Headlong (12 page)

I look at my watch. Yes, somehow, unbelievably, it’s long after lunchtime. I heat some soup, without the appetite even to cut bread to go with it. As I watch the sluggish brown liquid stir slowly into life I hear steps on the stairs behind me. It’s Kate who’s had to make the first move to rescue us from our impasse. Of course. Why couldn’t I have done that, at least? I can’t even turn round to look at her, though.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, very quietly. I can hear from her voice that she’s been crying.

‘
I’m
sorry,’ I echo her gracelessly. ‘Do you want some soup?’

At least I’ve managed that much of a gesture. But there’s no reply. Is she crying again? I turn round at last to look at her. She’s sitting at the table, crumpling a handkerchief in her hands, but she’s not crying.

‘I’ve got some money my father gave me once,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure how much there is left. But it’s probably enough. I’ll pay it into our joint account.’

It takes me a moment to absorb the force of what she’s saying, and another moment for the shock of reciprocal surrender to pass through me. Then I go over to her and kneel in front of her. I put my arms round her and sink my head deep into her softness. She’s an inexhaustible and endlessly surprising treasure of goodness and love. She’s
never mentioned the existence of any money from her father before – probably, I realize, because she intended to use it for some private benevolence, perhaps even one directed towards me. Even more probably because in her sweet unworldliness she’d forgotten that she had it.

I lift my head and look up at her. She smiles down at me.

‘My love,’ I say, almost too choked to speak, ‘I’m not worthy of you … I’m so touched … You’ll never know … And of course I couldn’t accept …’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before, though? That’s what I don’t understand.’

Nor do I, now the question’s been raised. I think my way back through all the receding planes of silence and mistrust to the time when all this began. Why didn’t I tell her? Well … because I knew she wouldn’t believe me. And I was right – she didn’t. Still doesn’t, either. Not that it seems of much importance now. No picture in the world is worth losing this for.

‘Because I’m a fool,’ I tell her.

‘I was keeping it for emergencies,’ she says.

‘Good. Go on keeping it. I couldn’t take it, my love. Not in any circumstances whatsoever. Not if it was my last hope in the world.’

She strokes my hair. Everything’s as it was. We’ve faced our first great crisis together and, thanks entirely to the goodness of her heart, in spite of the deviousness of mine, we’ve come out of it closer than ever.

‘The soup’s boiling over,’ she says softly.

I go on holding her. Let it. So am I.

So here’s the fundamental principle that I’ve settled in my own mind:

I shan’t risk any money on my great scheme unless I can find evidence, objective evidence, for my conviction that the
Merrymakers
is what I think it is. Kate says that she doesn’t have to be consulted – doesn’t
want
to be consulted. She entirely accepts my judgement. But I realize I can’t expect her to share my
prima vista
intuition sight unseen, or my feeling that the anomalies in the iconography count in favour of my attribution rather than against it. What I think I’ve tacitly agreed with her, and what I’ve certainly agreed quite explicitly with myself, is that I must be in a position to make out some kind of reasoned case to her.

We’ve spent a happy weekend together, all three of us. We haven’t talked about my scheme. Or scarcely. I haven’t even thought about it. Not all the time, anyway. And first thing Monday morning I’m back on the London train again. I’ve rung our bank in Kentish Town and arranged to see our ‘personal banker’ – with the full agreement of Kate, I should explain, because she understands why I can’t accept her money if I do go ahead with the scheme, even though she’s still offering it. On the way to Kentish Town, though, at Kate’s excellent suggestion as she drove me to the station – where we kissed with a newly regained tenderness that takes us right back to those first few glowing months of our marriage – I’m going to the V & A to do
what I should have done when I was looking up the saleroom records for Bruegel: to check the kind of prices that Giordano fetches, just in case my uninformed guesses are too wildly out. Such good, practical advice. And such a delight to be working on this together. Even though she’s doing it for love of me, not out of any real confidence in my attribution. Yet.

The question is how to find objective evidence. What kind of thing am I looking for?

Details of style and technique? Not a very plausible line of inquiry. I can’t ask to examine the picture again at the length that would be necessary without revealing too much interest, and I haven’t the specialist knowledge to know what I was looking for even if I did.

The iconography? This is more hopeful, particularly with Kate’s help. But will the iconography differentiate Bruegel from his followers and imitators? More likely, it seems to me, is my own pet discipline – iconology. I might be able to show that Bruegel’s using the iconography of the picture in a way that relates it to his particular outlook and philosophy.

At once a difficulty arises. What
are
Bruegel’s outlook and philosophy?

I sat on the train with my pile of books, now mercifully lodged not in plastic bags but in Kate’s holdall for Tilda’s things, and went through them all once more. I was even more struck this time by Bruegel’s extraordinary elusiveness and ambiguity. It’s not just the biographical detail. It’s
everything
about him – the whole sense and intention of his pictures. Every scholar reads them differently.

Here’s Grossmann’s catalogue of the possibilities: ‘The man has been thought to have been a peasant and a townsman, an orthodox catholic and a Libertine, a humanist, a laughing and a pessimist philosopher; the artist appeared
as a follower of Bosch and a continuator of the Flemish tradition, the last of the Primitives, a Mannerist in contact with Italian art, an illustrator, a genre painter, a landscape artist, a realist, a painter consciously transforming reality and adapting it to his formal ideal – to sum up just a few opinions expressed by various observers in the course of four hundred years.’

Or Gibson on ‘the amazing number of different interpretations by scholars of Bruegel’s attitude to the peasants: descriptive, moralising, mocking, good-humoured, sympathetic.’

Friedländer stresses the humour. Stechow dismisses all such readings as out of date, and presents what he calls a ‘darker’ Bruegel, for whom nature is the ‘one realm in which Bruegel sought and expressed relief from human folly, selfishness, and hypocrisy.’ Tolnay, however, insists that his works are philosophical comments upon ‘the essence and necessary evolution of human life,’ though he agrees that Bruegel sees this life as ‘the kingdom of the mad’. Bruegel’s later years, says Tolnay at one point, are ‘an attempt to syn-thesise the rational reign of nature and the insensate reign of man;’ at another, ‘the stoical contemplation of a human life fatally subject to the eternal laws of the universe.’

Friedländer thinks that paintings of this later period are attempting to be ‘ethically neutral’. Cuttler, too, dismisses the moralistic view of ‘some modern scholars’ that Bruegel was concerned with man’s duty to overcome his foolishness and sinfulness. He doesn’t see man represented in Bruegel as insane or as helplessly subject to forces beyond his control. Human actions are not ‘manifesting a rootless existence’ on the surface of the world, but participating in its underlying order. Harbison takes a similar view. The cycle of the year in particular, he says, demonstrates the
human ‘response’ to the passage of time and the rhythms of nature.

Bruegel, in other words, is an absence, a ghost, which scholars characterize more or less however they choose. So instead of trying to relate his iconography to Bruegel himself, perhaps I could relate it to what was going on around him at the time. If I can’t see Bruegel, perhaps I could try to put myself into the space he occupied at the centre of his world, and see what he saw.

So I’m not yet in the V & A – I’m back in the Reading Room of the London Library, doing a little historical research. I know something about the Netherlands in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries from my nominalist studies. But the late sixteenth is
terra incognita
. My plan is to start with the more familiar territory, and then explore gently forwards.

Before I can make out a case to Kate, it seems to me, I have to be able to make out a case to myself. Now let me be absolutely honest with myself. If I
can’t
make out a case to myself, will it change
my
feelings? Not in the slightest. Supposing, though, that the objective evidence I turn up destroys my case instead of proving it; supposing that it proves the picture
isn’t
what I think it is … This is one of those ridiculous hypothetical tests like, ‘If the house was on fire, would I save Kate or Tilda first?’ Supposing, though? Would I still want the picture? Of course! It wouldn’t change the picture itself one iota, even if it turned out to have been painted by Tony Churt.

Would I want it as
much
? – Yes!

Really? Enough to go through with all the financial and moral complications of the deal? – Certainly! All it would mean is that the picture was valuable for itself alone, and not for what it told us about Bruegel and his works. And that it was worth a few thousand pounds instead of a few million.
Not that this is what I’m thinking about. Though of course I’d have to reconsider the finances rather radically …

Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I’ve agreed a principle with myself, now I’m making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings and intentions with myself. Who is this
self
, this phantom internal partner, with whom I’m entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)

Well, who am I talking to now? Who is the ghostly audience for the long tale I tell through every minute of the day? This silent judge sitting, face shrouded, in perpetual closed session? Sometimes I think there’s something recognizable about the way he listens. It’s Kate! It’s God! It’s my old history teacher! No, there’s something even more familiar about him than that. It’s some allotrope of myself, a twin lost in the womb, an alternative version of myself who might have been me – and who might yet be, after he’s heard what I have to say.

You
, yes. In the Reading Room with me, occupying my chair. Who are you? You’re almost as elusive as Bruegel. How much do you know already? How much do I have to explain? How formal do I have to be?

Quite formal, I think. Experience suggests that you tend to leap to conclusions. You’re not good at grasping a long train of evidence and arguments unless they’re laid out quite pedantically.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to treat you as if you were one of my students. A reasonably able one, but a bit short on concentration and tenacity. I’m going to spell things out to you rather laboriously, and spring sudden questions on you to make sure you’re following me.

Agreed?

I think it must be, because here I am, doing it.

The history of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century has a remarkably familiar ring to anyone reading about it today. However much allowance you make for the unbridgeable dissimilarities between one age and another, it reads like a first draft for the history of Occupied Europe under the Nazis, or Eastern Europe under the Soviets. The imperial power was Spain, and the two great pillars of their Netherlandish policy – as with Germany and Russia in their dependencies – were economic exploitation and ideological repression.

There’s a painful irony about the way in which the Netherlands became enslaved by Spain. It wasn’t the result of weakness and failure but of strength and success. Their rulers did too well for themselves.

The Netherlands … (And how many Netherlands were there? I told you I was going to spring the occasional question on you …! Seventeen – yes, good.) … the seventeen Netherlands were assembled into a nation around the end of the fourteenth century by the Dukes of Burgundy. The great skill of the Burgundians was not war but marriage. They married first north into Flanders, then out into the surrounding provinces. The huge revenues from the wool and linen trades, the brass industry and the great entrepôt of Bruges made them immensely wealthy. Philip the Good, who kept thirty-three mistresses and invented the rules of courtly etiquette, was the richest ruler in Europe, and in the fifteenth
century the Netherlands became the new heartland of European art, the northern centre of the Renaissance.

The family had a setback when they lost Burgundy itself, their original power base, to France. They protected their interests by once again exercising their great skill at marrying. This time they married southwards into the power of Spain. They did it with such success that their man, the son of Philip the Handsome, moved on to the Spanish throne as the Emperor Charles V. It was the master-stroke that crowned their achievements – and it was the fatal move that brought the Netherlands down. Charles gradually became accommodated to his new world, and lost to his old one. He was like a provincial English scholarship boy who’s absorbed into the London establishment. The Flemish King of Spain, ruling there through his hated Flemish advisers, slowly became the Spanish King of the Netherlands, ruling
there
through his hated Spanish councillors. By their success in colonizing the throne of Spain the Netherlands themselves became colonized.

So that’s how the economic exploitation and ideological repression began. The two were connected. Charles V, in the first half of the sixteenth century, bankrupted Spain by borrowing at high rates of interest from German bankers to pay for his defence of the Catholic faith, which was threatened by the Turks from without and by the Reformation from within. In 1555 he abdicated in exhaustion, and split his huge dominions into two: in the east, the Holy Roman Empire; in the west, the Kingdom of Spain. When his son, Philip II, succeeded to the Spanish half, the bankers would lend him no more, even at forty per cent. Everyone knows that he depended on the income from the precious metals mined in Spain’s South American colonies. What people forget is that he derived four times as much from the huge
commercial prosperity of the Netherlandish provinces.

I’m way past my period by this time, and I’m following the story in John Lothrop Motley’s great nineteenth-century classic,
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
. Motley was an American Protestant, and openly committed to the Dutch in their struggle against Catholicism and colonialism, so I’m balancing it with Edward Grierson’s
The Fatal Inheri
tance
and various other, more temperate works from the middle of this century – Rowen, Geyl, van Gelderen and Arnould and Massing. Whatever source you go to, though, the savagery with which Charles struggled to suppress Protestantism in his Netherlandish colonies remains impressive. He introduced the papal inquisition into the provinces in 1521, and in 1535 reinforced it with an imperial edict specifying that, although unrepenting heretics were to be burnt, repentant males were to be executed with the sword, and repentant females were to be buried alive, though whether this bizarre form of sexual discrimination was intended as oppressive or chivalrous remains obscure. Motley doesn’t believe that Charles was a religious bigot. ‘It was the political heresy which lurked in the restiveness of the religious reformers … which he was disposed to combat to the death. He was too shrewd a politician not to recognise the connection between aspirations for religious and for political freedom.’ Whether for spiritual or political purposes, further edicts were promulgated as the reign progressed, until by the time Charles abdicated, according to Motley, between 50,000 and 100,000 Netherlanders had been burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried alive.

This was the happy land in which Bruegel passed the first twenty-five or thirty years of his life.

Then things got worse. Charles was succeeded by Philip.

Philip II was obsessed with extirpating religious dissent
for its own sake. Motley calls him an ‘insane tyrant’. And by this tune the threat to Catholic orthodoxy in the Netherlands was not so much Protestantism as Luther had first conceived it in Germany, but the more extreme version preached and practised by Calvin, that came in from Geneva through the French-speaking provinces.

Motley asserts that Philip was ‘filled with undisguised hatred’ for the Netherlands. In 1559, four years after his accession, when Bruegel was painting
Netherlandish
Proverbs
and
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent
, and changing his name from Brueghel to Bruegel, the King announced to a convocation of distinguished local citizens in Ghent that he was leaving the country, and he never set foot there again throughout his long reign. On the same occasion he took the opportunity to proclaim the enduring twin goals of Spanish policy in a crude juxtaposition that made clear both their brutality and their ultimate incompatibility. He announced the renewal and enforcement of the various edicts and decrees for the extirpation of all sects and heresies; and he entered a ‘request’ for three million gold sovereigns.

The King said none of this in person, though. He couldn’t speak Flemish or French, so thoroughly Spanish had the family become, and the words were uttered for him, like his part in the ceremony where his father had formally transferred his powers, by a spokesman. His voice on both occasions was supplied by the same man – Antoíne Perrenot, the Bishop of Arras.

Perrenot was plainly the coming man. So was Bruegel. Their paths were converging.