‘Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.’
Mr Phillips turns around. A woman in a red coat and matching but very eccentric sort-of-beret is looking at the painting and nodding her head. One or two other people shift to other parts of the room as if, like dogs reacting to an ultrasonic whistle, they are responding to the way the woman’s madness is broadcasting on an extra-sensory frequency. Before Mr Phillips can look away she makes eye contact.
‘They didn’t used to do it, you know. It wasn’t that he couldn’t manage it. She wouldn’t let him.’
‘Do what?’
‘It — you know. Sex. He was a Christian, he was horny as a toad, and they never did it. You can see it in the picture if you look closely enough.’
Mr Phillips looks at the picture again. He has to admit that he can’t see it, unless it is in the fact that you wouldn’t bother painting yourself about-to-do-it or just-having-done-it when you could use the same energy to do it instead. Perhaps that is why double nude self-portraits are rare. The woman comes up beside Mr Phillips and says:
‘Brrrrrrr.’ Then, turning to him with a surprisingly sweet, sane smile she says, ‘It’s such a cold picture.’
Mr Phillips smiles politely and noncommittally back. He moves towards the Clore gallery where the Turners hang and then, like a man shaking off a tail in a thriller, dodges left towards British Surrealism 1900–1966. The woman unembarrassedly doubles back after him. He realizes that he has been adopted.
‘I’ve not seen you here before,’ she says as they stand in front of a John Craxton painting which features multicoloured cubist goats. ‘You’re not one of the regulars.’
‘Would you expect to know me if I was a regular?’ asks Mr Phillips.
‘Heavens yes,’ says the woman. ‘I come here every day. Mainly I come to heckle the tour guides. They talk the most fearful tripe and need much correcting. I used to pick them up on more or less everything they said but now I wait for errors of fact before I pounce. I think it helps them keep on their toes. Then once I’ve established a bridgehead I broaden out into more general interpretative points. I like to think that my perspective is broadly feminist though also unmistakably personal. And then sometimes, not often but every now and then, I like to spout any old mad rubbish just to see if they notice the difference and you know the shocking thing is they never seem to.’
‘Yes, that is disturbing’, says Mr Phillips.
‘This building used to be a prison, you know,’ the woman goes on as they walk further into the Surrealism room. ‘That’s why there are so few doors. You want to stop people getting in and out too easily. Just as you can’t walk in and out of a prison so you can’t walk in and out of an art gallery. Do you ever wonder why, of all the epochs of the world, now should be the most populous? Why so many souls should have chosen now of all times to be born?’
‘No.’
‘Nor do I. It seems perfectly obvious to me.’
They stopped as if by mutual consent in front of a painting of a man eating something, like a Dalí only even worse. Four out of ten.
‘It ought really to be like it was in the war,’ says the woman. ‘The National Gallery was sent into hiding and only one picture was taken out and put on show at any one time. The longing for art! The concentration, the hunger, with which people yearned for it! A great city should have no more than one picture on display. Let it change once a week, once a month. We would recapture our seriousness! The jewel in our crown!’
‘Does it matter?’ asks Mr Phillips.
‘Heavens yes. Why do you think all these people are here? What sort of behaviour do you think you are observing?’
Mr Phillips is thinking about that in a desultory way when with a surge of horror he sees, coming into the room from the opposite end, Mrs Palmer, wife to Mr Palmer, a.k.a. Norman the Noxious Neighbour. Mr Phillips can vaguely remember hearing something about an Open University course — it must be to do with that. At the moment she is looking down at a gallery plan but she is only about fifteen feet away and can’t fail to notice Mr Phillips when she looks up. That will lead her to start talking to him, which will make him have to explain what he is doing in the Tate Gallery at eleven o’clock on a Monday morning. She will then go home and ask her husband to guess who she bumped into and Mr Phillips’s quality of life at Wellesley Crescent will take a significant turn for the worse. He abruptly turns and heads back the way he came.
‘Aren’t we a wriggly one!’ says the woman, still at his heels. ‘But I’m not so easily left behind as all that!’
Mr Phillips feels a wave of tremendous fatigue, of a sort he doesn’t remember experiencing since the last time he was in the same building five years before. What is it about looking at pictures that makes you feel so knackered?
‘I think I’ve had enough,’ he says. ‘I don’t have much stamina for this sort of thing.’
‘Quite so. You’re very sensible. It is the emanations of spirit coming off the paintings which is so exhausting. The vibrations they might once have been called. If one thinks of it as spiritual exercise which drains and refreshes in the same way that physical exercise drains and refreshes, does that make it feel any better? No. Of course not.’ Another sweet, sane smile.
A tour party comes out of the next gallery at the end of the room, the man at the head of the party looking shifty as he walks past Mr Phillips and his new chum. Mr Phillips wonders if it is the same man with the posh voice who thought that the signs of dementia spoke for themselves. A light enters the woman’s eyes and she peels off to follow the group, squeezing Mr Phillips’s arm in abrupt farewell as she leaves.
2.5
Outside the gallery Mr Phillips takes a couple of lungfuls of London air at the top of the steps. The sky is now clear and blue, and it is hot. Beside him stands a girl with black sandals and red feet.
‘You have time?’ she says in a Spanish or Portuguese accent. A voice in Mr Phillips’s head says If you’ve got the inclination and If you’ve got the money and You interest me strangely and But this is so sudden. The voice that comes out of his mouth says:
‘Five past eleven.’ The girl nods and bites her lip.
Mr Phillips goes down to the Embankment and turns left towards Westminster. Across the Thames the sun is bright on the huge colourful building, all trees and ziggurats and pyramids and long glass windows, that houses the Secret Service. As always when he passes the building Mr Phillips stops for a look. You never see anyone moving about inside it, or going into it from the street in Vauxhall, so clever things have obviously been done with the doors and windows. At the same time there is something odd about spies going to work in a brand-new office building that is one of the most conspicuous and extrovert and obviously expensive in the whole of London.
It would be good fun to be a spy, and never to be allowed to tell anyone what you did. Not even Mrs Phillips, except in the most general terms. Certainly not Martin or Thomas. As for the neighbours, they would only know that you were something in the civil service, probably to do with fish quotas or harmonising EU policy in relation to tractor parts. And all the time you were standing at a barbecue while the man on your right boasted about his new Rover 816 and the man on your left talked about the council’s inability to empty the bins without leaving more mess strewn all over the road behind them than there was before they started, you would be thinking about whatever it was that spies thought about, and the main thing would be that nobody would have the faintest idea what was on your mind. And when Mrs Phillips says something like ‘What are you thinking?’ or ‘A penny for them?’ you wouldn’t be able to tell her, by law. You wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I’m worried about the quality of information we’re getting back from our network in Tripoli via his dead letter microdot burst transmission’ — you would have to say instead, ‘I was wondering whether after all we should have pushed Tom to keep up with his piano lessons’ or ‘Just trying to remember where I left the remote control, darling.’