The museum stayed open three hours later on Fridays but unless we regulars worked overtime, our shift would end at the usual hour and part-timers would come in and take over from six to nine, a comfortable relay though I’d miss hearing Henry’s jangling of keys, and it always threw me off a little to see unknown faces in the changing rooms as I was getting ready to leave.
That evening I didn’t head out once I had put on my civvies. Instead of making my way to the exit as I normally did, I returned to the second floor in my black wool skirt and high boots, ones I’d treated myself to the week before to mark the end of an era, and crossed section after section of my former kingdom, past men and women in grey, many of whom I didn’t recognise, past paintings whose shapes and colours I registered out of the corner of my eye, and kept walking until I reached Room 30.
Two men, Spaniards I think, were standing in front of her speaking loudly and gesturing. One of them moved his hand across the air as if following the contours of her body, the slope of her shoulder and the dip at her waist, while the other nodded in agreement and then repeated the movement. I waited until they had walked off.
It had been a while since we’d been face to face. I drew near for a close look. I was struck by how calm she appeared, at such peace in her salmon-pink boudoir, so oblivious to the strong emotions she’d stirred up in men and women over the years, and wondered whether if I stood there long enough some of this dignified calm would seep into me. I could almost feel the warmth of her enclosure, the brush of silks and satins, the sound of her breath as she gazed into the mirror Cupid held up. I’d rarely, if ever, seen such a beautiful body, a smooth and perfect arabesque, the kind any woman would dream of having.
As I stood there I noted a detail not in the paint layer but in the painting, something guides would often mention, the fact that the face in the mirror and the pearly woman outside didn’t match up, a disjunct between the reflection and the reflected. The face in the mirror was rounder and swarthier, one could see, out of focus and hard to read, while the face outside, at least judging from the one-quarter profile, seemed to belong to someone paler, more delicate and ideal. Light outside, shadow in the mirror, perfection beyond, something rougher in the reflected.
I took a few steps back and sat down on the leather sofa facing the painting. Yes, I could still see the dissonance, and for the first time it bothered me. I stood up again and returned to the painting, leaning further in to inspect the face in the mirror once more, but now instead of Venus’s blurred features another face appeared, that of a pale woman with a jagged black fringe and longish nose, her eyes searching and intense, and I blinked a few times to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, but no, for a few seconds a very familiar face gazed back out at me, and I wondered whether Mary Richardson too had quick glimpse of herself in this mirror.
‘Excuse me, Miss… Excuse me?’
I turned towards the voice. It belonged to woman in uniform, with greyish eyes and six silver hoop earrings climbing up her ear.
‘Could you step back a little, please?’
I obeyed.
‘A little more?’
A mechanical second step.
Satisfied, she returned to her post. I turned back to the painting but the spell had been broken. I moved on from Venus and pretended to study another Velazquez on her left but had no interest just then in Philip IV and decided it was time to leave.
With steps so slow I could hear the creaking leather of my boots, I made my way towards one of the exits and out of Room 30, then crossed the Sunley Room and the Central Hall, into the main vestibule across its mosaic floor and then down the stairs, past the shop on the right, and down one more flight and out into the cool wintry air of the portico where people stood with cigarettes taking in the view of the square. Once past the eight Corinthian columns I took a deep breath, released, forever, from the museum’s clench of hours, released, now and always, from both collections, and picking up speed I rushed headlong down the steps like a child, five, ten, fifteen steps in a new direction, and wasn’t bothered by the backs of statues below for they would no longer be my daily view, and I wondered which way to walk, whether home or to Soho.
While I tried to make up my mind, I stopped to watch a pavement artist, a young man who sometimes came and unfurled his copy of The Last Supper outside the Gallery and anchored it with four stones, touching up his canvas until the winter light withdrew, and he usually stayed on for a few more hours since I’d see him again after work, and that evening I stood and watched him kneeling beneath the glow of the street lamps as he counted out the change in his cap, people hurrying past in the evening chill, some stepping on the corners, even on the faces, of his work, which as far as I could tell was a very accomplished replica in oil paint of the original, but the young man didn’t seem to mind, even when a man in furs stepped right on Christ’s face with his large black shoe or when a pigeon began pecking at Judas Iscariot, and once he’d finished counting his coins he dropped them into a leather pouch which he tucked into his jacket and then placed his cap back on his head, and, still on his knees, lifted each stone from the corners of his scroll, piled them to one side, dusted off the painting’s surface with the back of his hand, and began to carefully roll it up, the long table and the apostles gradually disappearing into shadow. From a few feet away I continued to watch, not stirring until he had finished rolling his canvas into a large, heavy cylinder he then tucked under his arm though it seemed far too unwieldy, and, with confident steps, headed back into the tumult of the city.
Acknowledgements
Thank you first and foremost to Parisa Ebrahimi, my extraordinary editor at Chatto & Windus. And to Lauren Wein, Andrew Kidd, Anna Stein, Suzanne Dean, Poppy Hampson and Sally Riley.
Thank you to the following friends: Devorah Baum, Mathilde Bonnefoy, Michael Bucknell, Rubén Gallo, Astrid Gessert, Terence Gower, Phillipa Horan, Mary Horlock, Darian Leader, Wolfe Lenkiewicz, Neil Porter, Simon Preston, Sally Read, Lorna Scott Fox, Irene Skolnick, Josh Appignanesi.
And in memory of Malcolm Bowie.
Thank you to Ledig House, the MacDowell Colony and Santa Maddalena Foundation residencies.
Thank you to the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.
Thank you to Nicholas Donaldson at the National Gallery archives and to art conservator Christian Scheidemann for sharing his knowledge of craquelure.
Thank you to the kind guards at the National Gallery who patiently answered my questions.
And thank you, immensely and forever, to my parents and Eva.
I am particularly indebted to the following sources: George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, Dario Gamboni’s The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, Knut Nicolaus’s The Restoration of Paintings, and Mary Richardson’s Laugh a Defiance.
About the Author
CHLOE ARIDJIS was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows from Oxford, then lived in Berlin for five years. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in 2009. She now lives in London.