“It ain’t desertion, Vincent. You never done me nothing but good.”

“If you are still willing to share my life, I’ll take you to Drenthe.”

She shook her head without emotion. “No, there ain’t enough for two of us.”

“You understand, don’t you, Sien? If I had more, I’d give you anything. But when I must choose between feeding you and feeding my work . . .”

She laid her hand over his; he could feel the rough parchment of her skin. “It’s all right. You don’t got to feel bad about it. You done all you could for me. I guess it’s just time we was through . . . that’s all.”

“Do you want us to be, Sien? If it will make you happy, I’ll marry you and take you with me.”

“No. I belong with my mother. We all got to live our own lives. It’ll be all right; my brother’s going to take a new house for his girl and me.”

Vincent drained his glass, tasting the bitter dregs at the bottom.

“Sien, I’ve tried to help you. I loved you and gave you all the kindness I had in me. In return I want you to do one thing for me, just one thing.”

“What?” she asked dully.

“Don’t go back on the streets again. It will kill you! For the sake of Antoon, don’t go back to that life.”

“Have we enough left for another glass of wine?”

“Yes.”

She swallowed half the contents in a single gulp and then said, “I only know that I can’t earn enough, ’specially when I got to pay for all the children. So if I walk the street it will be because I must, not because I want to.”

“If you get enough work you’ll promise me, won’t you, not to go back to that?”

“Sure, I promise.”

“I’ll send you money, Sien, every month. I’ll always pay for the baby. I want you to give the little fellow a chance.”

“He’ll be all right . . . same as the rest.”

Vincent wrote to Theo of his intention to go to the country and sever his connection with Christine. Theo answered by return mail with an extra hundred franc note to pay off his debts, and a strong word of approval. “My patient disappeared the other night,” he wrote. “She’s completely well now, but we couldn’t seem to find any relationship to fit ourselves into. She took everything with her and left me no address. It’s better that way. Now you and I are both unencumbered.”

Vincent stored all the furniture in the attic. He wanted to come back to The Hague sometime. The day before he was to leave for Drenthe he received a letter and a package from Nuenen. In the package was some tobacco, and one of his mother’s cheese cakes wrapped in oil paper.

“When are you coming home to paint those wooden crosses in the churchyard?” his father asked.

He knew at once that he wanted to go home. He was ill, starved, desperately nervous, fatigued and discouraged. He would go home to his mother for a few weeks and recover his health and spirits. A feeling of peace that he had not known for many months came over him when he thought of his Brabant countryside, the hedges and dunes and diggers in the field.

Christine and the two children accompanied him to the station. They all stood on the platform, unable to speak. The train came in and Vincent boarded it. Christine stood there with the baby at her breast, holding Herman by the hand. Vincent watched them until his train pulled out into the glaring sunlight, and the woman was lost forever in the grimy blackness of the station.

Book four

Nuenen

1

THE VICARAGE AT Nuenen was a two-storey, whitewashed, stone building with a tremendous garden in the back. There were elms, hedges, flower beds, a pond, and three pollard oaks. Although Nuenen had a population of twenty-six hundred, only one hundred of them were Protestant. Theodorus’s church was tiny; Nuenen was a step down from the prosperous little market town of Etten.

Nuenen was in reality only a small cluster of houses that lined both sides of the road from Eindhoven, the metropolis of the district. Most of the people were weavers and peasants whose huts dotted the heath. They were God fearing, hard working people who lived according to the manners and customs of their ancestors.

On the front of the vicarage, over the door, were the black iron figures A° 1764. The entrance door led straight off the road and admitted to a wide hall which split the house in two. On the left-hand side, dividing the dining room and kitchen, was a rude stairway which led up to the bedrooms. Vincent shared the one over the living room with his brother Cor. When he awoke in the morning he could see the sun rise over the fragile tower of his father’s church, and gently lay pastel shades on the pool. At sunset, when the tones were deeper than at dawn, he would sit in a chair by the window and watch the colour being thrown over the pool like a heavy blanket of oil, and then slowly dissolving into the dusk.