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The Red Hat
By John Bayley St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1997 John Bayley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6811-3
CHAPTER 1
Part One
I flatter myself that I am not at all boyish, although I am often told, as if it was a compliment, that I look like a boy. 'As pretty as a boy', a gay friend with whom I am a bit in love once assured me, gazing with satisfaction at my absence of bust. I never wear a bra, I don't need to. Actually I think breasts are a bore; and the sort of men I approve of don't favour the bigger ones.
Funnily enough I used to know a splendid fellow, not at all gay, who prided himself on his own breasts. He had pectorals like a powerful fish. He once told me, too, that he could never pee in his wife's presence, but had no trouble with a girlfriend standing by. There had once been trouble about this once, and he told me why; but that, as Kipling would say – he used to be one of my favourite authors – is another story.
Peeing and all that seems suited to the Netherlands, which is where we were when this particular story happened. It's often shown in their pictures; but not, of course, in the ones by Vermeer, which we had come to see.
Why had we come? – Cloe and Charles and myself, that is. Well might one ask. I found myself wondering why after I'd been trapped for an hour or so in a small dingy room bursting with Vermeer worshippers. We weren't allowed to move until the crowd in the next room moved on; and when I tried to sneak out backwards I was stopped by the spreading arms of a burly Dutchman in a grey uniform, who was friendly but firm.
I gave up then even trying to look at the pictures – the devotees in a cluster round each made them all but invisible anyway – and I amused myself instead with a fantasy about being a painter like Hieronymus Bosch, and painting us all with nothing on, brooding away cheek by jowl over Vermeer's masterpieces as if we had been summoned to the Last Judgement.
There we would all be, in the nude, but pretending not to notice each other because of all the silent admiration that was going on. I wonder what old Bosch and Co would make of Vermeer? Probably not much.
Does it sound as if I know about art and artists? In fact I don't. Charles is the one that does. Charles, by the way, is the man who once told me that I looked as pretty as a boy. I've loved him for it ever since. Although he's about as queer as they come, and believe me I ought to know, Charles is trying pretty doggedly to be in love with Cloe, or to do his best to fall in love with her. She adores him of course. Cloe is supposed to be what we once used to call my best friend, which is one of the reasons I am here with them.
OK: another is because of Charles. Cloe knows about all that, but she doesn't let it worry her. Cloe is my best friend, yes: but actually I hate the idea of best friends. Or friends of any sort, come to think of it. What's the point of them? – why such a big idea? There are people you know, and a great many more whom you don't, and that's about it. So I feel; but I have known Cloe a long time, and always 'kept up' with her. And I'm always trying to impress Cloe. I can't help it.
Cloe's very feminine. If I'm boyish she's everything that a female is supposed to be. Pear-shaped, though her bottom's more like a toffee-apple. If a man were to put his fatherly hands on her shoulders, and I'm sure that plenty have done or wanted to do just that – she brings out their protective instincts – his rugged paws would slip down off them helplessly: just like those old Victorian climbers sliding off the icy top of Mont Blanc.
That's assuming she had nothing on, of course; but then she wouldn't have, would she? I imagine men usually look at her as if she'd nothing on, even when she's fully clad. If my little fantasy were to come true, and we were all there together in the picture gallery naked, I think it's just possible that Cloe might distract one or two of the male devotees from their Vermeer worship. Not that she's living art – far from it – but it could be that in the unusual circumstances I had in mind some art-fancier might wrench his gaze away from the paintings for a moment to take a normal interest in her.
Or maybe not. Still, enough of these frivolous thoughts. I was, and am, fond of old Cloe – can't deny that. Grateful to her too. She'll see why presently, if she cares to stick the course. And looking at pictures can be rather like reading a book, I suppose.
Meanwhile, there was Charles trying so hard to be in love with her. He being gay I suppose she represents for him the maximum challenge. To be in love with me wouldn't mean anything to him at all. After all those boys and men he's had he could do it in my arms at the drop of a hat.
Of a hat, yes. It was a hat that started the whole thing off. Not a real hat but the one in the Vermeer picture. It's the one of this girl, looking at you with very bright eyes, and wearing a red hat.
Of course I hardly saw the picture in the flesh, as it were. I shouldn't think many people did. Just a glimpse of it over heads and between arms. But this picture of the hat had been put on the entrance ticket, and I still have that. Two of them in fact. Little souvenirs. You'll see why presently.
What I see when I look at the ticket is the lips and the eyes – the teeth a bit too – all lustrous and gleaming, but at the same time pink and warm too. As if they were made of some divine marshmallow.
Amazing what Vermeer could do with paint. Especially pure plain white paint.
Or was it done by the people who restored the pictures? I've no idea; and I wonder if anyone else has, really. It's one of those things, and there are so many of them, that one doesn't know and would rather not know, like who are the men and women in the pictures, and what were they doing, and what happened to them afterwards.
If it comes to that the Dutch don't even seem to know what their own capital city is called. We call it the Hague; they call it Den Haag – fair enough. But they don't seem to be sure by any means, for on the map they decide to mark it "s Gravenhage'. This means 'the Count's Hedge', so a Dutchman told me. But, as my mother used to say, can't they make up theirmainds?
Never mind that – back to the Red Hat. As I said, she's a girl. She's wearing ear-rings. Nice long pearly ones. She's wearing ear-rings like that – not queers' ear-rings you understand – and yet she's not a girl. She's a boy. That's obvious. At least it's obvious if you really start to think about it, so perhaps you shouldn't think about it.
But another thing that's obvious – and really obvious this time – is that she looks just like me. Or he does. I was absolutely staggered when Charles put the ticket into my hand. It was so abundantly clear who he was – or she – that neither Cloe nor Charles bothered to remark on the fact, and neither did I. They just looked at me with a knowing smile, to which I paid no attention. As the pressure of the devout mob, before and behind, propelled us into that black hole of an exhibition, Cloe did give my arm a squeeze and say: 'That was a bit of a shock for you, Nance, wasn't it?'
As soon as we got in Charles and Cloe began to wear their dedicated look, like everyone else in the crowd. One of the things this look takes for granted is that in pursuit of art the wearer would be prepared to undergo any quantity of discomfort. But there's nothing elitist about it you understand. Charles and Cloe don't think they're so very special. On the contrary, they assume we can all stand in front of old Vermeer for hours – and all of us with that special rapt look on our faces.
Actually people like Charles are not at all common, because in the pursuit of art he is prepared to undergo more than discomfort. Actual hardship. That's one of the things for which Cloe genuinely admires him. She wouldn't do it for herself – undergo hardship I mean – but she would for his sake. It's exasperating in her, but also lovable no doubt. Some kinds of women today know better than to identify with their man's interests – that wouldn't go with feminist correctness. Instead they have a way of becoming more him than he, if you see what I mean. More subtly, more sort of invasively, what he is, than what they are themselves. As well as being into Charles, Cloe is now into art in this sort of way too. Into Vermeer's pictures, that is.
Oh those pictures. The great thing for the devotees is that you stand there in silence. Just a bit of a hushed murmuring. Nobody says 'Oh look at the little boy or the little girl – aren't they sweet!' There are no little boys and little girls – none of those twee and cosy goings-on that there are in the other Dutch pictures painted at the same time. Could their absence make Vermeer, do you think, just a little bit boring? By the time you've stood and contemplated for ten minutes or so, along with all the others who are lost in contemplation? I daresay I am, or shall be, just a sentimental old maid really, but I do like a bit more life in my pictures. Very philistine of me no doubt. But in an odd way there's plenty of life in the girl, or boy, with the red hat.
The command was given and the crowd obediently moved on, bearing Charles and Cloe in its bosom. Soon they were standing four or five deep in front of that hefty woman who's pouring out the milk. Although she's built like an all-in wrestler she can only coax the thinnest possible stream of milk out of that great stone jug she's holding. Perhaps that's the great zen-like charm of the thing, but it can keep it as far as I am concerned.
I baulked. Smiling sweetly at the attendant who was trying to shoo me in with the others I slipped under his extended arm and back into the first room again. There was a moment's delightful emptiness in there before the next lot were let in. I said to the man 'I'm feeling a little faint – would you mind?' – and with true Dutch gallantry he let me sit down on a cold radiator. From there I could contemplate one of the Master's early paintings. Very unVermeer-like. Some female saint is wringing from a cloth into a basin the blood of a martyr who's just had his head cut off. You can see his head in the background still looking a little bit surprised. The rest of him, naturally enough, is quite unbothered.
I preferred this saint lady to the milkmaid. At least she's really getting somewhere, and she looks devoted and dedicated as if she's found the very job she ought to be doing.
It was a simple matter now to escape not only from Charles and Cloe but from Vermeer. The rooms hung with other pictures were empty. Hardly a viewer. The Vermeer exhibition had put poor old Rembrandt in the shade. Normally I'm not a great Rembrandt enthusiast. Nor is Charles, who like many of the experts hates pictures with what you might call a human interest. I don't mind that. I don't like him because he's such a show-off. Sometimes he's just like one of those more modern artists – or writers, come to that – who are always reminding us that they've got right away from any conventional nonsense, and are showing us reality as it really is.
All the same it was a relief, after the Vermeer worship, to have a quiet look at the big dusky – or perhaps just dirty? – canvas which shows us the boy David playing the harp to king Saul. Meek crafty very Jewish David is giving us a conspiratorial look, while Saul sits there in his tawdry robes, with a great tear at the corner of one eye. Saul looks as if he knew what trouble was all about, but wasn't expecting any from this young chap, at least not yet.
I idled on, nearly missing a small even dingier picture in a recess. A female figure beside a sort of sandy bank, with some weedy grass, and a dark round spot among the general dinginess which suggests a rabbit-hole. A rabbit-hole by Rembrandt is a nice thought somehow, particularly when the subject is what you might call a classical one. The female is wearing one of those garments which in Rembrandt's version of the ancient world seem to have the sole function of slipping down round the hips, in order to leave bare a big bald wrinkled tummy. Did the Dutch and their patrons think those fat stomachs seductive? Or was it to cheer the men up when they looked at their wives, and to make them think their old Dutch must be really quite an oil painting? – 'if this is art I'd better try to like it' sort of thing?
This fat old girl has her hands chained above her head and looks fearfully uncomfortable, apart from her dressing-gown coming down. She's labelled Andromeda. I recalled that Rubens has a much jollier Andromeda, a rollicking great lady who looks as happy as the day is long to be showing off her charms to the cliff watchers. The languishing Victorian ones do look a bit nervous about the monster who's coming to eat them up; but they seem even more concerned to keep the graceful pose they've been arranged in by the painter; and like the Rubens lady they don't seem to mind being watched by the gents on the cliff-top, or rather in the picture gallery. No doubt the Victorians enjoyed a romantic marine landscape all the more if it could boast a damsel in distress, and in the nude.
But Rembrandt's woman is just having a lousy time, and was that his idea, I wonder? If so, you could say he's pulled it off by making you see that the real Andromeda must have had absolutely no fun at all, however sexy she looked to Perseus as he came to rescue her. Did Rembrandt get just a bit too cocky, though, picking a model who looks fat and forty? The poor thing's not so much pathetic as comic.
But maybe that was his idea too? Perhaps the real Andromeda, if such a person ever existed, was fat and forty? How can we know, at this moment in time, as they say? Losing interest in the question I wandered off to a giant canvas by a painter called Potter. Chiefly a cow and bull, though there was also an excellent frog. But I was beginning to feel bored with the whole art gallery. Hell, why had I come in the first place? Because of Charles I suppose.
I sighed. The bonds of love could be so tiresome. But bugger all that, and art too – I was a free agent, not like poor Andromeda. I'd sneak out and get myself something at the refreshment place. I'd noticed on the way in that they served smoked eel sandwiches. Trust the Dutch for something like that. The thought of a smoked eel sandwich made me wriggle with hunger pangs.
As I turned to go I noticed this very tall man who must have been standing behind me. Rather a good looker too. He himself was not looking at the pictures but at something in his hand. I saw it was the ticket to the exhibition, which had Vermeer's picture of the Red Hat girl reproduced on it.
Next moment he looked up and saw me. He started visibly. I mean he really did. I swear it. He had been gazing at the girl on the ticket, and then he looks up and sees her walking towards him, for by that time I was on my way out. There she was, in the flesh, minus the red hat of course. But you could have knocked him down with one of its red feathers.
I felt gratified of course, distinctly so. But what I really wanted was one of those eel sandwiches.
As I made my way to the buffet I pondered the question of the young person on that ticket; or in the real picture on the wall, somewhere among the crowds where she could scarcely be seen. Well, what is she really? – a boy or girl? Or is Vermeer so mystically Zen-like that it doesn't matter? Perhaps that's the answer, but I don't really think it is. I mean, everybody must be one or the other when it comes to the point, even if a great artist can't make up his mind while he's painting them.
I stopped again, to look more closely at the picture on my own ticket. The eyes – my own eyes – looked back at me. Was there a faint suggestion of blueness round the chin? If so, was it the beginnings of a beard, or the shadow cast by the red hat?
And then again, the portrait is full of shine and light. The shine on her nose – it's very definitely she this time – makes her look both charming and vulnerable because she doesn't know it's there. She's thinking instead how well she must look in the red hat she's been told to put on. Would he have the same thoughts, or would he just be wearing it as his natural right – a swashbuckling young man? He wouldn't be caring about the shine on his nose either.
There's another possibility too – maybe there are lots more. But one at least could be that she's not a model but a rather older and richer woman, the owner of the red hat, whom the artist has cunningly painted to appear younger than she was. She's having her portrait painted, in all her finery, by a respected but obscure artist, happy to earn a few guilders.
Naturally there was an interest in all this for me. And that was the astounded look on the face of the tall man, when I turned round and he looked up and saw me. Which did he think I was – boy or girl? Which would he have liked me to be? Did he have any trouble making up his mind?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Red Hat by John Bayley. Copyright © 1997 John Bayley. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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