Next I picked up the autumn eggshell and brought it close to the lamp. I could only focus on the clumps of glue that fastened the rough paper leaves to matchsticks. When I turned to the mountain and volcano they too seemed like something pawed at with impatience by a child. They had never appeared so crude, nothing more than coarse dioramas by an amateur, and the more I stood back and stared the more I felt the landscapes vanishing before my eyes.
But maybe all landscapes vanish after a while or one just comes to prefer others. My great-grandfather’s final years were lived out in a cottage at the bottom of a field in Yorkshire. For days on end he wouldn’t exchange a word with anyone; the silence of low ceilings and unclipped hedges was more appealing than any human voice, he said, and his eyes had taken in enough faces to fill three lifetimes.
Only after my trip to Paris could I understand the weariness he once described as he was nearing the end of his time at the Gallery. After forty-six years there who could blame him, but even I, after a mere decade, felt pangs of disenchantment, my feet growing heavy as I climbed the steps to the staff entrance the following Monday. At first I was so indifferent to everything around me I almost forgot to check the plaque to see whether any names had been added while I was away but, needless to say, nothing eventful had taken place in my absence. When I put on my uniform the greyness spilled over my insides too, pressing down on my chest and ribs, cancelling out all colour. My tie kept coming out crooked, as if in two weeks I’d forgotten how to knot it, and I had to ask a colleague for help. At least I was assigned the Sainsbury Wing that day, I would’ve sunk into mortal tedium with the Impressionists, but even the gilt on the medieval panels and paintings refused to shine and not a single saint beamed himself out to distract me. At lunch I had no desire to tell Roland about Paris, though he bombarded me with questions and was more animated than usual, clenching his jaw with a mania I’d never seen before.
All around London the trees remained stripped by winter, their bare branches like bouquets of burnt sparklers. In the sky charcoal clouds hitched rides on strong currents of wind. Strange face-like patterns appeared in the cracked ice of the pavements, rising up from the ground like tombstone rubbings. Things appeared and disappeared, and the scratch on my face had just about healed, now a thin, pinkish line down the length of my cheek.
Daniel, meanwhile, seemed to be flourishing. We had yet to meet up since Paris but had spoken on the phone. From the moment he returned, he’d been gripped by writing fever. He’d walked into his flat, thrown a sheet over the wooden contraption, and sat down by the nautilus shell at his desk. He sent out his poems and wrote more and more new ones. With less patience than usual, I listened on as he told me how for years he’d been inching towards the haiku, circling the form and making small advances, and had now finally started the process, he said, a miniaturisation of existence. But they were urban haikus rather than hymns to nature. Roaches instead of grasshoppers, pigeons instead of swallows, pavements instead of riverbanks, television towers instead of trees. His correspondents had cautioned him from falling into the haiku trap. Few things were more tempting, they knew, than to pare down life and apply X-ray vision to each day, but one had to be careful; the form was deceptively simple.
Two weeks after our trip I was standing in the threshold of Rooms 65 and 66, with just a little more presence in Room 65 since it contained a showcase with one of our very few Dürers, an oil panel on pearwood, St Jerome on one side and on the other a comet, the man in his wilderness and a yellow flash with a red tail bursting out from dark clouds in a night sky, when Daniel appeared. He seemed to have been in a hurry, hair matted to forehead and scarf nearly trailing the floor, but he slowed down once he spotted me, and stopped to catch his breath.
‘Hello.’ I moved towards him. ‘Is everything okay?’
The red of his face retreated slowly, replaced by winter white.
Without answering he removed his gloves, reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled newspaper clipping.
‘Thought you might like to see what just arrived in the post, courtesy of Pierre.’
I unfolded what appeared to be an obituary from a French newspaper, dated four days earlier. In the upper left-hand corner was a photograph of a striking man with large eyes and shoulder-length hair. Just as I was starting to see the resemblance, Daniel began to translate, lowering his voice as three new visitors entered the room and came to stand at a painting nearby. Normally I would have asked him to wait until they’d left, but at that moment impatience was burning a path straight through me.
In recent days, the region’s official chronicler had written, the chatelain had gone to live in his car and from his car it was a brief journey, without any need for petrol or accelerator, to the grave. He might have died overnight or perhaps in the morning; he wasn’t found till the afternoon, by a former gardener who had come to tow away an abandoned tractor now home to a family of foxes and had noticed a leg hanging out of the 1976 Ford GS. Drawing closer, he saw the rest of the body in the back seat. The chatelain’s eyes were concave, his skin a pale green. A tiny spider, the last sign of life, crawled out of his beard.
At the top of the clipping Pierre had written, Il quitta le réel.
‘Meaning what?’ I asked.
Daniel shrugged. ‘He quit the real.’
I felt as if the floor of Room 65 were being seized by the corners and tilted sharply to the left, my legs about to buckle under. I looked around for a seat but that day, inexplicably, there was no chair nearby. Daniel studied my face and I studied his. I realised I had no sense of his feelings regarding the chatelain. He lingered another moment, then folded the clipping and returned it to his pocket. A fresh batch of visitors entered the room. He turned to me and said, Goodbye, let’s speak later, whispering the words so quickly they sounded like a foreign language. And that was it. He walked out and left me alone with the newsflash.
All I could think of as I stood there was the man entombed in his car, his leg hanging out and the spider in his beard, and above that image, disturbing enough on its own, was the awful thought, circling like a crow overhead, that in some way I had hastened his death by disturbing him. Why else would he have gone from sleeping in his chimney to his car? I struggled to remain composed in front of the visitors but began to feel increasingly dizzy. The cold sandstone of the wall I was leaning against seemed to soften under the pressure of my hand. I looked into the centre of the room and started to imagine that the Dürer panel would at any moment burst open and release the comet from the parabola in which it had been fixed, nebulous matter spilling out into the halls of the Gallery, a new incident in cometary history to mark the news we’d just heard. Yet, like so much else, it wasn’t to happen, and before long I moved on to Room 67.
Jane was out when I returned to the flat, which was just as well though by then nothing would have stopped me. Without taking off my coat I headed to my room and over to the shelf and one by one picked up my landscapes. I grabbed them from their peaks or foundations, whichever was first to touch my fingers, and began. I held the volcano from its base and pushed upwards, trying to force the so-called magma up through the mantles of crust and into the crater, but the whole thing just collapsed in my hand. I scratched at the mountainside, bits of slope getting stuck under my fingernails, including the moth. It was harder to destroy the cliffs of Pegwell Bay, no matter the angle the plywood wouldn’t give, but I tore off as much as I could from the top and shredded the gold leaf into jagged rays. With the seascapes I broke off the waves of crystallised sugar, amazed by how much they’d hardened, then tore at the dark cotton clouds and broke the masts in two. Every matchstick that had transformed into a tree went back to being a matchstick, albeit no longer whole. The yielding of the eggshells was especially satisfying, little domed worlds that crushed at the centre of my palm, and the more I thought back on the chatelain the greater my contempt for these misshapen things.
First in my hand and then under my foot, I demolished each
one, listening to the symphony of cracking, crumbling and caving in. As if a thousand papery wings were guiding my movements, the crushed moths adding a silvery dust, I tore up paper skies, uprooted little trees and crumpled aluminium lakes, destroying landscapes I knew I was never going to inhabit, in case of tempest this garden will close, and I didn’t pause for a second until I’d annihilated every one, for in the end we are all either gatekeepers or trespassers, and I knew I would never want to have to choose between the two.
As soon as I opened my eyes the next morning I looked over at the area beneath the shelf. Tiny bits of eggshell lay strewn across the floor like in one of those Dutch paintings. I left them there for two days before sweeping everything up with a small dustpan and brush, the crushed white clinging to the small dustballs that had formed. All the detritus, the broken matchsticks, the torn paper, the shreds of cotton, looked like nothing more than the aftermath of a children’s party. And though I searched for it, would have even held on to it as some kind of talisman, I never found the cat’s tooth once it separated from the grotto where it had lived for over fifteen years.
The person I needed to speak to at Human Resources was flipping through a catalogue when I went down to see her during my first tea break.
‘Hi Marie, what can I do for you?’
She closed the catalogue and smiled wearily.
‘I want to hand in my notice.’
The words came out more naturally than I’d expected. From the corner of my eye I saw the others look up from their desks. Such drab surroundings down there, below all the splendour, I wondered whether they cared.
‘You want to leave the Gallery?’
‘Yes . . . ’
I looked straight into her eyes, drawing myself up to my full height.
‘Would you like to take a seat?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Okay . . . ’ she trailed, ‘you’ve been here for quite a long time, haven’t you?’ She swivelled round in her chair and opened the top drawer of a filing cabinet behind her, from which she extracted a thick folder. Flip flip flip till my name came up.
‘Yes,’ she fingered the papers, ‘nearly ten years . . . ’
‘The boredom gets to you eventually, doesn’t it?’ someone said from his desk. The others laughed.
‘No, it’s not that.’
‘Is there a problem, Marie? Something we can help you with?’ she asked in a conciliatory tone.
‘No.’
She stared fixedly to see whether I was telling the truth. I lowered my eyes.
‘There’s really nothing wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well then how soon would you like to leave us?’
‘Whenever the contract runs out.’
She nodded.
‘There’s a waiting list, you know, for a job like yours. If the list were a queue, it would wrap itself all the way round the building. Are you sure you don’t want to think it over?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Very well, then. Your notice period is four weeks. After that, you’re free to do whatever you wish.’
When I told him my plans at lunch, though the only concrete one was to leave the Gallery, Roland lay down his fork, reached for his water and began sipping at it compulsively. And what next, he asked, to which I had no answer. New subjects, I told him, and new verbs. I had no idea what those would involve, I admitted, but my days would have something like a new vocabulary. No more standing back and watching over culture. I still had four weeks left but in a symbolic act towards the end of lunch we exchanged numbers, for the first time ever, I realised, and agreed to meet for drinks at least once a month, the sort of promise one sincerely means while already doubting it will be fulfilled.
Jane’s concern was how I was going to pay the rent. I reassured her I would begin trawling various job listings that weekend and start making phone calls. The Gallery would write me a reference letter and there was no reason why it shouldn’t be good. And I had a tiny bit of savings, enough to last a month or two, by which time I’d surely have found a new job. The world felt large again, almost infinite, and I wanted to postpone the moment till I committed to new walls and rules.
At first Daniel was sceptical, frowning as he listened to my decision, but after a few days he rang up and gave his support and even confessed to sometimes having wondered whether like my great-grandfather I would turn grey and hunched in the rooms of the Gallery, a fate I often thought I’d share with him.
After the destruction of my objects it took weeks to accustom myself to their absence. Each time I entered my room I’d look over at the empty shelf expecting to see them, the way you glance at the same spot on the wall where you once found a large spider, half hoping, half dreading, to see it there again although you removed it with a glass and paper long ago. One evening I finally moved an armful of paperbacks to the shelf and propped them up with tea tins full of gravel and, with that, the imprint was gone.
In bed at night, and during lulls at the Gallery, the chatelain would come lurching into my thoughts. Sometimes I could see his face, but often it was only the back of him or that first glimpse from afar, a human-size clump of ashes blown out of the fireplace. Over the weeks he began to feel about as real as Daniel’s Hungarian hypnotist, and I wondered whether this would end up being the story I’d carry round and sometimes unfold from my pocket. Marc Cointe quit the real, Pierre had said, but maybe he’d never belonged to it. Each time I doubted I’d pull out the evidence and lay it on the table: four witnesses, a printed obituary with a photograph, and, not least, the scar on my cheek, now a groove so pale I had to tilt my head under a bright light to locate it in the mirror. All real.
Late one afternoon a young sketcher entered my room at the Gallery with his notebook. Dark hair in a ponytail, always the same beige vest and scuffed suede boots. I’d seen him many times before. He sat down on the bench and began sketching Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow so feverishly he seemed to forget everything but himself and the painting. I strained to get a better view but my seat was too far away. He was working with such intensity, my curiosity grew and grew, and I finally got up and walked around, pretending to check something behind him, and was more than a little surprised when I glanced down and saw that instead of a sweet infant Christ the Madonna was holding a foetus with enormous eyes and frog-like hands, its fingertips like suction cups and toothed circular mouth a red sea anemone that seemed to move on the page. Given his docile manner I’d always assumed the young sketcher was producing elegant, faithful copies of the works in our Gallery, not mangling them. The Madonna—beautifully rendered, he was an excellent draughtsman—was cradling a baby Jesus from outer space.
Four weeks passed in a gust.
At the start of my final day, not wanting to rush, I set out for work half an hour early. ‘There are beggars and buskers on this train. Please do not encourage their presence by supporting them,’ said the announcement on the Tube, but that morning I encouraged them with small coins, those tiny acts of generosity you’re prone to when feeling, however briefly, that the universe is finally on your side.
As I stood in the threshold of 45 and 46 watching strangers fill the rooms, my head began to swarm with images from the past and present, like in those old paintings or, more often, panels, with continuous narrative, in which different scenes or chapters of a saint’s life crowd the same space with little perspective, and I thought back on my years at the Gallery, the thousands of hours spent standing and sitting, watching over immobile images and mobile figures, and I wondered what I would miss. It had been a second home, this geometry of square rooms, rectangular halls, circular junctions between quadrilaterals, the links, axes and extensions, the vestibules and sub-vestibules . . . But apart from Roland and the St Jeromes, it was hard to tell what else might return in dreams; only later would I know.
At 6.10 in the changing room, I began saying farewell to my uniform. I removed my jacket and laid it on the bench, brushin
g off two strands of hair from the collar. I undid the button and zip and stepped out of my trousers, taking time to pull each leg out. Then came the seven buttonholes down my chest, which I tackled as slowly as I could. Once freed from the lilac blouse, I folded it neatly and also laid it on the bench though I knew everything would soon be tossed into the wash. I was sad to give up the purple tie but knew I’d never wear it in the real world.
The museum stayed open three hours later on Fridays but unless we regulars worked overtime, our shift would end at the usual hour and part-timers would come in and take over from six to nine, a comfortable relay though I’d miss hearing Henry’s jangling of keys, and it always threw me off a little to see unknown faces in the changing rooms as I was getting ready to leave.
That evening I didn’t head out once I had put on my civvies. Instead of making my way to the exit as I normally did, I returned to the second floor in my black wool skirt and high boots, ones I’d treated myself to the week before to mark the end of an era, and crossed section after section of my former kingdom, past men and women in grey, many of whom I didn’t recognise, past paintings whose shapes and colours I registered out of the corner of my eye, and kept walking until I reached Room 30.
Two men, Spaniards I think, were standing in front of her speaking loudly and gesturing. One of them moved his hand across the air as if following the contours of her body, the slope of her shoulder and the dip at her waist, while the other nodded in agreement and then repeated the movement. I waited until they had walked off.
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