Daniel reached for the next letter. My thoughts began to travel.
To me, poetry would remain hazy territory, and poets individuals who saw life through either microscopes or telescopes, people for whom there were a thousand ailments, a thousand medicine cabinets. They said they liked to climb but in truth they preferred the descent. When I met Daniel he had one entire collection, endlessly polished and ready for the world, yet little desire to publish. Citing his favourite Czech author, he pointed out that neither Christ nor Socrates had ever written a line yet their teachings were still alive, while there were many writers who were read less and less in inverse proportion to the number of books they published. History, not critics and booksellers, would decide.
At the insistence of a friend Daniel had sent his first collection, Lamentations in Front of a Closed Shop Window, to a press in Manchester. A young editor had liked it, her colleague, also a young editor, had liked it, but it came to a sobering halt in the hands of the senior editor, who complained about what he called an abundance of Latinate words. There were several back-and-forths. After the senior editor suggested Daniel turn to a more Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and get in touch when he had a new collection, Daniel swore that from then on he would write only for himself and his friends.
Apart from his notebooks he had, over the years, committed lines to napkins, pamphlets, museum maps, tickets for different transportation systems, flyers for clubs, restaurant menus, place mats, gum and mint wrappers, shop receipts, margins of newspapers, and whatever else contained a blank space, including the fronts and backs of his hands, the safest place of all apart from the time he forgot and washed his hands and lost a poem to the drain.
Perhaps owing to my ignorance, or to caution or discretion on his side, Daniel showed me mostly fragments. This was fine with me; I had trouble concentrating when something was read out loud so the shorter the piece, the less chance of drifting. On the back of a cinema ticket: Mortal coughing in the antechamber. On the pamphlet to the Imperial War Museum: Life in limbo, a stalling of haikus. On a napkin from a café in Soho: Canary in cage/Biography in microscript. On a torn piece of paper: Verbs locked away/The snow leopard’s winter hoard. On another scrap: Lame dragon December, followed by two smudged lines.
Some poems had been inspired by things he’d overheard at the museum, words spoken by visitors walking past or standing at a painting nearby, and in some cases, or actually most, they were direct transcriptions of phrases misheard, for that’s how a new idea would pop into his head, he said, when he was there at his post, half present half absent, and phrases were being uttered around him. He could interpret them as he chose, and in many cases he jumbled them up, changed a word, replaced a letter or subtracted a line. He’d only started this methodology at Tate Britain, snatching things from the air and giving them shape with his pen. At the National Gallery there were too many visitors and too much noise and activity, so fewer chances to eavesdrop. I would often hear snippets of conversation as people entered and exited the rooms, like the details from paintings they sold on postcards in the shop, but my hearings and mishearings rarely led to anything new.
Daniel never asked for my opinion and I never offered one. Years ago I’d nearly killed our friendship by suggesting I didn’t like something and had kept quiet ever since. It made little difference how much I listened or let my thoughts stray. Along with the nautilus, I was simply another ear, and sometimes all he needed was to get the poem off the page and into the air in order to then send it out.
The afterlife of what he wrote depended, I knew, almost entirely on the reactions he received through the post. When a poet from Buenos Aires expressed in the most diplomatic terms possible his concern over Daniel’s new collection The Singed Fur of the Circus Tiger, suggesting it was maudlin at times, Daniel immediately shelved it. He omitted ‘at times’ from his memory and pulled the word ‘maudlin’ into relief. Yet if he’d asked me I would’ve said, Don’t shelve it, send it out. If he’d asked me I would have told him that I loved the poem about the old elephant that escaped a travelling circus, one of the few he’d read me complete, how after a life in chains and goaded by rods, four-ton Dora was startled by a cat and broke free and ran out into the highway where she collided with a bus. The driver died, Dora died, as well as six passengers, their wounds described in chilly detail. Daniel ended the poem with a description of the final spotlights to shine on the lifeless pachyderm, those of passing cars. But the poet from Buenos Aires wasn’t moved, not by Dora or any of the other unlucky animals featured in the collection, and maudlin was too weighty a verdict.
It was nearing eight by the time Daniel put away his various papers and remembered I was hungry. By then I was shifting in my seat every few minutes and looking out of the inky squares of the windows. The pot of tea and the bottle of wine had long sat empty. After consulting a few takeaway menus we ordered three Thai dishes, clutching at our chopsticks in the half-lit room, the open container of rice sitting on someone’s Collected Works, as Daniel asked me about my week and I about his. That was how many evenings, after the long show and tell, drew to a close.
My Sunday, I couldn’t help feeling, had ended up being a long immersion in other people’s pursuits and desires. I wanted to steer my thoughts elsewhere, away from bats, poems and corsets, so on the bus home I reached back in time to a correspondence of my own, the only one of my life, in fact, begun in my late adolescence and lasting into my early twenties.
Hatched not from a hobby or a mutual friend but from a pen-pal scheme I’d read about, with inmates at prisons in the UK. I filled out a form and sent it in. Based on my answers, a match was made. David Murphy was his name, an inmate at Wormwood Scrubs, a Category B prison in West London. I wrote him my first letter. Three days later, I received a reply. I no longer recall the contents, only my crackling pulse as I extracted the paper from the envelope. I sent him a second letter. A further reply. Each letter of his was a bit longer, more detailed. Soon we were writing every week.
Most of his letters described life in prison: the soul-crushing routines, glimpses of the sky through three glass panes and wire mesh, drab variations in the food, highly volatile cellmates. Days measured out in steps—five from bed to door, three from bed to window, two from window to sink. A constant twilight. Pet spiders and mice. The fitful buzz of a dying fly. Occasionally he’d half joke about his situation or draw pictures in the margins. In his previous life he had worked as a welder.
I sent photos of myself, the most flattering ones I could find, and imagined them taped to the wall by his bed or stowed under his mattress. He never told me why he was there. I never asked.
A few months into our correspondence, David Murphy changed address. He was being moved, or ghosted, to Belmarsh, a Category A prison in Greenwich for prisoners whose escape would pose a serious threat to national security. I found this out later. At the time, the name Belmarsh sounded like a stately home, much more elegant than Wormwood Scrubs, so I assumed it was a nicer place, for more refined criminals.
It was clear we would never meet. Every now and then I’d offer to visit but he never responded to my question. I finished school, started university, dropped out, moved to London and began at Compendium, then at my second job, then my third. I dated appropriate and inappropriate individuals, moved flat and flatmates. Through it all, I continued writing to David Murphy.
And then one summer’s night I was skimming the news on the BBC website when I read that two convicts, both jailed on multiple charges of murder, had escaped from Belmarsh that evening. Across the country search parties (dogs, helicopters, sirens) had been dispatched. A telephone number was provided should anyone have leads. For the first time ever, I saw his face. As a mugshot on the computer screen. It was haggard, but not in the way I’d imagined. He had lots of stubble, and his hair wasn’t as long as I’d pictured it, in fact he had a close prison shave. But his eyes were what startled me the most.
Panic set in. He knew exactly where I lived, th
e address of my current flat and all the ones before. Of course he would come looking for me, perhaps even ask for shelter. I packed a suitcase and went to stay with friends in Forest Hill. I checked the street, peered out of every window, was tempted to change name, job, city.
Yet David Murphy never came. In fact, I never heard from him again. A small part of me was, I admit, disappointed, and for a time I kept half hoping he would pop up somewhere, that I’d turn a corner and there he’d be. As far as I know he has yet to be caught. It’s unlikely he stayed in the country. He probably jumped on a freighter and is now in the wilds of New Zealand or Brazil, where he’s started a new, sanitised life, maybe even a family. Every now and then, I wonder.
Five
After so many years at the job I considered myself an expert in the sounds produced by different shoes on wooden floorboards. Clogs were the loudest but had gone out of fashion. So had most platforms and cowboy boots. Sandals with cork-filled soles made the least noise. Trainers too, nearly inaudible. Boots with traction produced a muffled crunch, like dog paws on snow. Heavy boots with metal buckles, usually on the feet of long-maned men from Scandinavia, sought an audience as much as the paintings. There must’ve been a shift in footwear over the years however, since the old-fashioned click clack so familiar in films had been generally replaced by less dramatic entrances.
Whenever I felt like detaching myself from what was around me, rather than listen for shoes I’d try to block out all sounds and focus on the reflections of visitors in the polished wooden floors. Every visitor at the Gallery has a double that wanders through the rooms with him, and in rooms where the wood is especially shiny the reflected double is nearly always more vivid and beautiful than the human above. As the afternoons wore on and the reflections diminished, my attention would then move to the shifts in light, and I would try to guess how long till closing time without checking my watch.
Shadows and reflections would’ve been different in my great-grandfather’s day, when Gallery illumination was an evolving theme. With the lanterns that were first used the pictures received too much light, he said, and visitors could see their reflections in the protective glass more than the pictures themselves. Skylights proved much better: light poured into the centre of the room, bringing the work to life.
In Ted’s day, too, there was no rotation, nor female warders. Heating came into existence rather slowly; certain draughty rooms lay in the dreaded pneumonia wing. Overcrowded London elbowed its way into the rooms of the Gallery. Warders had to rise from their chairs when spoken to, figures on standby that would go from L to l when addressed and from l to L when released, a constant movement between upper case and lower. Fog or darkness could cause the Gallery to close at short notice. Outside, horses would stand hitched to carriages for hours like thaumatropes at rest. All these details never ceased to have a hold on Ted and as they had a hold on Ted they had a hold on me.
Even in his twilight, when I would visit him in his two-room cottage in Yorkshire, my great-grandfather would return to the events of 10 March 1914. He had heard some of the commotion the suffragettes had been making, of their ardent campaign for the female vote, but had never imagined he would witness anything so dramatic firsthand. Mary Richardson provided Ted with the story of his life. Even the events of the Great War did not diminish the moment this young suffragette, drum major for the Women’s Social and Political Union’s Fife and Drum Marching Band, took a chopper to ‘his’ Venus; this story belonged to him, though it failed to make him a hero.
As a young girl I would listen on, fascinated yet pretending to be horrified, as he explained how the suffragettes were to blame for the collapse of society as he knew it, and how these national outrages, as he called them, were harbingers of the great European disorder to come. Even if he had caught her in time that day, it was too late. There was already disorder in the nation. Disorder in the Gallery. Disorder on the Continent. It was all linked, Ted would say, all linked. At the heart of everything lay grief and disorder, and swishing through this disorder was a phalanx of long, intransigent skirts.
His tone was so grave and prophetic, I rarely questioned anything he said, forgetting the cramp in my leg as he spoke about how in those years he was the first to admit that life as he knew it, meaning his England, would never be the same. It began with those viragos, he’d tell me, comets detached from the firmament, deviant and sharply veering, long-haired vagabond stars, hissing through the universe on their solitary paths, a tear in the social fabric, threats to the status quo. Yet once war broke out, Ted said, their battle, eclipsed by larger events, became no more than one of many lit matches in the stratosphere.
By then he had entered so far into the past, a brittle figure collapsed into his armchair travelling through decades when he scarcely had the strength to cross the room, that all I could do was let myself be pulled along with him, even when I’d heard the stories countless times and wasn’t sure what to make of them, feeling more excitement than dismay. My affections had skipped two generations; I was never close to anyone in my family and he was the only relative whose stories ever really enthralled me.
In his head he was always turning them over, a mental exercise during which he rarely stumbled on a fact or figure. Winters when I’d visit we would sit by the radiator, and every hour or so he would place a coin in the palm of my hand to feed into his meter, as if the retrieval of his memories depended on it. He would tell me of the night in early May 1910 when Prime Minister Asquith, aboard his yacht the Enchantress, received news that King Edward VII had passed away. Saddened by these tidings, Asquith went out on deck and gazed into the darkened sky. At that moment, Halley’s Comet came blazing overhead like a lit sword. There was our prime minister, alone with this punctual omen in the night sky, while in those years, back home, other fires were being kindled.
Comets and suffragettes. Ted always equated the two. He feared the approach of these comets that drew nearer, their brightness increasing, the light of their nucleus ever more vivid, great curvatures of tails stretching across the heavens, a sudden advance in size and splendour. One glimpse, one omen, that’s all it took: decades later, the events of those years still had him in their grip.
Ted had been pacing in my thoughts that afternoon when the art restorer entered the room with her students. Along with my great-grandfather, it would be this woman who, in Room 65 of the Sainsbury Wing, shed light on an obscure aspect of the museum.
Mid-fifties, attractive, with straight chestnut hair, she stopped in front of a small van Eyck, an intriguing portrait of a man in a red turban, possibly the artist himself, a painting I had always liked despite knowing little about it. The students fanned out like apprentice surgeons at a dissection and pinned their eyes on the subject.
From my chair, I watched and listened.
‘Paintings too are vulnerable to the ravages of time,’ the restorer began. ‘They crack and they flake, their colours change, things fade or darken. Any work you see today will have looked rather different when it was created. And if you look closely—not too closely—you will note that just about every painting in this Gallery contains a vast network of cracks.
‘And these cracks,’ she went on, ‘are what we call craquelure.’
She spelled out the word. A dozen hands took note.
‘Inherent craquelure, the release of stress, occurs with age. As you know, most of the tension in a painting is located in its four corners. Accidental craquelure, such as spiral cracks and spider cracks, is the result of external impact.’
The hands continued to scribble.
‘Look at this van Eyck. Your attention is probably first drawn to the red turban, to the magisterial way in which each fold has been painted. From there, you move on to the face. It is more cracked than wrinkled, you can see—the paint’s age shows even more than the man’s.
‘This type of grid craquelure is created when primary cracks, which follow the direction of the brushstroke, and secondary cracks run in right angles
to one another. Aging cracks often follow the lines established by drying cracks. Remember: mechanical forces will always seek out the path of least resistance.’
Some students leaned forwards, pressing dangerously close to the van Eyck. My impulse to intervene and ask them to take a few steps back was crushed by my fever to hear more.
‘Over time,’ the art restorer continued, ‘I hope you will all learn to identify fake craquelure, which forgers add to a painting in order to give it the illusion of age. They scrape the edge of the canvas on a table, bake it in the oven, and sprinkle sugar on top until the surface cracks in just the right way. There are other techniques too, but this is one of the simplest and most effective.
‘Yet in the words of the great Friedländer, Forged craquelure is arbitrary, monotonous and pedantic—whereas natural craquelure throbs with rich variety. So, to conclude: craquelure grants a painting its history, its authenticity, a whole topography the painter himself could never have envisioned . . . ’
When they left the room twenty minutes later I closed my eyes in order to process her words. Like a hot grille, the image of the van Eyck pressed into my eyelids despite the cracks being indistinguishable from where I sat in my chair. After hundreds and hundreds of hours in the Gallery, how had I failed to consider something so vital? I had always been drawn to decomposition, to the knowledge that everything in the universe tends from order to disorder, and the thought of the arrow of time also moving through paintings overwhelmed me. Painters create order from disorder, but the moment that order has been created, the slow march towards disorder begins again.
I’d been handed a secret. Visitors could stand and admire what they saw on the walls, point out to one another the various colours and compositions, but my inner lens would now be focused on something more hidden, an intimacy between me and the paintings that a thousand gazes could not disturb. I had always sought quiet in the world and there were few movements quieter, I realised, than paint cracking over time.
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