Glover’s Mistake. Nick Laird
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‘Still, today’s did not go well…’ A bell rang in the corridor outside and stopped. ‘If it’s the handout, I don’t have any more copies now but next week—’
‘Oh no, I got one of those. It was more of a general thing.’ Up close the long nose became a little sharp, though it contained all the intelligence and glamour of European Jewry and sat, to David’s untutored Old World eyes, a touch uncomfortably with the Aryan hair. ‘I just wanted to thank you for your lectures. They’ve made me think in ways about things…’
She smiled uncomfortably. He realized he was giving the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech and stopped. She waited for a few seconds, then swung her velvet bag up onto her shoulder and helped him out. ‘But you wanted to tell me you’re leaving the course?’
He was dropping art altogether and changing to English literature. They ended up sitting on the stage steps and talking for almost fifteen minutes. She asked David about himself and his family, and he found himself telling her. About being the only child of a philistine butcher and a woman fuelled by tension. He had never had any support. He needed the support. Why could they not have given him their support? When he’d begun to cry—for all frustrated artists, for all hampered ambition, for all the sensitive souls in the world—she’d dredged up a tissue stained with make-up from her bag, and had praised the bravery of his difficult decision. He often thought about how kind she’d been to him, and how attractive he’d found her own weird mix of confidence and fear. He’d kept that tissue in his pocket all evening, and the next day had been reluctant to bin it, although he had. Years later, in a second-hand book shop in the Elephant and Castle, when he came upon a glancing reference to her in A Guide to Contemporary American Art, he ran his fingertip along her name and bought the book.
David felt abashed on entering the National Gallery. When they climbed the great staircase, the awe of scale meant he was whispering, and by the time they came to the art, entering a room where portraits hung on thick gold chains against the crimson walls, and a cornice was piped like icing around the ceiling’s edge, both had fallen silent. Ruth stared at each picture and he followed, a masterpiece or two behind. David noticed he was walking in a formal, measured stride, much like the Duke of Edinburgh, and he’d even tucked his hands, rudder-like, behind his back.
When he joined her in front of a self-portrait by Murillo, brushing his duffel coat against her shoulder, she gave a raspy little sigh of satisfaction. It was a picture of a picture, with a frame within the frame, and the painter-subject, a lump-faced dignitary with a suspended moustache, reached out of his own portrait and rested his hand on the inner surround in a neat trompe l’oeil.
‘The fingers are very fine, aren’t they? It gives real space and depth, but it’s also Murillo saying’—she raked the air in front of the picture—‘look, I’m the only one who can decide the reality of the art, or the art of the reality.’
David nodded, not quite sure if her chiasmus made any sense. Nonetheless a statement was plainly called for: ‘It looks exactly like a hand.’
She stopped in reverent silence before a Michelangelo. The Entombment showed a naked Jesus being lifted up by John the Baptist and two others. To the front right of the picture was a blank in the shape of someone kneeling. The creases at the top of Christ’s thighs made the upper half of an X, marking the spot where his penis should be, but in its place there was only another blank, a cob-shaped void. I know how that feels, David thought. He put his hand in the pocket of his duffel and pressed it against his unresponsive crotch.
‘There’s something astonishingly modern about it,’ Ruth said at last, picking her words slowly, ‘and his mastery of the line’s incredible. It’s only through these contours’—she gestured again, spell-casting—‘that we experience the figure having volume and weight. It gives me a visceral reaction.’ She shivered, or pretended to shiver. David thought how pointless the phrase ‘visceral reaction’ was.
‘Who’s the missing person?’
‘The Madonna. Isn’t it almost as though Michelangelo couldn’t bring himself to make her visible, couldn’t make her witness her son’s entombment?’
‘Hmmm,’ David encouraged.
‘Though apparently he was waiting for ultramarine to paint her blue cloak. The lapis lazuli he needed could only be gotten from Afghanistan.’ There was a pause and then she tried a little political satire: ‘Nowadays they’d just invade it.’
As they headed past Leicester Square station and up Charing Cross Road towards the Bell and Crown, Ruth, like one of Prufrock’s females, was still talking of Michelangelo. She explained to David just why he was the supreme artist, how he represented the culmination of disegno. Just then a bicycle rickshaw went past, ferrying a bridal couple. The man, his hair slicked back as if he’d surfaced in a pool, grinned idiotically and waved. Poking from a millefeuille wedding dress, a wreath of white flowers in her hair, the bride was tossing confetti at passers-by. A trail of it stuck flatly to the wet road. Their cyclist was pumping his thigh muscles under a flapping, neon-blue rain poncho, and ringing his bell over and over. David couldn’t tell if they were genuine or some kind of publicity stunt, but was amazed when Ruth waved back, and even more amazed when he did too.
Glover acknowledged them with a solemn wink, and they waited and watched him serving. He had an undeniable elegance behind the bar. For a big man he possessed grace. Simultaneously he poured two pints, listened to a customer’s order, laid a banknote in the bed of the till, plucked up change, laughed at something, cracked a comeback, and all the while nodded his head to the R’n’B that slinked from the speakers.
He wouldn’t take money for the drinks, a first as far as David could remember. He just shook his head and mouthed no, though David noticed him glance to the side to check whether Eugene, his slight ginger colleague, was watching. After passing across two glasses of red, he propped himself on his elbows on the bar, flexing his tennis-ball biceps.
‘So how were the pictures? You get plenty to think about?’
There was an edge of banter to everything. Glover and David became her wayward boys, cocky and mocking and sly. It seemed to fit their three personalities, the little hierarchy of ids and egos and superegos. It was flirtation, David supposed, and surprisingly he was good at it. The Bell’s manager, Tom, came up from the cellar wearing a tight silver shirt—David whispered to Ruth that he should be put in an oven and basted regularly—and then Glover finished his shift and joined them on the other side of the bar.
They moved to a table, and when David produced his gift shop postcards Glover stared at each in turn and said, without a hint of humour now, how beautiful they were. Ruth began to repeat some of the things she’d said in the gallery, and her lack of irony drew something similar from him. She talked about painting the way Glover talked about cars, with a personal, urgent pride in what others had made. David told them his own theory of art—which was that the finest pictures by the old masters featured either a monkey or a midget, or even, as in the Veronese they’d seen that afternoon, both. The classic double, he called it.
‘She comes in every day at noon and orders a half of cider. Sits just over there.’
‘With the Mirror.’
‘Right, and her Dunhill Lights.’
‘With a mirror? Why does she bring a mirror?’
‘The Daily Mirror newspaper. And it used to be her husband, Ray, who’d come in for a Guinness every afternoon, but Ray’s dead of a heart attack. I’d never even seen her, Irene, before. Then on the first day she came in she sat and cried.’
‘She’s on pilgrimage really, honouring his memory. Didn’t Raleigh’s wife carry his head around with her for years?’
‘In a velvet bag,’ added David.
‘She likes to do the crossword. And she told me once the flat was just too empty without