone by since he’d last been in a room with the German and as if we weren’t all now in a room with hardly a word spoken between us to explain ourselves.

           
“And”—he gave Master Hans a searching look—“a theologian; and perhaps an astrologer too?”

 
          
Master Hans nodded. Father darted to the middle of the picture. He was eyeing the angle at which an arithmetic book showing a division sum under the German word
dividirt
was held open by a set square; and the very similar angle at which one side of an open hymnal in German was raised from the table by a bundle of four flutes.

 
          
“The same angle?” he said. Master Hans nodded, intent, delighted, watching Father’s quick mind work out answers. “And the same angle as the big lines taking you from the skull to the crucifix—your memento mori?”

 
          
Master Hans nodded again, almost bursting with excitement. They
       
were almost hissing at each other now, lost in their play of minds.

 
          
“What angle is it?”

 
          
“Twenty-seven degrees.”

 
          
“And we’re to think of grief: Lent, and Good Friday, and Christ behind the curtain . . .”

 
          
Father wrapped one crooked arm around his waist, with the hand catching the elbow of his other arm. His second hand was cupping his chin. He was deep in thought.

 
          
Master Hans couldn’t wait. “Twenty-seven degrees was the altitude of the sun this Good Friday, in midafternoon, at the time Christ died,” he blurted. “The skull is a record of the shadows cast by that sun: not just the usual memento mori,” and he flashed a little shared-secret grin at me as he said “memento mori.”

 
          
Father smiled. A new smile. A degree of infectious joy to match Master Hans’s own. “This Good Friday. The Easter weekend when the Lady Anne was proclaimed . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence with the word
queen
, but he’d seen the secret sense of the picture: Master Hans was grieving as he was for the destruction of the common church and the darkness into which life was slipping. He’d portrayed the time of Anne Boleyn’s rise as the end of the civilization we knew.

 
          
“Yes!” Master Hans was saying, and unable to restrain himself any longer, like an errant schoolboy forgiven, or a friend, he stepped forward and clapped his big bear-paw on Father’s shoulder. “I knew you’d see.”

 
          
How had I thought the room dingy? The air was full of doves as we sat down to eat; the ale golden as honey. And suddenly we could talk, as we hadn’t been able to for months. The picture glowed before us, and Father and I went on hunting for elements of the games Master Hans had been playing—an inexhaustible stream of inventiveness. There were big 
thoughts, part of his idea that the times were full of foreboding and that civilized life was being torn apart by religious strife.

           
The marble floor looked like the Westminster Abbey pavement where kings were anointed, a marriage of heaven and earth; and there were magical hexagons at the top and bottom of the picture, a mathematical device signifying the otherworldly, and as Master Hans showed us when we didn’t understand quickly enough, the composition also contained a hidden astrology square of the dark planetary configurations on that day when Father’s fate had been sealed.

           
There were details too that struck me from time to time, making me so fond of Master Hans that once I had to choke on my bread and cheese and lean into my ale to hide my feelings. There was something endearing about the little hints of flattery to the Frenchman who’d commissioned him—Polisy marked as an important place in France on the same globe, say. And I loved the spelling mistakes his German pronunciation led him astray on: “Pritannia” for Brittany and “Baris” for Paris on the terrestrial globe.

 
          
“You were once going to come back and do some final alterations to our portrait, Master Hans,” Father said, stretching contentedly back in his seat, pushing away his wooden board. “Do you remember? But it was a long time ago, and I hardly like to ask you now. You’ve become a busy man. Perhaps you don’t have time . . .”

 
          
We all knew nothing more need be done to the painting. It didn’t need the lutes and chairs Father had once asked for. What he was really talking about was a tentative proposal for more meetings; a new friendship. And Master Hans glowed with the pleasure of it. He loved Father, I could see. He and Father made each other playful; gave each other ideas; w
ere more alive together. And I loved him for bringing to Father—already somehow less shrunken, less gray, with less of an air of being away from this world—this renewed willingness to engage with happiness.