Inspired by Still Life: Pewter and Silver Vessels and a Crab by Willem Claeszoon Heda, on display at the National Gallery, room 14
Read by David Mildon
The winter of 1634 is a cold one. The Spaarne freezes and the fair is still going late in February. The days are short and Osias finds it hard to mix the paint with numb fingers.
“Come on, boy,” says Willem. “I’m not working beyond three today. I need to get laid.”
It is a grand house in the new style. Heer Cuyp, the merchant, Willem’s client, is a short man with a large wife and an African servant, a second shadow who trails him through the house. The servant has caught a cold. Each time he sneezes Willem starts, the brush leaping in his hand.
“Get me some wax, Osias. My nerves will not survive this.”
The merchant is forever moving between the rooms of his house. Osias has noticed a similar restlessness in other clients. The new rich. They never seem entirely happy. This wealth is a novelty and they appear uncomfortable with it. Osias has watched them in the Grote Markt, haggling with the silversmiths and the craftsmen. They are tight-fisted and argumentative, and their wives have eyes that cannot settle. Money is a hot chestnut to be passed from hand to hand. They build their houses, they take on more servants, they gild their looking glasses and fill their coffers. And yet, curiously, they do not appear capable of enjoying these riches. Willem paints a picture to remind them what their toil has reaped. A mirror held up to their achievement.
“It is very drear, is it not?” the merchant said after seeing Willem’s first study. “Silver, pewter. I had expected something with more punch. More colour.”
“We may introduce more objects, Heer Cuyp,” Willem said. “I erred on the side of restraint.”
And so Osias has been sent to bring lemons, a bigger Roemer, and now a Rhine crab. The thing sits in a bucket of water at the side of Willem’s easel. They have learnt the hard way about crabs (and lobsters for that matter). On one job in Alkmaar they made the mistake of cooking the creature on the first day. By the third the room reeked of rotting flesh. This time the model will be alive for its sitting. Only after will Willem add a layer of puce. Is this cheating? That the painter does not replicate the leaden green of the living creature? Osias picks up the crab by the edge of its shell, and holds it at arm’s length, the claws snapping at his fingers, but unable to connect. He ties its pincers with twine and sets in on the pewter salver. Supine, demented, the creature rocks but cannot right itself.
“Will you be requiring me?” Osias asks.
“Somewhere you need to be?”
“I thought I might go out to see the fair. Margriet said it will only be here for another few weeks.”
Willem flashes him a glance.
“Margriet did, did she?”
“She showed me Heer Cuyp’s geese yesterday.”
“You goose her, yet, boy?”
Osias colours. Willem can be crude at times.
“She has been kind to me while we have been here.”
Willem’s face hardens.
“She is the client’s daughter. We will be coming back when the painting is finished.”
Osias nods obediently and goes back to mixing the yellow for the lemon rind. Willem sighs.
“Oh for God’s sake, all right then. Just make sure the maalstok has a clean leather on it before you go.”
Ten minutes later and he and Margriet are out beyond the fields. So close to Haarlem and yet Osias can hardly believe that the city is near. This feels like a different world. The hawthorn dusted with frost, the frozen canals glassy, pooling cold light. The low February sun is an egg poached in cloud.
“Where did you see it?” asks Osias.
“Less than a mijl from here. Come on.”
Margriet pulls him hard by the hand and he slides on the ice. It is slippery, this world, fast moving and uncertain. The land is still in the grip of winter, but already he can see the change where water meets a clump of reeds or a tree’s roots. The ice turning back to liquid. It is so easy to forget, gliding on the hard surface, that they are here suspended not on earth but on water.
“Can you not skate?” she asks, as he totters, a toddler again in this world of glass.
“Not well. Willem will not allow it when we are working. He fears I will break a bone.”
She giggles.
“Indeed you might, dear Osias. Out here, anything could happen.”
He finds a sort of rhythm. His feet at last learn the dance, the blades interlacing along the canal. Margriet has her hands clasped at her back. She sings a song that he does not recognise.
“My father said there were poachers,” she shouts back. “But I never believed him.”
They are stopping now, by an elm, its trunk vanishing where the ice begins. Margriet sits down on the bank of the canal.
“Why are you taking off your skates?” Osias says. For a moment he feels the twinge of something in the pit of his stomach. Fear? Excitement? Even though it is still so cold that their breath is visible, he feels too warm.
Margriet looks up at him.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not going to deflower you, painter’s apprentice. I want you to see this.”
She lies on her stomach and pushes out onto the ice once more. Osias sits on the bank, still unsure whether to follow her. Margriet looks back at him.
“Come on,” she says.
On their bellies they push forward. There is a layer of powder from last week’s snowfall, but as this clears with their forward progress Osias can see down into the depths of the water, beneath the ice. Another few seconds and Margriet stops.
“Here,” she says, clearing the surface with a mittened hand.
At first Osias is not sure what he is seeing. The murk below is brown here. The ice cannot be thick at this point, maybe only three duimen deep. But against the muddy background he can see colour. White, or maybe it is grey. Feathers, and an orange beak. The head of a goose, but on the other side. Through the glass. And then beyond the feathers something else. A dun brown tunic, sandy hair and the strangely tranquil gaze of a human eye peering from underneath, from the world of water. It is the face of a boy, maybe the same age as he is. Maybe younger.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” Margriet says. She smoothes away the ice until she has created a rectangular frame in the powder through which they may view it; this accidental composition.
“Who is he?” Osias says.
Margriet shrugs.
“Does it matter? He was poaching. Probably one of my father’s geese. Should have thought not to skate at night.”
She turns her head to Osias.
“Anyway. A bit better than that turgid stuff my father hangs on his walls. Would you not agree?”
They do not stay long at the winter fair. Margriet ranges from stall to stall, tugging his hand whenever he stops to examine a ceramic plate or a pewter salver.
“Don’t you people ever stop working?” she chides him.
They watch the village boys clowning at kolf in the distance. They drink hot bowls of brenebon, the pigs’ trotters deliquescing on the glistening surface of the broth. Osias thinks of suspensions in oil. The paint he prepared earlier for the lemon rind, the Naples yellow that Willem insists they keep locked in the strong box.
“How long will it take?” Margriet asks. “My father’s painting.”
Osias shrugs.
“A month or two, he says. It depends on how many layers Willem uses.”
“How can you be so patient?” she asks.
Osias smiles.
“You get used to it,” he says.
Heer Cuyp tilts his head from side to side. Behind him, in the corner, the black servant sniffs, rubs his nose with his sleeve.
“Yes,” says the merchant judiciously. “Much better.”
Osias shifts the easel round so that the others can see it. Cuyp's wife, the housekeeper, Margriet. Willem, standing beside the family, chews on the end of his brush.
“I’ll need to build it up,” he says. “But you get the general idea.”
“The only question I have,” says the merchant after a pause. “Is why you chose to tip the Roemer on its side. Should it not be standing upright?”
Osias sees Willem stiffen for a moment.
“It is a composition,” he says in a measured tone. “A series of deliberate choices that I have made, taking into consideration the interplay between the separate objects on the plane. If you desire something other than this, an inventory of your possessions, say, may I suggest you approach a draughtsman?”
It is Willem’s usual reply.
The merchant stands for a moment with his hand over his mouth, aware that something has been challenged. Then Osias sees the man soften, and a broad smile breaks across his face.
“No, it is most excellent as it is.”
The merchant begins applauding. At first a single pair of hands clap in the fading light of the afternoon, then others join. The palette is scraped clean, the maalstok and the knife replaced in the strongbox with the paints, and the easel collapsed. By five the cart is loaded and they are waving goodbye to the Cuyps.
Once they are out of earshot, reins in hand, Willem turns to Osias and hisses under his breath.
“What a way to make a living.”
Late in April, the painting is loaded back on to the cart, and they retrace the journey to the Cuyps' house.
Osias feels a sense of expectancy as the wheels hit the cobbles of the courtyard. He looks to the upper windows of the house, but nobody leans out and calls to him. Margriet is away in Leiden, with her mother.
They bring the painting in under a blanket and soon it is hung in the main hall, beside the fire, where there are other paintings by other painters from the Haarlem Guild. Everything in the room belongs to Heer Cuyp, Osias realizes. The furniture, the rug on the wall, the ceramic plates displayed on the mahogany dresser. Even the inventory of wealth, the pictures themselves. All except for one thing. Osias sees Willem straighten the frame on the wall and step back.
“There,” the painter says. “Now, tell me I was wrong to upset that Roemer.”
They follow the canal back towards Haarlem. It is a warm day, and the birds are singing. Osias can hardly believe the change. He remembers the feel of ice under his feet. But beneath the new season, it is the same landscape.
“Oh, Willem. Look. The tree.”
The painter stops the cart and Osias leaps down, races over the lip of the canal bank and steps carefully to the water’s edge. All is silent here now, still and indifferent. The elm tree leans over its reflection, its roots reaching through the surface and into the darkness beyond. Osias stands for a moment, and remembers the dusting of snow, the slice of skates over the icy rind of frozen water. He remembers a goose’s head and a boy’s face and then the touch of Margriet’s hand as they headed for the fair.
“Come on, boy,” says Willem. “Time to go.”
(c) Gregory Jackson, 2016
Gregory Jackson lives in London. His writing has appeared in The Mays, The Independent, & the Bridport Prize anthology. His poem Catherine of Aragon features in Shooter Literary Magazine Issue #4: Technology, available at Foyles and online.
David Mildon (right) is an actor and playwright & was a founding member of Liars' League. His stories “Worms’ Feast” and “Red” were performed & appeared in the Arachne Press anthologies London Lies & Weird Lies. In 2015 his play The Flood was produced at the Hope Theatre Islington & short plays Second Skin and Either/Or were performed at Theatre 503.
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