The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

gap for them,” she said. “How many years? Forty years of ice.”

“Well, they carried on painting. Or some did.”

Isabel stared at one of the paintings: a girl in a room looking out of a window; a feeling of desolation. And beside it a grey landscape under a grey sky—was that Poland? The closest she had been to Poland was Berlin, where already one had the sense of plains stretching out into a sorrowful emptiness farther east; and here it was now in paint, greyness and sorrow.

“I’m getting depressed,” she said, her tone lowered; she did not want the Poles to hear her say that their landscape, or their paintings, depressed her.

“I was just about to make myself a pot of tea,” said Robin. “It’s warm enough to sit outside. We’ve got a little table out the back.”

She followed him down the stairs, past the display cases, and into the small garden. The table stood on a patch of raked white gravel, two French ironwork chairs on either side. Isabel sat in one of these while Robin went back to fetch the tea; she closed her eyes and let the sun play on her face. There was a bird singing in a tree somewhere over the wall that divided the ground at the rear of the building into patches of urban garden. Geraniums were in blossom somewhere close by; she could smell them, that sweet, velvety odour. She opened her eyes and saw that there was a tub of the flowers not far away; red clusters against dark green leaves. The smell took her back, to somewhere far away and long ago; somewhere she could not quite remember…and then she thought: Georgetown, and her window box. There had been geraniums in the window box, planted by the previous tenant, who, like her, had been a research fellow in philosophy, and who had confessed that the geraniums were the only things she had ever planted in her life. All I leave behind me, she said, are some gerania, and had laughed.

Robin returned with a generously sized teapot and a couple of mugs. Tucked under his arm was a glossy auction catalogue, which he retrieved once he had put down the mugs. “Sotheby’s,” he said, nodding in the direction of the catalogue. “Just in. Their next sale of old masters.”

She reached up for the catalogue and looked at the front cover, much of which was taken up with a picture of a small family group huddled under an oak tree. “Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” she read. “Jan Brueghel, the Elder.”

“But not the oldest,” said Robin, looking over her shoulder. “One of the dynasty. Son of Pieter and father of Jan the Younger. There was quite a clan of them.”

Isabel scrutinised the painting. “Not much seems to be happening,” she said.

“Well, they are resting.”

“Of course.”

“And the whole point of the painting is the oak tree,” Robin went on. “The flight into Egypt is pretty much incidental.”

He began to pour the tea. “But things happen in some Brueghels. Do you know that famous Bruegel—Pieter Bruegel, that is—The Massacre of the Innocents? It’s one of the busiest old masters around. There’s an awful lot going on. I saw it the other day, as it happens. There was an exhibition of Flemish paintings and it was in it.”

Isabel thought. “No. I don’t think so. Which innocents were they?”

“Dutch innocents,” said Robin, passing her a mug of tea. “Dutch innocents—massacred by Spanish troops. Except…”

“Except?”

“Except the painting—or one version of it—tells a different story. A later owner found it too vivid and ordered the truth to be painted over.”

“That wouldn’t have been the first time that a painting was changed in that way,” said Isabel. “Nor the last, for that matter. I was in a gallery in Moscow once and saw a picture of the Politburo with the nonpersons painted out.”

Robin smiled. “Probably more successfully than the Bruegel. The problem with The Massacre of the Innocents is that you look at it and you wonder why the soldiers are all stabbing a very large turkey. And why is a large bag of wheat lying on the ground, in the middle of nowhere? Then you see the children underneath the turkey and the sack, painted over, but no longer well concealed. A restorer has made a start and then maybe not liked what he saw underneath.”

Isabel paged through the catalogue. The old masters revealed the small range of their interests—or those of their patrons. Endless religious scenes, low-country landscapes, the occasional interior. “I wish they’d been free to paint other things,” she said. “More reportage. More work scenes. More life as it was.”

Robin sipped at his tea. “Painters rarely paint for posterity. They portray the things that people want to admire at the time.”

Isabel frowned. She was not sure that she agreed. “Guernica?”

Robin put down his mug. “Yes, I suppose so. I suppose Picasso wanted to put that on the record.” He paused. The bird in the neighbouring tree had raised the pitch of his song, and for a few moments they both listened to the ringing challenge. Then Robin rose to his feet. “I almost forgot. That painting.”

Isabel looked up from the catalogue. “What painting?”

Robin was making his way back into the gallery. “Hang on a sec. I’ll get it,” he said over his shoulder.

Isabel turned a page of the catalogue. A worldly wise infant looked out from his mother’s knee; above his head, a thin circle of gold, a halo; in the background, a line of cypresses marched off across a landscape that was Tuscany or Umbria. She looked at the mother’s face, at the expression of gentle solemnity that seemed to be the approved look of motherhood. Had she ever looked at Charlie quite like that?

Robin reappeared, carrying a small painting, a double handbreadth or so across, which he put down on the table in front of Isabel. “Here it is,” he said. “It came back from the framer yesterday.”

She gave a start. It was another fox; a small painting of a fox, standing in a clearing, sniffing the air.