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  Perhaps Bruegel was able to give the Cardinal a solemn assurance that he hadn’t read the stories himself – that he’d simply heard them in church, or had them read over to him by a properly qualified specialist. Then again, Granvelle was a worldly and cynical man – think of his regret at having to share the spoils of office with all the new bishops. If Bruegel was a favourite, the Cardinal might well have been prepared to overlook small personal weaknesses. He was well placed to protect him, after all. But Bruegel must have been acutely aware how precarious his position was.

  And if Tolnay’s right, he was also vulnerable in another way. He had a bit of a past. Tolnay believes that while Bruegel was living in Antwerp he was in contact with a group of geographers, writers and artists called ‘the Libertines’ – not rakes, but ‘liberal spirits, tolerant on questions of faith, enemies of confessional fanaticism, with a Stoic ideal of life, founded on the great belief in the moral dignity of the free man.’ Tolnay curiously insists that this didn’t mean Bruegel was ever a heretic. But they were strange ideas, to say the least, for the Netherlands in the sixteenth century – and a number of the Libertines, according to Tolnay, had stranger ones still. They were members of a sect that he calls the schola caritatis, founded by Hendrik Niclaes, the author of The Mirror of Justice, a work in which salvation is envisaged as being brought about by the power of universal love alone. All external cults are secondary, Niclaes believed; all religions are symbols of a single truth and Holy Scripture has merely an allegorical sense.

  I imagine the Cardinal dropping in at the studio one day to check progress on his latest commission. The two men chat about this and that, and the conversation turns to philosophical matters. Bruegel tells him about the views of his friends in Antwerp. Human freedom and the moral dignity it confers. No need for the intercession of the Church. Catholicism and Calvinism much of a muchness. The Cardinal’s very interested. ‘You must let me meet these friends of yours,’ he says. ‘Invite them round one evening, why not, and we can … stoke up the fire and have an enjoyable evening together sorting out our little differences.’

  I suspect that Bruegel didn’t mention his old Antwerp friends. They all seem to have survived. A dozen years later, one of them, Abraham Ortelius, even went on to become geographer royal. Failure to inform upon suspected heretics: another charge hanging over Bruegel’s head. Another little capital offence.

  No wonder he had to be somewhat elusive. Either he had to conceal his past, or if the Cardinal knew about it already, he had to be discreet enough to allow him to overlook it. Or perhaps Bruegel distanced himself from his youthful vagaries even more firmly, by persuading Granvelle that he’d become a sincere and useful supporter of the regime. Art was one of the most powerful instruments of the Counter-Reformation. Another Netherlandish artist, Frans Floris, also collected by Jongelinck, travelled to Rome to study the heroic style favoured by the Catholic Church at this period, and then did a Fall of the Rebel Angels in which St Michael, with obvious topical symbolism, is striking down the heavenly dissidents with great violence and effect. Eight years later, in 1562, with the Cardinal installed in Brussels and the new terror well under way, Bruegel weighed in with a Fall of the Rebel Angels of his own.

  So what am I saying now – that Bruegel was simply a hired hack of the Counter-Reformation? It might explain why he went back to the old Books of Hours as the source for his great cycle of the year. He was merely serving up the same old reassuring myth, so carefully sustained from generation to generation, of a happy bucolic world untouched by the conflicts and savageries of real life, one more episode in the long-running story of Arcadian shepherds and Bourbon milkmaids, of Soviet tractor drivers and Merrie England.

  I offer this interpretation with judicious scholarly detachment. But I don’t feel detached about it at all. I don’t believe it. Not for a moment. I refuse to believe it. If Bruegel is all things to all men, then he certainly isn’t that to me.

  Do I have any evidence for this? Yes – the evidence of my eyes! Of plain common sense! Those six magnificent panels can’t have sprung from such base origins! The suggestion’s ludicrous!

  But I need something a little more objective than this. What other evidence can I find?

  There’s one other fragment of contemporary testimony apart from van Mander, though it looks at first sight too insignificant to consider. Abraham Ortelius, the Antwerp geographer with whom Bruegel shared his dangerous past, must have remained a friend, even after Bruegel moved to Brussels, because it was probably in the following year that he commissioned a picture from him, The Death of the Virgin; and in the 1570s, after Bruegel’s death, he began assembling an Album Amicorum, a collection of tributes to his friends, in which he included an epitaph for the painter – the only contemporary account of him still extant apart from van Mander’s. An epitaph isn’t the kind of source that usually provides much illumination, and when I glanced at it before, in Tolnay’s end-notes, unable to understand more than a few words of the Latin, I assumed it was the usual bland tribute, and passed on. Now that I look at it again, though, in the light of all those fires, with the smell of all that burning flesh in my nostrils, and His Eminence the Reichskommissar looking over my shoulder, I start to wonder if it’s quite as innocuous as it seems.

  Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt …’ begins Ortelius. ‘He painted many things, this Bruegel, that cannot be painted …’

  Why can’t they be painted, these things that he did in fact paint? Because they’re in some way elusive, hard to observe, difficult to render pictorially? The rawness of early spring, the heat of summer? Or does the difficulty go deeper? Is he referring to things that can’t be seen? To the feelings that landscape and the changing seasons induce? To the lift of the heart as the spring draws on and the mind goes out to the far blue horizon?

  Or does he mean things more abstract still? Beliefs? Ideas? Strange ideas, perhaps, like religious tolerance and the moral dignity of the free man? Ideas which are unpaintable for more reasons than one?

  My spirits have suddenly begun to lift. All my senses are alert. How does the epitaph go on? Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt, quod Vilnius de Apelle …

  But here both my Latin and my grasp of classical allusion give out. Also, I suddenly realize that I have to get to Kentish Town before the bank shuts.

  Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt …

  The nice thing is that Kate can translate it for me. She can read the Latin in a breviary or a Book of Hours as easily as the English in a newspaper. As with the iconography, we can work on this together.

  I walk round our cold flat in Oswald Road, still wearing my overcoat, turning on the central heating. I’m going to stay in town overnight and go off to the V & A first thing in the morning to do what I should have done today – investigate Giordano prices – since I’m determined to leave nothing to chance, and to have a clear-cut plan of action for Kate’s approval.

  I look in at each of the cold rooms, checking that nothing’s changed behind our backs. Nothing has. Everywhere there are the traces of Kate and Tilda, and our life together. Tangles of tights and underwear on the stairs, waiting either to be washed or put away; plastic ducks and buckets scattered across the bathroom floor; the newspaper I was reading at breakfast the morning we left propped up against a lurking bag of muesli. One of the things we like about each other is that we’re neither of us obsessively tidy, and Tilda seems set to take after us. Multa pinxit … In the rush of our departure we’ve forgotten to make the bed; the pillows still have the shape of our heads in them, the piled duvet the mass of our warmly twined bodies … Quae pingi non possunt …

  I sit down amid the sweet wreckage of the bed and phone her. As I listen to the phone ringing in our distant cottage, and imagine her coming indoors, or laying Tildy down, or drying her hands, I put my head down into the bedclothes to inhale the deliriously lingering smell of us, and I feel the life stir inside my trousers.

&
nbsp; The dear familiar caution of her ‘Hello?’ thrills me, as it always has.

  ‘I’m faxing you some Latin to translate.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At Oswald Road. I’m going to have to stay overnight.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, and I realize how much she was looking forward to the moment when my smiling face separated itself from all the meaningless faces emerging around it into the station yard.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I still haven’t got round to Giordano. I’ve been working on our man.’

  Our man. Yes. Now.

  ‘Not because of what I said?’

  ‘Not at all. Because of what I said. I just want to be absolutely sure in my own mind before I go ahead. As sure as it’s humanly possible to be.’

  ‘Don’t give Tony Churt a chance to get rid of it some other way first,’ she says. She’s being so sweet about it!

  ‘No, but I’m not going to rush, I’m not going to panic. How’s Tildy? What’s she been doing? What’s the weather like down there? No sign of Mr Skelton yet? The sink hasn’t blocked up again? Oh, Kate, I miss you so much!’

  And love her so much. Perhaps even more at this distance than I do when we’re together. She’s like my picture. No painting in the world has ever meant as much to me as that briefly glimpsed panel, so difficult of access. I think of it all the time, almost as much as I think of Kate – I’m thinking of it now, even while I’m talking to her. By the time I’ve had it on the kitchen wall for three months I’ll probably have ceased to look at it.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ she says. ‘I took Tildy to see the cows. The sun came out just after lunch. Did you get to the bank?’

  She’s even taken the initiative in talking about the bank! It transforms life, now I can say everything to her quite openly again, now we’re in this together.

  ‘Just!’ I confess. ‘No problems, though. We can simply increase our mortgage. It should only take a week to go through.’

  We – yes. Joint account. I’ve applied for the maximum they’ll offer, which against the equity we’ve got is £15,000, just in case I decide to go ahead with my original plan of getting Tony the full price of a genuine Vrancz. On my vague estimate this might leave a few more thousand to find – not from Kate! – but there must be other sources. It’s a useful possibility to keep at the back of my mind, that’s all. No point in going into hypotheticals with her at the moment, though. Time enough if the occasion should actually arise. I’m not going to do anything until I’ve really identified that picture. I can’t, in any case, until the bank’s come through with the money.

  ‘So what’s this Latin?’ demands Kate. She’s beginning to be caught by the mystery. I can hear it in her voice.

  ‘You tell me. I’ll put it on in a moment.’

  ‘Don’t forget to look up the Giordano tomorrow. You don’t want any surprises.’ She’s becoming as obsessed as I am.

  ‘First thing on my list for the morning,’ I assure her. ‘Kiss Tildy for me. I miss you both so much!’

  As soon as I put the phone down, of course, I remember that I’ve no fax, because Kate’s got it – we took it down to the cottage. I’ll have to ask Midge, our usual standby in emergencies. I write the epitaph out in carefully legible capitals, since the laptop’s relaxing in the country as well, and run downstairs with it. So much more plausible and congenial, one’s neighbours in town – and so much closer.

  ‘Emergency,’ I say, when she opens the door. ‘Yet again. Could you send a fax for me?’

  ‘I thought you were in the country,’ she says, as she ushers me in and takes the page, trying not to look at it.

  ‘Kate is. It’s to her. She’s got the machine.’

  ‘Nothing wrong?’ she asks, glancing at the desperate capitals in spite of herself.

  ‘No, no,’ I assure her, but she’s not listening – she’s reading. MULTA PINXIT, HIC BRUGELIUS, QUAE PINGI NON POSSUNT … And she’s storing it away for future use, because she writes a column for one of the papers, I can never remember which, about the more comical aspects of life in Kentish Town. We feature in it from time to time, our names changed but otherwise our lovably eccentric and absent-minded selves, locking ourselves out and locking each other in and overflowing the washing machine into her flat. Now we’re going to be in it again, coyly corresponding about our domestic arrangements in Latin. Well, she helps us out – we help her out. Exactly like me and my good friend Tony Churt.

  I’m back upstairs by this time, anyway, looking through the various commentators again to find any possible candidates for the things Bruegel painted that can’t be painted. Almost at once I find the converse – things that can be painted and that he didn’t paint. ‘Bruegel,’ says Friedländer, ‘was the first artist successfully to eliminate the lingering echo of religious devotion.’

  I make another trip through the pictures, and yes, the absence is striking. Even when he did do religious subjects the sacred events tend to be diminished in size, off-centre, offstage even, left at the edge of the onward rush of the everyday world, like Icarus in his fall. Saul’s converted, to become the great founding father of the Christian church, and no one notices. The citizens of snowbound Judaea pour into Bethlehem for the census, and you have to search among them to find the pregnant woman arriving on the donkey. The Kings arrive to pay homage to the holy child, and what occupies almost the whole of the picture is their train of retainers and pack animals waiting in the softly falling snow. Three-quarters of an inch further to the left and Jesus himself would have been out of frame.

  I turn back to The Fall of the Rebel Angels. And no – it’s not a contribution to the Counter-Reformation. It’s totally unlike Floris’s picture. The fallen angels aren’t devilish muscular warriors, but fantastic creatures with the bodies of fish, the heads of birds and the wings of butterflies – figures straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. They don’t look like anything that might be described as angels, and they don’t appear to be engaged in anything that might be described as rebellion.

  And then, in the great cycle of the year, not so much as a nod to religion, even in the remote background, even at the outermost edges. Not a ghost of a saint – not a prayer – not an uplifted gaze – not a sigh – nothing.

  Perhaps this creeping secularity is what the Cardinal appreciated in Bruegel. At last, a painter who was trying to sober up and cut down on his biblical intake! For a senior churchman, a little breather from all that Christianity must have been as good as a holiday.

  Multa pinxit … Even as he ushered the religion out of the back door, he was smuggling something else in, and under the Cardinal’s very eye. What was it?

  A sudden loud hammering on the door makes me jump out of my chair in the empty flat, full of a confused terror that the inquisitors have read my thoughts. But it’s Midge, holding out a curling sheet of fax paper.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, as I gaze mutely at her, still too shocked to speak. ‘I’ve been tapping and tapping. I thought you must be asleep.’

  ‘No, sorry,’ I explain, ‘I was …’ Was what? I gesture helplessly. In the Netherlands, I want to say. In the sixteenth century. I can see from the little amused tightening of her lips, though, that she’s got enough for another paragraph or two already.

  Well, pleased to be of some use. I’m already sitting down at the kitchen table again and reading Kate’s translation. What was it he painted that can’t be painted?

  Thunder.

  This seems to be what Ortelius is suggesting. That Bruegel painted thunder.

  I was through the door of the London Library next morning as soon as it opened, and now I’m sitting with Kate’s translation on the desk in front of me, together with a pile of classical dictionaries and Vol IX Book XXXV of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis. What Ortelius was trying to say in his epitaph takes a lot of puzzling out even translated into English, because it’s wrapped up in a series of obscure classical allusions.

  This Bruegel [begins Kate’s neat handwritin
g] painted many things which cannot be painted, as Pliny said of Apelles.

  I dimly recall that Apelles of Kos was a painter, and I discover from my books that Pliny thought he was the greatest in classical Greece, though nothing of his work has survived. And, yes, according to Pliny he ‘painted the unpaintable, thunder, for example, lightning and thunderbolts.’

  I can’t see what’s so unpaintable about the last two, but thunder would certainly present problems. When I run through the works of Bruegel in my mind, however, no suggestion, however oblique, of thunder in any literal sense, or even of lightning or thunderbolts, can I recall. If Bruegel contrived to paint an electrical storm it must have been a metaphorical one.

  Then comes a reference to another Greek painter:

  The same author said of Timanthes that in all his works more is always understood than is painted.

  Also a suggestion of something hidden. Not thunder in the case of Timanthes. What his reputation rested on was a picture called The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, in which Agamemnon conceals his uncontrollable grief by covering his head with his mantle. Is this the ‘thunder’ that Bruegel was hiding – feelings too terrible to reveal?

  Actually, Apelles, like Timanthes, was famous for concealing something, though in his case it was himself. ‘It was also his habit’, says Pliny, ‘to exhibit his finished works to the passer-by on a balcony, and he would lie concealed behind the picture and listen to the faults that were found with it, regarding the public as more accurate critics than himself.’