This intelligence was useful to Piet, who knew from watching certain undergraduates handle his father that getting on with petty tyrants is the key to a happy life. “What’s the secret to Mrs. de Leeuw?”
“Keep very clean. Be prompt. Don’t put on airs. She doesn’t like it when tutors forget themselves and start behaving as if they aren’t servants too.”
“Cleanliness, punctuality, humility.”
“Exactly. A little hard to do on two baths a week, but you can share my water if you want. In fact”—Didier grinned—“if we share each other’s water we can both bathe every second day.”
The prospect of bathing twice a week had until now seemed to Piet the height of luxe, but he was happy to raise his standards further. “Is there a lot of hot water?”
“Enough for one deep bath a night. Blok has Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. We can split the others. You’ll find a good bath a blessing after a day of tireless servility. It’ll keep you in with Mrs. de Leeuw too.”
“I’m game, then.” Piet smiled. “Tell me about Egbert.”
“You haven’t met him? The strangest little boy I ever knew in my life. He used to drive us mad when he played the piano in this house. Same tune a hundred times over—I don’t exaggerate. And this fear of going outside. It’s not the kind of phobia poor children suffer from.”
“I’m supposed to cure him of all that.”
“Good luck to you. Many have fallen in the attempt.” Didier shared the last of the Chartreuse between them.
“If Louisa never speaks in public, how do you know she and Constance gossip? Surely you don’t listen at doors?”
“Certainly not. That’s the sort of thing you get away with in other houses. Not here.”
“How do you know then?”
“I’ll show you. Come with me, but don’t say a word or you’ll wake Blok.”
Didier opened the door and led Piet out into the darkened corridor. Gert Blok was dozing and heard the floorboards creak. He was instantly wide awake. One of the young men was going to the bathroom. Perhaps he should go too and stumble against him in the dark as if half asleep? But he hesitated too long and a door closed. It was the door to Didier’s room, which was half the size of Piet’s and much more plainly furnished.
Didier drew Piet towards the window. “Louisa’s bedroom’s just beneath mine. She smokes on her balcony because her parents wouldn’t approve. When the door’s open you can hear every word she and Constance are saying. That’s how I know she’s an atheist.” He put his arm around Piet’s shoulders. “They’re probably talking about you tonight. Are you man enough to listen?”
The temptation to know precisely the impression he had made on two girls he so badly wished to charm was irresistible. Piet opened the window as quietly as possible. It was a narrow window and in order to get through it he had to lean across Didier, his shoulder resting against his new friend’s back. They listened. The lights in the room below were on and they caught Constance in midsentence. “… most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen. And his manners are a vast improvement on the last one’s.”
“He’s not as handsome as all that.” Louisa spoke in the same noncommittal tone she had used to Piet at dinner. “His mouth’s too big for his face and there’s something odd about his nose. We’re just starved of men, sweet Constance. Our standards are slipping by the hour. Besides—”
But now she moved away, and the words were lost.
“She’s unforgiving with everyone,” whispered Didier, breathing warm, mint-scented breath against Piet’s cheek.
The girls came back to the window. Both were laughing; but then Louisa said, in a much more serious voice: “There’s something fishy about this Mr. Barol, Constance. Something false. You can see he has an astoundingly high opinion of himself.”
“Well so do I, of myself,” said Constance.
“Yes, but you’re more straightforward than he is. I don’t trust him. As I said: he’s fishy.”
It was a terrible end to a day of otherwise unblemished triumph for Piet. He pulled back into the room and smiled to suggest that he took all this in his stride. In fact he was deeply wounded.
“Don’t worry.” Didier squeezed his shoulder. “There’s something fishy about me too.”
E
gbert Vermeulen-Sickerts woke the next morning a little after four o’clock while even Hilde Wilken—whose job it was to prepare the family’s breakfast trays—was still fast asleep. He was a small child, with a high red complexion and very pale blond hair. The night before, lured by the sounds of merriment and music coming from the drawing room, he had forgotten the sore throat he had spent all day complaining of and crept to its open door. Through the hinges he had seen the man who was to be his new tutor. He was desperate not to embarrass himself before such an enviable figure.
He sat up and put his right foot onto the carpet, then his left, then he withdrew them both and repeated the procedure six times. He went into his little bathroom and ran an ice-cold bath, which he submerged himself in seven times. He brushed his teeth seven times, until the iron taste of blood filled his mouth, then, aware of passing time, he got dressed. By a great effort of will—the kind only the fear of shame can inspire—he disobeyed the impulse to get undressed and dressed again a further six times. Spurred by this small but meaningful achievement, he opened his bedroom door.
The house was silent and dark. He preferred to move through it unobserved, in case he should make an error that required correction. This morning he was unusually alert and made no mistakes. He went down the stairs, treading with equal weight on a blessedly even number of red steps. The marble floor of his own entrance hall, with its chaotic darts of black on gray, could be a violent sea; but this morning it was calm and he crossed it with ease. He went through the dining room and opened the door cut into the wall. The grandfather clock struck the hour. It was five a.m.
Egbert never knew how the Number came to him. He did not choose it. He had no idea Who was responsible for its emphatic selection, but every morning as the door to his great-aunt’s house closed behind him, he heard it loud and clear. This morning it was 495. He was relieved. On days when it was above 1,200, he could not get to his piano before lunch. Sometimes he was not able to reach it at all. On these days he had to plead illness and return to bed. But 495 was manageable in three hours, even if he stumbled.
The forces to which Egbert Vermeulen-Sickerts paid his obeisance every day were expressed in the tangible world chiefly through the colors white and black, though they lived in shades of light and darkness too. He called them the Shadowers and they hated one another hysterically. If he did not divide his attention equally between them, a vicious
mob-whispering broke out in his head and pronounced terrible punishments.
The Number governed the number of steps in the abasement he was obliged to perform each morning. The precise order of the colors derived from long memorized runs in the preludes and fugues of J. S. Bach, as played on his great-aunt’s piano. They found literal expression in the black and white tiles of her entrance hall floor.
Egbert stepped across the tiles, swiftly touching four white ones in succession, then a black one, then another six whites. He moved rhythmically, backwards and forwards, up and down the entrance hall, his face tense with concentration. He heard the clock chime the quarter hour, then the half hour; then it was six a.m., and he heard unmistakable sounds of life coming from his own house.
On the 211th element of the sequence, he misjudged a leap and grazed a black tile when he had been aiming for a white one. Sweat broke out on his forehead. His mother had told him that Mr. Barol would be down at eight, and now he’d have to start all over again. He did so. This time he got to the 420th without error, but again he made a mistake and had to start at the beginning. By seven-thirty he was exhausted, going slowly for fear of a final error from which there would be no time to recover, but by a quarter to eight he had only reached the 193rd tile and was beginning to despair. A crazy recklessness seized him. He did not want to spend the day in bed, feigning illness, and couldn’t possibly be found by his new tutor in this compromising position.
Like his father, Egbert was deeply private about his interior afflictions. He had never told anyone of the tyranny of the Shadowers and did his best to disguise his state of bondage from those who loved him. The infinite shades of light on the leafy street outside were so daunting, the possibility of navigating them so slim, that he had found it easier to face his father’s wrath than rise up against his oppressors. He began to go faster and faster. Sometimes he spent all day like this. Sometimes he made seven mistakes: the maximum permitted, which required the taking of seven ice-cold baths in expiation. He had reached the middle of the volume of preludes and fugues when he heard voices in the dining room. His father had come down to breakfast. He was now trapped. Retreat was impossible until Maarten left for work, because he would neither credit nor sanction a convenient fever or sore throat. And by the time his papa had left, Mr. Barol would have found him.
Egbert began to dart across the tiles in a frenzy, faint with hunger and commitment. Fortune was smiling on him and detained Piet for several minutes with his employer in the breakfast room. He heard Mr. Barol’s rich warm laugh and continued his leaping, ending the sequence on a white tile by the drawing room door. He went through it, panting, and threw himself into the final stage of his odyssey.
P
iet Barol had not slept well. He was furious that Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts should have seen through him, and said so for Didier Loubat to hear. As he washed his face he felt inclined to hate her. But it was the refuge of lesser men to hate and he refused to stoop to it. He resolved instead, as he knotted his tie, to make Louisa like him in spite of herself.
That
was the worthy challenge. But before it could be attempted there was the question of his new pupil, on whom a first impression remained to be made.
He heard Egbert as soon as he opened the door in the dining room wall. The boy was playing Bach with maniacal precision, and Piet stood in the entrance hall listening with admiration. It was clear that Egbert was already a far better pianist than Piet would ever be; there was nothing he could teach him on that score. He wished that Jacobina or Maarten were present to introduce them, but Maarten had instructed him to present himself alone. Piet hesitated. He did not much like Bach, and the boy’s relentless repetition of the prelude did not inspire any new affection. He listened a few moments longer, then knocked at the drawing room door and opened it with his friendliest smile.
Egbert was at the piano, with his back to him. Piet coughed. Egbert did not stop or turn around: he was on his fifth repetition, and if he did not complete two more the strenuous efforts of the morning would be wasted.
“Good morning,” said Piet. But still he was ignored. The music rattled on and on, came to an end and began again. Piet was nonplussed. His strategy, in so far as he had one, involved gaining his new pupil’s trust and regard. He did not wish to begin their acquaintance with an undignified tussle for attention. At some point he will have to stop, he thought. And indeed, a few minutes later, Egbert did stop.
“Good morning,” said Piet for the second time, “and bravo.”
“Good morning, sir.”
There was a table by the window. Egbert took his place at it with the slow indifference of an experienced criminal who intends to give nothing away under interrogation. He could not manufacture his sister Constance’s warmth and unlike Louisa, who was also naturally taciturn, he had no boisterous sibling to shelter behind. He wished desperately to impress Mr. Barol, but the fear of not doing so made him behave with an hauteur learned from his elders, which was deeply unattractive in a ten-year-old boy who will one day be the possessor of a large fortune.
“We’ll start with French grammar,” said Piet, rather coldly. “Are you familiar with the subjunctive mood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Decline, then, if you please, the present, future and imperfect subjunctive forms of
avoir
.”
Egbert did so, faultlessly. He also translated that morning’s leader in the
Algemeen Handelsblad
into accurate, idiomatic French; and then into German of lesser but acceptable quality. They moved from this to still-life drawing, and here there was something Piet could teach him, for Egbert failed utterly to capture the supplications of a vase of tulips in the last stages of their glory. They worked for an hour or more on this challenge; then Piet said, with careful nonchalance, “It’s very hot in here. Why don’t we go outside and find another subject?”
But a stiffening of Egbert’s posture and a stubborn glazing of his expression told Piet he was alive to such simple tricks. Piet’s head was feeling delicate and he did not press the point. He rang for coffee. An urn of water was kept permanently at boiling point in the kitchen of Herengracht 605 and four minutes later Hilde Wilken knocked at the door and bowed, caught Piet’s eye, and smiled and poured and bowed again—just as Didier had said she would. The impact was marvelous. He set Egbert one of Pliny’s most rambling letters to translate into Dutch and removed himself to a comfortable armchair with the papers. The room was a trifle gaudy but there were worse places to spend a morning. As Egbert worked, Piet’s good spirits reasserted themselves.
No one expected an immediate miracle. His charge was willful, certainly, but he moved from task to task without rebellion. It would not be so very hard to keep him occupied. And while Egbert was occupied, he, Piet Barol, could enjoy a handsome salary and the freedoms of the best-run domestic establishment in Amsterdam. It struck him as a very pretty bargain, and with the contentment it inspired came a whisper of inspiration. He would confound Egbert’s expectations. He would never again suggest he leave the house. Forcing the child would not work; only the passage of time, and the avoidance of confrontation, might win his trust. It seemed an agreeable solution for them both, and when Egbert had finished Piet checked his translation and set him another and returned to the newspaper feeling rather jolly.