‘Where’s Fran?’ She had told me all about Fran, her housemate, who, like all housemates through the ages, was ‘completely mad’.
‘She’s at her boyfriend’s.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘It’s just you and me.’
‘Okay. And how are you feeling?’
‘A little better. I’m sorry for freaking out like that. I shouldn’t have taken that pill, it was a bad idea. But I appreciate you staying with me. I needed … a calming presence.’
‘And now?’
‘Now, now I feel … perfectly fine.’
We smiled. ‘So,’ I said, ‘am I sleeping in Fran’s bed?’
‘Good God, I bloody hope not.’ She took my hand and we kissed again. She tasted of lime and chewing gum. In fact the gum was still in her mouth, which would have thrown me at any other time.
‘Sorry, that is disgusting,’ she laughed, removing it, ‘us kicking that around in there.’
‘Don’t mind,’ I said.
She stuck the gum on the doorframe. I felt her hand on my back, found my hand on her thigh, on top of the dress then beneath it. I stopped to catch my breath. ‘I thought you said nothing was going to happen?’
‘I changed my mind. You changed it for me.’
‘Was it because of the lemon battery thing?’ I said, and she laughed while we kissed. Oh yes, I was quite the wisecracker.
‘My bedroom’s a disaster area,’ she said, breaking away. ‘Literally and figuratively.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said, and followed her upstairs.
Do I sound uncharacteristically suave in all of this? Do I sound aloof, nonchalant? The truth is that my heart felt like a fist trying to punch its way through my rib-cage — not from the excitement of it all, though it was thrilling, but from a sense that finally, finally something good was about to happen to me. I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?
Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was very good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvases of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed, then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess — critical term — so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all.
Such was my understanding of the history of art — its ‘narrative’, I ought to call it — until I met my wife. It is barely more sophisticated now, though I’ve picked up a few things along the way, enough to get by, so that my art appreciation is almost on a par with my French. In the early days of our relationship Connie was quite evangelical and bought me several books, second-hand editions because we were in our happy-but-poor phase. Gombrich’s The Story of Art was one, The Shock of the New another, given specifically to stop me tutting at modern art. Well, in the first flush of love, if someone tells you to read something then you damn well read it, and they’re terrific books, both of them, though I’ve retained almost nothing of their contents. Perhaps I should have given Connie a basic primer in organic chemistry in return, but she never expressed an interest.
Still — and I’d hesitate to confess this to Connie, though I think she knows — I’ve always felt a little at a loss with art, as if a piece of me is missing, or was never there. I can appreciate draughtsmanship and deft choice of colour, I understand the social and historical context, but despite all my best efforts my responses seem to me fundamentally shallow. I don’t quite know what to say or, indeed, feel. In portraiture I look for people that I recognise — ‘Look, it’s Uncle Tony’ — or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud’s school of art appreciation. In realist works I look for detail; ‘Look at the eyelashes!’ I say, in idiotic admiration at the fineness of the brush. ‘Look at the reflection in his eye!’ In abstract art I look for colour — ‘I love the blue’ — as if the works of Rothko and Mondrian were little more than immense paint charts. I understand the superficial thrill of seeing the object in the flesh, so to speak; the sightseeing approach that lumps together the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel as items to tick off. I understand rarity and uniqueness, the ‘how much?’ school of criticism.
And of course I can see beauty. In my work, I see it all the time: the symmetrical cleavage of a fertilised frog egg, the stained stem cells of a zebrafish embryo or an electron micrograph of Arabidopsis, the thale cress flower; and I can see the same forms and patterns, the same pleasing proportion and symmetry in paintings. But are they the right paintings? Do I have taste? Am I missing something? It’s subjective, of course, and there are no right answers, but in a gallery I always have that feeling that the security guards are waiting to bundle me out of the door.
My wife and son have few such insecurities. Certainly they weren’t on display in the Italian gallery of the Louvre, where Albie and Connie were playing that game of seeing who could stare at a painting the longest. In this case it was a fresco by Botticelli, cracked and faded and a lovely thing, but was there really so much to see? I waited while they drank it all in, the brush strokes, the interplay of light and dark, all the things I’d missed. Eventually there was movement, and we strolled on past endless varieties of crucifixions and nativities, assorted martyrs whipped or pierced with arrows, a nonchalant saint with a sword embedded in his head, a scene of Mary — it’s usually Mary — recoiling from an angel that had left a vapour trail behind him. ‘Braccesco, apparently,’ I said. ‘Jet-powered angel!’ as if it meant something, and we moved on.
We passed a terrific battle scene by someone called Uccello, soldiers clustered together into a black porcupine, the cracks and tears on the canvas adding to its grandeur in a strange kind of way. Then in the grand central corridor my eye was drawn to a portrait of a bearded man whose face, on closer inspection, was composed of apples, mushrooms, grapes, a pumpkin, his nose a fat ripe pear. ‘L’Automne by Arcimboldo. Look, Albie, his face is made up of fruit and vegetables!’
‘Kitsch,’ said Albie, presenting with his eyes the award for Most Banal Remark Ever Made in an Art Gallery. Perhaps this was why those museum audio-guides had become so popular; a reassuring voice in your ear, telling you what to think and feel. Look to your left, take note, please observe; how terrific it would be to carry that voice with you always, out of the museum and throughout all of life.
We moved on. There was a lovely fuzzy da Vinci, as if seen through smeary spectacles, of two women cooing over baby Jesus, but this didn’t seem to interest Connie and Albie, and I couldn’t help but notice that the more famous and familiar a work of art, the less time they spent looking at it. Certainly they had no interest in the Mona Lisa, the Hard Rock Cafe of Renaissance art, hanging regally between signs that warned of pickpockets in an immense, high-ceilinged room while other neglected canvases glared. Even early in the day a crowd had gathered, and were posing with that particular ‘can’t believe it!’ smile that people have when their arm is around a celebrity’s shoulder. ‘Albie! Albie, can you take a photo of me and your mum …’ I said, but they’d already snubbed the Giaconda in favour of a small canvas on the other side of the Mona Lisa’s wall — a murky Titian, in the shadows both literally and figuratively, of two large, naked women giving a recorder concert. They stared and stared and I wondered, what was I meant to take from this? What were they seeing? Once again I was struck by the power of great art to make me feel excluded.