The Flanders Panel

She moved closer to the painting. Beatrice of Ostenburg was seated near the lancet window, her eyes lowered, absorbed in the book that lay in her lap. She reminded Julia of the virgins painted by the early Flemish masters: fair hair sleeked back, caught up beneath the almost transparent toque. White skin. Solemn and distant in that black dress, so different from the usual cloaks of crimson wool, the cloth of Flanders, more precious than silk or brocade. Black, Julia realised with sudden clarity, was the symbol of mourning, and the black widow’s weeds in which the Duchess had been dressed by Pieter Van Huys, the genius who so loved symbols and paradoxes, were not for her husband, but for her murdered lover.

The oval of her face was delicate, perfect, and every nuance, every detail, reinforced the resemblance to Renaissance virgins. Not a virgin like the Italian women honoured by Giotto, who were maids and nursemaids, even mistresses, nor like the Frenchwomen who posed as virgins but were often mothers or queens, but a bourgeois virgin, the wife of a municipal representative or of a noble landowner ruling over undulating plains scattered with castles, mansions, streams and belfries like the one painted there in the landscape outside the window. This one looked rather haughty and impassive, serene and cold, the embodiment of that northern beauty a la maniera ponentina that enjoyed such success in the countries of the south, in Spain and Italy. And the blue eyes – at least it could be assumed they were blue – their gaze turned away from the onlooker, apparently intent on her book, were nonetheless alert and penetrating, like the eyes of all the Flemish women depicted by Van Huys, Van der Weyden and Van Eyck. Enigmatic eyes that never revealed what they were looking at or wanted to look at, what they were thinking or feeling.

Julia pushed back her hair and touched the surface of the painting with her fingers, tracing the outline of Roger de Arras’ lips. In the golden light that surrounded the knight like an aura, the steel gorget almost had the gleam of highly polished metal. He was resting his chin on the thumb of his right hand, which was slightly tinged by the surrounding glow, and his gaze was fixed on the chessboard that symbolised both his life and his death. Judging by his profile, like a profile stamped on an ancient medal, Roger de Arras appeared unaware of the presence of the woman sitting reading behind him. But perhaps his thoughts were not of chess at all; perhaps they flew to that Beatrice of Burgundy at whom he did not look, out of pride, prudence or possibly merely out of respect for his master. In that case, only his thoughts were free to devote themselves to her. At that same moment, perhaps the lady’s thoughts were unaware of the pages of the book she held in her hands and her eyes were contemplating, with no need actually to look in their direction, the knight’s broad back, his calm, elegant features, the memory of his hands and his skin, or merely the echo of contained silence, the melancholy, impotent gaze she once aroused in his loving eyes.

The Venetian mirror and the painted mirror framed Julia in an imaginary space, blurring the boundaries between the two surfaces. The golden light wrapped itself about her too as, very slowly, almost resting one hand on the green cloth of the painted table and taking great care not to upset the chess pieces laid out on the board, she leaned towards Roger de Arras and kissed him gently on the cold corner of his mouth. And when she turned, she caught a gleam, the insigne of the Golden Fleece on the vermilion velvet doublet of the other player, Ferdinand Altenhoffen, the Duke of Ostenburg, whose eyes were staring at her, dark and unfathomable.

By the time the clock on the wall struck three, the ashtray was full of cigarette ends and her cup and the coffeepot stood almost empty among sundry books and papers. Julia sat back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling, trying to put her ideas in order. To banish the ghosts encircling her, she’d turned on all the lights, and the boundaries of reality were slowly returning, gradually fitting back again into time and space.

There were, she concluded, other, more practical, ways of asking the question; there was another point of view, doubtless the correct one, if Julia bore in mind that she was more of a grown-up Wendy than an Alice. In order to approach things from that angle, all she had to do was close her eyes and open them again, look at the Van Huys as she would at any other picture painted five centuries ago and then pick up pencil and paper. And that’s what she did, after drinking down the last of the now cold coffee. At that time of night, she thought, not feeling in the least sleepy and more afraid of sliding down the slippery slope of unreason than of anything else, it would be no bad thing to set about reordering her ideas in the light of recent events. So she began to write: