Asunder (7 page)

Even in his twilight, when I would visit him in his two-room cottage in Yorkshire, my great-grandfather would return to the events of 10 March 1914. He had heard some of the commotion the suffragettes had been making, of their ardent campaign for the female vote, but had never imagined he would witness anything so dramatic firsthand. Mary Richardson provided Ted with the story of his life. Even the events of the Great War did not diminish the moment this young suffragette, drum major for the Women’s Social and Political Union’s Fife and Drum Marching Band, took a chopper to ‘his’ Venus; this story belonged to him, though it failed to make him a hero.

As a young girl I would listen on, fascinated yet pretending to be horrified, as he explained how the suffragettes were to blame for the collapse of society as he knew it, and how these national outrages, as he called them, were harbingers of the great European disorder to come. Even if he
had
caught her in time that day, it was too late. There was already disorder in the nation. Disorder in the Gallery. Disorder on the Continent. It was all linked, Ted would say, all linked. At the heart of everything lay grief and disorder, and swishing through this disorder was a phalanx of long, intransigent skirts.

His tone was so grave and prophetic, I rarely questioned anything he said, forgetting the cramp in my leg as he spoke about how in those years he was the first to admit that life as he knew it, meaning
his
England, would never be the same. It began with those viragos, he’d tell me, comets detached from the firmament, deviant and sharply veering, long-haired vagabond stars, hissing through the universe on their solitary paths, a tear in the social fabric, threats to the status quo. Yet once war broke out, Ted said, their battle, eclipsed by larger events, became no more than one of many lit matches in the stratosphere.

By then he had entered so far into the past, a brittle figure collapsed into his armchair travelling through decades when he scarcely had the strength to cross the room, that all I could do was let myself be pulled along with him, even when I’d heard the stories countless times and wasn’t sure what to make of them, feeling more excitement than dismay. My affections had skipped two generations; I was never close to anyone in my family and he was the only relative whose stories ever really enthralled me.

In his head he was always turning them over, a mental exercise during which he rarely stumbled on a fact or figure. Winters when I’d visit we would sit by the radiator, and every hour or so he would place a coin in the palm of my hand to feed into his meter, as if the retrieval of his memories depended on it. He would tell me of the night in early May 1910 when Prime Minister Asquith, aboard his yacht the
Enchantress
, received news that King Edward VII had passed away. Saddened by these tidings, Asquith went out on deck and gazed into the darkened sky. At that moment, Halley’s Comet came blazing overhead like a lit sword. There was our prime minister, alone with this punctual omen in the night sky, while in those years, back home, other fires were being kindled.

Comets and suffragettes. Ted always equated the two. He feared the approach of these comets that drew nearer, their brightness increasing, the light of their nucleus ever more vivid, great curvatures of tails stretching across the heavens, a sudden advance in size and splendour. One glimpse, one omen, that’s all it took: decades later, the events of those years still had him in their grip.

Ted had been pacing in my thoughts that afternoon when the art restorer entered the room with her students. Along with my great-grandfather, it would be this woman who, in Room 65 of the Sainsbury Wing, shed light on an obscure aspect of the museum.

Mid-fifties, attractive, with straight chestnut hair, she stopped in front of a small van Eyck, an intriguing portrait of a man in a red turban, possibly the artist himself, a painting I had always liked despite knowing little about it. The students fanned out like apprentice surgeons at a dissection and pinned their eyes on the subject.

From my chair, I watched and listened.

‘Paintings too are vulnerable to the ravages of time,’ the restorer began. ‘They crack and they flake, their colours change, things fade or darken. Any work you see today will have looked rather different when it was created. And if you look closely—not too closely—you will note that just about every painting in this Gallery contains a vast network of cracks.

‘And these cracks,’ she went on, ‘are what we call craquelure.’

She spelled out the word. A dozen hands took note.

‘Inherent craquelure, the release of stress, occurs with age. As you know, most of the tension in a painting is located in its four corners. Accidental craquelure, such as spiral cracks and spider cracks, is the result of external impact.’

The hands continued to scribble.

‘Look at this van Eyck. Your attention is probably first drawn to the red turban, to the magisterial way in which each fold has been painted. From there, you move on to the face. It is more cracked than wrinkled, you can see—the paint’s age shows even more than the man’s.

‘This type of grid craquelure is created when primary cracks, which follow the direction of the brushstroke, and secondary cracks run in right angles to one another. Aging cracks often follow the lines established by drying cracks. Remember:
mechanical forces will always seek out the path of least resistance.
’

Some students leaned forwards, pressing dangerously close to the van Eyck. My impulse to intervene and ask them to take a few steps back was crushed by my fever to hear more.

‘Over time,’ the art restorer continued, ‘I hope you will all learn to identify fake craquelure, which forgers add to a painting in order to give it the illusion of age. They scrape the edge of the canvas on a table, bake it in the oven, and sprinkle sugar on top until the surface cracks in just the right way. There are other techniques too, but this is one of the simplest and most effective.

‘Yet in the words of the great Friedländer,
Forged craquelure is arbitrary, monotonous and pedantic—whereas natural craquelure throbs with rich variety
. So, to conclude: craquelure grants a painting its history, its authenticity, a whole topography the painter himself could never have envisioned . . . ’

When they left the room twenty minutes later I closed my eyes in order to process her words. Like a hot grille, the image of the van Eyck pressed into my eyelids despite the cracks being indistinguishable from where I sat in my chair. After hundreds and hundreds of hours in the Gallery, how had I failed to consider something so vital? I had always been drawn to decomposition, to the knowledge that everything in the universe tends from order to disorder, and the thought of the arrow of time also moving through paintings overwhelmed me. Painters create order from disorder, but the moment that order has been created, the slow march towards disorder begins again.

I’d been handed a secret. Visitors could stand and admire what they saw on the walls, point out to one another the various colours and compositions, but my inner lens would now be focused on something more hidden, an intimacy between me and the paintings that a thousand gazes could not disturb. I had always sought quiet in the world and there were few movements quieter, I realised, than paint cracking over time.

Days after the art restorer’s visit those three syllables—cra-que-lure—continued to rumble in my head. The allure of the crack, the lure of the crackle, the lair of the kraken. The crack of dawn, the crack of doom.

Little by little, I began to notice small changes in mood. At home, I felt ever more susceptible to things around me, above all to the abundance of creams, oils, facial masques and body lotions that Jane kept in our bathroom, combatants against the passage of time. Ever since I’d known her she’d been spending a small fortune on this mission to keep her skin supple and smooth, tender and silky for
the one
, and now each time I entered I felt the jars and bottles mocking me with their sweet pungent scents. In the past she’d been drawn to unavailable characters—men paralysed by depression, addicts or alcoholics, urban hermits or living overseas; there was always something safely in the way, an expiry date stamped on the package. And once one man was out of the picture, it took a while to erase the rough Braille he’d left on her looks and perfect herself for the next. But now, perhaps, if she
had
met
the one
she could relax the campaign.

Meanwhile, in our flat, the moths continued to gather thickly. Jane laid out more traps, now in all the rooms, strips on the tops of cabinets, dressers and wardrobes. Yet the ones on my landscapes weren’t decomposing rapidly enough, stubbornly resisting disintegration as if aware they would be replaced the moment they showed so much as a tear. Morning and night I would check for developments but no, these little brown torsos and wings remained intact, holding fast, in one final stance, to their makeshift landscapes.

At work I found myself challenged by ever greater feats of self-control. My patience was tested in new ways. For instance, I was both startled and not a little annoyed to note the presence of a new painting in Room 86 and the absence of one that’d hung there for as long as I had been working at the National Gallery. It was typical of curators not to let guards know about changes—overnight, paintings would be switched around or taken down and the next day you would send someone to the wrong room to see a painting that was no longer there.

In the Sainsbury Wing, one of the first things our new director had done was move the location of the
Battle of San Romano;
he decided the Italian paintings should be shown chronologically and that this Uccello should come earlier, so one day we arrived at work and saw it had been moved from Room 55 to 54. Ever since, people have walked past it. Had we been asked our opinion we would have told him that its original place on a wall that could be seen as one approached from several rooms away was more powerful than its current peripheral location. But no one takes our views into account.

During my tea break I went down to Human Resources and complained about the change in Room 86, struggling to contain myself as I explained that in order to do our job well we needed to be kept up to date on every alteration in the Gallery, that they ran the risk of making their guards look like fools by keeping us in the dark, and that if it were ever repeated I would resign, a lie naturally but I wanted to throw in some drama to make more of an impression. The woman nodded from behind her desk, glancing over at her colleagues to see their reaction, everyone was absorbed in a task, and she said
note taken
without taking much note, and before I knew it, it was time to get back to work.

Thursday was especially relentless. From room to room, post to post, a weary transference of grey as my colleagues and I released ourselves from one position and slipped into the next, rooms chairs thresholds, thresholds chairs rooms, as we carried out our silent musical-chairs rotation.

At half past four, time seemed to decelerate to an unbearable pace. Rotation didn’t solve anything. In each room the minutes got caught in the same thick transparent gel. Searching for signs of movement, I studied the visitors. A hunched man in his seventies wearing trainers and a plastic rose ring—a retired actor perhaps, or a famous painter, or a tourist from Miami. A woman with cropped black hair and bright red glasses who kept checking her watch as if about to run off. A fat man with his shirt hanging out of his trousers, who seemed perpetually short of breath, stopping to pant in front of every painting. It was often tempting, and all too easy, to transfer a bad mood on to others—all I had to do was go up and scold someone for standing too close to a painting when they’d been keeping a respectful distance and then ignore their protests. I considered approaching the woman in red glasses just for some variety but she left before I had the chance.

A couple walked in and went to stand in front of paintings at opposite ends of the room. They moved counterclockwise, overlapping only once at a painting in the centre, and finished at the same time, then floated silently into the next room. Not long afterwards another couple, far less silent, the man pontificating without breaks, entered and exited the room, leaving behind a different kind of mood.

Two young Italians, one in a wheelchair, appeared, speaking loudly. One could tell they were brothers, they had the same forehead, the same curly dark hair, the same pitchy eyes, but the one in the wheelchair had a larger, more distinctive nose and was therefore more handsome. Each time his brother wheeled him before a painting he would crane his neck and try to make himself higher, a casualty, along with children and small people, of the established dictates of museum height. Yet his brother kept pointing at things from an angle that ignored the constraints by which his sibling was bound. Each time he pointed, the other one strained to see, and I fought the urge to walk over and gently intervene by perhaps suggesting one brother hold the other up to what he wanted to show him rather than futilely point it out, but instead I kept still, tapping my foot once or twice.

A large group entered next, a flock of tourists straggling behind one of our so-called educators in a tour organised by the Gallery. I stood up from my chair, straightened my tie and aimed at total verticality, feet parallel and back columned with wall, and waited to see whether my efforts would be acknowledged. But not once, as the guide began waxing on and on about the ‘unequivocal musicality’ of a certain painting, did he so much as glance in my direction. I knew he had seen me—after years of working at the same place, the wiles of others were familiar—and that afternoon he went as far as to comment on the female gallery assistants, so drab amidst the mythological women around them. A few visitors looked timidly in my direction but most were kind enough to ignore his attempt at humour.

Guy Mount had been tour guide for nearly as long as I’d worked there but we only occasionally, luckily, crossed paths. He drew a clear and unconcealed distinction within the staff and looked upon us security folk with disdain, his rust-coloured eyes peering down from his educated heights, oblivious to the sophisticated thoughts that might, just might, be flowing through even our minds every now and then. He was the sort of person who said nasty things with a smile.