The Flanders Panel

Julia was taking notes, caught up in the story, but she stopped suddenly and looked at Alvaro.

“What I don’t understand,” she said, chewing the end of her pen, “is what this Roger de Arras would be doing in a picture by Van Huys, playing chess with the Duke of Ostenburg.”

Alvaro fidgeted in his seat with apparent embarrassment, as if suddenly gripped by doubt. He sucked on his pipe and stared at the wall behind Julia’s head, with the air of someone waging an inner battle. Finally, he managed a cautious smile.

“I’ve no idea what he’s doing there – apart from playing chess, that is.” Julia was sure that he was looking at her with unusual wariness, as if he could not quite put into words an idea that was going round and round in his head. “What I do know,” he added at last, “and I know this because it’s mentioned in all the books on the subject, is that Roger de Arras didn’t die in France, but in Ostenburg.” After a slight hesitation, he pointed to the photograph of the painting. “Have you noticed the date of this painting?”

Puzzled, Julia said: “Yes, 1471. Why?”

Alvaro slowly exhaled some smoke and uttered something that sounded like an abrupt laugh. He was looking at Julia as if trying to read in her eyes the answer to a question he could not quite bring himself to ask.

“There’s something not quite right there,” he said finally. “That date is either incorrect or the chronicles are lying, or else that knight is not the Rutgier Ar. Preux of the painting.” He picked up a mimeographed copy of the Chronicle of the Dukes of Ostenburg and, after leafing through it for a while, placed it in front of her. “This was written at the end of the fifteenth century by Guichard de Hainaut, a Frenchman and a contemporary of the events he describes, and it is based on eyewitness accounts. According to Hainaut, our man died at Epiphany in 1469, two years before Pieter Van Huys painted The Game of Chess. Do you understand, Julia? Roger de Arras could never have posed for that picture, because by the time it was painted, he was already dead.”

He walked her to the university car park and handed her the file containing the photocopies. Almost everything was in there, he said: historical references, an update on the catalogued works of Van Huys, a bibliography… He promised to send a chronological account and a few other papers to her as soon as he had a free moment. He stood looking at her, his pipe in his mouth and his hands in his jacket pockets, as if he still had something to say but was unsure whether or not to do so. He hoped, he added after a short pause, that he’d been of some help.

Julia nodded, feeling perplexed. The details of the story she’d just learned were still whirling round in her head. And there was something else.

“I’m impressed, Professor. In less than an hour you’ve completely reconstructed the lives of the people depicted in a painting you’ve never studied before.”

Alvaro looked away, letting his gaze wander over the campus. Then he made a wry face.

“The painting wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to me,” he said. Julia thought she detected a tremor of doubt in his voice, and it troubled her. She listened extra carefully to his words. “Apart from anything else, there’s a photograph in a 1917 Prado catalogue. The Game of Chess used to be exhibited there. It was on loan for about twenty years, from the turn of the century until 1923, when the heirs asked for it back.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, now you do.” He concentrated on his pipe again, which seemed about to go out. Julia looked at him out of the corner of her eye. She knew him, or, rather, she had known him once, too well not to sense that something important was preying on his mind, something he couldn’t bring himself to say.

“What is it you haven’t told me, Alvaro?”

He didn’t move, just stood there sucking on his pipe, staring into space. Then he turned slowly towards her.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I just mean that everything to do with this painting is important.” She looked at him gravely. “I’m staking a lot on this.”

She noticed that Alvaro was chewing indecisively on the stem of his pipe. He sketched an ambivalent gesture in the air.

“You’re putting me in a very awkward position. Your Van Huys seems to have become rather fashionable of late.”

“Fashionable?” She became tense, alert, as if the earth might suddenly shift beneath her feet. “Do you mean that someone else has already talked to you about him, before I did?”

Alvaro was smiling uncertainly now, as if regretting having said too much.

“They might have.”

“Who?”

“That’s the problem. I’m not allowed to tell you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not. It’s true.” He looked at her imploringly.