Asunder (2 page)

Curious visitors had begun to turn away from the pictures towards the spectacle in the chair, and I could almost sense the man’s fading pulse radiating outwards into the room as if searching to latch on to new hosts.

Two more colleagues arrived, murmuring loudly, their agitation unconcealed. Frances stood up, straightened her skirt and asked us to help clear the room. Just as the last visitors, the couple who’d found him, by then probably feeling invested in the man’s fate, had left, four medics rushed in through the far door with a stretcher.

Something was happening in the Gallery, a flicker of an event that would be committed to the annals, and this time I was part of it, though from a historical perspective it was only the quiet death of a sixty-eight-year-old felled, most likely, by a heart attack, I had to remind myself as I watched sadly on as the corpse was gently lifted, laid out on the stretcher, and removed.

The dusk of Millbank had filled with the amber lozenges of unoccupied black cabs, miners with lantern-strapped foreheads rushing towards or away from the city centre, as I made my way to meet Daniel at the Drunken Duck, a pub a few streets from Tate Britain.

I stepped inside and searched for my friend in the noisy crowd that had gathered amidst the wooden stools and nodding taps, and eventually found him at a table that offered a strategic view of his current passion. The girl at the bar, though he had yet to speak to her.

‘I’m sorry about Crooke,’ were his first words once I’d removed my coat and draped it over a chair. ‘I remember him from my years there . . . He seemed like a good man.’

‘Yes, I thought so too. How did you hear?’

‘Oh, the news reached us pretty quickly,’ he said, pushing a pint of beer towards me. ‘I got stout, hope that’s okay.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, though he knew I preferred wine.

He shot a longing look in the direction of the bar, then turned back to me, his heavy-lidded blue eyes sloping down into his temples with the melancholy that sometimes crept into his face when he wanted something he couldn’t have.

Daniel Harper and I met nine years ago, patrolling neighbouring rooms of the Sainsbury Wing and, by day four or five, discovered a kinship. His air was removed, fugitive and self-contained, his focus on something far beyond the Gallery’s grand portico and vestibules, and from the start he struck me as different from the other guards. Whenever I’d peer into the next room I’d see him either pacing back and forth or writing in a notebook. He wrote at lightning speed, I observed, yet when visitors entered the room the notebook would vanish into his pocket like a magic trick in reverse. I couldn’t figure out what he was writing—cricket scores, shopping lists, endless games of noughts and crosses—but he did it with such stealth, I imagined it must be something confidential; I later found out they were poems.

Apart from his withdrawn aura, the other noteworthy characteristic was his limp, a visual stutter that accompanied most of his movements. When stationary, he looked geometrically even; the moment he moved, the evenness was lost.

Daniel was as honest, knowledgeable and courteous a guard as they come but in the end he was fired, fired for his pacing, since he couldn’t keep still and would pace from one end of the room to the other, the pacing made worse by his limp, for he would take one step forward and then drag the other foot in its wake at four- to five-second intervals like a broken metronome. It didn’t help when he changed to soft-soled orthopaedic shoes; you could still hear every step and drag of his feet. He would only come to rest when asked a question, but the moment he finished answering he would resume his tortuous path.

Because of his kindness and because, apart from the pacing, he was an exemplary guard who knew more about art than the rest of us, no one had the heart to complain, until one day a professor of early Flemish painting came to the Gallery to examine a triptych and by day six he was driven mad by the four- to five-second intervals and marched over to the management and lodged a complaint. It turns out this professor of early Flemish painting was married to one of the gallery’s main patrons, Lady So-and-so, and one week later Daniel received a letter of dismissal. Nearly catatonic with disbelief, he stopped writing for a year, talking only about his ‘pacing dragon’, and how these two feet of his, pacing and dragging in close alliance, would spell the end of him.

A few months after his disappointment at the National Gallery, Daniel was offered a similar job at Tate Britain. The paintings weren’t as magnificent, even the best of them, but he liked most of them too. The museum lay farther from home, now a bus and two Tube journeys rather than a simple bus ride, but he could use the time to read. And the building wasn’t as large or grand as our Gallery, but at least it too was classical in style, with a six-column portico and a central dome. A different kind of cathedral, less holy and with fewer pilgrims, yet my friend was determined to protect the paintings with the same degree of devotion.

As for the other warders, they were of a different breed from those he was used to. He was amazed by how scarce they were and by how many rooms seemed to go without protection, but then realised there were fewer visitors as well. And unlike many of us at the Gallery, the guards at Tate Britain were mostly art students or aspiring artists who had no intention of spending their lives working in security.

At first Daniel had a crisis over the presence of so much twentieth-century, even contemporary, art—how could it compare, how could it coexist, with that of the past? He couldn’t help feeling that by placing the centuries so close together they were stretching things, diluting the force of the greats, and it took him several weeks to stop feeling a jolt each time he turned from a room with Blakes or Turners into one containing less transcendent work.

Yet to enter the room with Turner’s late paintings, he would say, was extraordinary, and made it all worthwhile, it was like entering a room of light, pure sunlight pouring forth from the walls, that was when the voltage surged, when the museum became a cathedral.

In fact, early on in our friendship we had agreed, during one of our very first conversations, that we much preferred the old to the new. It was far better to watch over art that had withstood the test of time—why devote hours of your life guarding something that might be gathering dust or mould in a warehouse fifty years from now?

‘If the foreign couple hadn’t noticed Crooke in his chair I would’ve probably been the one to discover him,’ I reflected, ‘when I’d moved on to Room 23.’

‘We’re thin lines of defence,’ Daniel replied, tapping on his glass with two fingers.

‘That we are,’ I said, half relishing the thought.

Over the decades the museum lore gathered, mainly things overheard rather than witnessed first-hand. Among these were the widely circulated stories that had become public domain, such as the heavily lipsticked woman who kissed a white painting in order to cheer it up, and the guard at the Louvre who went around carving Xs into paintings with his own set of keys. And of course Rembrandt’s
Night Watch
, attacked no less than three times in the past century. We came to hear about all sorts of museum pathologies, mostly involving people suffering from an identity crisis, paintings mistaken for mirrors as individuals caught sight of a troubling reflection.

At work we had been taught to be good judges of character, programmed to pick up on the slightest stirrings of unrest, to read faces and gauge their intentions. After so many years at the job, I had become finely skilled in the interpretation of a clenched fist, a skittish glance, the roaming gaze of someone unharnessed. I would try to detect whether there was something in immediate need of release, on the verge of eruption, a dangerous failure to distinguish one’s personal life from that of a painting.

Daniel knew many more stories than I did, and additional ones from overseas, such as the irritable old ladies at the Hermitage who despite seeming languid and inert were in possession of sharp eyes and tongues, the mentally impaired guards at one of Munich’s painting collections, and the custodians at Pompeii who flicked ash from their cigarettes into the ruins.

After he’d brought up some of these details yet again that evening, reminding me of the great yet for the most part untapped range of variables in our profession, I returned the conversation to poor Leighton Crooke, whose fading pulse I could still feel between my fingers, but as I spoke I could see Daniel’s attention beginning to drift.

The girl at the bar was calling out—with a rather pronounced lisp that didn’t match her looks—to a man who was walking away without collecting his change. But for a few degrees her face was nearly turned in our direction. Daniel made himself taller in his chair, straining to enter her line of vision.

Most of the time, like me, he did not care to draw notice to himself and was similarly content to carry out life at low volume. There was an abundance of loud people in the world, we agreed, and someone had to compensate, bring the dial down halfway. We preferred to stand back, cross our arms, and observe. The world was full of people rushing around trying to change things or make themselves seen. So it fell to the rest of us to withdraw from the foreground, just like those distant bluish landscapes in old paintings, so discreet you only notice them later. I liked to imagine our kind as thinkers in training, a flow of indefinite blue that deepens over time.

Ships in bottles steered by one tiny captain, Daniel liked to say. He too enjoyed the invisibility, of having gazes wash over him with indifference. But there at the pub that night he was desperate to have his presence acknowledged.

His first glimpse of her had been a profile, as she’d held a goblet to the tap of Leffe and waited for it to fill, and he’d stood at the bar transfixed, longing to see up close the face within the bob, the kind of cut-glass bob that in silent films framed a whole catalogue of faces. A new employee, he assumed, or the publican’s daughter home from somewhere. He had never seen her before.

‘She kind of looks like you but with a wonky eye,’ he’d later said, and I remember being half flattered, half aghast, at the thought of looking like anyone or anyone looking like me, yet was intrigued by the wandering eye Daniel mentioned, wired up to its own puppeteer. From where I was sitting I could see there was indeed a resemblance, and when he returned, emboldened, to the bar for another round, he commented on her jagged black fringe, like that of a cabaret singer whose hair had been trimmed in the dark.

‘Kind of like yours,’ he’d added, with which again I had to agree, though I had my flatmate Jane to thank for that; she was the one in charge of trimming my fringe and also did it in the dark, in the darkness of self-absorption.

Daniel and I each had our collections, private and public, and beyond their horizons all we required was one solid friend. Neither of us had anyone else of significance in our lives, though every now and then he would fall prey to an obsession, for the most part unrequited, and I would have a brief encounter, usually with someone I dimly knew from my past, that didn’t threaten the peace.

After meeting, ours had quickly settled into a friendship with thankfully little ambiguity, and though I was drawn to his face and found myself studying it from different angles, even having faintly erotic dreams about him once or twice a year, I could never imagine getting close.

At thirty-three my romantic past was far from populated—a modest list of names with few pangs attached, perhaps one or two vague regrets but certainly no one for whom I longed to rewind time. As for Daniel, he’d been married in his early twenties to a Japanese nurse, and the only lasting result of those three years, he said, was a twenty-eight-line poem, ‘False Door to the Tomb’. He still occasionally dreamt of finding someone but over time had started to feel like the last remaining individual of a species, he said, a highly evolved bird with a highly evolved cry, his song unheard since he never shared it with anyone, and he’d even started to wonder whether perhaps the right female for him had become extinct, preceding him by days, decades or centuries; anything was possible, a tragic error in chronology or biodiversity.

The hours passed. I fetched the next round, and the next, Daniel having decided to continue his contemplation from afar. The girl was pretty, I conceded, with wide set eyes that focused on different corners of the pub, and she had an aura of the past that tends to cast a spell over nostalgic types.

Dispensing with our plans for an early night, we ordered a snack from the blackboard and settled further into the clamour of that Tuesday evening, Daniel’s attention looping in and out, and my own returning frequently to events in the Gallery that day.

A bell sounded through the pub. Last orders.

‘Go on,’ I urged him, ‘she’s just a girl with a jagged fringe and a wayward eye.’

But Daniel remained seated and when we got up to leave he shot one unreturned glance in her direction and followed me out; he knew as well as I, if not better, the danger of closing the distance even a fraction.

At night I prefer to take the bus home though it often means transferring. To descend into the brightness of the Tube cancels out the day’s end too brusquely, while buses do the opposite by carrying you through the pensive streets. I found a seat towards the back and settled in by the window, preparing myself for a quiet journey.

A masculine woman smelling strongly of roast coffee came to sit beside me. I tried to relax, the smell was quite pleasant, but the driver turned out to be extremely erratic, stepping on the accelerator at odd moments, lurching forwards along with the traffic, bolting the moment a clear strip opened up, each jerk knocking me against the passenger by my side, who didn’t react. As we zoomed past bags of rubbish awaiting dawn collection, yesterday’s debris ready to be carted off to make room for tomorrow’s, I thought about Leighton Crooke and how quickly he’d been removed from his chair at the Gallery. I’d sometimes watched him in the canteen, the museum juncture that best offered a glimpse into the lives of colleagues, not the most exciting glimpse but one nonetheless. Some individuals brought their own lunch, prepared by a spouse or themselves, the distinction apparent in the detail, others purchased hot food at the counter. Leighton Crooke always bought his food there at the counter, never anything from home as far as I could tell, and occasionally our trays would end up face to face. The widower was given to mood swings; sometimes he would talk about everything from rising bus fares to the proliferation of shopping bags in his kitchen cabinet, at others he would clunk himself down with a sullen expression and not extend more than a nod in my direction.