The darkness beneath the surface
Max Egremont
THE RED HAT It's the sort of thing every solitary tourist longs to happen, and it never does,' John Bayley's narrator says of making love with an unknown person while on a trip to a foreign country, giving one of the themes of this novel: that of the way hope and fan- tasy can seem to be almost the same, and certainly as powerful, as life itself.
Nancy, a single girl, goes to the Vermeer exhibition in The Hague with her friend Cloe and a bisexual art historian called Charles. They are a trio outside time, so to speak; we learn nothing of their lives before the incidents described here. Nancy keeps a journal of their visit, recording dis- satisfaction with the exhibition, which is crowded and lacks magic, an important point for her because she wants mystery and experience, of which we sense she has not had enough, especially of the erotic kind. Her thoughts seem to be honest and self-knowing; then there is a slight change in tone, almost imperceptible at first, which makes one sense fantasy, and also a wishful masochism — a comment surely on how misleading diaries can be. But this fluent and deceptively quiet novel is also about truth, or the difficulty of finding absolute truth, so the growing sense of deception is important. It comes again with the astonishing likeness of Nancy to the Vermeer portrait of 'The Girl with the Red Hat', noticed by other visitors to the exhibition and by her friends: apparently a sign that life can follow art. The dream fig- ure in the picture seems to be alive in the reality of present-day Holland, a country of kind officials, helpful passers-by, Geneva gin, clean canals and cheese for breakfast. This red hat features throughout the book. Nancy wears a later example of it for a Dutch fancy-dress ball, then it is found floating in a canal at the end of a strange sequence involving a night of silent love- making with a secret agent and an escape from Arab terrorists. An image of fantasy and adventure, the hat evokes Vermeer's enigmatic girl, herself the subject of so much conjecture and admiration. It seems to bring sexual allure to Nancy's flat- chested, boyish looks, so that they at last arouse the drunken Charles.
Holland is a utopia, the home of all the good liberal virtues: comforting too, for Nancy's involvement with the stranger is cosy rather than sexually satisfying. Then, back in London, her account is read by another man, Cloe's friend, a teacher of English literature, who goes off in search of Nancy to a village in the south of France where she is temporarily living. Prim, narrow in thought and experience, he sees her as both an ideal of freedom and a cap- tivating ghost and the conflict between these two visions is played out in the drama at the end of the book against a landscape of Paradise before the Fall. 'I had fallen for a dream figure,' he says, but cannot let go.
Throughout, one has a sense of life lived obliquely but also (and this is a clever con- tradiction) of reality blending with myth to create a world where characters reach the deepest parts of themselves. The surface of The Red Hat, as mysterious and as brilliant as Vermeer's picture, is immensely attrac- tive but cannot hide the darkness beneath. One shivers even in the most ostensibly bright scenes, as when Nancy strolls jaunti- ly across the top of the Pont du Gard, watched from afar by her timid but bewitched pursuer.
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