Reaching the Dutch capital late that Friday afternoon, I followed the signs for the Museumplein and Paulus Potter Straat. The Hotel Kok, where our seminar group had stayed three years before on an art-history study trip, was somewhere nearby. It was a reasonable place much frequented by American students doing Europe on five dollars a day, but would be no good when Alice arrived. It was organized like a youth hostel with the sexes in different dormitories.
Her boat train was due some time after one o’clock the following afternoon, and I spent much of the next twenty-four hours dreaming in various squares of cream-coloured gravel, squares edged with trees, parked cars, and, beyond, the street doors to small businesses, shop fronts, and bars—above them the windows of higgledy-piggledy apartment houses. Sitting down on a public bench, taking out one of my reading list paperbacks, opening the volume at the book-marked page, I would lose my place and drift off into memories of that first study trip we had made through the Low Countries.
Dr. Green had made no attempt to disguise the fact that he had his favourites, and he didn’t get on well with the girls in the party, especially Isabel. There were outbreaks of gossip and backbiting as we travelled to Antwerp, Brussels, then Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague, Delft and Rotterdam. At Antwerp we stayed in the Seemanshuis and one evening, for a breath of air, I wandered off alone in the opposite direction from the town centre, Rubens’ house, the churches and galleries, to the docks on the Scheldt, where the lights of coasters and fishing smacks rocked in their rigging. After a while I went into a bar. It was a very modest place with just a few wooden tables and chairs. Two men were playing with a red and yellow plastic cigarette dispenser. The thing would stick every time they tried to use it; the men’s stubborn determination, the attention they were devoting to the thing, seemed only to humiliate them all the more. The cheap little object was like a Christmas present that breaks the first time you play with it—and however much you’re told it’s the thought that counts, something has been irreparably stolen from the thought.
That same night in a student bar our group played Dr. Green’s guessing game: which famous reproductions did we each have pinned to our bedroom walls? Others were caught out with Breughel’s Icarus, his Tower of Babel, Piero della Francesca’s Nativity, Vermeer’s View of Delft and such like, but all the paintings attributed to me were met with a definite shake of the head.
Then Dr. Green exclaimed: ‘I bet he has his own daubs up on the walls!’
My blush at the acuteness of the remark made it clear our lecturer had guessed correctly.
‘How pretentious of you!’ Isabel said.
‘Why so?’
‘Because it’s your favourite word … and you’re always using it about other people.’
‘Which is rather pretentious in itself,’ Dr. Green added for good measure.
Sitting alone in one of those tree-lined squares, book open on my lap, another memory from those three years before came back, a memory of Isabel curled on the deck of the ferry home to Hull. She was petite, with auburn hair cut just to shoulder length, parted in the middle, a tiny upturned nose, aquamarine eyes, and a vulnerable smile—surprisingly vulnerable considering her subsequent career as a child psychotherapist. The ship’s steel decking was painted a dark emerald green; Isabel had become horridly seasick and her face turned a green much paler than that of the deck. Wearing a short grey coat, and pair of jeans, she was lying in a foetal position on the floor with a strong wind blowing and the white wake of the ferry widening behind us, seagulls scurrying above the lifting stern. It was the two shades of green brought her back. Isabel had matched her surroundings—as if they themselves had made her ill. Dr. Green stood fussing over her, wondering was she all right or should he call a steward?
I spent that restless night of high anticipation at the Hotel Kok, paid my bill the next morning and dawdled the time away exploring the Nieuwe Herrengracht’s environs, the Plantage, and Waterlooplein—arriving only too early at Amsterdam’s central railway station. In its buffet, a Borussia Dortmund fan wanted to discuss his favourite soccer teams in German. Escaping from that fix once our minimum of common language was exhausted, I waited impatiently by the timetable boards; then there was Alice stepping off her train, looking around, and now walking towards me.
‘Great to see you,’ I said, to acknowledge the fond feeling inside.
‘Great to be here,’ she replied, and kissed me Euro-style.
Outside, in clear sunlight, her firm features and usually animated mouth seemed drawn, her cheeks slightly puffy from lack of sleep. She put her travelling bag down and ran both hands through the thick hennaed hair, drawing it tight as she stretched, her neck curved back and eyes squeezed shut. She had freshly plucked her eyebrows.
‘Something to eat?’ I asked.
‘Did you find a place to stay?’ she came back, recomposing her features and granting me a smile. ‘I’d very much like to wash off that journey.’
Emerging from Amsterdam’s station, I had to admit that I hadn’t. But we immediately noticed a sign for the Tourist Information kiosk. It was on a traffic island, with the belongings of youth on the move in heaps outside. At the kiosk we were sold a map and handed a list of places to stay, the cheaper ones ringed in biro. Most were very near, towards the city centre. Heading in that direction, beside a canal with hump-backed cobbled bridges, we found ourselves entering the sex-industry quarter.
‘Hmm, pretty shabby,’ she said.
We found the address of the first recommended hotel and stepped up into its entrance hall. A youngish-looking man wearing a lumberjack shirt was at work with a broom on the floor of a dining area. It was a cheerfully decorated place, making no allusions to the main commercial interests of the district.
‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ I muttered, turning to the man with the broom, hoping he understood English.
‘Do you have a room for two?’
The man was glumly nodding his head.
‘May we look at it?’
The room, in deep shadow, was on the third floor, at a level with the upper part of a Dutch Calvinist church tower visible from its window; it seemed a glimpse of the street before the sex trade took over. The double bed was low. Alice sat down on a corner, testing its firmness, not liking to sleep on something too soft. She pronounced the bed comfortable enough. The room’s one light bulb had no shade. It hung from the high cracked ceiling, pendulous on its twisted cord. A sink was set into the wall behind the door. But it would do till we found something better.
‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, after we’d both washed and gone down, ‘what did you mean by “beggars can’t be choosers”.’
We were crossing the wide street called Rokin, a main thoroughfare lined with elaborately dressed windows of department stores.
‘I didn’t realize how expensive it was here. It’s not that I’m short of money or anything. Just have to be careful …’
‘Puts a bit of a dampener on things,’ is all she said.
After that Saturday spent going round the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh and Stedelijk Museums, then Rembrandt’s House, we were making our way back from a Chinese meal, walking under trees alongside a narrow canal that led up towards the station. With nightfall, the streets round our hotel took on their especially business weekend character. And there it was, a thing I’d never seen before: as if the shops were all staying open very late, as if the women clad in scanty baby-doll nightwear were modeling unusually frilly bedroom suites in a furniture store window. Only it was they themselves, those girls sitting with strange patience on display, set faces bathed in a pinkish red light, who were the emporias’ merchandise.
The dark pavements under the ground floor windows of those brothels, sex shops, strip and peep shows were crammed with jostling people: single boys, couples, gaggles of international executives. Here were men accompanied by girls who might have just encountered them. Outside the clip joints were the set frowns of bouncers and fixed grins of living invitations to step inside and see what was at that moment being revealed and up for grabs.
‘Dope, coke, acid, horse, speed?’ said a voice from a doorway. She shook her head definitively.
‘No, man?’ the voice called.
Flexing her knees up ahead, an Asian girl was making her play for passing trade. Perhaps she’d been selling too hard, for a man close by, instead of walking on, turned and started to abuse her. The girl herself hurled an insult at the man and spun contemptuously away.
‘I missed a day last week,’ Alice said. ‘Do you think, to be on the safe side, we could use a contraceptive?’
There was a shop up ahead on the left. Racks of magazines in cellophane wrappings promised to reveal all you could conceivably do with a body of either sex, or both, so long as you paid, pulled off the wrappers, and cracked the spine. There were varieties of aids in red and black, leather, rubber, and nylon, electrical devices for satisfying desires, and pink inflatable models. The shop had a vast range of condoms. Some were bright-coloured, crinkly and crenellated. The cool summer night air and a faint scent of canal water greeted me as she took my arm outside the door.
What had the young man in a tie-dyed T-shirt said to the other in a black and chrome wheelchair? Provoked somehow, the man with no more than stumps of legs suddenly launched himself from his mobile seat. He was yelling and throwing punches at the groin of the one in the T-shirt. Astonished by this violent assault against such odds, the young man backed quickly away. He was fending off the other, who came up to his waist, and trying to appease, or at least to stop him. Yet at great speed, on hands and stumps, the infuriated disabled pursued the able, taunting and attacking him with murderous intent.
‘Christ,’ she said, ‘do you think he’s got a knife?’
We crossed the street and quickened our pace to pass by on the other side. There in that zone of splayed or interlocking legs, some failed deal, betrayal, or affront must have infuriated the still young, but badly disabled man.
Relieved to be back in our bare room, she drew the curtains for us. Even so, there was quite enough illumination from the street to make the light bulb on its twisted cord unnecessary. Over by the basin, preparing herself for bed, she took off her clothes, folding them neatly in the wardrobe to the left of the sink. As she did so, I was scanning across her suntanned back, the vertebrae at the nape of her neck, and pale stripe where her bikini strap went. I was sitting at the side of the bed, naked too, leaning over to place one condom in its shiny blue packet under a pillow. The quiet of the room was perpetually invaded by voices of traffickers and punters from the street below.
The Dutch headmaster and his wife, in bathing costumes, had scampered off towards the waves—running in a vigorous diagonal, glancing to each other as they approached the sea. They were a well-matched pair, both about six feet tall, equally athletic, fair hair ruffled by a stiff offshore breeze. We were standing in a defile between sword-blades of sand dune grass, fully clothed. I was stooping to untie my laces as Alice took off her sandals. We were both some inches shorter than the Dutch couple, and differently built—a skeletal long distance runner courting his bonny Scottish lassie. Nor did our hosts hesitate as the breakers whitened round their waists, but struck out energetically into deeper water.
Maarten Verhagen and his wife Nina would drive up to Bergen-aan-Zee most Sundays from May down through September. They were only too happy to enjoy their regular swimming party with the two young English people that Maarten had found hitching on the road outside Amsterdam. We had been standing on the grass verge of a dual carriageway leading inland to the north. Almost the first car to come up was Maarten’s.
It was one of the headmaster’s ways of honouring his father’s memory. His dad had been a policeman in the Dutch capital all his working life. It was his practice to be a Good Samaritan for holidaymakers without funds or a place to sleep. Fortunately, Nina was as equally well disposed to strangers.
No sooner had he swung his light blue 2CV back onto the road than Maarten asked where we were heading.
‘Forests and hills,’ said Alice from the back. ‘We thought it would be good to find a different Holland.’
At breakfast that same morning, the ordinary actions of pouring her a coffee or passing a slice of bread began to restore a familiarity. After making love neither of us so much as spoke a word, but fondly kissed and then fell asleep in each other’s arms. Sitting down to eat at that table covered with a green polka-dot cloth, I was somehow not quite able to look her in the eye—noticing, instead, a small hole in the short sleeve of her white lace-trimmed blouse.
‘Jesus, let’s get out of here,’ she’d said.
‘Why? What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, don’t be so coy. You know as well as I do it feels all wrong. Let’s go out into the countryside somewhere, where things will be cheaper anyway.’
‘What about Ann Frank’s House and the Flea Market?’
‘Another time.’
‘Only place I know is Arnhem …’
‘Fine,’ she said, ‘that’s fine.’
‘Perhaps we’ll try to get to Arnhem,’ she called from the back seat of Maarten’s brand new 2CV.
‘It is a good idea,’ Maarten confirmed.
He looked about thirty, with straight hair parted in the centre and swept behind the ears; he spoke with a faint American accent.
‘Please will you come to have lunch at our place?’
Alice leaned forward and prodded me in the side.
‘Thank you, we’d love to,’ I said.
When we arrived, Nina and two of their friends were drinking coffee in the tiny back garden of their maisonette. Whispering in English might have seemed rude, so we sat silently sipping from the cups offered us. Despite the luck of being taken up into the local society, I couldn’t help feeling a pang at being separated from our intimate solitude. There were so few days in which things could go right. It was just after eleven o’clock when Jan and Lieke rose from their deckchairs and said goodbye in perfect English. Maarten then offered to show us the sights while his wife prepared a simple lunch. Nina—whose other language turned out to be French—was making a suggestion to her husband.
‘Yes, good,’ said Maarten. ‘Our friend Jan is driving towards Arnhem tomorrow morning. We would like you to stay for dinner and spend the night here. This afternoon we will go swimming. If you will stay, I shall telephone Jan and ask him to come here tomorrow.’
‘You’re both so very kind,’ Alice replied.
Maarten led us back through the open-plan living room, neat and sparse, with its Turkish rug and modernistic furniture. The 2CV stood parked in its bay beside a small grass patch with a few flowers growing outside.
‘I will show you Volendam—and Edam where our famous cheese is made,’ he said.
Maarten drove through the outskirts of Purmerend, the Verhagen’s dormitory town. We were motoring along a straight, tree-lined road, tall narrow trunks rising high into the air. It was just like that famous Hobbema landscape. An enormous grassy bank rose up to the left.
‘You would like to see the Ijselmeer?’
Maarten pulled onto the roadside and stopped the car. We all struggled up the steep green slope. At the summit, brilliant blue water stretched as far as you could see. The strong sunlight of that Sunday in early September glittered across tiny wavelets to the water’s edge a few feet beneath us. There were thick-wool sheep sheltering in the shade of trees and enjoying the wind of that choppy expanse of lake, down by the waterline. In every direction, white sails fluttered and billowed. Spinnakers filled like maternity dresses. Cleats and halyards tinkled. Booms swung with the tillers’ motions. Pennants of every colour flapped at mastheads. Yellow and orange lifejackets leaned over sides, or ducked and bobbed as the yachts changed direction, stretching onward and onward as if to infinity.
Maarten beamed with pride. The water and sails were completely hidden from the road—as if this man-made lake created to express self-esteem and love had been fearfully concealed from the everyday world of windmills, tilled land, grazing cows, and polder wrested from the
sea …
A cold wind was blowing at Volendam. We stepped out to look around, but contented ourselves with staring briefly across the turbulent waters. Maarten proposed trying some rollmops, so we divided one between us, then scurried back to his buffeted blue car.
Maarten was explaining how the land had been wrested from the sea, earth drained and made fertile. He described how the new republic used to protect itself against invasion in the seventeenth century by breaking the dykes, and restoring the ground once each threat passed. We were gazing out across the carefully tended, irrigated fields, the natural and the human seeming to collaborate so intimately, white sails gliding through the landscape—for the water they sailed on was concealed behind earthworks.
‘What subjects do you teach?’ Alice asked.
‘In my school there are only five teachers and we all teach every subject.’
‘That must be difficult.’
‘No,’ Maarten replied, ‘the children are very young and we are telling them the simplest things.’
‘How old are the pupils?’
‘They are from four to seven years,’ he said. ‘Would you like to see my school?’
‘Yes, please, if it’s possible,’ she was saying.
‘Of course it is possible, I am the headmaster.’
He drove quickly back between the flat fields of black and white cows and white sails. Maarten, being a headmaster, must be older than he looked, I thought. His car was once more approaching Purmerend.
‘Our town is a new development,’ he continued. ‘It has been built because it is so difficult to find a place to live in Amsterdam. There are many young couples like ourselves and you see there are many children in our town, and they come, all of them, to my school.’
The car turned in through open gates and came to a halt on a small tarmac apron before the single storey brick building. Maarten unlocked the door and stepped inside. It was an infant school like any other, yet being his guests we couldn’t but see it differently, presented through the calm, enthusiastic narration of our host.
‘Do you have problems with discipline?’
‘Oh no,’ Maarten replied, ‘and if there are some problems of behaviour we always ask the parents of our pupil to come and speak with us at the school.’
‘Do you ever use corporal punishment?’
‘No, never, in Holland, is it permitted. We have a rule never to touch the pupils. It is also best not to be alone with the pupil if you criticize them. I always leave the class door open.’
We followed the headmaster into one of his schoolrooms, its walls decorated with the children’s paintings of simplified houses and trees, one with a big black sun in the sky. And this would be the mummy and daddy with tube-like bodies, thin stick arms and legs, the hands and feet like bunches of bananas, enormous heads and large, expressively misshapen features—one with each tooth careful picked out in a smile. Here again were the images of love and fear, as if from a COBRA exhibition; so the land flourished and the sea was kept at bay behind walls; these children were themselves the blossom of such needs.
But why did the Verhagens have no kids? Perhaps they were waiting till they could afford it, or maybe they just couldn’t. Yet there seemed no such sadness between them. They were still young. There was plenty of time for them still too. It was not, of course, a thing to ask, so I let the thought slip from my mind.
In the dunes at Bergen-aan-Zee, we remained a moment still, watching Maarten and Nina’s heads bobbing up and down in the sea. The shoreline stretched away in a flat arc before us. To the right of the defile where we stood, sand crested into hillocks topped with coarse pale grass. These sloped down shallowly almost to the distant sea’s edge. A ramshackle booth was selling ice creams.
‘Want one?’ she asked, fishing in her purse for some coins.
Choices in one hand, footwear in the other, we set off into the streams and pools of the tide run and wide curving beach ahead. The waves came foaming over wrinkles in the harder sand, then the water would halt and pause, before, as though reluctantly, being drawn back into the undertow, leaving tiny burdens of sand, pebbles, or bladder wrack behind. Gentle sucking noises rose from our left and right feet in turn. Alice’s white cotton trousers, rolled up below the knees, flapped against the goose pimples of her calves as she strolled along.
Perhaps it was the relaxation and calm of that moment’s wind-refreshed peace. We had found such contentment and generosity by chance, and now life seemed to slope easefully away like the shoreline itself. While she walked, Alice’s feet dug up tiny granules of the sand that stuck between her toes and on her bright red varnished nails. White frills of foam slid forward up the beach in intersecting flounces. Then don’t ask me how but I let the baseball boots slip from my fingers. They dropped directly into the tide and began to fill with water. I bent down to snatch them from the sea before the socks stuffed inside were completely wet through and, as I did so, the remains of the ice cream toppled off the end of its cone, hitting the beach, and making what looked like the last traces of a sand castle washed away by waves.
‘Oh you silly thing,’ she said, as I blushed and bit into the cone.
The Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller was separated from heath-land and pine forest by rows of specially planted trees. The Dutch bikes we had hired didn’t have brakes on the handlebars. To stop or slow down you had to press backwards on the pedals. It wasn’t easy to get used to the idea. Trying to squeeze the nonexistent brakes on the handlebars, there had been one or two unnerving moments in traffic through the suburbs of Arnhem as we rode out the afternoon before. Dropped off at a crossroads by Maarten and Nina’s friend Jan, we got ourselves stranded with hardly any traffic somewhere near Nijmegen, and after a while decided to give up and take the bus for Arnhem. At the tourist office in the terminus, there was a poster advertising a modern art exhibition, so we decided on the spot to hire bikes as recommended and ride out to see for ourselves. First of all, though, we headed for the banks of the Rhine to take a look at the town’s famous bridge-too-far.
As a plaque informed us, we had reached the site of the battle thirty-one years minus a few weeks after Montgomery’s notorious error of judgment. In the shadow of the bridge that had replaced its fought-over span, bombed soon after the failed attack, we ate a picnic lunch of bread and sliced sausage meats from a nearby delicatessen, and studied the free tourist map.
There, on the riverbank, was the last time that Alice and I ever spoke of you. I know I was trying to keep you out of my mind, trying to concentrate upon the present so as not to risk spoiling it with the ghost of a comparison, a stab of guilt or remorse. But as she reiterated, and with again what appeared my best interests in mind, she really didn’t believe you were the right person for me: too much the would-be manager, sentimental, materialistic … as she more or less spelled out. Yet although I could see bits of your character and behaviour in lights such as these, her portrait didn’t exactly coincide with that of the girl graduate caught up inside me forever.
‘Oh, I don’t know …’ I said.
‘No, I think you do,’ she replied.
The broad Rhine was flowing on past us, sunlight glinting across its waves, a laden barge coming up under the bridge. Moments such as these were what I had worked all those months at the National to experience.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’
She gave me an unconvinced, quizzical look, and I tried to smile it away. Doubtless, she’d meant it for my own good. As I say, she had woken up in New York; now she wanted me to wake up too. And of course it’s what I was trying to do, but there beside the water’s glitter, I must have dozed off for a moment. Next thing I knew, she was giving my arm a gentle shake, suggesting, as I opened my eyes, that time was getting on and, if we were going to go and see that art gallery, we ought to set off and find ourselves a place to stay.
So, back on our brakeless bikes through Arnhem’s scarifying traffic, we headed towards the forests. Reaching the tiny village of Otterlo as darkness was falling, we found there were only a couple of private guesthouses recommended in the brochure, and freewheeled around its few streets to take a look. In the vestibule of what seemed the most homely, she suggested we stay for a couple of nights.
It was on a bright Tuesday morning, after the usual breakfast, when we set off into the Hoge Veluwe national park to find that art gallery. Gliding along avenues through forests of firs, she was following the signs along a road called the Houtkampweg. I was pursuing her flurried hair and broad back in the wind-ruffled pale yellow vest far lighter than her tan.
Suddenly we were approaching a deep glade within the trees. Expanses of plate-glass shone with reflections of the sky. White clouds were breezing across each segment formed by the grid of concrete beams. Inside, the rooms gave one onto another in a procession of plain white walls. There were few other visitors moving round those spaces, figurative sculptures moving on armatures fixed to a rail above each invaluable item, before which they steadily paused.
The first piece we stopped at was called Bride (1893). I leaned forward and read that it was by Jan Thorn Prikker.
‘Not exactly a household name,’ I said.
‘One to conjure with,’ she came back.
Next to its art nouveau swirls there hung a greenish-yellow painting by Odilon Redon, The Cyclops (1898-1900), showing the head and shoulders of Polyphemus gazing lovingly and one wide-eyed into a glade where a naked Galatea lay sleeping.
‘Creepy,’ she muttered, and moved quickly on.
Beyond the numerous works by Belgian pointillists, whom in those days I didn’t have time for, were three canvases by Juan Gris hanging in a row: Glass and Bottles of 1912 was clumsy in its handling, the paint a thickly applied impasto, its transitions stiff or blurred, the faint traces of lime green and pink failing to transform a dull bluish-grey tonality. Next to it was Playing Cards and Siphon, painted on panel in 1916. Landscape-format, the composition was formed as an oval with the area beyond that shape painted black, a black also appearing in the oval forming what looked like a set of intersecting shadows. There you could read most of Le Journal and pick out a cup, a glass, paper, the playing cards, a siphon and the table on which they rested. The intersecting parts of its grey oval, abutting crisply delineated representations and abstract shapes on the black rectangular support were no longer inventories of objects but a single whole composed of passages, outlines, and aspects. The third, Siphon and Fruit Dish, completed four years later, had a mellower and more wavering design, its moss green and turquoise patches contrasted with the overlapping areas of black and white.
‘Lovely textures,’ she said, in response to an appreciative humming sound, before moving on to admire the polished flanks of a torso by Brancusi.
‘Isn’t it sensuous?’ she exclaimed.
Now she was moving on to the gallery’s classic Mondrians—the paint of their matt white, red, blue, or yellow rectangles cracked in places and brushed with a dusty patina. She found them rather disappointing. We both preferred the earlier Composition 10: Ocean and Pier (1915) where the horizontal and vertical lines in black on a white ground appeared to shimmer like the waves at Bergen-aan-Zee.
‘Practically Op art already,’ she said.
Then there was a Still Life with Cow’s Skull (1929) by another Dutch artist called Charley Toorop—the dark shadows and sharply delineated objects reminiscent of a Georgia O’Keefe. Turning to mention something about her Girl Friday job with Will, the photographer chap, I found her nowhere to be seen.
‘What do you think of this?’ asked her voice, disembodied and echoing in the silent spaces beyond a further white wall. Across the room and round a corner in shadow, a larger picture was displayed.
‘Nudes in the Forest (1909-1910): by Léger … never have guessed it was one of his.’
‘Early work,’ she whispered.
There were some whitish-grey tubes on the left, representing the trunks of trees, looking like lampposts after a car’s ploughed into them. The red-brown striped spatulas would have to be hands. Various lumps and blocks appeared in the foreground, and one figure had arms raised high above his head, the hands together as if chopping wood. Other sections of body, looking like rusty spare parts for the Tin Man, were interspersed with muted green domes that must be forest foliage.
‘Isn’t it meant to be a study of volumes?’ she said. ‘I think he said the picture was “a battlefield of volumes”?’
‘Didn’t know you were a Léger fan.’
‘Lots of things you don’t know about me,’ she said, murmuring out of reverence for the surroundings. ‘Anyway, I’m not exactly what you’d call a fan.’
‘Certainly a bit of a tussle … he’s obviously been wrestling with it here.’
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ she said, stepping up closer to study the pentimenti.
Next to it was The Typographer (1919) by Léger too, his name signed in printed capitals—bluish-grey ovoids, red shapes like containers, some bits of lettering, and a fragment of the typographer’s hand.
‘Have to say I prefer that oval Gris back there …’
‘Le jour de Léger est arrivée peut’être!’ she announced with an air of mysterious knowledge.
Out in the sculpture garden, mobiles were being propelled by trickling water. Maternal forms interlocked on humps of lawn. Couples were strolling among them, us leading and following each other into the sunshine. Blemishes of green light tinted wall surfaces; a fuller green of the trees outside impinged through glass. Here were flat squares of nature like a triptych whose panels coincide across the frame. Nearing the garden’s entrance, we paused by the architect’s drawings of the gallery itself. Only a few token trees appeared in his impression.
‘To see it like that you would have to cut down all these trees,’ she said.
‘No, it’s not at all faithful.’
After finishing off our picnic of rolls and salami this time, semi-reclined there among the Smiths and Caros, we had both settled down to some writing: Alice on a fan of postcards from the museum shop, me in a notebook, bought specially for that far-off September. After scribbling a few memoranda about the art works I had chanced to see, thanks to this bit of good fortune, I sat watching the motions of her hand and forearm, fingers delicately pushing and pulling the pen nib, then absently reading what was written. She was describing the coincidence of meeting a couple from Brooklyn Heights on the steps outside the Van Gogh Museum. They were leaving for the States the following day, so she’d barely enough time to catch up on their news. Then she put in a bit about how Rembrandt’s house was rather empty of paintings to admire. Her handwriting was tiny, quite the opposite of yours, and she’d practically filled up the space left below the address. Soon she would have to turn it and write up the side. The card was to Isabel.
A crackle of automatic rifle fire reached the sculpture garden. The forest of Arnhem was a military training area, and the modern art museum had been built within a mock-battleground, encircled by gunnery ranges and tank terrain. We were relaxing in the heavily defended art area, surrounded by places in which it would be dangerous to stray. Soldiers with twigs in their hats and donned gas masks would be lumbering somewhere near with their heavy machine guns. Puffy white clouds were in convoy above them, taking their own route towards where, speckled with sunlight and peaceful, we were lying. Arm in arm, between the mobiles a few yards away, a teenage couple came strolling by.
‘Couldn’t possibly be English,’ she said.
But her words seemed to echo far too loudly in the silence of that sculpture garden’s calm. For their part, the young Dutch couple glanced over at the pair of us, but, evidently not that interested in hyperrealism, they immediately decided we weren’t worth the trouble.
The grass around was speckled with coins of light printed out by the colander of foliage above. We too were covered in the spots of light, as if like Danae in her shower of gold. Through the leaves, across the brilliant sky, solitary clouds in strung-out procession were moving almost imperceptibly. Resting in the grass beside her, absentmindedly watching them, I imagined those clouds as thought balloons.
Not far away, behind coverts and bluffs on the shallow horizon, the far noises of battle simulation continued, excursions and alarums being played out in the distance: the white square defended against the red.
Alice let out a sigh, then closed her eyes and allowed her head to rest on the bank of grass, enjoying the sunlight on her neck and face.
‘So what are we doing here?’ she asked, pushing the short sleeves of her white blouse up to the shoulders.
Falling in love—is what I didn’t say.
We spent that Wednesday hitchhiking and by evening had arrived at a place called ’s-Hertogenbosch in North Brabant, a long way from the tourist routes. It stood at a crossroads: one led back towards Amsterdam, the other in the direction of Brussels. We had talked through our plans in a roadside hotel lobby late that same morning. The barmaid was skimming layer after layer of watery foam from an overflowing beer glass. With each repeated gesture, she seemed to be bringing our promise-filled excursion to what felt like an unpredictably premature end.
The recommended hotel in the town was a place used by lorry drivers and commercial travellers. We ate a meal in the nominated café, where a discount could be obtained on the bill. Alice spent most of the time watching sparse traffic interrupt the blankness of the street outside.
‘What will you do?’ I asked.
‘Have a few more days in Amsterdam,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of art still to see.’
We went to bed while it was still early, and attempted to make love slowly, as if piling on the agony of the separation to come; then, curling up together, I tried to go to sleep. Though our caresses on the night before parting might have seemed a vain attempt to re-join two people almost rehearsing their goodbyes, there was nothing to do but try. All that day she had said nothing about my imminent journey into Italy, the journey she would not be making, however much I might have wanted her with me in that other life. Lying awake with the scent of freshly washed hair and the faint note of her breathing, deciding, in so far as it would be up to me, that she would have to be my future, I found myself reliving the night before.
In the dark of the spacious double bedroom at Oterloo, behind drawn curtains, in each other’s arms, we had formed two other areas of dark. Making love with the light off increased the sensation of touching, and though sensing still some intimately known dimensions, still I couldn’t be sure about where each of us ended and began. Glimpses of her features, a shoulder blade or breast, an ear, or a stretch of neck would promise continuity. It was so hard to make out her facial expressions. Kissing with eyes open could seem such bad manners. But how would I meet her gaze and smile? Energetic, passionate, and yet a little too rushed: that’s what our nights together had felt like to me. Overwhelming desire rearranged the features, our faces were so close to each other that her eyes moved into the bridge of the nose, they became so enlarged that the forehead shrank to the hairline. With our expressively misshapen features, confused images of love and fear, we were turning into those paintings by the pupils at Marten’s school. Hanging upon each other’s silence, moving as best we knew how: it made an undulating landscape with sudden and piercing surprises of perspective, vulnerable areas and delicate spots our hands could stray dangerously over. On her back the sunburnt skin still diaphanously peeled.
‘Be careful,’ she whispered. ‘It’s really tender.’
Then there was no wind at all. The fir-trees around that small guesthouse were absolutely still. We were those nudes in the forest.
Now she was moving away from me, stepping out of bed and walking quite naked into the bathroom. She turned on the taps. Her right leg arched slightly and foot on tiptoe, she was soaping herself with a flannel. Then she skipped back into bed, pulled up the covers, and that lovely young woman kissed me once again.
While I drifted off to sleep, my thoughts had gone wandering back along the gallery walls. A one-eyed head was staring at a bride; bottles and siphons and playing cards were shattered in a broken heap on the floor; a pier was being demolished by high seas; tubular trees and naked foresters were shrinking in memory, dislocated nudes withdrawing into distance. Yet now the pictures were staring peacefully across the spaces of their corridors and recessed spaces, wholly unaware of each other. A full moon above the gallery cast its fair cool light onto the trees and clearings of Arnhem’s silent, pitch-black forest and the sleeping village.
But now it was morning in our small hotel. We were sitting alone at a table with a thin white laundered cloth. On the wall above our heads was a carved crucifix. It would be a cloudy start to the day. The sun was fitfully filtering through lace curtains, enough to brighten the tablecloth with its patchy neutrality. On it were the now familiar objects of a Dutch breakfast: fresh crusty white bread, butter, a choice of jams, a small bowl of haajeslag as they’re called, a sort of chocolate sprinkle, coffee pot, milk and sugar.
‘When they write the biography,’ she whispered, leaning over confidentially towards me, ‘this will be called: A Brief Affair.’
I took another mouthful of bread and jam, hoping to let her painful words die their death between us.
‘But it was nice while it lasted,’ she added, winningly.
‘Yes. No, I’ll be in touch soon as I’m back. It’s not that far from London.’
‘You’ve got my Bristol address,’ she said. ‘Come over and see me in the autumn.’
There was still some early mist outside, no more than the day would soon clear, and a faintly acrid smell from the nearby factories. We paid the bill and walked out across tramlines, up towards the corner where the roads diverged.
A brief affair: her joking phrase had seemed to seal off those days together. Approaching the point of separation, it was as if our few nights together in Amsterdam, Purmerend, Otterlo, and ’s-Hertogenbosch had been framed and put behind glass, to be variously viewed by distant spectators passing before us in the gallery of lost-preserved time.
We soon reached the signposts. She glanced up towards the words. It was like a subtitled film when, only knowing a little of the language, your eyes flit between the moving lips and the white printed words which shimmer below them. But they weren’t quite synced, and the lips didn’t fit the phrases. The speakers’ bodies were continually leaving them, even though appearing to be going on ahead. So the two of us gazed at each other, kissed once more, and—catching one another’s eyes—began to turn away. I looked around and, with the sad relief of a tricky parting over, said yet again, ‘Goodbye … goodbye.’