Death of a Delft Blue

CHAPTER TWO

A Dinner in Amsterdam

‘… there was sharp stylistic differentiation in the arts and crafts of tribes whose broad culture pattern was the same.’

G. C. Vaillant

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Dame Beatrice and Laura explored Amsterdam first of all by steamer from the Stationsplein. Unlike those of Venice, the Amsterdam canals are bordered, for the most part, by streets. Moreover, they do not form a network so much as a woven pattern of concentric circles, and the same bridge may span four, or even more, of these canals at a time.

Laura and Dame Beatrice had been on the steamer for not more than a few minutes when they heard the sound of a barrel-organ for the first time.

‘Hullo! Pop music,’ said Laura.

‘I have been told,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that one should by no means neglect to take the opportunity of inspecting one of these anachronisms. They are said to be decorated by figures which behave in a human manner and to be one of the show-pieces of the city. Incidentally, they may furnish us with a subject of conversation at this evening’s festivities.’

‘Any subject to be avoided, by the way? One likes to be forewarned,’ said Laura.

‘So far as the professors are concerned, none at all. Of their relatives’ sensitivities, of course, I cannot speak with any assurance.’

‘One usually has to avoid discussing politics and religion.’

‘They are very much better avoided, in my case, as I know little of either, and could not discuss them intelligently, however much I might wish to do so.’

The pleasant jumble of houses slid by. The voice of the professional guide droned on. The white-painted pleasure steamer passed beneath bridge after bridge. The boat was broad, squat, comfortable, and had a glass roof. Time passed. Empty barges, painted coal-black and bearing numbers instead of names, were drawn up at quays. A large municipal building, half-obscured by trees, had a tower of red brick topped by a silver-grey spire of graceful proportions. A clock at the base of this spire gave the time as half-past twelve. In the distance was another bridge and there were more towers and a gasometer. Opposite the barges, privately-owned motorboats were at moorings. Everything looked remarkably clean.

‘Well,’ said Laura, when the trip was over, ‘where do we go from here?’

‘Back to lunch,’ replied Dame Beatrice firmly. ‘After that, we can see how we feel. For my own part, I am open to any suggestions which you may see fit to offer.’

‘The Rijksmuseum would give us something to talk about, if the barrel-organs pass out on us or we haven’t managed to see one.’

‘The Rijksmuseum? An excellent idea.’

‘On the other hand, there is something to be said for leaving the Dutch immortals in peace,’ said Laura thoughtfully. ‘I don’t somehow feel I can do them justice at the dinner table. All my concentration will be on the food. What about hiring a car and going to Haarlem? From there — I’ve been looking at the map in the hotel vestibule — we could go to Zandvoort. Didn’t you once speak of yachts?’

They spent a pleasant and comparatively lazy afternoon and, in the evening, were conducted to the hotel at which the dinner-party was to be held. They were taken up by Sweyn to the floor on which the private dining-room was situated. With them in the lift were a squarely-built, black-haired, elderly woman and a younger one, fashionably dressed, slim and elegant. The older woman suddenly broke out with impressive vehemence.

‘So why are we mounting to these attics?’ she declaimed rhetorically. ‘Why not a decent room on a decent floor, no?’

‘The best we can do,’ said Sweyn, smiling.

‘I’m sure it will be very nice, mamma. I don’t suppose they let the ground-floor rooms to private parties,’ said the young woman hastily.

‘Nice is nonsense! I am not here to be nice. For relations I have to be nice! Phooey!’ She turned her back on Sweyn and, after giving an insolent stare at Dame Beatrice, who had come into her line of vision, she shrugged and sniffed.

The lift stopped at the third floor. Laura and Dame Beatrice got out. The mother and daughter followed them and Sweyn brought up the rear. They were all conducted to a swing door and ushered in. The rest of the company, it seemed, was already gathered in the ante-room in which cocktails were being served. Soon Dame Beatrice and Laura were pounced upon by Binnie.

‘Oh, hullo,’ she said. ‘I say, here’s a mess! Great-aunt Rebekah Rose, Bernie’s grandmother, has invited herself and Aunt Petra to the dinner. Oh, Lord! Here they are! Nobody’s safe while Great-aunt Rebekah is around. Do have some sherry or something. I hope dinner will come soon. I’m famished, wolfish and starving.’

Dinner was announced, and at the table Laura found herself next to Sweyn van Zestien. He declared that he was delighted.

‘Oh, so am I,’ said Laura. ‘I hear you’re an authority on rune-stones, especially those in Denmark. We’ve got some at home in Britain, but when I was in Sweden last year I was told that in about a.d. 1000 the runes took a new lease of life and the rune-stones became more numerous in Sweden than anywhere else. Would that be so?’

Sweyn embarked upon a long, elaborate and very learned reply. Laura listened attentively, but could not help overhearing a far more enthralling conversation which was going on elsewhere. An old, strident, self-assured voice dominated the milder tones of her relations, who were attempting to apply the soft pedal.

‘So I am paying for an empty pea-shuck, is it? So I am to be cheated by rascally shopkeepers, yes?’ shouted Rebekah Rose.

An exquisite young man, who had been introduced as Bernardo, and who was a Byronic, very handsome fellow, took issue with her.

‘Now, now, Grandmamma! You can’t expect us to swallow that one, you know! You took back an empty pea-shuck? It just sounds silly to me.’

‘Silly?’ screamed his grandmother. ‘So what? Is silly when, in a bar, you are asking for whisky and paying for it, too, and you get an empty glass? That would be silly, isn’t it, when you don’t complain?’

‘It’s not the same thing, Grandmamma, not the same thing at all. An empty pea-shuck, well, that’s only one among many, and can make no possible difference; but an empty whisky-glass is a thing in its own right, don’t you see.’

‘And a whisky-glass is accounting for all these deaths on the road, hein? A little ordinary pea-shuck is not doing that, yes? So it has no importance? Stupid boy!’

‘Runic stones in Denmark are to be found mostly in village churchyards,’ pursued Sweyn’s thoughtful, cultured voice. ‘Many of the runes are accompanied by very interesting designs based upon those used in wood-carving. There is a notable example…’

Laura tried to listen to him, but was soon defeated.

‘So I am calling you, Bernardo, an outraged twit!’ screamed Bernardo’s grandmother.

‘Outrageous, not outraged! Mind your innuendos, Grandmamma,’ protested the handsome Bernardo. ‘You should go to evening classes and learn English.’

‘So why you are dodging the synagogue?’ his relative demanded hotly, taking the battle on to her own ground.

‘But I’m not dodging it, Grandmamma. I just don’t care to go, that’s all. A lot of old men in beards, and all of them wearing their hats! The synagogue doesn’t appeal to me at all, especially on a Saturday. I’d rather play golf with my friends.’

‘Of course, there was Asmund, a professional writer of runic inscriptions, who seems to have lived, (or, more likely, to have worked), somewhere between a.d. 1025 and 1050.’ went on Sweyn, patiently, to Laura. ‘By that time, of course, Christianity had taken over, and we find a rune-stone of the period commemorating a death — the death of a much-loved son. It concludes with the words:‘God and God’s mother help his soul.’

‘So what was good enough for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, is not good enough for you!’ yelled the Jewish grandmother to Bernardo.

‘But the patriarchs didn’t go to the synagogue, Grandmamma dear. There weren’t any synagogues in those days,’ explained Bernardo, amused, but also slightly apprehensive.

‘So you risk to die, like poor little Isaac, for someone’s jealousy, yes?’ demanded Rebekah.

‘At one time,’ pursued Sweyn, ‘the runic alphabet was reduced to sixteen letters. Later, however…’

‘You’re talking through your top-knot, Grandmamma,’ protested Bernardo, his voice rising higher.

‘I am? Then think of this, maybe. Who else but this Hagar is wishing to see this Isaac dead? Yahweh? Phooey! Why He should wish to murder a little small boy on the top of a hill? Hagar is pitched out, with child Ishmael, no? Jealousy, envy, hatred, malice, all in Sarah’s heart. She made to have Hagar turned away into the desert. I tell you, Abraham was got at! Why he should want to have a son by this Sarah, when he has already this beautiful little boy by slave-girl Hagar?’

‘The magical inscriptions,’ went on Sweyn, ‘protected, not only people, but the rune-stones themselves. There is quite a powerful curse put on the Bjorketorp stone in Norway, for example.’

‘But nobody killed Isaac, Grandmamma,’ argued Bernardo. ‘There was a ram in a thicket, if you remember.’

‘I remember good. Why not? He is in my stars, this ram. In April I am born, isn’t it? You may give me a little ram in diamonds for a coat-brooch on my birthday, April ninth. You are not forgetting?’

‘The Golden Fleece!’ muttered Bernardo to Binnie, who giggled wildly and began to choke.

‘Runes,’ went on Sweyn, his quiet voice now audible in the silence which had followed Rebekah’s request, ‘were little used from the end of the sixth century until the beginning of the eighth century. England then developed her own alphabet of twenty-eight letters and this was increased in the ninth century to the number of thirty-three.’

‘So twenty pieces of money are given for Joseph, sold into Egypt,’ said Rebekah, glaring at Bernardo.

‘Bulbs,’ announced Binnen, from her seat between Bernardo and his grandmother, who had been arguing with one another across her, ‘are of more importance than money, in my opinion. Anything which grows is of more value than something which does not grow.’

‘Money does grow,’ muttered Rebekah.

‘Ah, yes, dear aunt,’ said Derde, ‘do tell Dame Beatrice about the bulb-fields. She tells me she has a very large garden at her country home in Hampshire. I am sure she would be interested.’

‘Well, some of us would not!’ shouted Rebekah. ‘Bulbs? Phooey! I spit on bulbs!’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ groaned Bernardo. ‘Be quiet, darling Grandmamma. You’re making yourself conspicuous! Look at poor Aunt Petra! She blushes for her mother!’

Petra, beautifully dressed, handsome and slim, grimaced at him from the opposite side of the table. It was difficult to believe that the quiet, well-mannered, sophisticated woman was the dreadful Rebekah’s daughter. She must take after her father’s side of the family, Dame Beatrice thought. Rebekah, abandoning her war with Bernardo, leaned forward and studied the rings on Dame Beatrice’s left hand. She gesticulated.

‘The emerald,’ she said. ‘What you are asking for the emerald?’

Dame Beatrice finished the last morsels of a delicious rijsttafel. Then she removed several of her rings and took off the one to which Bernardo’s grandmother had referred. She passed it over to her. The old Jewess dived into her handbag, which she had been prudently clasping underneath the table between her feet, and produced a watchmaker’s eye-piece. She screwed this in, picked up the ring, scrutinised it closely and then announced:

‘Flawed. Twenty-five pounds I offer in English money.’

‘It is not flawed,’ said Dame Beatrice equably. ‘Moreover, it is not for sale.’

‘The first bulbs,’ said Binnen anxiously, ‘date from about the year 1560. They were experimental and, of course, all were tulips.’

‘There was speculation in bulbs at one time,’ said Derde, nobly backing up his aunt. ‘And, another thing, we used to divide off the bulb-fields by hedges, but these impeded mechanisation and so are disappearing.’

‘Bulbs are to be sold by auction,’ announced the Jewish grandmother, scornfully. ‘No commercial savvy has anybody in bulbs. All are cheated. All auctions are cheat. Somebody runs up and then backs down. Fake buying!’

‘But, Grandmamma,’ protested Bernardo, ‘you couldn’t sell all those millions of bulbs any other way than by auction.’

‘I,’ responded his relative, ‘would be having all those silly little bulbs through my fingers.’

‘Like the pea-shucks, eh?’ retorted Bernardo.

‘You know, Aunt Rebekah,’ said Derde, desperately, ‘there is State control of the bulb-fields. All diseased bulbs are weeded out and destroyed. The auctions are perfectly fair, I can assure you.’

‘Mrs Gavin,’ put in Sweyn, ‘has been telling me about the British rune-stones, particularly in relation to a story which she is prepared to lend me, and which I want very much to read.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Laura, accepting the ball which had been lobbed to her. ‘It’s a story by M. R. James, once Provost of Eton, called Casting the Runes. I don’t know that it has much bearing upon the subject,’ she added, ‘because the runes don’t appear to have been, so to speak, the official ones.’

‘One never knows,’ said Sweyn cheerfully. ‘The story has its origin in magical practices, no doubt. The word “runes” means mystery, secret, secrecy.’

‘The festival of flowers is well worth seeing,’ said Binnen. ‘The growers do not need the flowers, only the bulbs. They are glad to have the flowers used in the festival. The floats are miraculous.’

‘So is the Three Arts Ball,’ said the immaculate Jewish daughter, making her voice heard almost for the first time. ‘I like it very much.’

‘Barbarity!’ said her mother. ‘One talks of the morals of ostriches!’

‘Do ostriches have morals, Grandmamma?’ enquired her handsome grandson, in a dangerously interested and solicitous voice.

‘In West Friesland,’ said Binnen, still sounding anxious, ‘are tulips and irises, on a nice, heavy clay soil. Straw and fine peat…’

‘I am telling you Abraham, Isaac, Jacob are living 1900 b.c., Christian date,’ shrieked Rebekah, completely ignoring Binnen, and joining in the conversation between Sweyn and Laura.

‘And I,’ said Sweyn, impassively, ‘am telling, not you, dear Aunt Rebekah, but Mrs Gavin, that Jacob slept on a pillar of stone and dreamed of angels. Why not an early type of rune-stone? We know that the runic alphabet was based on a script invented or inherited by a North Etruscan people in the second or first century b.c., and it could be…’

‘What is this second or first, cart before horse, century?’ demanded Rebekah, speaking with venom tempered by a kind of unwilling respect. Sweyn patiently informed her that, for instance, 4000 b.c. was long before 1000 b.c.

‘So this dating is all phooey? No?’ was Rebekah’s comment.

‘It is a convenience, that’s all,’ explained Sweyn.

‘When I am needing a convenience, I am going to the ladies’ cloakroom, isn’t it?’ demanded Rebekah.

This unanswerable query provoked an outburst of ‘cover-up’ talk from the rest of the table. Sweyn told Laura loudly that in the thirteenth century a Danish legal document called the Codex Runicus had been compiled and that at about the same time a prayer-book had been written in runes for the benefit of a Danish notable of the era who was not conversant with Latin.

Laura responded with a rather vague reference to the Breeches Bible and realised, too late, that she had perpetrated a gaffe, but her face was partially saved by Binnen, who, equally unfortunately, took the opportunity to inform all and sundry that in September compost and stable manure were spread on the bulb-fields.

‘For heavens’ sake!’ shouted Binnie’s brother, the blue-eyed Florian, who, up to this point, had conversed little and that only with his Aunt Opal, who, to his apparent fury, had been given him as a dinner-partner and to whom he had been, on the whole, extremely rude. ‘Can’t we get away from ordure?’

‘Yes, we can,’ said Lord Byron, rising from his chair. ‘We can, indeed. I have the honour to inform you all that Binnie and I propose to be married in the near future. We invite you all to the wedding and will let you know the date as soon as possible.’

If Bernardo’s idea had been to change the subject, he succeeded admirably. Every woman of his family and connections, with the exception of Binnie, contributed an opinion, a congratulation or, in the case of Grandmother Rebekah, a denunciation.

‘You are to marry this C. of E. chit?’ she yelled. ‘No, not! I have promised you this twenty months to Aaron Lomberg for his daughter Rachel!’

‘You should have told me, Grandmamma,’ said Bernardo, ‘and then I would have told you that my tastes do not lie in the direction of Rachel Lomberg. She is a nice girl and I shall always regard her with brotherly affection, but…’

‘You are marrying for money, you think!’ screamed Rebekah. ‘Let me tell you that you are not! Bernard’s money will never go to this little Miss Prim and Proper! If anybody gets it, it will be divided.’

‘English as she is spoke by Grandmamma,’ muttered Bernardo to Binnie. ‘Listen, darling,’ he added, addressing his aged relative, ‘I have never supposed that any of the van Zestien money would go to little Binnie, but, if I married Rachel Lomberg, none of it would go to me, either. And Aaron Lomberg has six sons, remember. Why do you think my dear mamma insisted on calling me Bernardo? The old man is tickled to death to have a namesake. What says my cousin Florian? Binnie, my dear, let’s leave the table and seek romance beside the waters of comfort, otherwise one of the canals of Amsterdam, for they flow more quietly than ever flowed the Don.’

‘I’ll be glad to,’ said Binnie, with her accustomed giggle. There ensued a short silence, broken, as the door closed behind the couple, by noisy whoops of distress and fury from Grandmother Rebekah. Then everybody began to speak, except for Laura. Her attention had been caught by the expression on the face of Binnie’s brother Florian when Bernardo had addressed him.

It was a face of remarkable beauty. Florian was fair-haired, fair-skinned and looked incredibly young and pure unless and until he smiled. His smile added years to his appearance, and a devil, instead of an angel, flashed out and his hyacinth-blue eyes became cat-like slits of Satanic wickedness. Laura had never seen such an evil and fascinating change in anybody, for, upon the receipt of Bernardo’s announcement of the engagement, Florian had suddenly smiled. Of Bernardo’s pointed question with regard to the testamentary depositions of his grandfather, he had taken no notice at all.

‘The Aztecs,’ said Professor Derde gallantly, ‘followed cults common to primitive civilisations everywhere. They were nature worshippers and their religion embraced corn goddesses, the rain god and the Lady of the Turquoise Skirt. She was the protector and deity of rivers and lakes. Older cults appear to have envisaged the Seven-Snake goddess of crops and corn, but—’

‘I am not for these goddesses,’ moaned Rebekah, suspending her more spectacular evidences of grief and rage in favour of a milder form of protest. ‘Religion belongs to the men.’

Nobody disputed this point, neither was she given time to elaborate upon it, for Dame Beatrice at once remarked that Picasso’s preoccupation with bulls was connected less with the corrida than with a folk-memory which took him back to the days of the later Roman empire and the Mithraic sacrifices.

The professors leapt upon this red-herring with relief, alacrity and tremendous gusto. Even the so-far almost silent Petra and Binnen’s younger daughter Ruby joined in, and so, to Laura’s surprise, did Florian, his extraordinary beauty restored, the wolfish smile gone, his strange eyes deeply blue again and as innocent as those of a young child.

‘Oh, for a picture or a portrait bust!’ said Opal, looking into his face.

‘Yes,’ said his grandmother Binnen, ‘I think Florian must sit for his portrait. Except for snapshots, we have had no picture of him since he was five.’

‘His head should be cast in bronze,’ said Opal, eagerly.

‘In pure gold, you mean,’ said Florian, smiling again and with the same evil effect. Rebekah pricked up her ears.

‘Who could afford?’ she demanded.

‘Runes were often inscribed on metal,’ said Sweyn, hastily. ‘They were incised on the blades of swords. The swords of the Northmen were well adapted for inscriptions, for they were long and fairly broad, and the last phase of the Runic script, being sharply angular, was pre-eminently suitable…’

At this point Rebekah rose from the table and announced that she must go. She, her daughter and Bernardo were catching a plane in the morning back to London. Their departure broke up the party. This, Laura thought, was as well. Runes, bulbs and the Aztecs seemed inexhaustible subjects of conversation. Derde’s last reference was to Tlaloc, the rain-god. When, escorted by the professors, Dame Beatrice and Laura reached the street, the rain, as though invoked, was pouring down. Derde appeared to be gratified by this.

‘I have known it happen before,’ he mildly stated. ‘There is more in these ancient religions than some people think.’