Once by the river I slowed my pace and breathed in the heady mix of Thames air and car exhaust, the traffic moving more in time with the water than on weekdays. There was no hurry so I could wander; Daniel and I hadn’t set an hour. He had begun working at his Tate most weekends, a decision that so far had benefited both his finances and his writing, he said, since the relatively empty rooms allowed him space and time to think outside the confines of his home, and had he gone to a library he wouldn’t be making the extra cash.
It’d been years since I’d visited Tate Britain and as I walked beneath the row of bare chestnut trees that ran parallel to the river, every now and then stopping to take in the view of the few barges napping on the muddy Thames, I tried to remember which Pre-Raphaelites were in the collection, probably most of its finest specimens, but after a few minutes of envisioning pale knights and expressionless beauties, in my mind all with the same porcelain face, draped in medieval colours, I started to think about how strange it would be to see Daniel in their midst, and how his own irregular geometry might jar with the paintings around him, and from his lameness my thoughts shot back to the major story of his life, one he rarely mentioned, not his marriage, not his poems, not his catalogue of poet friends in other countries, but the one he told me shortly after we met.
It had begun with a headache, he said, one of those headaches that stamps out nearly every impulse and emotion, the pulse of an imp inside your brain. The headache arrived with the morning post, half a dozen envelopes scattered on the floor, nothing of interest a tiny voice told him, yet he bent down to gather them all the same. Just as he reached for the final item, an electricity bill, he felt a bolt of pain behind his right eye. He stood up, straightened his back and dropped his shoulders, but the pain was still there.
He placed the envelopes on his desk and got back into bed. He would wait for the headache to pass. After an hour, he called in sick to work and took two aspirins; a few hours later, he took two more and began to sense that something heavy and impenetrable had sprung up around his head, a complex fortification that pressed into his temples. He tried sitting up, lying down, one pillow, four, reclining at a ninety-degree angle, or at 130. As the afternoon stiffened around him, Daniel said, he imagined an immense ship sailing towards him, a ship carrying all the headaches he’d ever had in his life, closer and closer until its keel grazed the top of his head.
Day two was no different. He went to see his GP, who said it would pass. Yet on day three, the ship felt heavier. By day four, Daniel was desperate. The only thing that helped, just a little, was to chew strong peppermint gum on the side where it most hurt, behind his right eye. Along with this and extravagant amounts of aspirin and ibuprofen, he had tried every remedy he could think of: tiger balm and eucalyptus oil, hot washcloths and bags of ice, pressure showers and deep-tissue massage, a Chinese acupuncturist, a German reiki man. He wore sunglasses, avoided screens, monitors and the printed word. He wrapped a kerchief tightly around his head, otherwise it might split open. He tried whatever remedy people happened to put forward, from his local newsagent to the woman at Boots. Everyone had an idea. None of them worked.
At home, he felt outside time. Despite the painful fortress that imprisoned him, he refused to stay immobile. His search for a cure, a wise word from somewhere, wasn’t going to happen while he lay in bed, so at least once a day he put on his sunglasses and went hunting for a solution.
Soon his extended family was discussing his condition. His cousin Lucy recommended a headache doctor she had once seen in Harley Street. Daniel went to this doctor and ended up parting with £135 for the man to tap his skull, shine lights in his eyes and wade through three pages of questions. He was sent home with a jar of ointment and a box of beta blockers. He rubbed the ointment into his temples, took the beta blockers. Nothing.
Day six, he ran into a friend on the street, Paul, who worked at the gift shop at the British Museum. It was he who told Daniel about the Hungarian hypnotist somewhere off Marylebone High Street who had cured his wife of chronic back pain. This man was an expert in pain, he’d said, knew how to make it vanish. On the spot, Paul called his wife and got the Hungarian’s number. Daniel was on the next bus to Marylebone.
The Hungarian had thick white hair and blue eyes that seemed to hold half the sky. He wore rings, four fluted bands of silver, two on each hand, and wasn’t particularly tall. Yet he carried himself proudly, Daniel said, as if he were taller.
‘What is problem?’ he asked.
Daniel removed his sunglasses and pointed to the right side of his head, describing the pain that wouldn’t go away.
‘No problem,’ the hypnotist replied.
He then sat down and motioned to a stool across from him. Once Daniel was seated, he was instructed to look into the man’s eyes, into his eyes and nowhere else. That was easy. As Daniel stared into the black pupils and their surrounding blue, he began to see a land of old forests and lakes, where clouds tiaraed round treetops creating ephemeral crowns, and houses wore hats of chimney plumes . . . For a second he thought he heard a woman yelling in a foreign language in another room, but blocked out the sound. And as he gazed into the distant landscape unravelling within that panoramic pair of eyes, the man asked him to count backwards from ten.
‘Ten, nine, eight . . . ’
From up close the hypnotist had a sweet, nostalgic smell, like black cherry tobacco. Daniel was tempted to lean forwards, he said, and inhale more deeply, but found he could not move.
‘Seven, six, five . . . ’
He was still aware of the Hungarian’s breathing but could no longer see any landscapes in his eyes. His pupils had turned into two round black hats floating on the surface of the bluest water.
‘Four, three, two . . . ’
Once Daniel had finished pronouncing numbers ten to one, he had no idea where he was sitting, whether he was sitting at all, nor where he’d lain his hands, knew not whether they were at his sides or in his lap, and he couldn’t feel his legs either, whether they were crossed or straight, whether he was still wearing shoes.
From somewhere deep and remote, like halfway through a mountain tunnel, he heard the voice of the hypnotist asking him to repeat, Head does not control me.
‘Head does not control me . . . ’
‘Head does not control me.’
‘Head does not control me . . . ’
After this, said Daniel, he couldn’t remember anything further. All he knew was that many minutes had passed and that he had travelled to a foreign land and returned.
A clapping of hands. The clanking of rings. Sounds from the street. The trance was over, his ache had vanished. His head could breathe again, the ship and the fortress had fallen away. After six leaden days, he had forgotten what it was like to be free of pain. And now, he was reminded.
‘Thank you, my friend, thank you,’ Daniel said, patting the Hungarian on the back.
The Hungarian raised a hand and said, ‘No problem.’
‘How much do I owe you?’
The man asked for £120, looking away as he said the amount, as if discomfited by monetary matters. Overflowing with gratitude, Daniel gave him an extra ten. The Hungarian beamed. They shook hands. Daniel put on his coat and started to walk towards the door. With the first step, and then the second, his left leg felt heavier and fell behind the right. He gave it a shake and continued, but again that leg fell behind. He tried putting the other foot first. But something wasn’t synchronised. His feet refused to walk in the way they had for the past thirty-four years. He looked over at the hypnotist.
‘No problem,’ the man said.
Daniel limped out of the room and started down the stairs, clutching the handrail. Even the surface of each stair felt wrong, as if the world had redrawn its geometry. Out on the street, it was the same. He checked the pavement and saw it was even. It was his left leg that did not want to cooperate. It kept falling behind. Again, he tried placing that foot down first, then bringing the other forwar
d. But the moment he stopped trying to coordinate them, the limp returned.
After a few days, he went back to Marylebone.
The hypnotist shrugged and said, ‘Temporary. No problem.’
Over the next few weeks, Daniel sought out experts across London. They measured each foot and leg, tapped and weighed them, asked him to walk at different speeds, took X-rays and scans. Every doctor concluded the limp originated from his head. There was no asymmetry anywhere in his body, no trauma, tumour or inflammation.
Whatever the truth, the limp was there to stay. His headaches were gone but in the rewiring, Daniel said, something else had come undone. He had traded in the headache for the limp and, when it came down to it, life was more tolerable with the limp. After his visit to the Hungarian, and to this day, he has never suffered another headache. But every deficit of his, he told me, everything he hated in himself, would be spelled out in that gap between his feet.
He returned to the Hungarian many times. At first the man kept saying, No problem, and then one day he was gone. A week later an Austrian dentist hung a sign, changed the doormat, and set up shop in the space.
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 o
wn. 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.
Nine
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.
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