Portrait of an Unknown Woman (23 page)
I drew in a sharp breath, and I wasn’t the only one. The idea of the composition had been a joke one evening long ago. But now it was a vision of lives restored—an invitation to nostalgia. It was almost like seeing our family reunited, with every personality full of remembered beauty, depicted with love. Father fixed his gaze on Margaret’s prayerful little head.
But I found myself drinking in the sight of the absent Cecily, with her neat profile and her kindly face, and then, less easily, turning my eyes to Elizabeth. How watchful her beautiful eyes were, above her perfectly straight nose. How unsmiling her lovely lips. She looked unhappy, I thought, with a shock of realization; as if she didn’t fit into our circle and was withdrawing to the edge. For the first time, it occurred to me that Thomas More’s true daughter might have felt as ill at ease in the More family as I sometimes did—though for different reasons, in her case: because she was better at pretty repartee than rhetoric, and more skilled at the galliard than at her Greek. And, unusually for me, I found myself longing to see her as much as Cecily, their husbands, and the babies to come. I wanted to talk to Elizabeth in a different way, to be more straightforward with her, to admit that I’d sometimes felt more than a twinge of jealousy for her prettiness, to try and bring to life something a little warmer between us.
When I looked around, I could see everyone in the room had been thrown into a reverie by the sudden reappearance of our family, reunited.
I didn’t want to interrupt all their separate trains of thought. I was no painter, but the picture looked finished to me, with a cluster of objects at the back of the painted room and our heads in a semicircle at the front. But I suppose pictures are only really finished when the most important clients are satisfied. I looked to see what Father and the Dame were making of it.
Like two sides of the same coin, they were both looking awkward and uncertain.
“You should,” Alice said, breaking the spell and making me half jump out of my skin, “put some lutes on the shelf at the back of the hall.” Her voice was challenging. I thought the feelings the painting had stirred up in all of us might be embarrassing her. She was trying to break the transcendent mood that had suffused us all and bring us back to earth.
She didn’t like being carried away by emotions. Like Father, perhaps, she was scared of their messiness. “Do Sir Thomas’s musical gifts justice.” She laughed jarringly.
Father looked at her. Then he took his cue from her and burst out laughing too, trying as hard as she had to make light of the magic of the emotion that we’d been feeling. “If you’re going to put musical instruments in,” he added jocularly, “why not put Dame Alice on a chair? She complained about her knees aching all the time she was posing for you.”
We all laughed along. “I’ll change everything so it’s just how you want it,” Master Hans said expansively. I supposed he just might draw in some lutes later, or put the Dame on a chair, but I didn’t think anyone seriously meant him to change anything. The picture was perfect as it was. Father was just feeling vulnerable. We quickly fell silent again and went back to admiring the portrait. I wanted to catch Master Hans’s eye. Yet even he was in his own triumphant dream. He was looking from one lost, thoughtful, haunted face to another, and gently nodding his head. He could see us all remembering love, or wanting to create it. He knew his picture had had the effect he’d wanted.
When Father made his usual apologies and slipped away toward the New Building a little later, I slipped away after him, leaving John in the parlor with the rest of the family without a backward glance. I was suddenly full of courage. Of all nights, I thought, tonight was one time Father couldn’t be too busy to speak to me alone.
“Father . . . ,” I called softly from behind.
He turned in the dusk, in a cloud of cow parsley, surprised to be followed. “Meg?” he said, equally hushed, but accepting; waiting for me to catch up.
There were so many searching questions I’d wanted to ask him for so long, but not dared. I’d imagined dozens of tête-à-têtes between us: interrogations about the man in the western gatehouse and the question of heresy; discussions about politics, Cardinal Wolsey, or the king and his loves, or frank talks about John. But in the end, now we were walking together through the tender gnats and stars, what we talked about—walking a little farther apart than we might need, too far to make it possible to link arms, but cautiously feeling a way toward something approaching intimacy—was genius.
“How lucky we are to be alive, and to have Margaret with us still,” he said reverently, almost in a whisper, as if he were praying. “How lucky we are to have your gift for healing.”
“And John Clement’s,” I murmured back, happily embarrassed by the implied praise and hoping to move him on to the subject I wanted to talk about most, but he didn’t seem to hear.
A few shadowy paces farther on, I tried again. A little uncertainly: “So many of your circle have extraordinary gifts. Didn’t you find Master Hans’s painting astonishing . . .”
But he only sighed at that, as if I’d uncovered the secret discontent in his heart. “I’ll be frank with you, Meg: of course I love excellence, like any gift from God, but I find some of these modern gifts and geniuses disturbing,” he said confidingly, “when they produce work that you feel is assaulting your senses, like a great shout in your ear. Like Hans Holbein’s painting tonight. I looked at it and wondered: is he sharing his vision of the world with his friends—or is he thrusting it down their throats?”
He wasn’t looking at me, but at the hot, dry ground opening up before him. I kept my steps steady. I didn’t want to appear startled. I hadn’t expected him to feel so threatened by a picture that he’d commissioned himself and which, to me, looked so like an act of worship anyway. The secret part of me that distrusted Father and suspected him of hiding a growing taste for cruelty felt a twinge of alarm—a protective sort of unease on behalf of that great German innocent in the parlor, who’d looked so radiantly happy that his picture had touched us as deeply as it had. But the man at my side was speaking so trustingly, as any affectionate father might to a child he loved, that I stifled my worry and only nodded, and made a little noise to encourage him to go on speaking his mind.
And he did. “The ideas I enjoy are those that everyone has a share in; the work that’s accomplished together,” he said, almost to himself. “The cathedral whose loveliness is the work of hundreds of artists whose individual names we don’t need to know; the choral singing whose beauty is that no single voice dominates; the riches brought by a prosperous guild for the benefit of every master and journeyman.” And he sighed again, a little sadly, like rain melting into a sunny garden.
“But, Father, you’re famous for welcoming men of genius. Every man of learning in Europe comes to you. And they don’t come to show off. They come to bring their gifts to you. They come because you’re one of them, and you can appreciate them intelligently. They come to be near your genius,” I said cautiously.
“Oh no,” he said with a modest wave of the hand, a denial of vanity. “There’s no genius in me. I’m just a humble lawyer, a public administrator. And, more and more often now, I feel I’m a man of the past too. I can’t help feeling nostalgic for when people all worked together, when the world was held together by people doing God’s bidding together at God’s direction.”
He turned his face toward me now, for the first time, and I could see it shining with sincerity. “What’s a good way to explain it to you, Meg? When I was a boy, there were wars in the land and we should have felt more uncertain in every way, every day, than we do in this time of peace and plenty,” he said. “But we didn’t. When I walked to school at St. Anthony’s in the morning, with a candle in my hand, London looked like a map of the face of God. Monasteries, nunneries, guilds, churches; it used to be a city where everyone—every man, woman, and child—knew his place and his role. Life was an act of worship and a dance. We knew the weight of a loaf of bread and the dowry of a silk-woman in the Mercery and the fee for a mass for our dead and the length of service of an apprentice in the rope-makers’ guild and the words of the Holy Bible and the proper respect to show to our fathers and our monarchs and the princes of the church; that was all part of what made up our lives, the whole that God had created for us. Even if there was war, we lived at peace with God.”
We were at the door of the New Building now, and he was fiddling at his belt for the key. And I was still nodding and murmuring encouragingly, honored that he’d reveal his mind to me, doing whatever I could to spin this rare moment out, and he was saying: “But now the world seems so full of loud discordant voices, each crying out ‘Listen to me!’ ‘No, me!’ ‘No, me!’ that it sometimes feels like anarchy.
Some of them are genuinely evil—like the pretenders who’ve tried so often to take the throne from our kings, or the renegade priests who want to tear the Holy Church apart. Luther, Tyndale: the men of darkness. But others aren’t evil at all. They’re just young people, brought up with all the choices of our times and not enough reverence for God’s holy order, who think they can ignore it and scream for attention for themselves. Like young Holbein. But in some ways it’s those people—the Holbeins—that make me feel uneasiest of all. Because if you see it as your life’s work to bring back the harmony that’s been lost from the world, to draw men back together into that virtuous bond with one another and God and banish the darkness, it’s easy enough to condemn a man who openly spits anathema at all that—a Luther, say. But what do you do with a Holbein?”
“Oh, Father,” I said helplessly. I understood a little of why he’d find Hans Holbein’s boisterous individuality to be part of the same continuum that led, at its most dangerous, to Martin Luther or William Tyndale. His own instincts, his upbringing, were so different. With sudden tenderness I found myself recalling all his public acts of respect and obedience to Grandfather, even today. The family authoritarian, a tough judge and a man of the old school who favored beatings and hunger and the hard school of life, was always seated first at church and at table. His every barked opinion and desire was deferred to even though now he was wrinkled and infirm. And even the twitch of Grandfather’s stick in his constantly irritated hand had Father looking deferentially his father’s way to bring the old man whatever comfort he might need. I knew Father hadn’t been brought up in the soft way we had. He’d been left to the mercies of a nurse even before his mother died. There’d been no suckets and marchpane for him if his lessons were learned well—just the fear of beatings if they weren’t, that would never have been with the peacock feathers he’d waved so laughingly at us, but with real sticks. The fact that he’d made our childhoods so different from his own, rewarding us so lavishly for developing unexpected gifts and talents, suggested that a part of him had rejected that constricting old order. But he must have had more respect than I’d previously understood beaten into him for the old ways—for things being the same, generation in, generation out, because that was God’s will. And that hidden part of him probably did fear the very fearlessness with which someone like Master Hans loved experimenting with his art.
My glimmer of understanding wasn’t enough to make me agree, though. My hands tightened on my skirt, crimping little pleats into it. “But Master Hans is a good, kind man, Father,” I said, in a sort of weak protest, “and surely he’s using his gift as God intended. You can’t see anything ungodly in that.”
He laughed, but gently, and I felt myself beginning to relax. “Oh, I don’t think he’s ungodly; I’m not saying that; you know I’m a man of moderation, Meg,” he acquiesced.
And when I peeped sideways at his face, and saw not harshness but a soft, almost pleading expression on it, a wave of tenderness for him swept through me. I whispered: “I know.”
“I know Holbein’s a good man as well as a wonderful artist,” Father went on warmly. “I like him. All I mean is that he makes me realize how life has changed since I was young. That sometimes I find his vision too overwhelmingly, selfishly, his own. That Holbein feels life as a freedom that makes me dizzy; the kind of freedom which I fear threatens to destroy the ties that bind us and send us all toppling together into the abyss.”
He unlocked the door and began lighting the candles inside. Behind him I could see Master Hans’s noli-me-tangere picture, sold to Father when he first reached our house, with its ethereal Christ shying away from Mary Magdalene’s fleshy curves, glowing in the dim light. “I don’t worry about all his work,” Father added reassuringly, catching my glance at the religious picture and turning to look up at it himself. “In
this
picture, for instance, it’s easy to see a painter who recognizes his gift is God-given. I love it for its humbleness, for being a work in which the man has harnessed his genius to giving thanks to God. It’s pictures like this that make me recognize Master Hans as a kindred spirit . . .”
