I stopped at the first paintings that greeted me but then decided that before anything else I should find my friend, who’d failed to tell me which section he’d been assigned. First I turned right, into Turner land, but he wasn’t in any of those rooms so I crossed the hall and went left, wandering aimlessly past Blakes and Burne-Joneses, feeling nips at my conscience for not stopping to look, moving through the rooms like a train that slows down at small village railway stations, stalling just long enough for passengers to read the station’s name and have an idea of what they might be missing before the train picks up speed and continues on its way. I had seen people do this constantly at the National Gallery, and always wondered what was so urgent that they couldn’t slow down for even thirty seconds.
In a daze I crossed room after room, my steps quickening or easing up depending on the people and dimensions I encountered, for some rooms felt generous and immense and others like crowded annexes, until the image of Daniel, seated and uniformed in Room 9, a large hall containing works from 1850–1880, came into view. He didn’t see me so I stopped to observe him, sitting with his legs crossed and head tilted back, as he kept an eye on a group of Russian tourists crowding round the wistful Lady of Shalott, a semicircle of gaping faces, only half of them focused. The guide waved her umbrella like a lion tamer and once she had her lions captive she lowered it and began to speak.
I approached from the side. Startled, Daniel quickly uncrossed his legs and said my name as if to remind himself who I was. The pen and notebook in his lap fell to the floor. He bent down to pick them up.
‘Have you been getting some writing done?’
‘A bit… It goes from silent to noisy back to silent.’
‘I know. That’s how it is.’
‘I think the acoustics here are more pronounced than at the Gallery.’
I looked up and around. ‘Could be.’
The Russians started to file out, led by their guide.
‘Have they been here long?’ I whispered.
‘A couple of minutes… How was your trip?’
‘I’ll tell you about it later.’
‘But how was it?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
He shrugged. ‘Okay.’
He’d sounded confused when I rang him that morning, and asked why I was already back in London. I’d said I’d explain when we met, that for now I just wanted to get out of the house and put my Sunday to some use, as I would have had I seen the cathedral.
‘Come and see this one,’ he’d said.
Familiar with the irksome sensation of sitting in a chair while someone towers over you, I said I’d have a look round and return before closing time. Daniel seemed to welcome the idea.
In the room hung a few works I recognised from childhood visits or textbooks, in every case the reproduction more familiar than the originaclass="underline" Millais’ Ophelia; Hogarth’s self-portrait with pug; Reynolds, Derby and Gainsborough… I greeted them silently, old acquaintances to whom I’d never given the proper time, so patient over the years, no reproach whatsoever, their existence as untouched by my life as mine by theirs. I liked the Turners most anyway, and those I hadn’t even stopped to take in.
Just as I was about to move on to the next room and leave Daniel to his notebook, I noticed a painting I’d never seen before. Or perhaps it had simply never caught my attention in the past. But that day it jutted from the wall like some kind of promontory, forcing out a space for itself beyond the frame, and I went over for a closer look.
Pegwell Bay, Kent — A Recollection of October 5th 1858, read the caption, by William Dyce. It was a mysterious painting, of a seaside landscape with a few human figures, and my eyes first came to rest on the wall of ancient wrinkled cliffs resembling a procession of tired elephants. The shallow inlet was like a lunarscape, with rocks and boulders emerging from a glinting yet motionless body of water. Clumps of seaweed, rocks covered in moss, an old fence run aground, a pole measuring the level of the tide: details I noticed a few moments later. The human figures in the foreground — three women and a boy (the painter’s son, wife, and her two sisters collecting shells, the sign explained) — had an otherworldly aura. Most disconcerting of all was the boy, his spectral face as pale and distant as the cliffs.
Over the years I’d fantasised about stepping into many a landscape, of following paths that led far beyond view, but I would never wish to step into this one.
Upon seeing me at the painting, Daniel came over with his notebook under his arm and asked whether I had spotted the comet, to which I said no, startled by both the thought of a comet in a painting and the fact I had missed it. I leaned closer in to scour the sky — gradations of light pink and blue thinning into yellow, like a molten version of rock sediment, dolomite, limestone, sandstone and shale, and finally found the comet. A simple white brushstroke: one milky line at the top, hardly visible.
Daniel told me that Donati’s comet would not pass over Earth again until the year 3811. In other words, this was one of the rare glimpses we would get, here in Dyce’s painting. The last time it had passed over our planet was in the autumn of 1858. On 5 October, the date in the title, the comet was at its most brilliant — at twenty minutes after sunset, its head could be seen with the naked eye.
As I gazed at the astral body, its opal white streak growing ever more important and distinct in my mind like a fiery ice-cold sword rising up and away from the canvas, Daniel went on to describe how on that day crowds had thronged the streets, rooftops and bridges to catch a glimpse of Donati, which was not only the second brightest comet of the nineteenth century but the first comet ever to be photographed.
‘No matter how greatly you shine,’ I later said to Daniel in the pub, ‘it’s all over before you know it. And what’s left? A white brushstroke, only visible if you really look.’
‘That’s better than nothing.’
‘Well, most of us don’t even leave behind a brushstroke.’
Yet that faint brushstroke skimming the surface of the canvas didn’t exit my thoughts for a while and, looking back, I couldn’t help feeling like events that winter were somehow harnessed to its tail, as if my glimpsing it that day were a tiny, punctual omen of its own. A comet in a painting, how sad to fall prey to such superstition, and when I went back months later and found in its place William Holman Hunt’s The Ship, dark and metaphorical but no Pegwell Bay, I went to demand an explanation at the information desk, where someone eventually mumbled a few words about loans to other museums due to the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth.
Nine
And then, one glorious afternoon, she returned. With fewer students, six in all, and a magnifying glass. The students too were equipped with magnifying glasses, I noticed, medium-sized discs with large black handles that they clutched as they stopped and waited for their mentor to speak.
Since her last visit I had thought many times about how a painting went from being a thing of beauty to a thing of decaying beauty to a thing of decay. Our museum must have held countless instances of paint giving in to tension, loosening its dominion over faces and landscapes, handing them over, instead, to the paintbrush of hours, and I still harboured the plan to one day go in search of as many examples as I could find.