Asunder (12 page)

A chilly wind had started to whip along the river’s edge. I lowered my face, drew my arms into my chest, and turned left towards my destination.

In my mind, museums and the law were tightly bound up and as I climbed the steps to the Tate I was reminded that it lay on the site of a failed Victorian prison, the radials of its panopticon design subjecting every prisoner to round-the-clock observation and a suppression of dialogue between inmates. Grim details, like the spyholes in each cell door fitted with eyelashes, never ceased to be an item of curiosity and horror. In 1890 Millbank Prison was torn down and before long a different sort of warder began to implement another kind of silence.

I stopped at the first paintings that greeted me but then decided that before anything else I should find my friend, who’d failed to tell me which section he’d been assigned. First I turned right, into Turner land, but he wasn’t in any of those rooms so I crossed the hall and went left, wandering aimlessly past Blakes and Burne-Joneses, feeling nips at my conscience for not stopping to look, moving through the rooms like a train that slows down at small village railway stations, stalling just long enough for passengers to read the station’s name and have an idea of what they might be missing before the train picks up speed and continues on its way. I had seen people do this constantly at the National Gallery, and always wondered what was so urgent that they couldn’t slow down for even thirty seconds.

In a daze I crossed room after room, my steps quickening or easing up depending on the people and dimensions I encountered, for some rooms felt generous and immense and others like crowded annexes, until the image of Daniel, seated and uniformed in Room 9, a large hall containing works from 1850-1880, came into view. He didn’t see me so I stopped to observe him, sitting with his legs crossed and head tilted back, as he kept an eye on a group of Russian tourists crowding round the wistful
Lady of Shalott
, a semicircle of gaping faces, only half of them focused. The guide waved her umbrella like a lion tamer and once she had her lions captive she lowered it and began to speak.

I approached from the side. Startled, Daniel quickly uncrossed his legs and said my name as if to remind himself who I was. The pen and notebook in his lap fell to the floor. He bent down to pick them up.

‘Have you been getting some writing done?’

‘A bit . . . It goes from silent to noisy back to silent.’

‘I know. That’s how it is.’

‘I think the acoustics here are more pronounced than at the Gallery.’

I looked up and around. ‘Could be.’

The Russians started to file out, led by their guide.

‘Have they been here long?’ I whispered.

‘A couple of minutes . . . How was your trip?’

‘I’ll tell you about it later.’

‘But how was it?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

He shrugged. ‘Okay.’

He’d sounded confused when I rang him that morning, and asked why I was already back in London. I’d said I’d explain when we met, that for now I just wanted to get out of the house and put my Sunday to some use, as I would have had I seen the cathedral.

‘Come and see this one,’ he’d said.

Familiar with the irksome sensation of sitting in a chair while someone towers over you, I said I’d have a look round and return before closing time. Daniel seemed to welcome the idea.

In the room hung a few works I recognised from childhood visits or textbooks, in every case the reproduction more familiar than the original: Millais’
Ophelia;
Hogarth’s self-portrait with pug; Reynolds, Derby and Gainsborough . . . I greeted them silently, old acquaintances to whom I’d never given the proper time, so patient over the years, no reproach whatsoever, their existence as untouched by my life as mine by theirs. I liked the Turners most anyway, and those I hadn’t even stopped to take in.

Just as I was about to move on to the next room and leave Daniel to his notebook, I noticed a painting I’d never seen before. Or perhaps it had simply never caught my attention in the past. But that day it jutted from the wall like some kind of promontory, forcing out a space for itself beyond the frame, and I went over for a closer look.

Pegwell Bay, Kent—A Recollection of October 5th 1858
, read the caption, by William Dyce. It was a mysterious painting, of a seaside landscape with a few human figures, and my eyes first came to rest on the wall of ancient wrinkled cliffs resembling a procession of tired elephants. The shallow inlet was like a lunarscape, with rocks and boulders emerging from a glinting yet motionless body of water. Clumps of seaweed, rocks covered in moss, an old fence run aground, a pole measuring the level of the tide: details I noticed a few moments later. The human figures in the foreground—three women and a boy (the painter’s son, wife, and her two sisters collecting shells, the sign explained)—had an otherworldly aura. Most disconcerting of all was the boy, his spectral face as pale and distant as the cliffs.

Over the years I’d fantasised about stepping into many a landscape, of following paths that led far beyond view, but I would never wish to step into this one.

Upon seeing me at the painting, Daniel came over with his notebook under his arm and asked whether I had spotted the comet, to which I said no, startled by both the thought of a comet in a painting and the fact I had missed it. I leaned closer in to scour the sky—gradations of light pink and blue thinning into yellow, like a molten version of rock sediment, dolomite, limestone, sandstone and shale, and finally found the comet. A simple white brushstroke: one milky line at the top, hardly visible.

Daniel told me that Donati’s comet would not pass over Earth again until the year 3811. In other words, this was one of the rare glimpses we would get, here in Dyce’s painting. The last time it had passed over our planet was in the autumn of 1858. On 5 October, the date in the title, the comet was at its most brilliant—at twenty minutes after sunset, its head could be seen with the naked eye.

As I gazed at the astral body, its opal white streak growing ever more important and distinct in my mind like a fiery ice-cold sword rising up and away from the canvas, Daniel went on to describe how on that day crowds had thronged the streets, rooftops and bridges to catch a glimpse of Donati, which was not only the second brightest comet of the nineteenth century but the first comet ever to be photographed.

‘No matter how greatly you shine,’ I later said to Daniel in the pub, ‘it’s all over before you know it. And what’s left? A white brushstroke, only visible if you really look.’

‘That’s better than nothing.’

‘Well, most of us don’t even leave behind a brushstroke.’

Yet that faint brushstroke skimming the surface of the canvas didn’t exit my thoughts for a while and, looking back, I couldn’t help feeling like events that winter were somehow harnessed to its tail, as if my glimpsing it that day were a tiny, punctual omen of its own. A comet in a painting, how sad to fall prey to such superstition, and when I went back months later and found in its place William Holman Hunt’s
The Ship
, dark and metaphorical but no Pegwell Bay, I went to demand an explanation at the information desk, where someone eventually mumbled a few words about loans to other museums due to the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth.

And then, one glorious afternoon, she returned. With fewer students, six in all, and a magnifying glass. The students too were equipped with magnifying glasses, I noticed, medium-sized discs with large black handles that they clutched as they stopped and waited for their mentor to speak.

Since her last visit I had thought many times about how a painting went from being a thing of beauty to a thing of decaying beauty to a thing of decay. Our museum must have held countless instances of paint giving in to tension, loosening its dominion over faces and landscapes, handing them over, instead, to the paintbrush of hours, and I still harboured the plan to one day go in search of as many examples as I could find.

The art restorer cleared her throat and tucked an imaginary strand of hair behind an ear. She reminded her students, who had now formed a small circle around her, of the anatomy of paintings—support, primer, paint layers—and how each of these parts had its own movement, islands of paint shifting all the while on something softer than the top coat. Information they seemed familiar with; they nodded, as if impatient for her to continue.

From there she went on to discuss the various types of craquelure, how one type of crack could be distinguished from the others, and the myriad ways in which it might have come into being. She repeated some of what I’d heard last time. She also spoke about drying cracks in the form of flames, nets, brushstrokes, spirals and grids, and ageing cracks in the form of spokes, garlands, corn ears and diagonals.

All tension spreads outwards once a unit has been disturbed.

Once she had run through her list, the students went in pursuit. This time all the paintings in the room were thrown under scrutiny, not just one, the cracks sought after like rare butterflies whose patterns could only be appreciated from a certain perspective.

At first I didn’t know which way to turn. Each student was at a different painting. The restorer took her place at the centre of the room keeping a gentle eye on things, and every now and then would smile over as if to thank me for my patience. She needn’t have, however, for I soon saw I had little to worry about. With rare restraint, the students maintained a good distance from the paintings and none held their magnifying glass too close to a surface.

As they stood happily, or perhaps anxiously, inspecting, I went through the list of cracks that had just been recited and started to envision them in the people around me.

Upon closer observation, the art restorer didn’t seem as serene as I’d first thought. She kept clearing her throat and tucking strands of hair behind her ears when none had fallen out, and I saw at the centre of her chest a concentric spiral crack, similar in structure to that of a star group, one great swirl from which the primal energy of the universe might come radiating outwards.

In the male student to her left, his narrow blue eyes squinting in concentration, I saw horizontal brushstroke cracks running across his face as if following the grooves of the brush in the paint layer, like fine currents of wind marking his cheeks.

Next, I observed a young woman in a seahorse-print dress who kept polishing her magnifying glass on her sleeve, surely something she wasn’t meant to do. On her neck, right above the collar, I located a large spoke crack, as if someone had been pressing outwards from beneath her skin.

In another girl, her bun held in place by a pencil, I saw garland cracks, small short curves disrupting the marginal areas of her face like tiny waves. In the guy next to her, whose glasses could have used a good cleaning, a grid crack divided his high forehead into right angles that ran into each other, creating little irregular boxes.

The longer I applied what I’d just heard to the living specimens around me, imagining more and more fissures in their façades, the louder these fantasies of decomposition started to gather force, like a creature that after years of slumber at the bottom of the ocean in blackish-blue darkness is nudged by a current initiated somewhere far off, possibly by a small boat skimming the surface of the water leagues overhead, and, awakened, opens an enormous eye and prepares for the next voyage.

Yet at home my miniature landscapes seemed immune to the passage of time, as if in possession of a secret formula against erosion. The moths I’d replace every couple of months but the habitats themselves hardly needed upkeep apart from some careful dusting, and I began to long for high-viscosity magma to burst through the surface of the volcano, up through the crust to force open a new path.

Once my model of the excavation was nearly complete, layers of time set in sand and superglue, I decided I would try to depict geological stages in a different way. I would replicate Pegwell Bay, but without the boy or his relatives.

After some deliberation as to how to reproduce the cliffs I found a slice of plywood, the sort used at rock-climbing centres, and coated it with non-reflective varnish to give it the illusion of age. For the shallow inlet I used a layer of dull yellow packing paper, and added a few glints of reflected sunlight with a paintbrush. Last I grafted on the sunset, the sky a sheet of carton smudged with raw umber. But the paper I’d used for the inlet wasn’t right, it wasn’t the proper tone and didn’t evoke anything, least of all an inlet on the south-eastern coast of England, so I tore it off in one go, taking along some of the rock since it had all been attached with superglue.

Over the next few days I brainstormed about what material I could use instead, what kind of paper or carton would capture the still yet not entirely flat or smooth sheet of water from which the limestone boulders emerged, a simple task yet for some reason I couldn’t think of the right material. A visit to Cass Art yielded nothing, nor a quick look in a crafts book in our museum shop. I would have to be extravagant and pay a visit to L. Cornelissen & Son in Great Russell Street.

This shop was always full of wonders: tall glass bottles of varnish, pigment and resin; apothecary jars filled with dry paint like sands from mythic beaches: Red Ochre and Manganese Blue, Cobalt Turquoise and Lapis Lazuli, Yellow Ochre and Egyptian Blue; reed pens and genuine Egyptian papyrus in case one of the mummies at the British Museum awakened with a thought; cigar-shaped pastels and labelled crayons; handmade paintbrushes the size of sceptres . . . After half an hour of gazing, during which I handled and considered and admired far more than I bought, I found a thin sheet of gold leaf perfect for the shallow inlet.

That night I came upon Jane and Lucian huddled close at the kitchen table, a pot of tea and an ashtray between them. Have a seat, Jane said, laughing nervously. I obliged. Lucian rolled three cigarettes, playing with the strands of tobacco before fitting them into the paper. Out of courtesy I smoked one. Jane got up and poured me a cup of tea, then asked about my week. I muttered something about Daniel at the Tate and my visit to Cornelissen’s. Lucian told me he’d sold fourteen skull rings to a group of Mexican kids in Misfits and Throbbing Gristle T-shirts. Jane told me about Funestre, a new band she’d signed. I sensed the issue of Lucian’s past had been resolved. And that they hadn’t spoken about the apparition on the balcony, or, if they had, Lucian hadn’t got the full measure of what had happened. But then again, neither had I.