The Jewel

by Neil Hegarty

  Gerard has seen this too, thought Roisin: and God knows, there is nothing wrong with that.

  Maeve would have understood this boy too. Better than most.

  *

  A fortnight passed. At the end of this fortnight, the gallery reopened – the great reopening, they said acidly in the fetid staff room, as they observed the axe-blow frown between Dr Read’s eyes, the ultimate in reopenings – and Roisin saw Gerard again. It was, yes, his role in proceedings to conduct some of the public tours of the gallery spaces: of the halls and great vaulted rooms and courtyards now resplendent in the colours and papers selected by Roisin herself, and now to be seen by the people for the first time.

  Rather him than me, Roisin thought.

  Already she had had her fill of this reopening business. Receptions and warming white wine, mini-spring rolls and mini-chicken skewers, complete with a peanut dipping sauce, and mini-blondies and -brownies, and an endless din of congratulatory conversation – they all made her want to dash her brains out against one of her own lapis walls. Having to conduct up to eight tours a day would have been the last straw.

  Gerard, though, appeared not to mind the process too much. To be sure, the halls rapidly became airless, overstuffed and overheated – an exalted version of the staff room – and these crowds ensured that nobody would receive the experience of their dreams: but Gerard seemed to keep his cool, to maintain a semblance of grace in the midst of this atmosphere of fart and egg sandwich, body odour and damp wool.

  Roisin saw him on the second tour of the opening day: the crowds already peaking, the crush dreadful. There was a pack on the long, white stairs, sharp elbows and snippets of conversation as she tried to elbow past. ‘Oh, ages and ages,’ one fur-coated woman said to her companion as they swept past, ‘it’s been closed for ages and ages; I’m dying to see what they’ve done with it. Apparently, it cost a mint, a mint.’ Roisin abandoned her attempt to gain the top of the stairs independently, allowed herself to be carried along with the crowd, her feet hardly touching the floor, noticed two of the security guards pinned against the walls – and then saw Gerard apparently in charge of this throng of humanity.

  A Pied Piper, leading them up and in.

  ‘Just follow me, please,’ he said lightly – but his voice carried surprisingly well, and his flock seemed disposed to obey. Let’s have a look at this, Roisin thought, and was carried on and in, coming to rest at last in the Sculpture Court. How beautiful it looked! – even on this packed day, and her heart swelled with something like pride. And how fine the painting looked, suspended there against her green silk walls, below the welling white light. The pools of shadow, the gleaming eyes, the bars of black light. Let’s see this.

  Gerard turned to face the swelling crowd, began to talk. The buzz of conversation died away.

  ‘Pauldron,’ he said, and Roisin watched as he began to speak.

  ‘Notice the gleam of the pauldron,’ Gerard said. He held a pointer in one hand: was it nerves? – for he was pushing its tip into the palm of his other hand. He was wearing a polo neck, fine merino, light grey; and perspiration at his armpits was darkening the wool. ‘The pauldron: it’s almost the centrepiece of the whole painting,’ Gerard went on. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t single out one feature like this, but’ – and here he paused for a moment, ‘it’s really how I feel.’

  Roisin had been preparing to feel pity for the boy – a mere boy, really; too young for such a task; what was Read thinking about? and that sweater ruined, surely – but now she saw that pity was not in this case required. Gerard had their attention. He didn’t give a damn about his wet armpits.

  Maeve, again.

  The crowd grew further, filling the broad spaces between the white marble statues, the boy talked on. ‘Not the figures, not their expressions. Just his pauldron; it’s the gleam of the pauldron that catches my eye every time. That catches in Sandborne’s colours. She’s looking behind their humanity, the artist is, do you see? – she’s breaking down the machine.’

  He stopped, then, and turned, and gestured with the pointer, and all eyes followed its tip, to look at the purity of green and blue and red and yellow, the bright, blazing trail of white on black.

  ‘And now look at the foot hanging down, look at the sole, the heel, do you see it?’ – and he ran his fingers through his red hair. ‘There,’ he said, and the pointer stabbed higher, ‘just the sheer humanity of it. The hard skin, the leathery sole, the dust.’ He looked, Roisin looked, they all looked, at this hanging emblem of humanity, at the shining light and the darkness, at the slash of the pauldron, and the glimmering lamps, brightness and darkness against jet. ‘A beautiful combination of darkness and light,’ he said, and Roisin watched, they all watched as Gerard dropped his arm and the pointer and laughed. ‘Darkness and light,’ he said, and now he laughed aloud. ‘It gets me every time.’ He paused. ‘Every time: you’d think I was an expert – but I only saw The Jewel for the first time this week!’

  The audience tittered.

  ‘And there she is, we think,’ and again the pointer rose, and wavered, and pointed. ‘Emily Sandborne, and nobody knows how she captured this distemper painting, and managed to keep it alive, and unfading.’ A pause. ‘She took this particular secret to the grave.’

  He had them: the crowd moved, exhaled audibly – and now there was, spontaneously, a round of applause; and Gerard flushed, and lowered the pointer, and nodded. He knew his mind: that was it. Like Maeve, he had his opinions. Roisin looked over the heads of the crowd at the sparks of light in the painting, and then she slipped away from her green silk walls, and out into the corridor, and away.

  30

  Another week passed – and now in the gallery, the lights were burning into the night. Only in one office, and that office faced away from the city and into a void. Not indeed – Roisin had all too frequently grumbled to herself – a void, a courtyard made over glossily by architect and builder and curator, full with silk and paved with Italian terrazzo: it was nothing like that. This void was damp, and gloomy; a line of bins in varying shallow hues, green and brown and black, stood ranged against a wall, along a stretch of which moss crawled from the damp ground. The public would never see this particular void, not if the gallery had anything to do with it.

  Dr Read had offered a touch of apology on that first day, as she showed Roisin around her new domain. ‘We’re not planning work on this wing,’ she remarked as she opened a fire door and revealed a dingy corridor, murky light, low ceilings – and beyond, a warren of small, partitioned office spaces. ‘It’s a pity, but—’ and she sighed a pitying sigh. Roisin would later discover that Dr Read occupied a corner office high in the building, with sheets of windows offering a clear, cool north light. Later: that first day was all poor ventilation and grimed windows, with the stuffy staff room as the pièce de resistance.

  Tonight, in her office looking into a void, Roisin was working late.

  It was all the gallery’s fault. She had no call to be working late, she had no call to be working after five o’clock at all; she ought to be in bed. But instead, she was here. Instead, the gallery’s reopening had put, as she had reflected loudly to anyone who would listen, the cat among the pigeons. Rejigging and rehanging and remodelling: it had been almost too much.

  Roisin expected no sympathy from her colleagues – and this was as well, for there was none to be had. They had become (in spite of themselves, in spite of their sarky comments, day after day and month after month) excited by the swirl of these last weeks: by the finishing touches applied, the clearing of wires and scaffolding and dust, the lighting of lights, the rising delight engendered by this upcoming reopening, the full and thrilling rehang of the collection, the rising energy in the building. They were delighted, and they avoided eye contact with Roisin, and avoided listening, and having to reply, and moved away.

  Roisin did not appear to notice; or at any rate, gave no indication of having noticed.

  She noticed that Gerard alone list
ened, paid attention, sympathised. She noticed silently, and was grateful.

  Now, tonight, she sat in her low-ceilinged office. Beside her sat Gerard. He looked tired, was saying little; Roisin, on the other hand, was saying a great deal.

  She was at her worst – and she knew it, and hardly cared.

  ‘And now the other file – no, the other one, the red one, give it to me. No, never mind, I’ll find it,’ and her hand riffled through a hillock of multi-coloured plastic files on her desk. She pulled out the red file, and opened it, and a collection of photocopied articles and images spilled out and onto the ground. Roisin preferred at all times a paper trail – but now she clicked her tongue with exasperation. ‘No, never mind,’ she said again, ‘I’ll do it’ – and then she sat back, and closed her eyes for a second. Opened them, and tilted back in her chair, and watched Gerard on hands and knees on the tough, institutional carpet, filling his hands with papers.

  No, not a power thing. Roisin’s eyes had filled with tears.

  Although: perhaps a power thing, perhaps a little.

  It was late. It was very late; this had been going on all day, and Roisin was very tired.

  But still.

  ‘Gerard. Please: I’m sorry,’ she suddenly said. ‘This isn’t your job: it’s never your job to be on the floor picking up after me, or after anyone. Please. This is my job.’ Then she was on the floor, and Gerard – and the shadows under his eyes were darker than ever, now – was back in his chair, and the sudden, shocking imbalance was cleared away.

  They had become friends, in the course of two weeks. After a manner: friendly colleagues was perhaps a better description – but even this meant the occasional coffee together, and the occasional conversation that veered away from art and art history into other areas. It was all rather surprising.

  All the more reason, then, why Gerard should not be found on hands and knees, picking up bits of paper that he hadn’t even dropped, that were nothing to do with him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Roisin said. This was all to do with a temper, a sourness. None of it was Gerard’s fault. Gerard nodded, mildly enough.

  Now Roisin went from her knees to her feet, and back to sitting, and pulled a set of floorplans across her cluttered desk, and compared them to another set of papers, bundled on her desk: text panels, which she had been working on for days – for days and days – and which were late being displayed. Late! – and she the Keeper of Displays! Roisin wanted to weep: the rehang of the collection was complete, and the panels were incomplete, and it was all her fault. Her walls were being violated. The shame and disgrace were immeasurable.

  ‘Look,’ she said, and she gestured first at a text panel, before pushing an index finger into the floorplan. ‘The Sculpture Court: I put down that The Jewel is hanging on the south wall, when it isn’t.’ Her voice rose an anguished notch. ‘It isn’t. It’s the west, the west wall. I haven’t corrected it!’

  It was a dispute from a day, two days previously – worst of all, picked up by Read herself.

  ‘Are you sure it’s the west wall?’ Gerard couldn’t read maps.

  ‘Making a fool of myself,’ Roisin said. Her precious dignity, her precarious self-respect, all of this was slipping. ‘A bloody eejit, as my mother would call me, and she’d be right, too. I had to sign off on’ – and she pointed at the bundle of files, at the papers, at the disordered desk – ‘all of this; and now I’ll have the Board saying I don’t know my south from my west.’ She fetched breath. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to go and stand there, and see if I can’t work it out. And sort this out once and for all.’ She stepped over the papers, she moved to the door.

  ‘I’ll come too,’ Gerard said, ‘and then we’ll call it a night.’

  The young man, the boy, rose to his feet slowly, and followed her out into the corridor, and through the swing doors. Her fingers moved quickly across the key pad of the alarm – so rapidly, indeed, that she failed to realise that the alarm was in fact unset. She stepped into the main gallery. A suite of rooms, the colours shining even under the dim lights, stretched ahead.

  ‘Come on then,’ and they set off along the corridor.

  It was pleasant to have a friend. Remember that. Not someone who chatted and who needed a chat – for Gerard, as they paced these beautiful, dim rooms, was quiet, happy to take in the spaces, the shadowy paintings, the airiness, the mystery and wonder of a beautiful, wondrous place. Not someone who needed endless attention, and not someone who probed. Just a young man who reminded her a little – a very little – of Maeve: who in spite of a fragility, had a sense of himself. Who had, when it came to it, a set of shoulders, and a pair of lungs, and a degree of passion.

  ‘I don’t mean taste,’ Gerard had said. They had been in the Sculpture Court, looking up once more at the painting now installed there. No pointer, no perspiration marks. ‘It isn’t taste I’m talking about.’ He hadn’t had to explain: Roisin knew. There was truth there: there, in that hanging, leathery heel.

  This was what she had told Michael Clancy, sitting in his darkening kitchen in Bow. Strip away the blather, the technique and the brushstrokes, the materials and the application, and look for the truth. He had listened and Tim had listened, and the candles had glowed in their yellow glass holders. How pleasant to have a friend, how pleasant to be on a wavelength. Her life had stripped away all of that: all of it, and her whole life, ever since she had lost Maeve. She had pushed Michael away too. Perhaps she might claw back some of these feelings, and acquire herself a second chance.

  Their feet clacked on the hard, glossy floor, and echoes ran clacking along the walls. There were the heavy copper doors of the Sculpture Court – and besides, who cared, really, whether the painting was hanging on the west wall or the south wall? She would try to work it out now: then, she would pack Gerard into a taxi and send him home; and she would go home herself; and west wall or south wall, Roisin thought, I’ll fix it in the morning.

  I need to wise up.

  Her hands met the cold copper of the doors. She pushed, straining a little, and then the doors swung silently on their massive hinges, and opened, and they entered the vast, silk-hung room.

  31

  Ward was old enough to remember the days when there was only one way of getting into this gallery: a sort of minor-key imposing entrance on the square around the corner. But nowadays, most visitors used this spiffy new entrance, all white Portland stone and modern lines, which opened into the gallery’s tall and dramatically top-lit new wing.

  He’d been glad to leave Dublin behind.

  Rob bustled, now: he began wheeling his little suitcase – natty – towards the gallery doors. ‘Where’d you get it?’ Ward had asked the moment he had laid eyes on it: covetous eyes, he wanted this exact model for himself; but Rob had refused to divulge.

  Now he glanced over his shoulder. ‘I’m coming,’ Ward said; and Rob rolled his eyes, and vanished through the doors.

  The gallery, of course, was closed to the public. Barely opened, and now closed again: a slashed throat had a way of messing up plans. A couple of policemen stood stationed just inside the doors. Rob now spoke to one of them – Ward was still busy with the doors – and the policeman spoke into his radio. They waited, standing by their cases: the two policemen didn’t seem especially keen to chat, and Ward felt this as a mild surprise, accustomed as he was to Irish informality.

  Well, whatever. They would have to wait, standing there by the wheelie cases. We probably look like cabin crew, Ward thought – although he knew they looked like no such thing. Too old, for one thing; though at least he was in decent shape, while Rob enjoyed the sort of strapping superhuman physique that God seemed to reserve for New Zealanders and Australians.

  The gallery was in good shape too: as a minute, two minutes, ticked by, and still nobody seemed to be in any hurry to meet and greet them, Ward passed the time by looking away from Rob’s physique (Rob himself was glancing over some gallery literature detailing upcoming exhibit
ions, for all the world as though he had just arrived on a weekend away) and taking in the surroundings. The gleaming whiteness, the daylight, even on this glum afternoon, welling in from above, the dramatic staircase which led away into the main part of the building – it was all beautiful, and confidently modern.

  Ward had been accustomed to spending a fair amount of time here, back in the day. No complaints here: he retained fond memories of the gallery, though not of Dublin. He thought of the little flat he’d had for a couple of years, just by the canal, a fifteen-minute trot into his lectures every day – the easiest of commutes. He’d been in the habit of pausing in the gallery for a few minutes, most days, and taking in a painting or two. You can do that, he liked to say – to French or German colleagues, or to European pals of Martin, in London to attend some clinical seminar or other – you can do that when a gallery or a museum is free: you can just drop in for a few minutes, en route to somewhere else; you can perk up your day, he would say.

  The French would shrug, and turn the conversation; the Germans would think that they were being invited to participate in an exchange of views and opinions, and would press on, until Martin enlightened them. ‘One of his old hobby horses, darling,’ he’d remark as he passed, as he refreshed a Caipirinha or a designer gin, ‘I wouldn’t pay any attention. Let him go on. Olive?’

  So, go easy, Ward thought now, go easy on Ireland. At least the museums and galleries are free.

  And now, time to snap to attention. Finally, someone to greet them. Someones: a man, a woman. The man, younger, the woman, older; the man, police – Ward could see that at a glance, though he wasn’t in uniform – the woman: well, he couldn’t place the woman, though he guessed she was attached in some way to the gallery. She was fiftyish, tall and slim – willowy would be the word – and well groomed. Tweed. Pearls at neck and ears, hair expensively though subtly tended. Interesting bone structure.