‘DeVere.’
‘DeVere: of truth.’
‘Is that what you’re looking for?’
‘Maybe it’s looking for me.’
‘He’ll help you find each other.’
9 All At Sea
Feeling a powerful hunger for Willem van de Velde the Younger, Klein entubed at Fulham Broadway, emerged at Charing Cross, and made his way to the National Gallery.
Trafalgar Square, hugging a greyness to itself, had nothing to say to him. Nelson on his column turned a blind eye to mortal concerns. The stairs and porch of the National Gallery bore with stony indifference the shuffling feet of visitors from everywhere, each pair of feet terminating in a head that required to be filled with images of beauty, history, war and peace, sacred and profane love and various states of mythical, real, royal and common domesticity. Once inside, the visitors walked purposefully, dawdled randomly, collapsed on to benches, consulted floorplans, guides, maps, gallery staff and one another, and stood in front of paintings.
Klein went to the information desk, had his floorplan marked by the woman there, climbed the stairs, turned left through Rooms 29, 28 and 15, turned right through Room 22, went down the stairs, and arrived at Lower Gallery A, Screen 24 and a goodly array of the paintings of Willem van de Velde the Younger: seventeenth-century Dutch ships and boats of various kinds in fair weather and under stormy skies, in calms and in stiff breezes.
‘Quite a remarkable thing,’ he said, ‘to miniaturise the sky and the sea and the ships to a size and perspective convenient to the eye and readily absorbed on dry land by land-lubbers.’ He particularly admired the paintings in which small craft met with strong winds and rough seas. One of these, No. 876, A Small Dutch Vessel Close-hauled in a Strong Breeze, about 1672, showed a gaff-rigged boat, a galjoot, on a larboard tack under a dark and threatening sky, pointing as close into the wind as possible, her weather vang bar-taut, the leech of the mainsail fluttering, the spray rising high over her bows as the seas swept her fore-deck. Klein could feel the spray, smell the salt, hear the wind in the rigging and the poom! as she rose and fell with the chop. The man at the tiller was pointing to larboard, probably shouting something to the rest of the crew, only one of whom was visible in the spray. Some way ahead a man-of-war on the same tack streamed its pennant.
‘Dirty weather,’ said Klein, ‘but they’re not afraid, they’re used to this sort of thing, they’re born to the sea and they know what to do.’ The sea continued in his mind as he left Lower Gallery A, went up the stairs, through Rooms 22, 15, 28 and 29 without looking at anything but a few Rubens bottoms, down the stairs, out to the porch, and down to the street, the grey October afternoon, and the Underground. All the way home he heard the boom of the sea and the wind in the rigging as the bows of the Wimbledon train rose and fell with the chop.
10 First Session
Dr DeVere was in his early forties and didn’t wear a tie. He had short hair, no beard, and nothing on the walls of his office but an unframed laser copy of the Redon pastel, Roger and Angelica. It was stuck to the wall with Blu-Tack and it moved with DeVere from office to office in his professional travels.
‘You’re the first doctor I’ve seen with a Redon on his wall,’ said Klein.
‘And you’re the first visitor who’s commented on it. You like Redon?’
‘I’ve done a monograph on him.’
Dr DeVere struck his forehead. ‘Of course! You’re that Harold Klein: Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon. I’ve got it at home.’
‘At last,’ said Klein, ‘a reader. Have you read Orlando Furioso?
‘Parts of it.’
‘The part where Ruggiero rescues Angelica from Orca the sea monster, yes?’
‘That’s why Redon’s up there on my wall.’
‘Have you got it there for aesthetic or professional reasons?’
‘Both. It seems to me that each of us contains an Angelica chained to a rock, threatened by an Orca, and waiting for a Ruggiero. Would you agree?’
‘I would. You’re my kind of shrink. Am I going to be with you for a while?’
‘As long as it takes. Still no inner voice?’
‘No. I’ve started whispering into my hand or talking to myself under my breath before I say anything to anybody, so I’ve kept out of Casualty for a while.’
‘That’s very sensible. I’m trying to imagine how it must be for you.’
‘Very strange. Most of my thinking is in words, and until this happened the words were spoken by my mental voice. Now I still hear music and see pictures in my head but the only way I can do word thoughts is by speaking out loud or writing them down. When I’m at my desk it’s not a problem because my words appear on the computer screen. When I’m elsewhere I go about muttering to myself or scribbling in a notebook or both, which makes me feel a little crazier than usual.’
‘The words you mutter, the words you write — are you hearing or seeing anything unusual?’
‘Unusual compared to what I ordinarily say or write but nothing remarkable — mostly rude words and sexual thoughts of the sort that might slip out when I’m drunk; it’s pretty much what was described in the Times piece: there’s no censor on duty.’
‘Would you say, Mr Klein, that when your inner censor’s working it has to work pretty hard? Or not?’
‘What would be your guess, Dr DeVere? Would you expect the inner censor of a little old man to have to work harder than that of a large young man? Or not?’
‘I see your point but I’d like to hear you spell it out for me if you would.’
‘All right. I have a certain reputation in the world of the arts but in the streets of daily life I am an object of no significance to anyone.’ He told DeVere what he had told Mrs Lichtheim about his apparent invisibility. ‘I won’t bore you with more examples,’ he said, ‘but my inner censor used to be kept pretty busy.’
‘So you’ve got a lot of anger in you. What about the rude words and sexual thoughts?’
‘I sometimes think a dirty old man might be the only kind of old man there is.’
‘Go on, please.’
‘My interest in women has become obsessive; one of these days I’ll be hit by a car while crossing the road with my eyes on a female bottom. I marvel at the action of hips and thighs, the articulation of knees and ankles. I love to see good flesh over good bones, women walking around in really classy skeletons and moving like thoroughbreds. The streets are full of beauties and I can’t stop looking and wanting.’
‘Are you married?’
‘I was. Her name was Hannelore. She was eighteen years younger than I when she moved in with me in 1970; I was forty-five; she was twenty-seven. She’d been my editor on the Daumier book I did for Hermetica. She was with me for seven years, then one day when I was at the British Library Reading Room she set the timer clock to start Die Schöpfung on the record player about the time I was expected home. Then she emptied a bottle of Tomazipan tablets and half a bottle of gin. When I got there she’d been dead for about three hours and the chorus were belting out ‘Und es ward Lichf. She was a very methodical person.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Then, after a few moments of silence, ‘Do you know why she did it? Was there a note?’
‘No. She was a mystery to me, and as time passes I know less and less about her. I think about her all the time; now that I have no words in my head I see her face and I talk to myself. I was never her kind of person; she liked to go out and I like to stay in; she liked parties and I like to work. I got her by being a good wooer but I never properly recognised the uniqueness of her. She was a handsome woman and tall. People wanted to be thought well of by her.’