Mrs Kesselman, who had the sharpest eyes and ears in the building, didn’t think anything at all of the rather sharp way Mr F ended the conversation — it was a Monday morning in February, and an unpleasantly cold one. She knotted on her overall, patted her raven’s-wing hair into place, and started to get ready for the girls.
Later that same morning, when Mr Scheiner insisted on taking his nephew all round the building and introducing him to everyone, it must be said that the young man in question looked far from keen. He could hardly be blamed; at sixteen, machine-room sweeper was not the most glamorous of jobs. He clearly found being paraded round by his uncle in front of everybody as The New Boy hideously embarrassing. In the upstairs workroom, Mr Scheiner insisted on everyone stopping work while the introductions were made, and this made it worse. Mr F looked at the boy’s sharp suit, and at his dark, clever face, and thought We’ll be lucky to get six weeks out of you.
After the boy had been sent back downstairs again, Mr Scheiner stayed on to see what sort of progress Mr F was making on the cutting of his current piece, a mid-length jacket in ocelot. Although the firm’s bread and butter was retail orders of the commoner furs — ranch mink, musquash, lamb — they did occasionally make one-offs for personal clients, usually family or business associates of Mr Scheiner’s. Ocelot is difficult fur to work, and if the client can afford the best-quality skins, it can be expensive. These particular skins were Brazilian, the best, and the ten of them required for a decently cut jacket represented a considerable investment — which was why Mr F, as Head Cutter, had been entrusted with the job — and why Mr Scheiner was keeping a close eye on it.
Like most small-scale manufacturers, his habitual language was that of complaint, and while he watched Mr F work on cutting the skins for the collar (always the trickiest seam on a jacket) he launched into a running commentary on how difficult it was to turn a proper profit on the individual pieces these days, crowning his argument with one of his most frequently heard catch-phrases: But the hidden costs, do they consider? The hidden costs. That’s my point, Mr F. He wasn’t expecting any response to his monologue — the man was taciturn at the best of times, and the job was a delicate one — and so was surprised when the knife stopped moving, and hovered.
“I’m sure the lady concerned will be happy,” said Mr F, not looking up from his bench, “and that’s the main thing — ”
Mr Scheiner couldn’t resist a chuckle:
“I should think she should be, when he tells her what this is costing him.”
The knife was still poised above the fur:
“ — because I should hate to be going to all this trouble for no reason.”
Clearly Mr F wanted to be left alone to get on with the job. His boss was happy to leave him to it and go back downstairs; he could see that the piece would be a knockout. And he didn’t mind the somewhat surly tone — he was used to it. The man was concentrating.
“Just checking to see my investment is in good hands, Mr F,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “And would I let just anybody touch skins of this quality?”
As he made his way back down to the office, Mr Scheiner considered his long-term plan, which was that at some point quite soon in the six months he should ask Mr F to take the boy on in the workroom, give him a try with the knives. He was a firm believer in management knowing the skin side of the business — after all, he’d been a cutter himself in the early days. And then, after the boy had found his way around the workroom, he’d start to show him the office and invoice side of the trade, introduce him to some people … after all, a boy from the family to head the firm, he had to come from somewhere (Mr Scheiner himself, despite the constant admonition of that And Sons painted on the window by the front door, had none). He had thought that now might have been a suitable moment to mention the idea to Mr F, but later would do. Let the boy get settled downstairs in the machine-room first. And besides, the man was clearly preoccupied. And no wonder; ocelot — tricky. Tricky on the seams.
He was right, of course; Mr F was preoccupied that morning. But not with the task in hand — this wasn’t the first time he’d had to match two spotted skins across an exposed collar-seam, after all. That was what they paid him for. No; he was having trouble concentrating. Not on the knife — that more or less knew its own job. It was his mind that kept on wanting to wander. To slip. He found himself having to keep on collecting himself.
As I’m sure you know, this is what happens once you admit to yourself that you have a secret. You find yourself carrying it around all the time — especially if it’s a secret which you know you can never, under any imaginable circumstances, share. You can never be quite sure where exactly might be a safe place to put it down for a moment, and this worry does begin to eat up your hours. You have to actively stop yourself thinking about it — and thinking about his secret is exactly what Mr F finds himself doing these days, far more often than he intends. Both in the evenings, when he sits with his tea, and in the mornings when he’s getting ready for work. Quite often over the past few days he’s found himself staring at himself in the washbasin mirror when he’s shaving, or scrubbing his hands, and thinking about it. Or stirring the teapot and thinking about it. Pausing, just as he closes the front door — standing there, at the top of the stairs, slipping the key back in his pocket and imagining what it would feel like to watch them carrying the body away down round the turn in the stairs and past the window, so that the light
And that’s the problem, you see. That’s all very well at home, in the living-room or in his bedroom, but he doesn’t want to start all that nonsense here at work as well.
Mr F adjusted his grip on the brass knife-handle, and returned to his task. The beautiful rosette-strewn skin opened under the blade like a flower.
seven
The next weekend, he just felt like a visit to the National Gallery. The fact that the great dark rooms on Trafalgar Square remained hushed even when they got crowded always reassured him. The sombre dark reds and greens of the damasked walls, the weight of the heavy gold frames on their chains, the high double doors that swung silently closed behind you — it all suited him. He especially liked the fact that you knew no one was ever going to speak to you — that you could be quite sure there’d be no one there who knew you. It made him feel well and truly left in peace.
He finished his dinner punctually at one o’clock, stacked the dishes on the draining-board, put on his weekend tie and, carrying his raincoat just in case, set out to walk to Camberwell Green. From there, he caught the number 36A to Kennington, where he had to change. As it happened, the first bus to come along was a number 59, and he could have stayed on it all the way to Trafalgar Square; but he preferred to get off early and take the short bracing walk along the river up past County Hall, then across Hungerford Bridge and up Villiers Street. He liked to walk; it was good for you.
Seated up on the top deck of the bus as it made its way up the Kennington Road and into Lambeth, Mr F could see just how much of London was being torn down and rebuilt. It always struck him, when he saw it all in one sweep like this, just how many new buildings were going up these days. Ugly great things, most of them, he thought. Incomprehensible. Still, the streets; they can’t move them, he told himself. At least they’re still all in the same place.
As he strode across Hungerford Bridge (he always found the way the walkway was so close to the trains slightly alarming; the way the metal shook, and rumbled) it started to squall with rain, and he was glad of his raincoat. He picked up his pace, and decided that when he got to the gallery he would start with the English paintings, as he usually did — the big green room with all the landscapes — then break his visit with a cup of tea, and then perhaps take a walk through some of the more far-flung galleries until he found one which he didn’t know so well. Just for a change.
He’d see what caught his eye.
As always, he walked straight through the first three rooms, the French pictures, without looking,
because he didn’t really care for them — too many hot, bright colours, to his way of thinking. Then, when he got to the English room, he slowed down, and began to work his way dutifully round the walls. Like most people when they visit a gallery, Mr F was always conscious of how many more pictures he still had to get through, and so never quite exactly came to a stop in front of each one; unless it was a favourite, his eyes would just slide over it, and then on to the next. There were two paintings he did pause for, the big brown and green painting of Salisbury Cathedral with the rainbow, which he always admired, and next to that the one of the lady with her little grey dog, pretending to be out for a walk in front of some rather flat-looking grey-green trees. Then there was rather a dull stretch of portraits (he was never quite sure about staring at the faces of people he didn’t know), and he half-wondered if now would be too soon for that cup of tea he’d promised himself — but then, half-way round the room, there was a picture that stopped him; genuinely stopped him. It must have been there before, but for some reason he couldn’t remember ever having seen it. It was a smaller picture than the rest, and oddly shaped, with the corners cut off to make it almost an octagon, and for some reason, in this room full of pictures of placid English countryside and well-fed people, this one showed something frightening: a small, ferocious and bright yellow lion, clinging to the back of a terrified white horse. Hemmed in by the thick gold frame, the horse rolled its eyes, tossed its mane and helplessly lifted one of its front hooves — as if it wanted to rear and bolt, but was too frightened or in too much pain to move. The lion sank its teeth into the muscles on the back of its neck, all the time staring straight out of the picture with its two blank tawny eyes — straight at you, as if to say; Yes? — digging its claws so deeply into the horse’s neck and rump that you could see how the individual talons were raking at the hide, gathering it slightly, the way your fingers pluck and clutch at the sheets when you — Mr F moved on to the next painting. He didn’t want to look at that one any more. Anyway he’d got too close to it — other people were waiting to take a look, he could feel their disapproval behind him. He stepped back and turned away, telling himself that perhaps he should stop dawdling now and go and find that new room to look at. It wasn’t really yet time for his cup of tea, that would be cheating. In the end he decided that the next thing he ought to go and do was leave his raincoat in the downstairs cloakroom; he was getting rather too warm in here with it still on.
Having left his raincoat, and washed his hands, Mr F set out, as planned, in search of something he had never seen before. He moved away from the busier part of the gallery and found himself walking through a sequence of nearly empty rooms where the walls were covered in a damask patterned in various shades of a dusty old gold colour, and the paintings were first of all all Spanish, and then Italian. The weather outside was obviously worsening; the dull drumming sound of heavy rain started to drift down from the gloomy skylights. As he kept walking, the sequence of rooms gradually darkened. Then, suddenly, just when he was standing in the middle of the last one, trying to see what there was there, all the lights in the gallery came on at once. Someone, somewhere, must have pressed an unseen switch. The dull gold of the walls blazed; the picture frames glittered.
With all the lights on, Mr F could see that there was something about this last room (it was a dead end, with only one door) which, if there had been anyone else in there with him, would have embarrassed him. Luckily, however, there seemed to be no other visitors in this part of the gallery at all; the polished parquet floor was empty, and the guard (Mr F checked), was asleep in his chair. The problem with this room was that every single painting on the walls (again, he checked), every single one of the paintings on the walls seemed for some reason or another to feature naked white arms and legs. Or even whole bodies, naked. And mostly men’s. Which meant that whichever way Mr F turned and looked, he found himself doing in public the thing which up until now he’d only ever done at home in private, sitting in his chair with his eyes closed and the cup of tea going cold at his elbow. And right out in public, too — right in the middle of the room. Staring at a body.
The sound of the rain on the skylights thickened; looking up, he could see that it was starting to get properly dark outside. All around him on the walls, the limbs of the various saints and warriors stretched, sweated and gleamed as they were variously martyred, massacred or entombed; skin and armour and marble and silk were pressed together as their bodies soared or were bound to pillars or hurled together in confusion. The paintings were so big that almost all of this white-limbed flesh was shown life-size — and under these lights, it seemed to be shining. Looming out of its great gloomy canvas, one despairingly out-flung arm in particular seemed to be straining straight towards him. He checked that the guard by the door really was asleep; he was. Then he looked right round the room again, and decided that he ought to pick one painting, and really look at it properly. He told himself quietly that it was alright, he was supposed to stand and stare. It was what this place was for. Go on, sir, it’s quite alright. You can go closer than that if you want to. He began to give his undivided attention to the painting which hung in pride of place in the middle of the end wall of the gallery.
It showed two men, on their own, in a darkened upstairs room. According to the label, it was called The Incredulity of St Thomas. He couldn’t quite remember which of the Bible stories it was that involved St Thomas, but he was sure from his face that the man on the left, the younger one, had to be Jesus, even though there wasn’t any halo. In fact, when you looked at the way he had been painted, he looked nothing like the Jesus he remembered from the church — big and dead and frightening — but actually quite ordinary-looking. Quite human. Slightly — well not fat exactly, but certainly fleshy. The painter had dressed him in just a twist of dirty white bed-linen, and he was pulling it to one side to show St Thomas the wound cut into his flank.
Mr F started to stare at the wound.
It must be an old one, he thought. There’s no blood.
In this painting, St Thomas, who is an older man, with a beard, bends down to peer at the wound, right up close, as if he’s short-sighted — and now Jesus does a very odd thing. He takes hold of St Thomas’s right hand by the wrist, quite firmly, and guides his hand so that the older man’s index finger is sticking right inside him, right deep inside the wound.
Mr F tries to see what the expression on Jesus’s face is as he does this, but even with all the lights on there’s too much shadow; the paint’s too dark. He can’t tell. He wonders if Jesus has just said something to St Thomas — if he’s just said, for instance, very gently, It’s alright, you can touch me if you want to. He could have done; the picture seems very quiet.
Just as he is about to step forward and get really close to the picture, to try and really see what’s going on, Mr F is interrupted by the sound of an actual voice — a man’s voice. Somebody says, in a rather high and very well-educated voice (one of those men’s voices that really carry, though this man must be actually standing right beside him, because the voice is very close, almost in his ear) —
“He does do hands better than anyone, don’t you think?”
Mr F looks round, of course, and there is indeed a man standing right beside him. Standing much too close, in fact. The man is slightly older than Mr F — silver-haired — and tall, and very distinguished-looking. He is holding a pair of yellow gloves in one hand, and in the other a pair of gold-wire-rimmed spectacles, which he has evidently taken off to inspect the painting. He isn’t looking at Mr F, despite the fact that he is standing right next to him, but staring straight at the painting. Right at the wound, in fact. Mr F has no idea how he got there, right out into the middle of the room — he certainly didn’t hear him come in — nor of how to reply to what he’s just said. Because the man isn’t looking at him, but still at the men in the painting, he’s not even sure if the comment was really addressed to him in the first place. But he knows it would be rude not to say
anything at all, so after a while he says the only thing he can think of, which is
“If you say so.”
“Such a marvellous sense of how tangible things are. I mean you can really see that finger sliding in, can’t you?”
The man gestured towards the painting, waving at it with the hand holding the pair of spectacles.
“And the way He’s guiding his hand like that. The contact. Marvellous. Quite marvellous.”
Mr F was going to say that yes it was, marvellous, very cleverly done indeed — because it was, when you looked closely, especially the way you could tell he was insisting that the other man push his finger right inside, so far in that the skin around the edge of the wound was just beginning to pucker — but by the time he had turned to speak to the stranger at his shoulder, he wasn’t there any longer. He had already moved away, as suddenly and as noiselessly as he had materialised. He was now standing on the other side of the room, apparently rapt in front of a big brightly coloured painting which showed some sort of a sky-blue curtain being drawn aside to reveal a tangle of pink and white bodies and bright gold jewellery. He did look back, just once, over his shoulder, giving Mr F an odd, thin-lipped smile; but then, after a few moments more with his new picture, he left the gallery without another word, walking slowly and deliberately, letting the high doors swing silently closed behind him.
Perhaps in the days before he had started having his dream Mr F, who normally hated any sort of forwardness, would have responded to this stranger’s rather rude behaviour by simply giving a small snort of derision to himself and then carrying on with his inspection of the rest of the room before heading off to the cafeteria for his cup of tea. As it was, he watched the man go (oddly, the heels of his highly polished shoes sounded a very definite set of ringing footsteps on the parquet floor as he made his exit), and then turned back to the painting.
Skin Lane Page 7