Halfway down the row of peek-a-boo shops, whose aggressive lights diverted attention from their shoddiness, we discovered one building without any Xs. Its entrance, a corroded metal door with torn notices for live sex shows, stood ajar. We decided to go in. There was an unlit stairwell, the lights from outside falling on the first stairs but no further. I followed Daniel, who took tentative steps, raising his stronger foot first, then hauling up the other. As the building’s concrete intestine wound its way past one floor and into the next, each lit by a frugal bulb per landing, we passed a pair of clogs laid out on a stair, as if someone had had second thoughts, removed his shoes and headed back down barefoot. The third floor contained only silence and two closed doors, so we forged onwards yet at the fourth and final floor there was no indication of a restaurant. I don’t think either of us truly expected to find anything there.
On the way down I nearly tripped on the pair of clogs and when we reached the ground floor and stepped back into the night, the neon cries of the sex shops and the smoking vultures in the doorways seemed somehow unreal.
Yet right before leaving, I remember looking up at the upstairs window one last time and there she was, the pretty lady with the glassy stare, and I realised then why she looked so familiar. She reminded me of one of the mannequins in the Ed Kienholz exhibition they’d had a few years ago at the National Gallery. An intervention of sorts, they’d said, twentieth-century art placed alongside the old, and I’d been so intrigued by this installation, which took days to set up, unfamiliar flurries blowing through the halls of our museum, that once I heard it was complete I dropped by the Sunley Room on my first lunch break and wandered through the imitation crepuscule of Amsterdam’s red light district, the trapped silicone whores gazing at me through the rain-streaked windows of their showcases, and I remember that as I hurried out, disturbed by the seedy crimson installation winking in our midst, I’d noticed a woman sitting quietly on a bench a few metres from the exhibition and wondered for a second whether she was part of the show before seeing it was one of my colleagues, suited and waistless like me, at her post.
We never found the Indian restaurant and, with my appetite ruined and Daniel’s whetted, we ended up at Spuntino’s, an Italian place in Rupert Street with loud music and young waiters with tattooed sleeves rushing about, two pounds for a Jack Daniels in a tin cup, five fifty for a small pizza. I think we were both relieved to be in a place where we could hardly talk against the punk volume of the music and the chaos around us, and not until after we’d eaten and stepped back into the night of Soho, flyers and rubbish blowing through the streets and the pageantry from pubs spilling out on to the pavement in a jumble of smoke and chatter, did I become aware of my desire to smash the panes of glass in the alleyway. Losing one’s way is never unintentional, they say, there’s a reason you take one street and not the other, pursue false leads or listen to bad directions.
Once home that evening I returned to my site. My latest landscape, still in its early stages, was a tiny model of an excavation, an idea I had after coming across a journal in our basement library describing various archaeological assessments of the terrain below the Gallery. The aim was to see whether there was a layer of dark earth capping the Middle Saxon material they’d discovered earlier and, if so, whether the distribution of artefacts within this layer indicated the presence of what they called ghost features. I was never able to find out what they meant by this, but assumed it was like the ghostly traces beneath a painting’s top layer, early attempts the painter discarded, no longer visible but somehow still there.
My archaeological landscape proved to be more of a challenge than its predecessors. An eggshell wouldn’t work — too domed and confined — and after casting my eye around for the right base I eventually found a rectangular plank in a skip outside a shop in Essex Road and sawed out a small rectangle on which I began to add the layers. For the Saxon gravel and sandy clays from quarry pits I used real sand, though it smelled vaguely of urine, from a playground nearby. For the dark earth sealing the Middle Saxon occupation I went to Cass Art and found brown paint the colour of burnt almond. For the shards of Middle Saxon glass I smashed up an ashtray with a hammer and created very fine bits, then selected the smallest sharpest fragments. Left only to recreate were the ribs of a cow, much of the skeleton truncated during the subsequent installation of a sewer somewhere in that terrain below the Gallery.
Six
Over the past week a new idea had started to invade my mind, first stalking the edges and then gradually snaking its way to the centre and, as I thought about some of the more intense suffragette moments Ted had spoken of, this idea, bizarre yet increasingly logical, began to take shape: that much of history, or at least the history I’d been thinking about, had been carried out by the violence of the angle.
The angle at which Mary Richardson pulled on her tight-fitting skirt and parted her hair neatly to one side, the angle at which she fixed the meat cleaver up her left sleeve with the help of a few safety pins. The angle from which she approached the Velazquez, the angle of her wrist as she started to plunge her weapon into the painting.
Or, rewinding a few moments, the angle at which the workman’s ladder was propped against the wall, and the angle at which the detective read his newspaper, and the angle at which light penetrated the skylight: each played a role.
And then with her extraordinary actions, Mary Richardson forced all these angles into a parallel, as she was intent on doing, a parallel between the public’s indifference to the slow destruction of a prominent woman and the destruction of the financially valuable object of a painted one.
The angle at which metal tubes were jammed down suffragette throats and nostrils, their larynx and trachea, in the force-feeding campaign, the vertical assault of cold metal pressing against the walls of their oesophagi, despite the coughing and gagging a stream of food poured or pumped into their stomachs, mouths lacerated, teeth broken, digestive organs injured, bronchial complications to follow.
And the angle at which another suffragette, also armed with a meat cleaver, this one hidden in the folds of her purple cloak, rushed at John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James at the National Portrait Gallery, bequeathed by the author only months before. Mary Wood, who until the moment of the outburst had appeared a placid and unassuming old lady, shattered the protective glass and went for him in three separate places: below the right shoulder, on the left of his head, and on the right side of his mouth, fresh jagged lines wrecking the sitter’s composure.
The angle at which an elegantly dressed suffragette outside Fortnum & Mason extracted a hammer from her fur muff and swung it at the glass of the window display.
The angles from which suffragettes were spied on in their cells through round peepholes covered with flaps, in every door of Holloway Prison.
The sweep of the pigeons at Holloway, cutting across in a loose angle, the hues of their plumage admired by Sylvia Pankhurst on her biweekly half-hour walks round the prison yard, their freewheeling command of the sky so at odds with the dulled gazes and plodding movements of the prisoners below.
A slight softening of hard angles in the presence of the matron, glimpses of humanity beneath her uniform as she stood in the distance, silent and watchful, with her chain and keys jangling at her side.