Conscious that she was at risk of presenting too beguiled a face, Celia gave her attention to the picture of Ludgate Hill, and found, as she looked at the image of the eventless street, that another image was emanating from it: the image of the dedicated artist, alone in the cold morning, waiting for the single instant that would make real the picture that he’d seen in his imagination.
‘I’d love to see it looking like that,’ the student commented. ‘I’ll have to try it one day.’
And then Celia said, to the student: ‘But we wouldn’t see it like that, would we? Only the camera sees it like that: all at once and everything in focus. This isn’t real. It’s more than real. In a way. Well, what I’m trying to say …’ And so Celia was gabbling when a woman emerged from the gallery office, holding a phone, and called Matt over.
‘Two minutes, OK?’ said Matt, interrupting Celia with a gesture that seemed to signify that he’d like her to continue, but when he came back he said he was going for a coffee, a quick one, because he had to be somewhere in an hour. The student said she had to leave. ‘What about you?’ Matt asked Celia, as if he’d been interested in the student and now felt obliged to invite her friend. Celia said she had twenty minutes to spare; in fact she had the whole evening.
She didn’t come away from the chat in the café thinking that a relationship might be beginning. ‘Is photography a particular interest?’ Matt asked her. Her answer was incoherent and embarrassing. He asked where she worked; she told him more than he needed to know. He wanted to know what she’d thought of Barcelona – it was his sister’s favourite city, he said. There was a bluntness to the questions, as if they had been forced into each other’s company. Other than that he had three siblings and taught adult education classes (he had a class this evening), the only things she learned about Matt in that half-hour were that he’d been taking photographs ever since his parents dragged him into a Walker Evans exhibition at the age of ten, and that for his fifteenth birthday his parents had given him a second-hand Leica, which he still used.
Several days later, having scanned the window of a camera shop by the British Museum, Celia understood that the second-hand Leica was a further indication (with the expensive-looking jacket, and the precise and accentless diction) of an upbringing that was several grades more privileged than her own. (The privilege, Charlie maintains, was an inseparable part of Matt’s aura.) And Matt’s background was indeed unlike Celia’s. His father, Martin (son of a surgeon who had removed his family from Bamberg to London in the spring of 1934), was a lawyer, specialising in shipping law (‘an inexcusably lucrative racket’, to quote Matt, who loved his parents dearly but would have been happier, Celia claimed, with less wealth in his immediate environment – hence the evening classes, when parental subsidy would have been his for the asking); his mother, Veronica (daughter of a professor of medieval history (the father) and a lecturer in the same subject (the mother – formerly a pupil of the father)), was one of the country’s pre-eminent Assyriologists. (‘Martin, Veronica,’ said Matt, introducing Celia to his parents; they had always been Martin and Veronica to their children.) The Taussig progeny had all grown up to be high-flyers (except – at the time Celia knew him – Matt): Christian (eldest brother) worked in Brussels, advising on the formulation of European agricultural policy; Emeric was a cardiologist in Paris; and Ursula ran her own design studio, specialising in hi-tech furniture.
The collective personality of the Taussigs was apparent the moment one stepped into their house. An unexceptional (if larger than average) Victorian dwelling on the outside, it had been completely refashioned within: the staircase was steel and glass, with lights in the treaders; the living room had casts of ancient carvings under spotlights, and no fewer then three sofas – vast red rectilinear items from Italy; the dining table (designed by Ursula) was twelve feet long and had a resin top that looked like a slab of obsidian. Prototypes of Ursula’s chairs were strewn about the house, positioned as carefully as sculptures in the corners of rooms and the angles of landings; most of them functioned better as sculptures than as chairs, Ursula commented, as though passing judgement on the work of someone she didn’t like. Photographs by Matt were displayed in various places, including one (in an alcove on the first-floor landing, where any guest would be certain to see it) that showed a sleek, long-legged and naked girl sitting on a rock, laughing, with limpet shells on her nipples and a triangle of seaweed in her lap: this was Ursula, aged sixteen.
On the second floor of the Taussig house, in the alcove corresponding to the one in which sea-nymph Ursula could be admired, hung another photograph: a wavy-haired blond girl in a gauzy dress, screaming into the angle of a high stone wall. ‘Matt drives all his girlfriends bonkers,’ his father told Celia, as if being Matt’s girlfriend were a post akin to being his personal assistant. The screaming girl, he explained, was Ulla, Matt’s ‘grand passion’ for a year, and something of a star of student drama productions; Matt had spent a lot of his time in Oxford hanging round with actressy types, and most of the rest of his time in the darkroom, which is why he’d ended up with such a lousy degree. Martin was not surprised to find that Celia didn’t know about Matt’s less than dazzling academic career: not because Matt was in any way ashamed of it (the hours in the darkroom had been a good education, after all), but because Matt had always been the secretive one – it had taken him months to get round to telling them, for example, that this particular photograph had won a prize. From her tour of the house with Martin, Celia learned as much about Matt’s past as she had learned from Matt himself, perhaps more. In the course of a year Matt revealed to Celia less of his biography than some of her lovers had revealed in a week, and for Celia – one of whose life-principles was that an affair was dead the day you felt you knew everything about each other – this was, on the whole, another point in Matt’s favour.
We must get back to Matt and Celia in the café. By the time Matt got up from the table and announced that he had to get a move on (looking at his watch in a way that suggested she had delayed him), Celia was convinced that he’d suggested going for a coffee only because he’d been interested in the cute young student. As for what he now thought of Celia, she had no idea. He’d given her a lot of eye contact, but it had felt more like being interrogated than being seduced. Not once had he smiled at her.
On the last day of the exhibition she went to the gallery after work; she did not go in the expectation of finding Matt there, and was not sure if she wanted him to be there. Matt was there. They talked for five minutes, then he walked with her to the door. Out on the pavement he kissed her, as if he’d been waiting to kiss her for hours and only at this instant had the chance arisen. A minute later he was gone – he had friends to meet. He wrote his address on a card, and the very next evening she went to his flat, where, of course, he took a photograph of her. It was the way he looked at her that made Celia’s brain go haywire. It wasn’t, she said, as if he were looking into her heart, into the depths of her soul. (‘None of that crap. It wasn’t like: “Let me see who you really are.”’) He put her on a stool, in front of a screen of white paper, and then he stood beside the camera and just looked at her, from a distance, as if her face were an immensely complex object and he didn’t quite know what to make of it. He seemed to be able to ignore the fact that she was looking at him; she knew she was being regarded by someone who did not see things in the way that most people saw them, and this was what was so exciting.
Matt, then, was a distinctive man, and Celia’s relationship with him lasted longer than any of her other affairs, before or since. ‘Passion lasts ten weeks’ – that was another of Celia’s maxims, but Matt was the exception. Yet Matt Taussig was never, at the time, ‘the one’. The very idea that anyone could be ‘the one’ for anybody was an absurdity, thought Celia. In the immediately post-Matt period she often reiterated the principle: love is not a matter of finding your missing half. But Charlie, true soulmate of Janina, believes that Celia has now, belatedly, been
converted to the creed of unique affinity, and that her conversion has come about primarily as a consequence of her betrayal by Mauro, a setback which prompted her to at last give some thought to what has happened in her life and why it has happened. It’s possible that Charlie is right. Certainly, Matt was never referred to as ‘the one’ before Mauro’s misdemeanour. When Celia said to me ‘I really do think he was the one,’ it sounded plausible. But merely plausible is what it was, like a rendition of an idea that has been rehearsed many times. So is it only a story that she’s telling herself, a story she might in time succeed in making true? Having been humiliated by Mauro, increasingly aware of the passing of the years, is she rewriting herself and Matt Taussig (a significant person, I don’t doubt), in order that her life might have a peak from which to descend? It’s possible. I don’t know. We must have more on Mauro.
‘Look, Ellen,’ I tell her, ‘you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. It’s not a condition of your contract.’ She says she enjoys it, most of the time, but the stuff about Celia and Matt is ‘too much’. She doesn’t want to read any more about Celia’s sex life. ‘But there’s no sex in it,’ I point out. ‘Just a passing mention.’
‘I think sex is overrated anyway,’ she says, and doesn’t appear to be joking.
I tell her that I agree completely.
The manufacture of micromosaics is an extremely labour-intensive process. Stage one: a layer of plaster is laid in a stone base or a tray of copper. Onto this plaster the picture is traced. Following the lines of the drawing, the artist removes a small section of plaster, then fills the excavation with a mastic that dries very slowly. The micromosaics are composed of glass threads so fine that as many as five thousand are needed to fill a single square inch. One at a time, these tiny glass threads are pressed vertically into the mastic, and when the picture has been assembled it undergoes a triple polishing, first with a hard stone, then with emery, then with lead. The chief workshop for micromosaics was the Vatican studio, which was established principally in order to address the problem of the decay of the paintings in Saint Peter’s. By the 1620s, a mere two decades after their completion, these paintings had become so badly damaged by damp that replacing them with pictures of glass appeared to be the only way of preserving the church’s decoration. A little over a century later, the work was finished. Employing a stock of almost 30,000 tints of glass, the Vatican’s micromosaicists created their facsimiles with such skill that few visitors to St Peter’s are aware that the images above their heads are not painted.
Ellen examines my trainers and discovers on the sole of one of them a pellet of clay that I had failed to remove. ‘What have you been up to, Daniel?’ she asks, having put two and two together. I confess. ‘But what if something happens to you?’ she says. ‘What happens if you take a tumble?’
That isn’t going to happen, I tell her. I move very slowly; I take Charlie’s umbrella as a walking stick; I take a torch; nothing’s going to happen to me.
‘I’d be happier if you’d let me come with you,’ she says.
I answer that I appreciate her concern, but I like to go out in the dead of night, and she wouldn’t thank me for waking her up at 2 a.m. She says I should take a phone with me; I point out that, not being mobile, I don’t have a mobile phone. She proposes that I should take hers; she could leave it on the kitchen table at night, so I could pick it up if I decided to go out. ‘The keypad is too fiddly for these fingers,’ I counter.
Within the hour Janina arrives to have words with me about my misbehaviour. ‘It’s so dangerous,’ she says. ‘Can’t you understand why Ellen is concerned?’
It would be quite funny, I suggest, if I were to topple into a trench and the builders found me lying there in the morning. Whatever would they make of that?
‘Danny, it’s not a game,’ says Janina, hardening the voice. She tells me that she’s going to get one of those alarm buttons that frail old folk wear around their necks. This, I tell her, would not be a sound investment; I’ll take Ellen’s phone with me if I ever again feel the urge to do something silly.
Later, I accuse Ellen of being an informer.
‘That isn’t fair,’ she says. ‘I’m here to look after you.’
‘And a very fine job you’re doing,’ I tell her. I add that I’m going to write about Dr Goffman for her, and there will be nothing to offend in it.
Doctors I Have Known, Part 2.
An afternoon in early summer – June, I think. I see Dr Goffman in wide-legged linen trousers, and sandals with beaded roundels above the toes. We each had a tumbler of water. A window was open: at one point she leaned over to close it, so we could hear each other speak over the traffic. I was telling her about the things that had happened to me since I’d last seen her, such as they were. There would not have been much to tell: another book or two proof-read; perhaps something to report from the world of Celia, who had embarked upon Barcelona Part II. The foxes of the South Circular had been the high point of the intervening period, albeit not as high a point as I made them out to be, for the benefit of Doctor G. I put considerable effort into maximising the charm of the scene. Picture them: a vixen and two cubs, tripping across the road in single file, circling to inspect a cardboard box in the gutter, before returning the way they’d come, again in single file, with one cub-length of space between each animal. The foxes in themselves were not of interest to Dr Goffman, but she allowed me to run on. She told me she’d had a fox in her garden a few days back, sunning itself on the grass in the middle of the afternoon. ‘They’ve become fearless, haven’t they?’ she said. ‘People, traffic – they’re not bothered by any of it.’ Well, I told her, there wasn’t much traffic about, and here Dr Goffman favoured me with one of her frowns. With Dr Goffman – deeply trained, as she was, to maintain composure in the face of deviousness, obscenity and florid irrationality – a frown was merely a minor and fleeting and very fetching corrugation of the brow.
‘It was four o’clock. I have a taste for night-time,’ I said. I wanted Dr Goffman to understand that a lawn in daylight is a sight most ordinary, whereas a zone of damp grass singled out for attention under streetlights has a lushness that makes you stop and wonder. I would have her see that a long straight empty road, lamplit in the rain, a tunnel of bright grainy air under the blackness of the sky, is a thing that can lift the heart; that even the dreariest street can acquire an aura of the sublime at night, like a cemetery in which you are the only one alive. ‘Night-time makes you think,’ I told her.
‘And what does it make you think, Daniel?’ she asked, in a cadence I can still hear – a tone of professionalised tenderness, an exquisite equipoise of the genuine and the fake.
‘A car stops at traffic lights at some ungodly hour, and you take a look at the driver: it’s a young woman laughing to herself, mad with happiness. And you wonder what the story is. Where has she been? Where is she going? Why at this hour? A week ago I saw two men trading punches in a front garden, lethargically, as if they were under water. A tonic to the imagination, it was. I recommend it,’ I replied, taking a sip of water, aping suavity.
(Other things seen in the dead of night but not disclosed to Dr G, for obvious reasons: two lovers under a tree, their coupled bodies – blanched by the moonlight – looking from a distance like nothing so much as a monstrous maggot wriggling on the grass; a couple going at it in a ground-floor room (lights off but curtains wide open), on a table placed so close to the window that it seemed inconceivable that the possibility of being observed was not an element of the thrill.)
‘It would be difficult to fit into my schedule,’ said Dr G.
‘Ah, well,’ I commiserated. ‘Not a problem for me. Snooze by day, work and stroll by night.’
‘So you’re doing your work at night?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘How often is sometimes? In the past fortnight, let’s say, how many times have you been outdoors in the middle of the night?’
‘Three. Four.’
A note is made. ‘What would you say if I were to suggest that this might not be an altogether healthy state of affairs?’
‘I’d point out that I’m not altogether healthy.’
The last two sentences are recalled precisely; also recalled is the pause of Dr Goffman, a pause which generally presaged a nugget of doctorly profundity. ‘To be fully who you are, to realise your fullest potential, you need society,’ she opined, or words to that effect.
‘What about monks and nuns? Are you saying they’re all barking up the wrong tree? If so, I have to say I think you’re being rather unfair to some very dedicated and remarkable people.’
‘They have a vocation, Daniel. You’re not a monk.’
‘But you take my point?’
‘We have a problem, you and I, that we need to tackle together. I need you to work with me. We must examine the psychological and social factors that are at work here.’ (All direct quotes; not necessarily from this conversation.)
‘Are you trying to say that if I buck my ideas up the lumps will fall off?’
‘No, Daniel, I’m not trying to say that. You know I’m not saying that.’
‘A man thinking is always alone.’
‘Please, Daniel, don’t play games.’ (A frequent request.) ‘Do you like coming here?’ (She removes the glasses, a sign that little of the appointed time remains. My God, Dr Goffman, you’re lovely.)
‘Coming here? You mean do I like the process of getting to this office?’
‘Obviously that isn’t what I was asking. What I meant was: are these conversations of help to you?’
‘Oh yes. Very much so.’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Most definitely.’
‘Good.’
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