Mr. Phillips

by John Lanchester

  For a moment Mr Phillips thinks about queuing for the big exhibition. But long queues, which are always the closest imaginable thing to being dead, are probably not a good idea today. So instead he weaves up the steps and through the revolving doors, behind a waddling man in trainers and a sunhat whose enormous jeans are hitched up to his sternum, and goes into the main gallery.

  It is immediately cooler and more noisy than the city outside. Some people are standing in front of the table where bags are being, not very convincingly, searched by a pair of guards in amateurish uniforms which look as if they had been made on a sewing machine at home. This will be all about bombs, presumably, one of those London things you get used to, unless it was also to scan for nutters who wanted to carve paintings up with Stanley knives or spray paint on them or set light to them or whatever. Chop them up with a machete until cornered by the underpaid, half-asleep guards. I’ll take two of you with me!

  Mr Phillips goes over to the searchers. In a gesture that feels vaguely sexual, he opens his briefcase and invites them to rummage in it. One of the guards looks and languidly moves a manila folder out of the way with a gloved hand. The folder contains a thick pad of the A4 graph paper ruled into 1 mm squares that Mr Phillips likes to use for taking notes and calculations. This particular pad contains the left-over sums for the Post-It Note memo, and a first draft of some sums he made about his and Mrs Phillips’s financial position when he had first heard that he had been made redundant. The other objects in the briefcase are: a calculator; a plastic ruler; a plastic box – a ‘pocket protector’ – with two HB pencils, a sharpener, a Rotring fine-nibbed technical drawing pen, and two black Bic biros; his Wilkins and Co. desk diary, which he has taken from his office and forgotten to remove from his briefcase; a spare tie with yellow and green horizontal stripes, a Christmas present from Thomas three years ago, ditto; a Wilkins and Co. pocket diary; an empty hip flask that Mrs Phillips gave him for emergencies, which he keeps in the briefcase for sentimental reasons only, since when it was full it leaked and made his papers smell of whisky; his office toothbrush, which has a useful little cap to stop it smearing paste everywhere; Bobby Moore’s autobiography; a silver-plated letter opener that he inherited from his father and which he, like his father, never uses; a small packet of tissues; his copy of the Daily Mail; two packets of Post-It notes.

  The guard looks at all this without any sign of curiosity or recognition. He nods at Mr Phillips, who takes that as a sign to close the briefcase.

  *

  Mr Phillips walks into the first rotunda inside the gallery and takes a floor plan out of the plastic holder. Then he decides he would prefer to wander aimlessly around and puts the map back; it doesn’t seem right to take something for nothing, especially if he isn’t going to put the something to any use. Anyone who has any memory at all of the forties in Britain has a different attitude towards waste than anyone who doesn’t. Mr Phillips was nine when rationing ended and can still remember the atmosphere of straitenedness and not quite privation. It is odd to think that he has only moved about three miles from where he lived then, in a middle-of-terrace house with his parents and his two-years-older sister. Because films of the period were always in black and white it sometimes seems that his memories are black and white too, especially his only real war memory, which has to do with the bomb damage that took years to repair. They were far enough from the docks to have been spared a lot of it, but Mr Phillips feels as if he can still remember – it is on the cusp between a real memory and something he has been told about so often he can see it – the way some homes had been turned inside out, excavated or split open like dolls’ houses, so that you could see a mirror askew with its glass shattered but its gilt frame intact still hanging in an upstairs bedroom, with the rest of the floor melting downwards and outwards like a partially eaten gingerbread house; or the way the ruined kitchen was open to full view; or the beams and pipings which made it look as if the house were spilling its guts. All the inhabitants had died, some of the 30,000 Londoners who died in the bombing. This is a number about which he sometimes thinks, and compares with other numbers when they come in books or TV programmes or newspaper articles. It could be expressed mathematically: 30,000 (Londoners killed in the blitz) < 42,000 (Germans killed in Hamburg fire storm) > 32,000 (number of U-boat sailors who died) < 2,800,000 (Russian POWs who died in German prison camps) > 78,000 (Japanese killed in the bombing of Hiroshima) < 2,200,000 (Chinese who died during the Japanese invasion) > 90,000 (Americans who died in the war in the Pacific) < 395,000 (British and Commonwealth dead in the war) < 1,000,000 (British and Commonwealth dead in World War One) > 60,000 (British dead on first day of the Somme) > 26,000 (US dead in battle of Guadalcanal) < 30,000 (American airmen based in East Anglia killed in daylight bombing raids on Germany) = number killed in London in the Blitz. The thing was that about half-way through doing the sums you went sort of numb and the numbers ceased to be anything other than numbers, as also happened when dealing with sums of money not your own, even if you were a trained accountant.

  Another memory of the forties was the taste of coffee. In 1949 his father had arrived home with a tiny sachet of real coffee twisted in a piece of brown wrapping paper. It was a gift from some bigwig who had been done a personal favour by his boss. That same evening Mr Phillips’s father carefully supervised his wife as she made a pot of coffee, standing fussily over the stove with something maternal in his solicitude for the ground brown beans. When the coffee was made his parents sat sipping it out of their best cups, not talking.

  ‘Would you like a taste?’ his father asked. Mr Phillips had been too shy to ask; except of course that standing by the kitchen table softly panting was in itself a way of asking. He nodded and his father passed to him the thin blue and white china cup. With both hands around it, Mr Phillips took a careful sip, and at the same time caught his first noseful of the acrid, hot aroma. Luckily he did not gasp or spit but handed the cup back to his father without mishap.

  ‘Well?’ his father asked. Mr Phillips was at a loss for words. He said:

  ‘Thank you, papa.’

  His father smiled and returned to his communion with the cup.

  ‘It’s really for grown-ups,’ he said. There is still a certain coffee taste – the bottom of the mug in a colleague’s office, or a really nasty after-dinner cup in a friend’s house – which transports him as if physically back to their kitchen in Wandsworth in 1949, when the thin, acrid, bitter, watery taste had been the rarest and most precious thing in the world.

  2.4

  Mr Phillips moves past a couple who have positioned themselves almost blocking the entrance to the main gallery, each holding one end of a folded-out plan, like scheming generals. They are in comfortable, spreading middle age – the man’s shoulders, waist and hips slide downwards into each other as easily as Mr Phillips’s own – but are dressed like students in jeans and clumpy trainers.

  ‘I dunno,’ says the man. His accent is American but once had not been; he is from somewhere else, Ulster or Scotland perhaps. Hybridized accents are harder to unpick than neat ones, even for the English, every single one of whom has a top-of-the-range on-board computer calculating the exact geographical and social location of the speaker every time somebody opens his mouth. Grammar school-educated Mr Phillips’s accent is Received Pronunciation overlying a stratum of South London. Martin and Tom both speak with a mild South London rasp that they can, especially Martin, roughen up or tone down at will. Mrs Phillips speaks a beautifully neutral form of RP that Mr Phillips had once found sexy – it was part of the idea of having sex with someone posher than you were. Class makes sex more interesting for everybody. Karen’s accent, East London verging on Essex, is sexy too, but in a more straightforwardly sluttish way. And there is something about the limitless reserves of indifference she can express, the thrilling estuarine boredness of her ‘Yeah’.

  The woman holding the map with the mystery-accent man is wearing jeans that reveal her waist size
to be 36 and her inner leg to be 30. Truth in advertising.

  ‘The Pre-Raphaelites just don’t do it for me,’ she says.

  ‘They were fags,’ says the man.

  ‘Ruskin was definitely a fag.’

  ‘Watts sure paints like one.’

  That seems to cover the subject.

  *

  Mr Phillips heads into a long narrow room with sculptures that runs down the centre of the building. As always when he goes to a museum his impetus runs out very quickly once he has got inside. He has a feeling that he is looking for something that is not there, and what is worse, that everyone else is too. Or that they know something which he doesn’t. Or that there are a set of feelings he is supposed to have in the presence of art but which in his case are simply absent. If he is honest with himself he would rather have been looking at photographs of naked women. If he is to look at things he would rather look at things that are forbidden.

  Mr Phillips stands in front of a sculpted head by someone called Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The head is two different heads melted into one, or has two very different halves, with one eye higher than the other and a nose that points off to the left as you look at it. At the same time it has a streamlined quality. Also there is something Polynesian about it. Like all those modern things with different bits and projections it implies that people are different at different times and contain lots of aspects to themselves. We are all many. Seven out of ten.

  Mr Phillips stands in front of Ophelia by Millais. She is lying there waiting to drown. Mr Phillips has never seen a dead woman. The field was limited: his grandmother had had a closed coffin and in any case he had only been seven years old. Mr Phillips’s mother went to live in Australia with his sister when his father died in 1981. When she dies he will go to the funeral; this grieving twenty-four hour plane trip, the longest and worst journey he will ever make, looms somewhere in the future.

  Unless it is a side-effect of hearing the couple under the rotunda, this is one of the paintings that make you wonder about the sexual life of the painter. Had he liked the idea of doing it with a dead girl? Some men did. At his first employer, Grimshaw’s, Mr Phillips knew a man called Smilt whose sister had told him that her husband liked her to have a very cold bath before coming to bed and then lying absolutely still. What made it worse was that the man was an undertaker. Mr Phillips had filed that one under ‘It takes all sorts.’

  Also, this painter obviously had a thing about hair. And people who had a thing about hair were supposed to be masochists. Or was that people who had a thing about feet? But that went oddly with liking dead girls; surely you couldn’t like the idea of having pain inflicted on you by a dead girl? No. And then there was the redhead aspect. This was a whole subject in itself. Mr Phillips had never been to bed with a redheaded girl and felt envious of anyone who had. But when you thought about it, Millais might well not be in that category.

  Also, if she was mad surely she wouldn’t be calmly floating on her back like that? Six out of ten.

  Mr Phillips stands in front of The Boyhood of Raleigh. A colourfully dressed man is sitting talking to two boys. He has an earring and a headkerchief. Nowadays this scene would probably be reported to the police and you could be fairly sure he was a pervert. Mr Phillips has virtually a whole album full of photographs which would now stand a decent chance of getting him and Mrs Phillips arrested, some busybody at Boots tipping off the police to raid them and take away pictures of Martin and Tom in various states of undress, in the bath, in bed, asleep and so on. It has to be admitted that the pirate-type man bullshitting away to the little boys does not look the opposite of a paedophile; there certainly is something over-eager about him, and if he does like little boys, the young Raleigh’s adorable frilly collar would presumably be like a ham sandwich spreading itself with mustard and lying down in front of a hungry man with a cry of ‘Eat me, eat me!’ And then of course sailors were notoriously keen on all that. Plus the idea of the picture was so stupid, as if you ended up doing what you did because someone had told you yarns as a child – as if his father had spun tales about the glamour and wonder of accounting, or he had dandled Martin on his knees and kept him spellbound by recounting the glorious annals of the recording industry. Five out of ten.

  Mr Phillips stands in front of The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke by Richard Dadd. This is a picture he has been to look at on each of the four occasions he has gone to look around the Tate (early date with Mrs Phillips, when he was trying to seem cultured; two visits with his sister and her daughters when they came to London and were doing the sights; and this one). This is on the borderline for disqualification from being a true Londoner, since as all Londoners know, real Londoners never go to do or see anything in their own city. The exception is those unfortunates with small children, forever having to go to circuses and cartoons and pantomimes and adventure playgrounds and rare breed parks. But that doesn’t really count. In his fifty years in the city Mr Phillips has been to the Tower of London once, on a school trip; the British Museum twice, once on a school trip and once with his nieces while his sister and Mrs Phillips went shopping; Madame Tussaud’s once, with Martin and Thomas; once to the National Gallery for the same reason; once to the National Theatre with Martin; and that was more or less it, so that he had never once been to Kew Gardens or Hampton Court or the naval museum at Greenwich or Teddington Lock or the Royal Opera House or the Barbican or the Trooping of the Colour or the Changing of the Guards or the Last Night of the Proms or indeed the Proms (Mrs Phillips went enough for both of them) or the Motor Show or the Planetarium or the annual open day in Highgate Cemetery. Excluding annual visits to the Richmond pantomime between 1977 (after Martin’s sixth birthday) and 1989 (Tom’s tenth) he has been to the theatre five times, which is five times more than he would have gone if it had been left entirely to him.

  In the old days one of the London activities Mr Phillips would probably have not done was go and look at the inhabitants of Bedlam on a Sunday afternoon. He knew about this because the first time he had been to the Tate a man with a posh voice was leading a party around and they had stood in front of The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke while Mr Phillips hung on the edge of earshot. The man who painted it had killed his father with an axe. He was called Richard Dadd, which was quite funny. He spent the rest of his life in the main loony bin, which for some reason was called Bethlehem (hence Bedlam). Mad Dadd killed his bad dad.

  ‘The elements of dementia in Dadd’s vision’, said the posh man, ‘speak for themselves.’ Every time he sees this picture Mr Phillips wonders what that meant. In his view either everything spoke for itself or nothing did. But the painting is small and very energetic and full of elves and goblins and things. Perhaps Dadd had thought he was the fairy feller himself, when he brought the axe down on his father’s head? It wasn’t the sort of thing you could do if you were aware of what you were doing. Eight out of ten, thinks Mr Phillips.

  Mr Phillips stands in front of a double portrait by Stanley Spencer. It is a picture of the artist and his wife lying side by side with no clothes on in a room that looks untidy and probably cold. The woman has red hair and one of those cross redhead’s faces. Her breasts have curious tinges of green in them. If that was what naked women usually looked like pornography would never have caught on. The man looks like a swot but also randy and quite nice – you are on his side. At the foot of the painting lies a strangely expressive leg of mutton (Mr Phillips’s favourite meat) dressed for the oven.

  Spencer has painted his own penis with lavish and loving care. It is quite big, too. Mr Phillips thinks about this for a moment. If you looked down at it it was supposed to be foreshortened, but of course you could always hold it out in front of you and/or use a ruler. Or you could position yourself in front of a mirror which is perhaps what Sir Stanley had done. If the mirror was leaning backwards slightly so that you could look down on it, and it was resting on the floor or at least below waist height, then it would certainly make it look bigger.
That was elementary perspective. Plus it was towards the front of the picture and made to look bigger that way too. Of course if you were going to paint your own cock you would take steps to make it show to advantage. It stood to reason. Nine out of ten, Mr Phillips is thinking, as a woman’s voice behind him says,

  ‘Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.’

  Mr Phillips turns around. A woman in a red coat and matching but very eccentric sort-of-beret is looking at the painting and nodding her head. One or two other people shift to other parts of the room as if, like dogs reacting to an ultrasonic whistle, they are responding to the way the woman’s madness is broadcasting on an extra-sensory frequency. Before Mr Phillips can look away she makes eye contact.

  ‘They didn’t used to do it, you know. It wasn’t that he couldn’t manage it. She wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘It – you know. Sex. He was a Christian, he was horny as a toad, and they never did it. You can see it in the picture if you look closely enough.’

  Mr Phillips looks at the picture again. He has to admit that he can’t see it, unless it is in the fact that you wouldn’t bother painting yourself about-to-do-it or just-having-done-it when you could use the same energy to do it instead. Perhaps that is why double nude self-portraits are rare. The woman comes up beside Mr Phillips and says:

  ‘Brrrrrrr.’ Then, turning to him with a surprisingly sweet, sane smile she says, ‘It’s such a cold picture.’

  Mr Phillips smiles politely and noncommittally back. He moves towards the Clore gallery where the Turners hang and then, like a man shaking off a tail in a thriller, dodges left towards British Surrealism 1900–1966. The woman unembarrassedly doubles back after him. He realizes that he has been adopted.