Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ teeth because he got into a brawl. I didn’t like to ask how he’d mislaid his hair.

      I laughed out loud, with sunshine pouring into my soul, and turned a corner as I turned over the page, so no one’s prying eyes could see my blushes and probably foolish smiles.

      It was a while before I came in, with the letter carefully tucked inside my dress. While I was still dazzled in the house’s darkness, I hid it in my room, in my medicine chest, locked away with the new jar of pennyroyal. I could hear voices in Elizabeth’s room: at least one voice, hers, raised in the querulous tones that were becoming characteristic of her.

      I didn’t like to interfere. I still felt uncomfortable when I remembered William’s barely polite refusal of my first attempt to help. But he wasn’t there; he was in London; and, when I looked in the corridor, I saw her door was open. So I plucked up my courage and put my head inside. Slightly to my surprise, it was Master Hans who was with her. Sitting at a chair by the bed where she was reclining; with a little posy of snowdrops from near the front door beginning to wilt from the heat of his forgetful bear-hands. He must have picked a few flowers and trotted straight off after her. He was leaning forward and murmuring something comforting. Her eyes were red-rimmed; but she was already composed enough to smile at me with dignity.

      ‘Oh Meg,’ she said brightly. ‘Could you possibly find a little vase? Look what Master Hans has brought me. Aren’t they lovely?’

      ‘I am telling Mistress Elizabeth,’ he said, with a touch of embarrassment on his broad features, as he brazened out my gaze, ‘how to have a baby is the most beautiful thing anyone can ever hope for. A miracle in everyday life. And how lucky she is to have this joy ahead.’

      He blushed slightly. Surprised at his forceful enthusiasm, I asked: ‘I didn’t know you had a family, Master Hans?’ A little unwillingly, as if he didn’t want to discuss this with me, he nodded. ‘In Basel?’ I went on, and he looked down and nodded again.

      ‘Tell me again – tell Meg – what it was like when you first looked at little Philip,’ Elizabeth interrupted, and even if she didn’t really want to look at me there was a hint of pretty pink back in her cheeks, and her eyes were fixing his and drawing him back into the conversation I’d interrupted. ‘When the midwife held him out to you …’

      ‘She said he was the spitting image of his father … and I couldn’t believe that this tiny bundle of white could be a person at all. And then I looked into his eyes, and he was staring at me so curiously, from big blue eyes, wide open and watching everything, and blowing kisses and bubbles out of his tiny mouth. And I saw his little hands were the same shape as my big German bear’s paws, ha ha!’ said Master Hans, warming up to his theme again. His eyes were sparkling with memory. ‘That’s when I knew what love was.’

      ‘That’s beautiful,’ Elizabeth whispered. ‘And what about your wife – did she feel the same way?’

      And they were off on a long conversation about childbirth, and prayer, and the shortness of pain, and what happens to women’s hearts after they see the child they’ve carried for so many months for the first time. They didn’t need me, and I couldn’t join in – I didn’t know the feelings they were talking about. But I was pleased to see Elizabeth beginning to look reassured. Perhaps she’d just been scared, in these last days, of the heaviness of pregnancy or the pain of childbirth, or fearful of leaving her own childhood behind. Whatever it was, Master Hans must have guessed. It was unorthodox to come visiting her in her room; but he was clearly doing her good.

      Quietly, I took the sagging snowdrops out of his hand. I arranged them in a little glass by Elizabeth’s bed. And I moved the letter on her bedside table to make way for the glass. As I did so, I recognised the spiky writing I’d loved for so long. John’s writing. Stifling my sudden indrawn breath, I folded it into my hand.

      Murmuring an excuse, I left the room. I needn’t have bothered excusing myself. Master Hans’s head followed me for a moment, but Elizabeth hardly noticed me go, so deep was she in this earthy new kind of talk.

      I had no qualms about opening the letter. There was too much I didn’t know about John Clement to pass up any opportunity of knowing more. There was no doubt in my mind, no morality, just crystal clarity of purpose. But this note was short and formal. Shorter than the one he’d written me. ‘My dear Elizabeth,’ it said:

      I write to congratulate you. I hear that you and William are to have a child in the autumn. You will remember from the classroom that my favourite advice has always been: look forward, not back. Your husband is a good man with an excellent career ahead of him; I wish you both every happiness in your family life.

      By the time I’d got this far, my conscience had caught up with my hands. I didn’t usually think twice about inspecting any correspondence that might relate to me; life is too uncertain not to look after yourself any way you can. But this was a harmless expression of formal good wishes, a private matter not intended for me. Feeling awkward at the contrast between my own cold-hearted prying and the warmth being shown by Master Hans, a stranger in our midst, I slipped back in, plumped up Elizabeth’s pillows, rearranged her quilt, and contrived to drop the letter back on the floor by her bed. She’d think it had simply fallen down; she’d never guess I’d looked it over. Then I went away properly, secretly relieved to leave the two of them to their conversation, which had turned to full-blooded midwives’ anecdotes about waters breaking and forceps that I didn’t much like the sound of – but which the usually fastidious Elizabeth seemed to be finding fascinating. If I’d been a different person – less self-contained, less able to reason – I might even have felt a little jealous that she was so effectively managing to monopolise the attention of my new friend the painter. But I’d never been the jealous type. I was pleased she was finding comfort in his gory stories, even if I didn’t really want to stay and listen.

      So I went back out to the garden to find a patch of sunlight far from the gatehouse where I could close my mind to everything but the warmth on my back and the drifting clouds of blossom all around, and sit and murmur ‘he loves me not, he loves me’ as I pulled the petals off daisies, like a lovelorn milkmaid, and read my own letter over and over again until I knew it by heart.

      * * *

      Hans Holbein felt almost unbearably sorry for the pitiful little scrap of femininity huddled up in the bed, hating her life. He hadn’t completely understood all the words in her wounded outpouring: ‘It was me who found John Clement and brought him here – and he as good as ignored me when he got here, and just talked to Meg, and went away without so much as a word. They all do that: talk philosophy to clever Meg Giggs and Greek to intellectual Margaret Roper. No one here has time to waste on an ordinary girl – someone with nothing better to recommend her than a pretty face. And now he’s sent the kind of pompous little note a stranger might write. As if he hardly knows me. As if I’m nothing to him …’ But Hans Holbein had understood the sense of what she was saying; he knew she was feeling something like the howling pain he’d felt with Magdalena. And when she bit her lip, and tears started out of her eyes, and she began to furtively dash them away, he wanted to give her a big comforting hug and tell her any sensible man should love her for her lovely eyes and her heart-shaped face. But he couldn’t tell her that. Who was he to tell a client’s daughter things like that? It was her husband’s job. But it wasn’t difficult to see Elizabeth was in love with the wrong man. And who should rightly comfort a married woman crying because a man not her husband was being too distant with her (and not distant enough with her witty, bookish sister) – even Hans Holbein, with his respect for truth, couldn’t tell. He was too fascinated himself by Meg Giggs’s awkward movements, blazing eyes and odd ideas to fail to understand if other men also fell under her spell.

      Personally, СКАЧАТЬ