The Music Lesson (13 page)

It had occurred to me midweek that I had no way to get in touch with Mickey, and having never had any contact with anyone else, I was completely on my own. I worried that he had been injured. I realized that I had no idea if Mickey was supposed to participate in the actual operation in The Hague. If not, then where was he? In
some underground Belfast IRA headquarters? Just up the road in Rosscarbery? I began to get angry. I went for little walks and shivered in the cold and drank too many pots of tea and listened to the BBC on the radio every hour and I tried not to let myself panic that I was simply abandoned here in Ballyroe and would never hear from him again.

Mickey’s people had not anticipated that the Dutch police and Interpol and Downing Street and MI5—whoever the consortium of intergalactic security people is for a case involving a mega art theft of the queen’s property—would keep the theft under wraps. I had no way to know it, but by the time the painting was in Ballyroe, the ransom demand for 10 million pounds in the form of untraceable gold bullion had already been phoned to Buckingham Palace.

Where had the painting been in those eight days between the time it was taken and the time it came to me? Mickey made a passing remark shortly before he vanished from New York about how those houseboats on the Amstel are surprisingly comfortable, which makes me think that it might have been transported to Amsterdam from The Hague, but that might not be the case, either. The great information specialist might also be a disinformation specialist, it occurs to me.

It’s astonishing to look at this painting and not know where it has been, to know that it has traveled through
city streets, on highways, and that it has passed through the world—a world that claims to care very much about this painting—but the world had no knowledge that it was there. Is
The Music Lesson
still beautiful when it is wrapped in bubble wrap in a Samsonite suitcase?

At the beginning of artistic production, Walter Benjamin writes, there were ceremonial objects: “What mattered was their existence, not their being on view.” He goes on to say, “Today, the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden … the work of art in prehistoric times … by the absolute emphasis on its cult value … was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic.”

The Music Lesson
is an instrument of magic. Perhaps now it is also an instrument of change, a talisman, the charm that will force powerful people to pay attention and take decisive action at last.

Those involved in transporting the painting probably would have no particular personal reaction to it. Would they stop to look at it for a moment in a museum? It might not be beautiful to them. Its beauty might lie in its purported worth, or in its provenance. Or maybe its beauty would be in its symbolic value in the eyes of those men who possibly risked their lives to move the briefcase, or the box, or the duffel, or whatever protective shipping material the painting has traveled in all this way.

The little elderly man who brought the painting to
me, for instance, probably had no clue that he was transporting a priceless seventeenth-century painting in the back of his delivery van, property of HRH. But I don’t know if he was an operative or really just a deliveryman. He arrived in the middle of the afternoon, when as many people as possible could see him. He got lost and stopped along the way for directions to Gortbreac Cove. Twice. He played his part a little more thoroughly than he needed to, in fact, standing around looking hopeful until I gave him two pounds for his efforts.

My delivery didn’t look anything like a priceless work of art. It looked like an ordinary gray Samsonite suitcase. Said suitcase, I was careful to mention to Kieran O’Mahoney with calculated dudgeon the following morning, had finally been found by Aer Lingus after all these days missing. Can you believe the airline would pay that fellow fifty pounds just to bring it out to me? It’s a wonder they can keep the planes in the air, et cetera.

I suppose whoever flew it into Cork might have thought it was a cache of weapons, or drugs. I will probably never know very much about how it all worked. I don’t really care. The painting is here, and for these days, it’s mine. It’s my instrument of magic and it has brought Mickey to me and it will bring change for the people of Ireland.

Queen Elizabeth I was so much more interesting than the present queen, whom Mickey mockingly calls
Betty Windsor and nothing else. Though I suppose when I think of the first Elizabeth, I’m really thinking of Glenda Jackson, whom I admire. More people have probably seen Glenda Jackson playing the queen in those
Masterpiece Theatre
productions than ever actually saw the genuine article. Which is more real, then, to us? Whom do we mean when we say Queen Elizabeth?

I wonder if the queen misses her painting. I wonder if she knows it’s gone, or if she’s been kept in the dark. I wonder if she cares about her paintings, about this painting. After all, it hasn’t got dogs in it. I wonder, quite seriously, if B. W. has ever really
looked
at this painting. But maybe the woman deserves more credit than that. If I try, maybe I can imagine her having long, fascinating conversations about it with, oh, I don’t know, Anthony Blunt, before he died. Before he was exposed.

His art writing is quite wonderful, but now, when I read him, I cannot help but consider the context of his having been a Soviet spy all those years. Does it change the way he looked at art? Perhaps not. Does it change the way we read Anthony Blunt? How can it not?

The queen’s face is on millions of coins and millions of stamps. She is reproduced, represented as a work of art, like a classical Greek or Roman head. And yet, this face before me on a tiny painting, this private face with its bemused smile that isn’t quite a smile, this woman with her glorious quality of actualness on the verge of creating
music—she is largely unknown, not imprinted on the average mind in that iconographic sense, not as real.

Perhaps if I were a Brit, I would feel differently about this, but I don’t believe the queen deserves to own
The Music Lesson
. How could she?

Queen Elizabeth I hated the Dutch, calling them “swag-bellied Dutch butter-boxes.” King James I probably hated them, too—his consort, Anne of Denmark, was said by the first Earl of Salisbury to prefer the company of her paintings to living people. But by the seventeenth century, King Charles I and other royals quite liked to sit for portraits by Dutch painters. And of course, let’s not forget the Dutch king of England, William III, aka William of Orange, who was born in The Hague and painted by Van Dyck (the House of Orange still reigns in the Netherlands); who really began the Troubles in 1690 with his victory over his Catholic father-in-law, poor old King James II, at the Battle of the Boyne.

It’s really perfect, when you think of it, that to commemorate the battle, the Brits named a flower sweet William, while the Irish christened a weed stinking Billy.

When George III bought
The Music Lesson
in 1762 as part of a large collection of Dutch paintings, it was attributed to Frans van Mieris. Which is to say that Vermeer came into the royal collection by accident. And there it was scorned, too, until this century. A nineteenth-century
guide to the royal collection—a copy is in the Frick Art Reference Library—described this sublime little painting as “very awkward and tasteless, the figure being too far back.”

Oh, those entitled Brits. Even when they do not value what is good and precious they trample and possess. Not this time. No number of Orangemen marching in their silly sashes every twelfth of July will ever change what the Irish know and feel. And the victory of
The Music Lesson
will be ours.

T
WO DAYS LATER
. Something happened this morning that shouldn’t have happened.

I had been reading since waking quite early, long before the sun rose (which in these short, dark months, it doesn’t do until well after eight o’clock), and now was making toast for a late breakfast, which in the kitchen of the cottage is a complicated process that’s essentially like broiling something. Sometimes I feel as if I’m cooking over a campfire. I don’t mind it, but it takes concentration. The bread has to be turned, and then the second side goes very quickly, especially if it’s a thick slice of Irish brown cake.

I was reading
The Book of Evidence
by John Banville, which I had picked up at the Dublin Airport the morning
I landed. It’s a novel a colleague of mine at the Frick had told me about, and I had been meaning to read it anyway. But having read about two-thirds of it last night and this morning, I had become quite unsettled, before Mary came to the door.
The Book of Evidence
is about a man who has committed a brutal murder in the course of stealing a painting—a Dutch portrait that sounds like a Rembrandt, though it might also be a Hals—with which he is obsessed. It feels like a personal message to me, and it makes me apprehensive.

Mary Carew hallooed me as I was messing around in the kitchen. I had the front door ajar because it was a relatively soft day with a little bit of watery sunlight, and the broiler was a bit smoky because of burning fat that must have splashed out of the pan last night when I roasted the most intensely perfect, brilliantly flavored free-range chicken of my entire life.

I must add here that I had been studying
The Music Lesson
in the early-morning light, and had not put it back into the Samsonite suitcase. I know this doesn’t make sense, but sometimes I have a compulsion to let her have space and air, as if she could breathe, as if a painting could feel, could have claustrophobia. (I’ve taken the glass out of the frame every time I look at the painting, too.) Which is to say I had left the painting out, leaning against the back of a chair in the upstairs middle room.

“Patricia, good morning to you. Are you receiving?
I’ve just brought you some warm scones and a little pot of my bramble jelly,” Mary called out as she put her head around the door. “They’re your brambles from September last, actually, or poor old Denny’s, God rest his soul. The sweetest brambles in Gortbreac grow right here beside your door, you know. Denny was mad for my bramble jelly. He had a sweet tooth, the old todger.” As she came in, she knocked on the door frame with a woolly-gloved knuckle, this formality retroactively legitimizing her intrusion.

I reflexively invited Mary in—I had to, as she was already well inside the door, peering around the place, her admission ticket the knotted plastic carrier bag from O’Mahoney’s shop containing the scones and jam jar that was now outstretched in my direction. I took it from her and thanked her and set the things on the counter and asked her if she would like a cup of tea, and she said she wouldn’t mind, which is a yes, I have learned from experience with Mickey.

Mary removed her ancient waxed jacket, a long, agriculturally aromatic green farmer’s coat that probably once belonged to her dead husband, and hung it on a hook located behind the door, which told me that she has visited here in the cottage on other occasions. She sat down at the table, looking around carefully, while I made sure to scald the pot and measure in the loose tea and pour the water from the whistling kettle after resting
when it goes off the boil, just as I have also learned from Mickey. Mary commented on how unusual it is for a Yank to know how to make a proper cup of tea, and I told her I had an Irish grandfather who taught me (which is actually untrue—Paddy wasn’t much of a tea drinker), and that’s when the toast caught fire.

When smoke fills a kitchen, inevitably, by the time you react, there’s a sense of déjà vu—the smoke you see, you have already seen, but you haven’t noticed it until you do. Now there was gray smoke hanging in the air, thickening by the moment like a sudden fog. I wrapped my hand in a threadbare dish towel and snatched the broiler rack from the oven. There were flames, and heavier smoke billowed out the open oven door. In a matter of seconds, I was able to cross the few steps to the door and fling the wire rack onto the ground outside, where the two flaming chips of charcoal that had been my toast burnt out to embers in a matter of moments.

“Och, Patricia, praise God you’ve got young reflexes,” Mary breathed behind me, fanning the air with
The Book of Evidence
, which had been tented on the counter where I like to have my morning tea and toast. I know it’s odd, but if I’m reading something that’s really exciting—or upsetting—sometimes I read standing up.

“But look, you’ve burnt your pretty hand.”

My left hand had a wide red mark across the palm,
like a branded life line, where the edge of the broiling pan had burned me through the thin weave of the dish towel. As I looked at it dumbly, it began to hurt.

“You’ll want cold water on that, let’s put your hand under the tap straight away,” Mary said, taking me by the elbow and leading me over to the kitchen sink.

I stood at the sink for a few minutes while the cold water gushed over my hand. Mary asked if I had any “plasters,” about, and I didn’t know what she meant. I thought she was proposing to apply some quaint sort of poultice, or a homemade cast. I asked her about that, and she didn’t answer. I thought she was still standing directly behind me—over the rushing sound of the tap water, I didn’t hear her going up the stairs.