Degrees of Being Alive
On Saturday morning, Nella takes a pie from the pantry, thinking it’s made of berries. She’s starving, having barely eaten since the verdict.
The crust is deceptive, turning out to conceal a pie made of cold fish, prosaic flounder where she’d hoped for winter fruits. In Nella’s nervous state, it almost feels like the food is taunting her. She wonders miserably whether Cornelia will ever candy anything again. The sight of a crystallized walnut might conjure Marin and her delicious contradictions.
Her stomach rumbling, Nella heads to Hanna and Arnoud’s shop, under their sign of two sugar loaves.
‘We’ll take more,’ says Arnoud when he sees her. ‘It works well with the honeycomb, and you’ll be desperate to get rid of it, no doubt.’
‘Noud,’ Hanna reprimands. ‘I’m sorry, Nella. They never taught him decent manners in the Hague.’
Nella smiles. Business is business. I don’t have to like you, Arnoud, she thinks – though she is fond of Hanna – clear-speaking, a diplomat in a dusted apron. As soon as this sugar’s sold, Nella promises herself she will shove Arnoud’s doll into a city apiary, to be covered by greedy bees.
‘Come,’ Hanna says, beckoning her to sit down on the polished bench in the front of the shop. Arnoud stomps to the back, banging out his trays.
‘Try this new cocoa-bean drink I’ve been testing,’ Hanna says brightly. ‘I put some of your sugar loaf in, and a few vanilla seeds.’
It is truly delicious. Like a happy childhood memory, it warms Nella up. ‘Have you heard?’ Hanna asks.
‘What?’
‘The burgomasters have lifted the ban on people-shaped biscuits. Though our dogs were so popular, I’m pleased we can go back to carving people’s sweethearts for those lucky enough to be young and in love. It’s good news for your stock.’
Nella wraps her grateful fingers round the hot terracotta mug. It is good news, and yet, not good enough to lift the overwhelming bleakness she feels inside. ‘I cannot be long away,’ she says, thinking of her household; newly configured, half of whom she’s only just met.
‘Of course,’ says Hanna, looking at her carefully.
Does she know, Nella wonders – has Cornelia finally held her tongue? ‘But I thank you,’ she says, ‘for your friendship and your trade.’
‘I would do anything for her,’ Hanna says.
Nella imagines Hanna and Cornelia in the orphanage – what pacts did they swear, what blood oaths till the day they died? Hanna lowers her voice. ‘Since my marriage—’ She cuts herself off, looking over her shoulder at Arnoud. ‘Running a business takes up every hour of my day.’
‘You have Arnoud.’
‘Exactly.’ Hanna smiles. ‘He is not a cruel man. Nor is he a selfish one. I have made my doughy bed.’ She leans forward, whispering. ‘We will pay you the money you need. From little seeds great flowers grow.’
Nella looks into the kitchen. ‘But what will Arnoud say? I cannot sell at a low price.’
Hanna shrugs. ‘There are means of persuasion. It’s my money too. I earned and saved what I could before I married. My brother gambled for me on the bourse and once I’d made a profit I told him to stop. He listened, unlike some.’ She sighs. ‘Arnoud admires my abilities, but he seems to have forgotten the source of half his capital. He likes his new role as sugar-trader. It’s brought him status in the Guild of Pastry Bakers. They might appoint him as an overman. The product is good, so they think he is too.’ Hanna smiles. ‘New recipes, plans for expansion. He wants to go and sell the next batch of sugar in Delft and Leiden, as well as The Hague.’ Hanna pauses. ‘All decisions I have encouraged.’
‘Will you go with him?’
‘Someone has to keep the business open here. We’ll take another three hundred loaves. And give you six thousand. That’s fair, isn’t it? Sugar crystals are more use to me than diamonds, Madame Brandt.’
What is she buying here – peace, or a moment to enjoy her own hard work? Nella glows with the sum Hanna has proposed.
‘In the long run,’ Hanna says, ‘I believe it will benefit us all.’
Nella walks quickly from Hanna and Arnoud towards the Stadhuis. The guard lets her through the gates, she treads the same corridor, and Johannes’ door is drawn back. It is three guilders this time to allow more than the usual quarter-hour. Johannes’ finite existence is making him more expensive, but Nella would give ten times that if she had to. There is a distinct smell of rosewater and pumpkin wafting about the guard, Nella notices. Checking the money in his hand, he nods, closing the cell door.
Someone, maybe Cornelia, has shaved Johannes’ stubble, which serves to make him more cadaverous, as if his skull is making its way inside out. I should have brought him a new shirt, she thinks, peering at her husband in the dim light. The one he’s wearing is ragged and thin. Nella swallows, girding herself against the sight. He sits on the pallet of straw, head against the damp brick, long legs twisting awkwardly out of his hips.
She realizes how like Marin he looks, haughty in repose, half-handsome even now. Her throat tightens. There is excrement in the corner, covered haphazardly with straw. She looks away.
If I told him everything, Nella wonders, who would Johannes think had betrayed him more? She remembers Jack screaming at Otto – he knows you’ve done something. Johannes had once questioned Marin’s piety in that argument in the salon, and later, she’d said she had taken something of her brother’s that wasn’t hers to take. Did Johannes know, and look away? It seems incredible but then much about Johannes’ person is incredible. He and Marin often pulled Otto between themselves, claiming him like territory, arguing over who appreciated or needed him most.
The two remaining pasties lie uneaten at Johannes’ side. ‘You should eat those while they’re fresh,’ she says.
‘Sit with me,’ he replies, his voice quiet.
How frail he looks, the light drained from his eyes. Nella can almost feel his spirit dissolving into the air, to nothingness. She wants to grab at it and hold it in fistfuls, stop it from getting away.
‘I’m selling the sugar,’ she says, sitting down. ‘A confectioner is helping me.’
‘I don’t think you’ll shift it all by tomorrow,’ he replies, with the shade of a smile.
Nella pushes back the instinct to sob. It seems Cornelia has kept her promise to keep quiet about Marin, but how can they not confess to him what has happened? His sister, his most beloved adversary, is dead. How is it possible he cannot tell the grief in the faces of his women?
‘Meermans will never take a bribe now, anyway,’ Johannes says. ‘It appears that some things don’t have a price after all. Marin was right, you cannot barter for abstracts. Certainly not for betrayal.’
Nella pictures Lysbeth Timmers, hustling for her silence. ‘But this is Amsterdam—’
‘Where the pendulum swings from God to a guilder. Frans says he’s doing this to save my soul, but underneath it, he’s fuming that I didn’t sell the sugar overnight. He’s fighting for his loaves by calling me a sodomite.’
‘Is that the only reason, Johannes – revenge?’
He looks at her in the gloom, and she waits. Now, she thinks; now surely he will tell about Marin and her refusal to marry. But Johannes is loyal to the end. ‘That sugar represented so much for him,’ he says. ‘And I mocked it with indifference.’
‘Why did you do that? Because of Jack?’
‘No. Because I could taste Frans’ and Agnes’ greed upon the air and it disgusted me.’
‘But you’re a merchant, not a philosopher.’
‘Greed is not a prerequisite for being good at business, Nella. I crave very little for myself.’
‘Just potatoes?’
He smiles. ‘Just potatoes. And you are right, I am not a philosopher. I am merely a man who happens to have sailed to Surinam.’
‘You said the sugar was delicious.’
He looks grimly round the room. ‘And thus am I amply rewarded. The secret in business is not to care too much, to always be prepared to lose. It seems I cared both too little and too much.’
The prospect of Johannes’ greatest loss to come looms large. ‘I misjudged the situation. Old wounds,’ he says. ‘No matter now. Come, there’s nothing to do. Cornelia drenched me with her tears and now you too. You could have brought me a new shirt. What a terrible wife you are,’ he chides, squeezing her hand. ‘You must tell Marin that she cannot come here.’
Loss washes through her; a brackish tide.
‘I would not want her to see me like this,’ he says.
‘Johannes. Why did Jack betray you?’
He runs a hand through his silvering hair. ‘Money, I suppose, and what money means. It has to be money, because any other reason I cannot counter.’ The silence thickens; she senses Johannes’ struggle to keep down his own fear. ‘You should have heard Agnes’ testimony,’ he says. ‘Her spirit was always brittle, but in that moment, I believe it truly snapped.’
He speaks quickly, pulling himself away from darker thoughts. ‘Agnes has always loved Frans, but too much love like that can be a poison. How happy she was to do his bidding this time, I know not. She believes in her God, of course, and the sanctified order of how things should be. But there was something about her on Thursday morning. She seemed quite disordered, as if she knew perfectly well she was doing something wrong, but was going to do it anyway. She has probably never known herself better than in that moment, nor taken herself more by surprise.’
He laughs, and Nella encloses the sound inside her.
‘Marin was always right about Agnes and Frans,’ he continues. ‘They are the type of people who see blackened sugar everywhere.’
God knows her husband has not always been the most prudent judge of character, but when it comes to Marin, Johannes has always known his sister’s worth. He has years stored up of her brilliance, and her gentler moods. Perhaps he watched her change from a bright girl to a harder woman who couldn’t find the path she’d plotted in her head. He is generous about her, and to Nella, it is almost as if all Marin’s selves are with them, shining in the gloom of the cell.
Nella is not Jack. She will not be the one to rip Johannes’ image of his sister from her frame. She can never tell Johannes what he has lost, nor, in the end, how slenderly Marin was known to them all.
‘I hate them, Johannes,’ she says. ‘With all my soul.’
‘No, Nella, don’t waste yourself. Cornelia told me the work you’ve done with Arnoud Maakvrede. I am not surprised, but it brought me such pleasure to hear. To think, the sugar staying here in the republic!’
‘Marin has been so helpful,’ she says, feeling the key to his warehouse under her shirt, pressed against her skin. Falling to silence, they entwine their hands, as if the touch of flesh will keep away the dawn.