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.
I finished my tea and stood up. Lucian offered to roll me another cigarette. Jane invited me to a gig that Wednesday. No thank you, I said to both, and wished them goodnight.
In my room, door closed and at my desk, I could hear her laughter in the kitchen, gleeful but tense, and smell the smoke from Lucian’s cigarettes. Very gently I pressed my thumbs down on the gold leaf not wanting to tear it, gently gently till the surface became rippled, like a gilt shimmer on water capturing the last of the day’s sun in the low tide, clinging to those last bits of illumination.
Ten
As much as Daniel and I tried to lose ourselves in our collections, it was hard to ignore the transition from late autumn to early winter, the shifts in colour and foliage outside and the swell in numbers within. Tourist season had begun and Christmas travellers were starting to flock to our museums and with them new languages, wider than the usual repertoire, began to float through the rooms. Yet beyond those walls the days grew darker and shorter, and expressions more sullen, as a steely melancholy bit into the city.
Over the past few weeks Daniel had been working on a new collection, The Tinnitus of the Old Astronaut, which gave rise to new hopes. The handful of correspondents to whom he’d sent samples commented on the great progress he had made, and the air of dignified resignation, as they called it, of his characters, all individuals who found themselves in the twilight of their careers: the old acrobat retired to the wings, the signalman losing his sight, the dancer with a shattered ankle, the porn star with disfigured breasts, the diabetic carpenter, forty kilos overweight, straining to lift his toolbox.
It wasn’t old age that had inspired the poems, since Daniel was barely circling his mid-forties, but rather a deep weariness with regard to his own body, he said, the body he could never escape. This sense of entrapment was felt most in his limp, with which he just longed to part ways and cast off in some foreign city after dusk, but no, it was as loyal and resilient as a dog.
At least the acrobat, the astronaut, and even
the porn star, he said, had been able to escape their own bodies and, for a few moments, flee their condition and enter something more hypnotic, but he had never had that, not even through his writing, for as he sat at his desk that hideous thing was still clutching at his foot and if it clutched at his foot it clutched at his mind, and he never felt entirely free. For years he had suffered the vertigo of existence, he said, but without experiencing any of its physical thrills. Even the damn contraption nailed to his living-room floor had become a problem, its sturdy wooden foot mocking him each time he walked past.
As opposed to his other poems, for which he required total silence, Daniel wrote the ones in this collection while listening over and over again to a favourite song from his youth, ‘Death of a Clown’, and it wasn’t long before the graphic designer next door was driven mad and slipped two notes in his letterbox saying that if he must have something on repeat could he at least vary it weekly, or from time to time choose another Kinks song, but he just didn’t understand, Daniel said, that no other song would conjure up the atmosphere required to finish his collection, and it wasn’t only the lyrics—the dry, clagging make-up, the old fortune-teller lying dead on the floor, the insect trainer searching for his runaway fleas, the tigers that no longer roared—but the tune. And he couldn’t listen to it through his headphones, either, for the funerary circus melody, or what he thought of as a funerary circus melody with its dying tambourine, had to be strung up, black and rattling, through his flat.
Like leaves unfastening from their tree, one by one he would print out each finished poem, a tiny obituary, and send it off.
To my surprise, for we had never taken a trip together despite our many years of friendship, Daniel asked me one evening whether I would like to go to Paris with him for the holidays. A correspondent of his, he explained, a poet from Ljubljana, was getting divorced from his wife of twelve years, and while they sorted things out in Slovenia their flat in Paris, where they had been living during their entire marriage, would remain empty. They weren’t interested in making a profit at a time like this, he added, so all we’d have to pay for was food and the Eurostar.
I could feel the little hairs on my arms rising as I listened to his proposition. A holiday from Jane, from the flat, from the museum. Not to mention that the years came and went and I had rarely used my days off work for anything memorable; I’d remain in the city and simply sleep late, wander the streets, tinker with my landscapes, but after four or five days feel desperate for routine. And then there was the fact I would probably never in my life have the money to pay for two weeks in Paris myself. I had visited the city once, aged fifteen, and the memories were dim. The more I reflected, the more it seemed like a brilliant idea. I nearly interrupted Daniel with an immediate yes but caught the word just in time, remembering there were a few other factors to consider. I promised him an answer in a day or two.
True, he had been my best friend for the past nine years. But I had never seen him first thing in the morning or last thing at night. We had never played house or even spent long unbroken spells of time together. There had always been an exit. I didn’t want to introduce any complications. When I’d asked how many bedrooms he said he was pretty sure there were two. But what if there weren’t?
All morning and afternoon at work, I debated. Like a dog that scratches at the door to be let in, and once inside it scratches at the door to be let out, and once you let it out all it wants is to enter again, and once you get up and open the door it comes in as if for the first time, only to change its mind seconds later and scratch at the door, which since it is winter must remain closed.
Some individuals, regardless of age, reach out and seize what they want from life. Others do not. The following day at work I witnessed the familiar dance between an old man and an empty chair. I had seen it many times. I was standing a few feet away quietly chatting with a colleague while trying, in the subtlest of ways, to assert my territory, when a white-haired man resembling an ancient mouse entered the room and immediately eyed my empty chair. He stared at it longingly but I could see him hesitate. At any moment I might return. He looked at me, then back at the chair. At me, back at the chair. After a minute or two he sighed and shuffled off into the next room to stare at the next empty chair he wouldn’t occupy. I could have taken him by the arm and led him to one of the wooden benches in the other rooms. Or told him that, despite having the best paintings, the Sainsbury Wing had the least comfortable chairs.
After a dozen mental back-and-forths, I accepted. Daniel immediately wrote to his friend to make arrangements.
‘What do you mean you’re going away for two weeks?’
The moment of most overlap in our lives, if I stayed up late enough, took place in the kitchen over a pot of tea. Jane flicked the switch on the kettle and reached for a pack of blue Pall Malls on the counter. Since Lucian, she had started smoking again full-time.
‘I have a chance to go to Paris, for free.’
‘We were going to repaint the flat.’
‘We can do it the first weekend I’m back.’
She waved her hand. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll do it myself. January’s going to be a really busy month at work. I won’t have time and I want to start the year with nice white walls.’
She bent over the stove and lit a cigarette, then tilted her head as she exhaled loudly for effect.
‘What about Lucian? Can’t he help?’
‘He’s going up north to see his brother. Basically I’m going to be here on my jacksy for two bloody weeks.’
‘I’m sorry Jane, but it’s too good to turn down. Daniel is being lent a flat.’
‘Are you going to be sharing a bedroom?’
I had to snuff out the glint in her eye, quick. ‘Of course not.’
‘Well, there might be a bit of night migration.’
‘No, there won’t, trust me.’
My flatmate and best friend had met only a handful of times, and on those few occasions neither had made much of an effort. In Daniel’s eyes, Jane was ‘relentlessly morose’. In Jane’s eyes, Daniel was distant and pretentious. When thrown into the same space, Daniel always asked about any new bands she’d signed, and Jane would ask how his writing was going, and from there the conversation would grind to an awkward halt unless I came to the rescue.
‘You wait and see.’ She raised an eyebrow and laughed, a hoarse, dusky laugh I’d never heard coming out of her before.
Eleven
Daniel told me to envision the Eurostar as a giantess straddling two cities. London lay at her ankles, Paris at her head, and as the train hurtled through towns, fields and somewhat lacklustre landscape, we were moving up her thighs, he said, circling the curve of her waist, sloping up and across her breasts, and would finally emerge on her face, a mechanical murmur pressing down on her lips, the slant of her nose, her sea of hair.
In the four-seat configuration we each had a window, the third seat was empty, and in the fourth sat a Chinese man who spent the journey underlining passages in a Bible with red and green markers. At one point the train slipped into a tunnel and we crossed the inside of the giantess, history smoothed out into twenty minutes of subterranean darkness, a diplomatic handshake 150 feet underwater. The black outside the window was severed in two by the blur of the rail, and for a few moments I forgot our destination.
Once we emerged from the tunnel and into France the landscape went from barren to populated within minutes, as if an animator were feverishly working to fill in the space. The train zoomed past rows of wind turbines, threepronged ghosts slicing the air, and pylons that looked like metal cat’s cradle or some other thread-pulling game. Rows of dour apartment blocks, the next thing to jab the horizon, sprang into view as the rural landscape receded. Paris was coming into focus.
The poet from Ljubljana had sent Daniel detailed instructions on how to reach his flat from the Gare du Nord. After a brief ride on the RER we emerged at the Luxembourg Gardens and wheeled our suitcases noisily along the un
even streets, past busy cafés and dusk-filled corners until reaching rue Claude Bernard, then down its sloping pavement to number 49. The entrance was marked by large green doors so heavy they required two hands to push open and beyond these doors stood the bird-like concierge, who after confirming our identity handed us the keys and explained something to Daniel while pointing towards the courtyard. We crossed this courtyard, climbed a flight of stairs, then another.
The flat smelled of gunpowder and candyfloss, as if a clown had just departed. I let Daniel go in first, then stepped out from behind him and began to survey. At the centre of the room stood a bulbless lamp on a stand. Evening entered through a vertical tear in one of the curtains. A small chair faced into a corner. I imagined a semi-empty theatre months after its last performance, the props now obsolete, the final act played out long ago, the actors involved in other productions, their lines from the old play forgotten and replaced by newer, more relevant ones.
All around us lay the remnants of someone else’s life. Unwatered plants, decomposing flies on the sills, unwashed plates in the sink, crumpled linen in the hamper, clumps of dust and hair on nearly every surface. A corridor linked the rooms in railway-car configuration: bedroom, living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Like an estranged married couple I gravitated towards the larger bedroom and Daniel took the smaller one, presumably for guests. The living room faced the street, the other rooms, the interior courtyard. There were no photographs anywhere and during our entire stay I was to keep revising my image of the ill-fated couple, hard to gauge from the few items they left in the wardrobe, a dark plum woollen man’s suit and a black chiffon dress with oversized white cuffs. In the bathroom by the sink lay a brush full of long strands of greyish blonde hair.
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