The person I needed to speak to at Human Resources was flipping through a catalogue when I went down to see her during my first tea break.
‘Hi Marie, what can I do for you?’
She closed the catalogue and smiled wearily.
‘I want to hand in my notice.’
The words came out more naturally than I’d expected. From the corner of my eye I saw the others look up from their desks. Such drab surroundings down there, below all the splendour, I wondered whether they cared.
‘You want to leave the Gallery?’
‘Yes… ’
I looked straight into her eyes, drawing myself up to my full height.
‘Would you like to take a seat?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Okay… ’ she trailed, ‘you’ve been here for quite a long time, haven’t you?’ She swivelled round in her chair and opened the top drawer of a filing cabinet behind her, from which she extracted a thick folder. Flip flip flip till my name came up.
‘Yes,’ she fingered the papers, ‘nearly ten years… ’
‘The boredom gets to you eventually, doesn’t it?’ someone said from his desk. The others laughed.
‘No, it’s not that.’
‘Is there a problem, Marie? Something we can help you with?’ she asked in a conciliatory tone.
‘No.’
She stared fixedly to see whether I was telling the truth. I lowered my eyes.
‘There’s really nothing wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well then how soon would you like to leave us?’
‘Whenever the contract runs out.’
She nodded.
‘There’s a waiting list, you know, for a job like yours. If the list were a queue, it would wrap itself all the way round the building. Are you sure you don’t want to think it over?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Very well, then. Your notice period is four weeks. After that, you’re free to do whatever you wish.’
When I told him my plans at lunch, though the only concrete one was to leave the Gallery, Roland lay down his fork, reached for his water and began sipping at it compulsively. And what next, he asked, to which I had no answer. New subjects, I told him, and new verbs. I had no idea what those would involve, I admitted, but my days would have something like a new vocabulary. No more standing back and watching over culture. I still had four weeks left but in a symbolic act towards the end of lunch we exchanged numbers, for the first time ever, I realised, and agreed to meet for drinks at least once a month, the sort of promise one sincerely means while already doubting it will be fulfilled.
Jane’s concern was how I was going to pay the rent. I reassured her I would begin trawling various job listings that weekend and start making phone calls. The Gallery would write me a reference letter and there was no reason why it shouldn’t be good. And I had a tiny bit of savings, enough to last a month or two, by which time I’d surely have found a new job. The world felt large again, almost infinite, and I wanted to postpone the moment till I committed to new walls and rules.
At first Daniel was sceptical, frowning as he listened to my decision, but after a few days he rang up and gave his support and even confessed to sometimes having wondered whether like my great-grandfather I would turn grey and hunched in the rooms of the Gallery, a fate I often thought I’d share with him.
After the destruction of my objects it took weeks to accustom myself to their absence. Each time I entered my room I’d look over at the empty shelf expecting to see them, the way you glance at the same spot on the wall where you once found a large spider, half hoping, half dreading, to see it there again although you removed it with a glass and paper long ago. One evening I finally moved an armful of paperbacks to the shelf and propped them up with tea tins full of gravel and, with that, the imprint was gone.
In bed at night, and during lulls at the Gallery, the chatelain would come lurching into my thoughts. Sometimes I could see his face, but often it was only the back of him or that first glimpse from afar, a human-size clump of ashes blown out of the fireplace. Over the weeks he began to feel about as real as Daniel’s Hungarian hypnotist, and I wondered whether this would end up being the story I’d carry round and sometimes unfold from my pocket. Marc Cointe quit the real, Pierre had said, but maybe he’d never belonged to it. Each time I doubted I’d pull out the evidence and lay it on the table: four witnesses, a printed obituary with a photograph, and, not least, the scar on my cheek, now a groove so pale I had to tilt my head under a bright light to locate it in the mirror. All real.
Late one afternoon a young sketcher entered my room at the Gallery with his notebook. Dark hair in a ponytail, always the same beige vest and scuffed suede boots. I’d seen him many times before. He sat down on the bench and began sketching Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow so feverishly he seemed to forget everything but himself and the painting. I strained to get a better view but my seat was too far away. He was working with such intensity, my curiosity grew and grew, and I finally got up and walked around, pretending to check something behind him, and was more than a little surprised when I glanced down and saw that instead of a sweet infant Christ the Madonna was holding a foetus with enormous eyes and frog-like hands, its fingertips like suction cups and toothed circular mouth a red sea anemone that seemed to move on the page. Given his docile manner I’d always assumed the young sketcher was producing elegant, faithful copies of the works in our Gallery, not mangling them. The Madonna — beautifully rendered, he was an excellent draughtsman — was cradling a baby Jesus from outer space.
Four weeks passed in a gust.
At the start of my final day, not wanting to rush, I set out for work half an hour early. ‘There are beggars and buskers on this train. Please do not encourage their presence by supporting them,’ said the announcement on the Tube, but that morning I encouraged them with small coins, those tiny acts of generosity you’re prone to when feeling, however briefly, that the universe is finally on your side.
As I stood in the threshold of 45 and 46 watching strangers fill the rooms, my head began to swarm with images from the past and present, like in those old paintings or, more often, panels, with continuous narrative, in which different scenes or chapters of a saint’s life crowd the same space with little perspective, and I thought back on my years at the Gallery, the thousands of hours spent standing and sitting, watching over immobile images and mobile figures, and I wondered what I would miss. It had been a second home, this geometry of square rooms, rectangular halls, circular junctions between quadrilaterals, the links, axes and extensions, the vestibules and sub-vestibules… But apart from Roland and the St Jeromes, it was hard to tell what else might return in dreams; only later would I know.
At 6.10 in the changing room, I began saying farewell to my uniform. I removed my jacket and laid it on the bench, brushing off two strands of hair from the collar. I undid the button and zip and stepped out of my trousers, taking time to pull each leg out. Then came the seven buttonholes down my chest, which I tackled as slowly as I could. Once freed from the lilac blouse, I folded it neatly and also laid it on the bench though I knew everything would soon be tossed into the wash. I was sad to give up the purple tie but knew I’d never wear it in the real world.