by Neil Hegarty
He took it all in. ‘Floorplans?’ They pushed the floorplans at him: he would study these at his leisure. He bundled the papers together; he understood, he said.
But, as he had pushed through the gallery on that reconnaissance day, he permitted himself to slough off the cynicism, the weariness. The air was charged with curiosity, with pleasure, with delightful anticipation. Ages and ages, one fur-coated matron said as she brushed softly past, it’s been closed for ages and ages; she was dying to see what they’d done with it; and it had cost a mint, a mint. The security guards had pressed their backs against the white walls; the curators – snobby pricks, he had thought, the lot of them – had pressed their lips tightly together as these waves of the unwashed eddied through and filled the halls, had looked shocked, had wished the gallery closed again. It was all too easy to read their thoughts: it was as though speech bubbles were floating above their skulls.
Well, he thought, and just you wait. We’ll give you something to be shocked about. Your lips will be tighter still, come Thursday morning.
He had come to get the lie of the land, to set up a nice, easy geography for himself. It was all part of the drill. There was only so much a floorplan could do, in the matter of illumination: it was necessary, always, to come and see the place for oneself. To shuffle through, a small man in anonymous clothes, drab and beige; invisible, or as good as.
The Sculpture Court, they told him, in important capitals, the Sculpture Court: just the one painting in that whole great silken hall; maximum drama; you can’t miss it. The clients had run through the whole thing, as though they themselves had designed the new gallery and re-hung its collection. A real heist, they’d told him, audacious – but he said nothing in the face of their excitement. A touch of the amateur about them; it was pathetic, really. He preferred the insatiably greedy amateurs of the eighties and nineties. Time to bring in a touch of reality.
‘I’ll have my knife, my shoes; the computer guys will disable the security; I’ll get in, I’ll get out, the job’ll be done.’ Puncturing words, flat tones: this was workaday stuff; this was the reality.
‘You won’t need the knife.’
He laughed at that. ‘You always need a knife.’
It never ceased to amuse him. These were tough guys – he could see it in their faces, in the set of their bodies, he knew the sort; and they knew damn-all about art too – and yet here they were, talking as though they were setting out to do something public-spirited. Audacious, sensational – his brutish clients changed all the time, but the lingo didn’t. As though he was after headlines.
The fact was, though – and everyone knew it – that a theft was a theft, a knife was a knife. A knife – razor-sharp, no serrated edges – would get most of the job done; add a little remote computer wizardry, and that was that. Basic tools, the equipment didn’t really change, in spite of what people might think.
‘It’s held between two pieces of glass,’ they said. ‘No need for a knife.’
But he’d bring one just the same.
And there he was, in the Sculpture Court. And there it was, against green-white silk.
And yes: the painting took his breath away. Its heavy darkness, and its flaming lights; the expressions, the beautiful movements, the jewel colours. The bright welling of green at the centre. He stood and watched; the Sculpture Court began to fill up even more, as the members of a guided tour filed in and took their places. A young man slipped past him with an apology, turned to face the swelling crowd, began to talk. He ignored the bee-buzz of speech, watched the painting.
‘Pauldron,’ the young man, the boy said, and he took his gaze away from the painting and focused on him.
‘Notice the gleam of the pauldron,’ he said. He held a pointer in one hand: as he spoke, he was pushing it gently into the palm of his other hand. He had seemed composed, this boy, at first; it took him a moment to see the evidence to the contrary. He wore a polo neck, light grey; and John saw that sweat had welled from his armpits and was showing against the fine wool; he looked at the wool, at the boy, at the pointer, and the painting. At his mop of red hair, and flushed skin. What age was he? – twenty, twenty-one? No age. ‘And the malachite stone set into the metal: see how it shines. It’s almost the centrepiece of the whole painting,’ the boy went on, ‘the green against the black, the black against the colours.’
The crowd grew further, filling the broad spaces between the white marble statues, the boy talked on. Gathered a little confidence, though the woolly sweat patches remained. ‘Not the figures, not their expressions. Just his pauldron; it’s the gleam of the pauldron that catches my eye every time. She’s looking behind their humanity, the artist is, do you see? – she’s breaking down the machine.’
The boy stopped, then, and gestured with the pointer, and all eyes followed its tip, to look at the bright, blazing trail of white on black.
‘And there she is herself,’ the boy said, and he ran his fingers through his hair. ‘There she is,’ he said, and the pointer stabbed higher, ‘holding the lantern. All the light comes from this one point.’ He looked, they all looked, at the dark-haired young woman, bright-eyed, long-haired, dark against black, black against brilliant colour, holding her lantern aloft. ‘Watching the scene. A self-portrait, they say: observing the scene she herself created. Emily Sandborne: and a true likeness, the historians say. A beautiful combination of darkness and light,’ he said, and John watched as he dropped his arm and the pointer and laughed. ‘Darkness and light,’ the boy said, and now he laughed aloud. ‘It gets me every time. The whole thing, the whole painting, the colours, the story, everything.’
Not all of them, then. This boy hadn’t been a prick. He had brought the painting alive – for them all, surely. You’d almost forget the job in hand, he thought, standing there as the crowd moved against him like a breaking wave, as they packed in to see this painting, this star turn. You almost would.
‘Nobody knows,’ the boy said. ‘Distemper pieces fade and fade to nothing, in time. But this one hasn’t, and nobody knows why. Nobody knows how she did it. She took the secret to her grave.’
Not so snobby.
That was then: now, John stood in the dim light. This was the moment: the security sensors were cut; they had tapped in remotely, they had done whatever it was they did, the place was his for these few minutes. He stepped forward, he passed the fine silver cord, set at shin level, that marked the end of the public space, the space allotted to the likes of him, the great unwashed. He reached up on the wall, and touched the glass, and pushed upward.
Outside, the distant police siren had long ceased. No noise now, or not much: only the hiss of the distant traffic, and a light patter of rain. The gallery was silent as he braced his legs, and brought the painting down – to head level, to eye level – and set it on the floor.
It was smaller than it had looked, up there on the wall.
It was easy. It was always easy.
The malachite shone, the pauldron gleamed, and the linen welled with inner light. The artist held the lantern aloft, and she watched and watched as he slipped the two bracing panes of glass away. The linen – miraculous, un-aged – puckered, suddenly, and began to slide to the floor.
And now, the echo of an echo of another sound: distant footsteps on distant tiles. Plans are plans, he thought – very calmly, for he was seasoned – and plans sometimes go awry.
And he had his knife.
And that was the handy thing about knives: they were useful in a variety of ways.
Damned if he was stopping now.
He stood quietly in the dim hall; he braced himself.
The clipping footsteps came closer. It would be bad luck for him, for them, to come into this very room, of all the manifold rooms in the gallery – and yet he knew they would, and he tightened his grip around the handle of his knife. There was always a first time.
The footsteps were close now: echoes ran along the walls and into the roof. Two pairs of hurrying footsteps.
One voice: female. A male voice, reassuring. Closer and closer.
He was coiled, now, for action.
A woman clipped into the room. A man – young, in the darkness, thin, tall. One younger, one older, shadowy in the darkness. And now they saw him, and for a second froze. And now one voice rose in – in anger, in furious anger. The woman, staring at him, at the glass, at the linen. Fearless, blazing.
‘What have you done? What have you done?’
And not a moment to lose. He lunged towards her, he drew his knife, he took hold of a bony upper arm, and a scream ripped through the air – and now the shadowy young man, stronger, faster, stepped in, seized his wrist. A moment of balanced struggle: the knife caught the light and gleamed green-white: and now the woman wrenched free and made to run, and now his own wrist was free, and the young man struggled to grab him again, and there was no choice now, and the knife sliced.
A clean slice, clean, clear, across his throat.
The woman was gone, her heels echoing and vanishing; and for a second John stopped, and breathed, and looked at the silk-clad walls now sprinkled with dark drops, at the glass, at the man, ripped, on the ground.
And looked again, and saw curling red hair, and closed his eyes.
And crossed the room, and gently rolled Emily Sandborne’s linen. She herself looked at him, expressionless, before he rolled her away. And without looking back, threaded his way among the statues, and vanished.
26
The art was the thing.
Roisin said the line in her head often enough. She’d rehearsed it until she had every intonation and inflection, just right. It was convincing now, as though it were the actual, unvarnished truth.
The chatter went on, tweetling voices filling the staff room. It was three o’clock, and the dingy little room was more full, surely, than it ought to be in the middle of the working day: with mismatched furniture and people, and idle chatter, and gossip exchanged unkindly.
No, the room was not a pleasant space, and nobody could argue otherwise. It was not part of the revamp, and so it could not boast new windows or modern, stylish light sources or radiant colour schemes; the aged, antique, bulbous radiators hissed as they had always done, and they were white-hot as usual, so that the room was overheated, rank with stale air and old, old farts. The room had been dour, dark and unpleasant before the gallery upgrade had commenced, and so it had remained as the gallery had been transformed around it, and it was dour, dark and unpleasant today. Filled to overflowing with years of gossip, and bitching, and the exchange of unkind information and news of private business.
Roisin had no private business, and no life worth probing.
Which was fine, because the art was the thing.
This was what she told anyone who asked. Who wondered about her life, pattern, career. She knew she had a concise reply readied – in such a way, of course, as to put them off asking any further questions. There were straightforward ways of achieving this full-stop effect. By being brisk, or brusque, or verging on the rude; by raising her voice a little and cutting in on any questions on the edge of being put: any number of ways.
And she’d had plenty of practice. She had been obliged to try out her various modes. To test them as though, she liked to think, they were a new intercontinental weapons system. An early warning array was the line of defence: it combed the skies, searching for incoming missiles. Weaponry could be deployed, then, as necessary – and would certainly see off any invaders. She’d invested heavily, over the years, in her defence capabilities, in the process using up most of her gross domestic product. I’ve spent everything, she sometimes thought: I’ve hardly a thing left.
Never mind. This was money well invested; today, her defences were impregnable. What an armoury, ready to pulverise. Sidestep a polite query from a new colleague – ‘Are you married, Roisin?’ – by sarcasm, by a lot of art-related blather, by one word where ten might have given the game away, or by ten words where one was more natural. How straightforward it had been, on her arrival in this place, to see them off, to stop the questions in their tracks, without even having to break a sweat.
‘The art was always the thing, for me.’
Of course, few enough people were happy to listen: Roisin had noticed this about the world in general, that its inhabitants had become a good deal more inclined to talk, principally about themselves, than to listen to a word anyone else said.
She also, however, noticed how sometimes there seemed to be a – a moving away when she appeared. The movement reminded her of the way the tide ebbed on the beach. It just flowed; there was nothing much that anyone could do about it.
Why should her feathers feel ruffled so? Wasn’t this what she’d always wanted? – to keep people at arm’s length? Surely it pleased her.
Sometimes, she was aware of an edge of hunger, a faint growling in her stomach. But this she could generally ignore. In general, she was pleased.
She was a rare one, as her mother liked to tell her. ‘Pushing and pulling, Roisin,’ her mother said once, ‘and all at the same time. What people must think of you, I just do not know.’ That was in the course of a rare visit home – and the moral was to make these visits, even now that she was back in Ireland, even more rare.
Roisin had felt again, that day with her mother, that pain, that edge of hunger. She’d glanced across at the kitchen window of her mother’s tidy new house, which looked out, these days, not at damp fields and distant hills, but at other new, tidy houses across the road. She said nothing.
It was not as though she cared very much, because what she said was the truth: the art was the thing. It trumped the business of life. It was infinitely preferable. It couldn’t be put in such terms, or in any vocal terms: she had a sense of how unpleasant it would sound, how controlled and controlling; somewhere, she retained a ghost of a wish to be agreeable to those around her. She hadn’t yet become absolutist about it.
She was becoming rusty, too. In the staff room, she was finding it increasingly difficult to interact pleasantly. She too was forgetting to listen (was it contagious?), to ask questions, to demonstrate interest and enquire after children, ageing parents, declining cats. A dog, the other day, who needed an intestinal operation. Were these poorly, were they celebrating this or that occasion, had they been neutered, had they been spayed, were they incontinent, these cats and dogs and parents? Had holidays been booked, had they been enjoyed? A river cruise, a Baltic cruise? Who, Roisin thought, glancing around the room, looking out the window, who cared?
Victoria, in the Education Department, had just been on a cruise around Iceland, to see the Northern Lights and all the rest of it, and had come back raving about her experience: the thermal baths, the ship, the world’s northernmost botanical gardens (though these had been a let-down, according to Victoria); the stop in Shetland where they had been taken to see a Shetland pony – but just the one, alone in a field; another let-down. A drunken night on the tiles in Reykjavik, where Victoria had been swept off her feet by what sounded like a Viking. Unlike the botanic gardens, not a let-down at all.
Roisin had been aware then too of a noise, a little like the high, excited twittering of swallows in the country in summer: pleasant enough to listen to for a while, but more pleasant to leave.
Just part of the background noise of her life. Victoria began describing more soundscapes – the deafening sound of rain on the corrugated-iron roof of the Viking’s house, in the very middle of the night.
Young people these days: their words, their private activities, the details of their lives poured out of them like diarrhoea. Roisin drained her coffee, and swilled out her cup, and left the staff room.
The gallery these days was neither one thing nor the other. It was neither open nor closed, neither broken nor fixed. Its revamp – its ‘reimagining’, in the words of the promotional literature – had gone on for so long now that it was difficult to imagine it ever being completed. So the staff said to one another: bitching and whispering on t
he edges of things. Was the management up to the job? Had they bargained for all of this – this hassle, this endlessly extended banging and sawing, drilling and roofing, unroofing, reroofing, month after month and year after year? So they wondered, in what Roisin thought of as Vatican-style conclaves. All that was needed was a guttering candle casting wild, quavering shadows on the walls, a frescoed ceiling overhead, a phial of poison waiting in the staff fridge, and the scene would be complete.
What a pity the reimagining of the gallery hadn’t included a frescoed ceiling, or a fridge kept at a perfect temperature for phials of poison.
But for Roisin, this closure could go on and on for ever. She felt that the gallery was better off closed, with its paintings sequestered from the roving gazes of those punters who, more likely than not, didn’t appreciate or understand what they were looking at.
The gallery had always been closed in the years she had been here. Closure seemed now to be its natural state: strange and all as this had been at first, she had realised quickly that it was just the set-up for her. An art gallery closed to the public, a completely controlled space, a gallery bespoke, for her. There could be no better place in the world.
She moved quietly along the corridor.
She knew to keep her mouth shut. And she was good at silence. She’d grown up with it.
*
‘Like a Virgin,’ said the caption on the yellowing newspaper that lay across the kitchen table: the song had been Number One that year in every country in western Europe; Roisin remembered the girls singing it in Our Lady of Victories, all those years ago. And a photograph of Madonna, in all her youthful pomp.
But it was the other photograph that caught Roisin’s attention, that held it. A photograph of a little brooch, a little silver lapel brooch. Two tiny feet.