Portrait of an Unknown Woman

‘That’s never John Clement?’ Dame Alice said, and for a moment I thought I saw tears in her eyes. That was impossible, of course – she was always so brisk. But that moist glimmer I must have imagined did remind me how she and John Clement used to huddle together to discuss how best to handle the younger me. She never knew I was listening from the gallery; he probably didn’t either, though I stopped being sure of that. I remembered feeling reassured that this forthright, no-nonsense woman worried over my nightmares and studied quietness back then; reassured too at how she trusted our first teacher, and at how carefully she’d listen to his slow, thoughtful responses. They were old friends.

‘Clement!’ old Sir John barked, looking astonished – the closest that the old authoritarian could get to being excited. And he began shuffling vaguely forward.

John Clement bowed low to Dame Alice (in his quiet way, he’d always had elaborate manners). He bowed lower still to Grandfather. But then his formality gave way and he put those long arms, which still waved more than most other people’s, around both of their backs at the same time. I thought he was only a breath away from whirling them off the ground too.

There was a sudden babble of welcome. Voices testing their strength. Cheeks and hands and arms proffered in greeting. And all those insincere phrases people say. ‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ ‘You look younger than ever!’

But it stopped as quickly as it started. He was looking around, as if he hadn’t seen everyone he was looking for. And then he caught sight of me, and I saw his face light up.

‘Meg – I’ve come on Thursday,’ he began. And this time his arms hung down awkwardly, and he didn’t try and swing me round like a little girl. Feeling the happiness inside me surging out towards him, it was me who stepped forward.

But Dame Alice had recovered from her shock and got the measure of the situation by now, at least enough to talk properly to her surprise guest.

‘Well, now, Master John,’ she said playfully, stepping in front of me to give his cheek an affectionate tweak. ‘What are you doing fondling all our daughters as if they were Southwark Queens? And what are you doing here anyway, turning up like a bad penny after all these years away without so much as a word to any of us? Not that it matters why – we’re just all very pleased indeed to see you. No – stop – don’t tell us anything here. Come up to the house at once, and tell us around the fire instead. We can’t stand around gossiping on the riverbank. It’s January, for mercy’s sake. Whatever can have possessed us all to come out and hang around in the cold in the first place?’ And she rolled her eyes comically and guided him away with a firm arm, still talking, with Grandfather and the rest of them streaming along behind, screeching like ravens. ‘As if it were spring!’ I heard her say from way in front.

Which left me alone, in the river breeze that suddenly seemed to have a touch of ice in it, on the jetty. Alone, that is, except for the boatman, now pulling boxes and bags out of the boat, and his squat passenger, who was looking as crestfallen as I felt as the crowd on the jetty disappeared.

The fair-haired man caught my eye. ‘If it please you, mistress,’ he said in halting English, fumbling in pockets and pouches. ‘I am to put up at Sir Thomas More’s house at Chelsea. Am I here?’ And he pulled out a much-folded letter, which I could see even from a distance was covered in Erasmus’ dear, cramped scrawl, and gave me a mute, pleading look from his spaniel eyes.

‘Oh heavens above,’ I said, struck with remorse. One of the items piled on the boards came into sudden focus for me – a long wooden frame tightly wrapped in woollen cloth: painter’s tools. The poor man was shivering in his rough cloak. And everyone else had gone without him. ‘You’re Hans Holbein, aren’t you?’

After a few minutes it stopped seeming such a messy encounter. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ I was muttering, full of confusion and excruciating embarrassment, but the big man beside me just burst out laughing. He had a big laugh that came up from his belly; he didn’t look a man to be bothered by embarrassment. He just looked capable and friendly, with big thick hands and fat spatula fingers, the muscular sort of hands you need to grind up powders with a mortar and pestle and mix them together. I didn’t know much about painting, then, but I could already sense he would be good at his craft.

So I could feel the sunshine again as I walked up from the jetty to the house where I knew I’d find my family fussing happily around John Clement and where, sooner or later, the two of us would have a chance to talk again. I had Hans Holbein trotting beside me, trying to make his massive frame small in the manner of humble men, and the skinny boatman trotting behind, weighed down with bags and squawking, ‘Thought it was the right thing to put them in together if they both wanted to come down here. Save them a few pennies, I thought, missis.’

With Master Hans beside me, with his easel balanced on his shoulder as if it weighed nothing, drinking in the vista unfolding before us, I saw it again myself as if for the first time. And it became beautiful to walk onto our land through the wicket gate (ignoring the gatehouse with the dark secrets whose windows I can’t bear to look through), and up through the lawns and beds, which suddenly seemed full not just of withered trees and shrunken shrubs, but of tomorrow’s berries and buttercups and lilies and gillyflowers and sweet cabbage roses, and up the steps towards the dignified redbrick frontage Father had chosen for us all – a porch, two bays, and two sets of casement windows on each side. There were jasmine and honeysuckle stalks already growing over the porch. We planted them last year, when we moved into the new house, built to show Father’s ever-rising status, and left our old London life behind. And one day soon we’d be seeing cascades of sweet-smelling colour coming from them.

‘My English is not good, and I am sorry,’ Master Hans was saying, slowly, so you had to concentrate on what he was saying, but I liked watching his sensible, no-nonsense face and the hearty voice, so that was all right. ‘But this is a very beautiful house. Peaceful. So I congratulate you. You must be happy living here.’

Talking to him was like dipping into a great vat of warming soup. Chunky broth with savoury vegetables and a meaty aroma – not the grandest of food, but more wholesome and comforting than the most elaborate dish of honeyed peacocks’ tongues. Cheerfulness was spreading through me now, as I pushed open the door. ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling more certain than I had for a long time. ‘Yes, we are happy.’

‘Give me your cloak, leave your things here and come straight to the table – you must be cold and hungry,’ I went on, smelling the food being laid on the table behind the wooden screens and hearing the murmur of voices. He paused. Suddenly he did look embarrassed. ‘Mistress, excuse me, I have one question before we sit with your other guest. Tell me, what is his name?’

In what I thought was a reassuring manner, I laughed. ‘Oh, he’s an old family friend. He’s called – John – Clement,’ I said, pronouncing the words so clearly that even a foreigner could copy them, happy to have the chance to say the name. I began to nudge the German towards the hall, but Holbein didn’t seem to want to move. He chewed on the thought, looking puzzled.

‘John Clement,’ he repeated. ‘That is the name I remembered. I drew a picture once of a John Clement. A young boy who would be our age now. It was my first commission from Master Erasmus. Would he be the son of this gentleman?’

I laughed again. ‘Oh no,’ I said, shaking my head firmly. ‘This John Clement hasn’t got a son of our age. He’s not married. It must be someone else, or maybe you mistook the name. Anyway, do come in properly, Master Hans. You might not believe it, but my family is very eager to meet you. And I can smell dinner on the table.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and met my eye, and laughed again. ‘I must have made a mistake.’ He let me guide him forward at last, and Dame Alice sent him to wash his hands and settled him at the table with a barrage of explanations and good-humoured apologies and expostulations and platters of steaming roasted food, and there was a lot of bowing and loud talk for foreigners, in clear, over-enunciated voices, and the kind of slightly forced good humour that you get among strangers meeting for the first time. I watched her dash off a note to Father telling him the guest we’d been expecting had arrived – and a second unexpected guest into the bargain – and took it to find a boy who could go to town to deliver it. Everyone had packed in, among them Nicholas Kratzer, the astronomer, who had not yet managed to start talking German to his compatriot. By the time I sat down to eat, there was only one chair left – on the same side of the table as John Clement but at the other end. I could hardly see him, let alone talk to him. He had Elizabeth and Margaret on either side, and all I could really see was Elizabeth chattering excitedly enough for all three of them, with pink in her cheeks again. I didn’t hear him say a single word through the meal – but there was plenty of chatter all around, and I couldn’t really catch the drift of what they were talking about. My own vis-à-vis was Master Holbein, on the other side of the table. The German was a restful companion, wolfing down vast quantities of food in silence. But I also caught him doing something other than wiping up sauces at speed with great wedges of bread. Once or twice I looked up and saw him chewing on his bread, thoughtfully, like a cow on its cud, and giving John Clement long, slow, considering looks. Whatever the odd thought was that he’d had as we walked in through the door, he was still clearly turning it over in his head now.

2

After dinner – after the settling and snuggling of the midday nap had begun, after the merciful silence that descended on the house whenever Dame Alice fell asleep – I slipped downstairs and found my cloak and boots.

It was what I’d always done at fourteen, on Thursdays. But now I felt my hands patting nervously at my white ermine cap and pushing some stray black hairs back under it. My heart was beating faster than usual. It wasn’t really just like old times. I had no idea what would happen next. John Clement had no bedroom door here from which to emerge, fumbling for his cloak, tripping carelessly against the banisters and cheerfully cursing under his breath. Was he about to come out from somewhere in this unfamiliar house, gangly and grinning, to sweep me off? And where would we walk if he did? Or would he not remember at all? Would I stand here by myself, feeling foolish, until there was nothing to be done but take my cap off again and go back upstairs?

It was completely quiet, but something made me look round. From the chapel doorway at the other end of the great hall, in the shadows under the gallery, Elizabeth was watching me. It was her eyes I’d felt in my back.

‘Woof,’ she said, with a nasty glint in her eyes, and retreated into the candlelit darkness. So she remembered. She knew. I could hear her husband William’s nasal voice inside, raised in prayer, until the door closed.

I thinned my lips, determined not to be downcast. But suddenly I felt very alone in my cloak in the doorway, hot under its prickly heat, looking down the corridor and up at the gallery in hopes of detecting the sounds that weren’t beginning. I could, I thought, take a turn round the garden by myself. No one would think I’d expected anything different (except Elizabeth). But I felt unsteadily close to tears at the idea.

Then I forgot Elizabeth, because the front door opened from outside. A roaring gust of air and sunshine blew in. And a pair of usually sad eyes, now filled with laughter, looked down gently at me. ‘Come for a Thursday walk with me, Mistress Meg,’ John Clement said lightly, in his magical voice. He’d been waiting in the garden. He was good at secrets. He held out his arm. ‘It’s been a long time.’

We walked in silence for a while, into the wind.

There were so many things I wanted to ask him. So many things I wanted to tell him.

But there was no hurry now he was here.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, more softly than ever, looking straight ahead and not at me. (A mystifying haze had come over us both; a glorious kind of embarrassment; we couldn’t quite look into each other’s eyes, and I was snatching sideways glances at him instead – committing to memory each feature and joyfully relearning the contours of cheek, nose, throat and chin as if I were caressing them with my eyes. His dark hair was just as I remembered it, though with a dusting of silver at the temples now. His eyes were the same: light blue and piercing, with that heartbreaking hint of learned sadness always in them.) ‘Sometimes, it’s good to be so at ease with a person that you don’t have to say anything. I’ve missed that. I don’t know many people this well, anywhere.’

At ease was absolutely the opposite of how I was feeling at this moment; but the wonder of this joyful embarrassment I’d been stricken with stopped me from laughing at the idea. I couldn’t quite believe he was feeling so at ease with me either. He couldn’t meet my eye even more than I could his. But hugging that secret knowledge to myself only made me happier.

He was matching his long, athletic stride to my shorter one. I could feel him reining back his legs. We were so close I could almost feel the muscles in his legs brushing against my skirt. I was half-turned towards him, against the wind, my arm hovering weightless and nervous above his, trying not to melt into the warmth we made together. But, all down the side of my body that was next to his, I couldn’t help but feel the line and life of him, and rejoice in silence at the loveliness of it.

‘I could walk like this forever, with you,’ he said, almost whispering.

I made a small sound back; I didn’t know what to say, because I couldn’t say, ‘I’ve been waiting for years for you to come back, and if I died now I would die happy just to have seen you again’, but it didn’t matter. Because I’d just half-seen him snatching one of the same glances at me that I’d been secretly throwing at him – memorising my features before turning away back into his silent contemplation of his memory of me – and a new soft little explosion of happiness was happening inside me.

He laughed. ‘But it is cold,’ he added. We were down by the river already, with a bank of snowdrops coming up behind us under the oak tree and a fierce glitter on the water, and the wind was coming at us hard and fast, snatching at his foreign-looking black beret. ‘Shall we sit down somewhere, out of the wind? In one of the gate houses – maybe this one right here?’

I didn’t understand the surge of feeling sweeping me along. All I knew was that there was nothing I wanted more than to be alone with him, somewhere warm and still, so that I might at last be brave enough to look into his face and we could talk forever. I started to nod my head, feeling my body slide closer into his arm. Then I realised what he was pointing at: the westernmost of the two gatehouses. The place I never go.

‘No,’ I snapped, surprising even myself with the sharpness of my tone. ‘We can’t go in there,’ I added, feeling his surprise and making an effort to keep my voice calm. ‘Father’s started keeping … things … in that gatehouse. Come away. I can’t tell you about that yet.’

Urgently I pulled at his arm, aware with another part of my mind of the closeness of his chest as he laughingly surrendered and let me manoeuvre him away. It was three hundred yards upriver to the second gatehouse. ‘But this other gatehouse is all right, is it?’ he asked breathlessly, catching me up and sliding his arm around my waist now as we walked towards it. I could feel it across my back. Fingers on my hip bone, moving. ‘What does he keep in here?’

What he kept here was his pets: a fox, a weasel, a ferret, a monkey, all on chains; rabbits in a wooden hutch; and a dovecote of fluttering white birds on the roof. Erasmus used to watch Father’s doves with me, out in the gardens at Bucklersbury, long ago. ‘They have their kindnesses and feuds, as well as we,’ he wrote afterwards. And he loved to tell how we’d seen the monkey, off its chain because it was ill, watching the weasel prising loose the back of the hutch. That monkey had run over, climbing on a plank and pushing the wooden back into a safe position again, saving the rabbits. Animal humanism – just the kind of story that Erasmus would treasure. Just the kind of thing that used to amuse Father, too, before his life took the turn it has now.

It was peaceful in the eastern gatehouse. It smelled of straw and feed and wood – calm country smells. We pushed open the door and sat down on a bench, side by side, with his arm still round my back, and listened to the wind on the water.

With his free hand, John Clement loosened his cloak, and turned to gaze down sideways at me. The arm behind me was bringing me round to face him, a process my body seemed, independently of my brain, to be joyfully helping. There was a little smile playing on his lips. He lowered his head and nudged his nose against mine. His eyes were cast down still, but his lips were so close now that he only had to whisper. ‘So, grown-up Mistress Meg Giggs – what shall we talk about?’ He smiled wider, and his smile filled my whole field of vision. ‘I hear that while I’ve been away becoming a doctor you’ve been becoming one too.’ His fingers were exploring my side, his arm was drawing me closer. ‘And I want to know all about that. But first, I want to say,’ he paused again, ‘how beautiful you’ve grown,’ and he looked straight into my eyes at last.

And then, somehow, we were kissing, and I was so dizzy with longing that I found myself clinging to him, aware of his cloak and the ribbons on his foreign-made jacket sleeves and the heat of my blood and – at the same time as losing myself in the bewildering mix of hardness and softness and wetness and roughness and gentleness and sensation on every inch of our bodies as they strained together – feeling touched to have the power to make his heart pound so audibly in his chest, and his hands shake so.

With a sigh, we came apart, and sat, rumpled and flushed, looking at each other from under our eyelashes, and laughing at our own shared confusion. ‘Oh Meg,’ John whispered. ‘Now I know I’ve really come home at last. You’ve always been home to me.’

Which was just about exactly what I had wanted to hear him say ever since he went away, almost half my life ago. And just about exactly what I had begun to think that neither he nor any other man ever would say to me, while I passed my empty spinsterish days buried alive in the countryside, watching all the others get fat with happiness, and became more isolated and eccentric and embittered by the day. So almost all of me wanted to believe the wonderful words I was hearing now. But I couldn’t stop myself also hearing another voice. It was Elizabeth’s, and it was taunting, ‘He’s been back in London since last summer,’ and ‘Father got him the job.’

I looked up at him, hesitating over how best to put my difficult question, with prickles of frustration in advance at trying to believe the answer could only be simple and honest, and at the same time feeling almost dizzy with the desire to slide back into his arms and lose myself in another kiss.

‘So tell me …’ I began, feeling my way into a new kind of uncharted territory. I couldn’t bring myself to say, ‘You’ve been back in London for six months, just one hour’s boat ride away, and never sent word; you went off abroad ten years ago; you never once wrote – and you expect me to believe you’ve treasured your walks with the little girl from all those years ago so much that you’ve always thought of me as your home?’ So I started as gently as I knew how: ‘What has it been like being the King’s server for all these months?’

He met my eyes now with a different kind of look, a little wary. Then he nodded once or twice, as if he’d answered some mysterious question of his own, and kissed me chastely, a brush of lips on lips.

‘Well, it’s a sinecure; a place at court while I set myself up properly; your father’s kindness to me for old times’ sake,’ he said. ‘But I know what you’re really asking. You think I should have done something better than just turn up out of the blue to see you after so long. You’re asking for explanations.’

I nodded, relieved that he’d grasped my thought. He paused again. He was thinking hard. I became aware of the rabbits scratching around in their straw.

‘Listen, Meg,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t give you enough explanations to satisfy you completely. Not yet. But you have to trust me. The first time I asked your father if I could marry you was nearly ten years ago, when he took me abroad for the summer.’ I held my breath. I hadn’t expected to hear that. My heart started beating even faster, so fast that I had to make a conscious resolve to keep my face studiedly turned down towards my knees so he couldn’t see my shock (though I was aware that his face was turned studiedly towards his own knees). ‘But your father said no,’ he went on. ‘He said I had to settle myself in the world before I could think of marrying you. He told me that if I’d got so interested in herbalism I should go and turn myself into a learned and rational physician – get my MD on the Continent – and bring something new to the new learning in England. Well, I have. And I came back to England with you in my heart. I swear I did. The first thing I wanted to do when I got to London was to come to you.’

He sighed. ‘But the problem was that your father still said no,’ he said.

I couldn’t stop myself looking up now. He must have seen a flash in my eyes. ‘Why?’ I said, and I could hear my voice – which I’d thought would come out breathless with a happiness I’d never even imagined might be mine – sounding hard and vengeful instead.

‘There are things he wants me to be able to tell you,’ he said. He stopped again. Looked down again. Took a big breath, as if making a decision, and went on. ‘He says I have to become a member of the College of Physicians first,’ he continued, and there was anxiety in his voice. ‘Not just a member, but one of the elect. I’m doing everything I can. I’m talking to Doctor Butts, the King’s physician. It’s not easy; I’ve been away for years; I have to prove myself as a good physician to someone I’ve never worked with. But your father won’t be swayed. He says I have to be able to tell you I’ve succeeded in my work.’

It was the More household attitude: everyone must bow to the things of the mind. Usually I shared it. I revelled in my knowledge of things no ordinary woman knew, and most men didn’t either. But now, when the picture of a life of ordinary domestic happiness seemed both tantalisingly within reach and impossibly out of reach, Father’s strict intellectual requirements of John Clement suddenly seemed unnatural and harsh.

‘I shouldn’t be here now, to be honest; I promised him I’d stay away. But when I met Elizabeth,’ he looked down and scuffed the straw with a boot, ‘and started thinking about how close you were here, just down the river, and I knew your father was away at court, and it was about to be Thursday – well, you’ll have to put it down to a lover’s impulse: I just couldn’t resist coming to take you out for a walk.’

I didn’t know what to say. His words and my feelings were going round and round, somehow failing to blend, leaving me speechless. I tried to control my spasm of anger with Father and concentrate on the happiness of being with the man I loved at last. He was looking searchingly at me.

‘Say you believe me,’ he said.

‘Say you love me,’ I heard myself say. With self-loathing, I heard myself sounding petulant. Like a child not understanding a story but wanting a happy ending.

‘Oh, I love you all right,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve always loved you, whoever you were – the little orphan crying over your lost past, the bright-eyed child storing up everything the apothecaries could show you, the girl who couldn’t stop asking difficult questions, the beauty you’ve turned into now,’ and he stroked my black hair, exposed now, with my white cap gathering straw on the floor. ‘And I always will love you. We’re two of a kind. And even though I’m twice your age, and not quite settled in life even in my dotage – if you’re willing to have me, nothing will stop me coming back to ask your father for your hand. Again and again. Until the time is right. Don’t you ever doubt that.’ And he folded me back into his arms so that his cloak covered us both, and moved his face over mine.