Portrait of an Unknown Woman (68 page)

           
Holbein goggled and gulped, but the older man didn’t wait for an answer, just went on, almost to himself, “I don’t know why, but I woke up this morning thinking about my first love.”

 
          
Holbein couldn’t believe what he was hearing. More was a man of great public grace who never spoke about his private feelings. This couldn’t be happening.

 
          
“I was sixteen . . . just out of university . . . starting at New Hall as a barrister . . . full of hope and promise . . . when I saw her. The most beautiful girl I’d ever imagined, standing opposite me at a dance with the most beautiful smile in the world on her face. She was up from Norfolk to stay with an uncle. It was as if I’d been struck by lightning. I was on fire from head to toe. I’d have married her right there and then if I could.”

 
          
More stopped, as if choosing his words. “Nothing came of it, of course,” he went on. “A snatched kiss or two. A few meetings and letters. Her uncle saw me off as soon as he noticed. He’d brought her to London to be betrothed to someone else. A better man than me: a young neighbor of hers from Norfolk who’d just completed his education. My father was told in no uncertain terms to stop me meeting her. I thought my heart was broken for a while, but I survived. I never saw her again, though of course”—he nodded at the likeness of Elizabeth Dauncey in Holbein’s picture, as if explaining why he was telling the story now—“much later, I named my pretty second daughter after her.”

 
          
He turned his gaze away from the painting and looked straight into Hans Holbein’s eyes. “I was a young fool, of course. I overreacted. I tried to become a monk. But they married me off too, a year later, and I found in the end that I could love my wife perfectly well. And my second wife too, if it comes to that. I had no idea back then of the lasting happiness you can get from your family.” He laughed—softly, but in a way that Holbein felt might easily contain menace. “Nothing ever does come of these storms of emotion, does it? But I was still too much of a child then to know what adults all find out sooner or later: that you only find real contentment by doing the decent thing.”

 
          
There was a sudden shiver of rain against the window. Gratefully, Holbein turned his eyes away and fixed them on the spurts of water running down between the drenched vine leaves. He was trying to will the heat out of his flaming cheeks. With no more success, he was trying to stifle his hot memories of tongues and muscle and breasts and Meg’s body harpooned under his on those guiltily rumpled sheets that he knew to be just behind More’s back, through the bedroom door he’d forgotten to shut. If he didn’t know that More couldn’t possibly know how he’d spent his night, it would be only too easy to think he’d been discovered and was being subtly warned off. He doesn’t know, he told himself. He can’t.

           
But he’d have found it easier to pretend innocence if he hadn’t known More to be at least as good as he was himself at intuiting other people’s secrets.

 
          
“It’s good to be able to open my heart to you, Master Hans,” More said, turning, like Holbein, to watch the rivulets of rain. “I like knowing there are no secrets between us.” Then, politely: “Have you had breakfast?”

 
          
Holbein nodded. He couldn’t speak. However hungry he was, there was no way he was going to walk in on the family’s breakfast with the man making these knowing, playful, half-accusing, guilt-inducing remarks.

 
          
They were making his stomach churn worse than ever. For once, he felt he needed peace and solitude even more than bread and ale.

 
          
More made his last enigmatic comment from the doorway: “Meg’s family is from Norfolk, you know. That was partly why I adopted her. She’s very dear to me.”

 
          
As soon as he was alone, Holbein slumped back down into the window seat. He leaned one red cheek against the glass and stared unseeingly at the raindrops that were beginning again, letting the heat out of his body, and feeling the cold seep in like fear.

 
          
She bobbed up out of the drowning greenery outside and tapped on the steamy window, startling him out of his reverie. She had no cloak on. Her hair was stuck to her head. Her clothes were clinging to her body. But her face was lit up with laughter as she beckoned him outdoors.

 
          
Holbein rushed out into the garden, stopping only to grab his own cloak as he raced for the door.

 
          
He couldn’t believe his happiness. He pulled her under a tree, rejoicing in the yielding softness of her, covering her face with relieved kisses that quickly turned hard and urgent.

 
          
“You’ll get as wet as me,” she whispered, pulling at the cloak he’d still got slung over his arm and laughing teasingly up at him again.

 
          
He’d forgotten the cloak. He laughed, delighted, and pulled it playfully over both their heads. In the rough darkness underneath it, he nuzzled his nose softly against hers. “Meg,” he whispered, with a blissful smile practically splitting his face, staring down at the perfection of the face he’d always loved, as if seeing it for the first time. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

 
          
She didn’t answer, just looked unblinkingly back up at him until he touched her eyelids shut with gentle lips and moved his mouth back to hers and went back to kissing her in earnest.

 
          
When he began to shake it was she who, leaning into him with the whole of one side of her body, as if their flesh was melting together, led him off down a path to a clump of elder trees behind the deserted barn.

 
          
She spread the cloak on the relatively dry ground at their feet and drew him down next to her on it, and clinging to him as though she were drowning, she pulled him on top of her. He looked down at her and opened his mouth as if to speak. He was torn between delicious desires; there was so much he wanted to say to her.

           
But she muttered, urgently, “Not now. Don’t say anything now,” and shut his mouth with her lips.

 
          
As soon as his breathing had returned to something like normal, he propped his head up on one elbow and gazed at her with eyes full of dreams. There was a leaf in her hair. He picked it out. The rain had stopped. The leaves were dripping quietly. The world was at peace.

 
          
“I could stay here all day with you, like this,” he began, unable to think beyond their embrace. He wanted to go on and say “I love you,” but she wouldn’t let him.

 
          
“Tommy might be looking for me. There’s no time,” she said wistfully. Her face set, and she added: “. . . and John will be here before nightfall.”

 
          
That thought seemed to sober her into action. She wriggled out from under him and sat up, brushing herself down, smoothing her skirts back over her legs, rearranging her bodice, self-consciously regaining her poise.

 
          
“I’ll come back and find you again when I’ve seen to Tommy,” she promised. “After dinner. We’ll talk. I promise.”

 
          
“But . . .” he whispered, and felt his mouth puckering, like a great baby’s about to cry. It was just sinking in. “Clement’s coming . . .” he muttered, beginning to understand the great dread filling him. He couldn’t be in the house with that man. Nor could Meg, now she was his.

 
          
“I know. But I can’t think about it yet. I don’t know what to do,” she said, somewhere between briskness and desperation. “Let’s not worry now. We have hours still.”

 
          
“And then?” he couldn’t help blurting, hating himself for nagging at her to pick her wound.

 
          
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” She shook her head, and he wished he could read her mind in her distracted expression. “Whatever happens, we can meet sometimes,” she added, and he thought he heard a note of pleading in her voice now. “In London. I could come to you. You could be my secret. That’s not what I want. You know it’s not. But it’s the best I can think of for now.”

 
          
His first instinct as he got to his feet and pulled her to hers was to angrily refuse the offer; to plead with her instead to come away with him, dissolve her empty marriage, leave her husband, leave her family, leave England, find a new life somewhere else, anywhere else. Anything. He’d come to unravel the More family secrets, not become another secret himself. But there was no point in protesting. He had nothing but daydreams to offer. She’d only say no. And by now a picture of the alternative future she was suggesting was already insinuating itself seductively into his head: a barefoot and tousle-headed Meg getting up from the bed in his rooms in Maiden Lane and padding toward the window to look at whatever was on his easel and kiss him and whisper compliments in his ear. It would be a future of brief moments of happiness in the darkness. But even that would be better than the utter darkness of life without her.

 
          
They turned back home, carefully not touching. Holbein drew what comfort he could from the way her footsteps slowed as the house came closer. He didn’t want to go inside either.

 
          
“Do you remember your first family?” he asked, trying to stretch out the parting, hoping to elicit a confidence and have a new kind of intimacy to savor when he was alone again. “The parents from Norfolk?”

 
          
She stopped and looked curiously round at him. “Not really,” she said cautiously. “Only my father, a little. Nothing about my mother. She died when I was born. Why do you ask?”

 
          
So Holbein found himself telling her about More’s visit to his room that morning, spinning out his story to keep her hovering on the path beside him.

 
          
“He said he’d come to see the picture again. But he hardly looked at it before he started talking about love. He said he’d once fallen in love with a girl from Norfolk who was betrothed to someone else. He was so insistent that love is dangerous that I almost began to think he must somehow have guessed about us.”

 
          
He laughed, hoping she’d reassure him all was well. But she’d gone very still.

 
          
“He couldn’t have guessed,” Holbein said uneasily. “Could he?”

 
          
But she was thinking a private thought that she wasn’t going to share with him. Her answer was too oblique to fathom. “In this family, Master Hans,” she said, with a strange grin, “the hardest thing is just working out how many more secrets might be waiting to come to the surface.”

 
          
He felt the quick squeeze of her hand on his.

           
“Thank you,” she said inexplicably. And then she was gone, flying up the path away from him, leaving him standing, staring after her with his mouth open in astonishment.

 
          
“Father?” I whispered into the thick chapel air. It was so dark that all I could see at first was the blue-robed Virgin rearing up in front of me. But he was kneeling there. He turned round and saw me. I’d never dared interrupt him at his fierce, solitary prayers. I didn’t know whether he’d be angry. But as soon as he saw me he started scrambling stiffly to his feet, as if he’d been waiting to be interrupted.

 
          
I couldn’t wait. Before he’d managed to get his back straight, the words were out of my mouth: the only words that made sense of everything. “Are you my real father?”

 
          
I could hardly see for tears. I could feel the wet trails on his cheeks too. After a lifetime of scarcely touching, we were suddenly clinging to each other in front of the Blessed Mary in a confused, swaying, weeping, radiant embrace.

 
          
My mind was racing as fast as my feet had been. The extra piece fitted so well into the puzzle that Father had always been. It filled the space between the detached irony with which Father liked to be seen treating his family and the world and the furious punishments he inflicted on himself and others in the name of God. He’d had his own secret all along. He’d flung himself into a love he hadn’t been able to honor. He’d got a girl from Norfolk pregnant and wanted to marry her, but she’d been taken away from him. And he’d never forgiven himself; never quite had the courage to believe in love again.