Asunder (9 page)

Once home that evening I returned to my site. My latest landscape, still in its early stages, was a tiny model of an excavation, an idea I had after coming across a journal in our basement library describing various archaeological assessments of the terrain below the Gallery. The aim was to see whether there was a layer of dark earth capping the Middle Saxon material they’d discovered earlier and, if so, whether the distribution of artefacts within this layer indicated the presence of what they called ghost features. I was never able to find out what they meant by this, but assumed it was like the ghostly traces beneath a painting’s top layer, early attempts the painter discarded, no longer visible but somehow still there.

My archaeological landscape proved to be more of a challenge than its predecessors. An eggshell wouldn’t work—too domed and confined—and after casting my eye around for the right base I eventually found a rectangular plank in a skip outside a shop in Essex Road and sawed out a small rectangle on which I began to add the layers. For the Saxon gravel and sandy clays from quarry pits I used real sand, though it smelled vaguely of urine, from a playground nearby. For the dark earth sealing the Middle Saxon occupation I went to Cass Art and found brown paint the colour of burnt almond. For the shards of Middle Saxon glass I smashed up an ashtray with a hammer and created very fine bits, then selected the smallest sharpest fragments. Left only to recreate were the ribs of a cow, much of the skeleton truncated during the subsequent installation of a sewer somewhere in that terrain below the Gallery.

Over the past week a new idea had started to invade my mind, first stalking the edges and then gradually snaking its way to the centre and, as I thought about some of the more intense suffragette moments Ted had spoken of, this idea, bizarre yet increasingly logical, began to take shape: that much of history, or at least the history I’d been thinking about, had been carried out by the violence of the angle.

The angle at which Mary Richardson pulled on her tight-fitting skirt and parted her hair neatly to one side, the angle at which she fixed the meat cleaver up her left sleeve with the help of a few safety pins. The angle from which she approached the Velazquez, the angle of her wrist as she started to plunge her weapon into the painting.

Or, rewinding a few moments, the angle at which the workman’s ladder was propped against the wall, and the angle at which the detective read his newspaper, and the angle at which light penetrated the skylight: each played a role.

And then with her extraordinary actions, Mary Richardson forced all these angles into a parallel, as she was intent on doing, a parallel between the public’s indifference to the slow destruction of a prominent woman and the destruction of the financially valuable object of a painted one.

The angle at which metal tubes were jammed down suffragette throats and nostrils, their larynx and trachea, in the force-feeding campaign, the vertical assault of cold metal pressing against the walls of their oesophagi, despite the coughing and gagging a stream of food poured or pumped into their stomachs, mouths lacerated, teeth broken, digestive organs injured, bronchial complications to follow.

And the angle at which another suffragette, also armed with a meat cleaver, this one hidden in the folds of her purple cloak, rushed at John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James at the National Portrait Gallery, bequeathed by the author only months before. Mary Wood, who until the moment of the outburst had appeared a placid and unassuming old lady, shattered the protective glass and went for him in three separate places: below the right shoulder, on the left of his head, and on the right side of his mouth, fresh jagged lines wrecking the sitter’s composure.

The angle at which an elegantly dressed suffragette outside Fortnum & Mason extracted a hammer from her fur muff and swung it at the glass of the window display.

The angles from which suffragettes were spied on in their cells through round peepholes covered with flaps, in every door of Holloway Prison.

The sweep of the pigeons at Holloway, cutting across in a loose angle, the hues of their plumage admired by Sylvia Pankhurst on her biweekly half-hour walks round the prison yard, their freewheeling command of the sky so at odds with the dulled gazes and plodding movements of the prisoners below.

A slight softening of hard angles in the presence of the matron, glimpses of humanity beneath her uniform as she stood in the distance, silent and watchful, with her chain and keys jangling at her side.

The angle at which a stream of ice-cold water was directed straight at Emily Davison, for fifteen minutes, when she barricaded herself in her cell at Strangeways.

The angle at which she flung herself over the railings of a balcony at Holloway, her attempt at suicide thwarted not by spatial miscalculation but by the wire netting thirty feet below.

The angles at which policemen pinched, wrung and twisted the breasts of suffragettes as they broke up the riot outside the House of Commons on Black Friday.

The angle of the collision between Emily Davison—who, until she stepped out onto the racecourse, had been standing beside Mary Richardson at the Epsom Derby—and Anmer, the King’s black thoroughbred, who came charging round the bend. The angle at which the hooves struck her chest, the angle at which blood gushed from the forty-year-old suffragette’s nose and mouth. The horse somersaulted and landed on his jockey; both eventually recovered. Davison never regained consciousness and died four days later, on 8 June 1913.

And then, as if in response to her violent diagonal, the uncoiling of a tightly wound tension in a long horizontal, the unfurling of suffragette banners white purple and green. To the clamour of ten brass bands, the funeral procession wound its way from Victoria station to King’s Cross, counting among its mourners Lilian Lenton, Harriet Kerr, Cicely Hamilton, Mary Leigh, Olive Bartels, Margaret West, Isabel Seymour, Mary Blathwayt, May Billinghurst, Vida Goldstein, Dorothy Pethick, Ada Flatman, Gladice Keevil, Clara Codd, Mabel Tuke, Dora Montefiore, Georgiana Brackenbury, Nelly Hall, Muriel Matters, Maud Joachim . . . That day my great-grandparents joined thousands of others to watch the cortège of 6,000 women, younger suffragettes in white carrying Madonna lilies, older suffragettes in purple and black carrying irises and peonies, and hunger strikers so frail they could only advance in small steps, an ethereal flock advancing to meet its fallen comrade halfway.

The unbending of an angle in a greater geometry of disruption. During those years all sorts of planes came together, dramatically intercepting, planes and elements that would normally never coincide. Canvas and cleaver, the shudder of steel instruments, the pounding heart of the racehorse, the trembling hand of a wardress forced to carry out the doctor’s orders.

Decades after the Epsom Derby, after a life of many setbacks, the jockey Herbert Jones gassed himself in his kitchen; before his death he had claimed to remain ‘haunted by that woman’s face’.

What was I haunted by? At odd moments in the day or night I would ask myself this question, not too often but every now and then, especially when there were long lulls at work and no one entered the rooms I was watching over, or when I sat up late working on a landscape and larger, wilder moths drawn by the light of my desk lamp would rap at the window, or when I’d catch sight of my reflection in an unusual spot, such as in the glass panel of a painting or a silver plate in a shopfront or the tilted side mirror of a van.

Life’s not complete without some kind of haunting. There on the very fringes of tranquillity, Daniel once said, should be at least one or two pacing wolves. I had chosen the suffragettes, they hadn’t chosen me. Yet they were always somewhere in the margins. David Murphy, who for months after his escape threatened my dreams with a reappearance, had long been put to rest. The only ones with staying power were these women. But I couldn’t help feeling that I’d inherited them from Ted.

One afternoon as I stood guard over Room 12, a room of Venetian painting, an essential room, its walls a deep scarlet, my thoughts began heading down the same path they always did when I was near a painting of St Jerome. What happened to the lion once the saint had died, I wondered, and what was the fate of animals generally after their owners passed away, my curiosity sparked one day in the museum bookshop by a reproduction depicting the burial of St Jerome. In the foreground monks prayed over the departed saint laid out on a slab while in the background hovered the diminished figure of the lion, a chopped off suffix, his great mouth open as if in a wail.

Like most St Jeromes, the Vincenzo Catena in Room 12 exuded a wondrous composure that I especially welcomed that afternoon. I hadn’t slept well the night before and had a mild headache. Soft lines and soft colours, a flowing geometry, the saint deep in his reading, head resting on hand, his lion asleep on the floor while a quail pauses nearby. The painting had a stillness that few others in the Gallery contained, and was also one of the few where the image represented still drew me in more than its craquelure.

A woman entered from the far end of the room. With a few zigzags of the head she scanned the area, her reddish hair squirrelled into a loose bun that seemed to hold all kinds of information, and walked over to Titian’s
Bacchus and Ariadne
, and from there on to the Catena. She stopped in front of St Jerome and, unless I was imagining things, her chest started to heave, the thick blue fabric of her shirt failing to hide the movement beneath. She raised a hand to her forehead, rested it there for a few seconds, then dropped it on her chest as she stared fixedly at, or rather,
into
the Catena.

I quickly took measure of the signs: breathlessness, increase in heartbeat, eyes possibly dilated. I sensed dizziness and vertigo, palpitations in the region of the heart, perhaps a ringing in the ears. The more I observed, the more convinced I was that this visitor was suffering from an ailment Daniel had once explained to me, specific to cultural sites where people felt lost, shipwrecked, overwhelmed. The museum controls the paintings, we try to control the humans, but no one can dictate the interactions between the two.

My first impulse was to lead her to a bench. My second was to remain where I was and see what happened. The woman sighed deeply, leaning her torso even closer towards the Catena as if wanting to disrupt the saint in his study. She was close, close enough for the painting to feel her breathing, but not close enough for me to intervene. Yet.

There were now four other visitors in the room but they seemed oblivious to the time bomb in front of them, who was now scratching her arm as if fumbling for something up her sleeve, and I debated whether to give orders to clear the room, clear the Gallery, clear the square . . . But the woman never gave me any reason to yell out those orders, or any order for that matter, and all I could do was stand and watch as she didn’t attack the painting, didn’t provoke me, didn’t stir things up.

In a final taunt she leaned even further in, the upper half of her body hovering over the boundary delineated by the green cordon at shin height, I was surprised the alarm didn’t sound, but before I could caution her she had leaned back upright, turned round and drifted off in a daze. At the far end of the room she gave the swinging doors a push and in doing so released a small draught, probably just enough to disturb the membrane of a painting hanging in the path of the current, its surface shifting ever so slightly. From my post I watched the door swing shut, once, twice, then vibrate a hairline more, before finally coming to a standstill.

An unwieldy tower of mugs filled with dirty water balanced against a small blue milk jug with a chipped lip upon four unwashed plates with sauce stuck to their faces beneath a jumble of forks and spoons and sharp little knives alongside two large pots, one with a burnt handle, the other with a burnt base, next to a strainer full of old tea leaves and a cereal bowl that’d grown a layer of whitish film. The kitchen sink grew busier by the day. Jane would eat in a hurry, at who knows what ungodly hour of the morning when she nipped home to bathe, feed and change clothes, and rush out again.

She and Lucian had begun seeing each other almost immediately. She hadn’t been able to resist, and had returned to Camden Lock the following Sunday to buy her black scarf, inviting Lucian, along the way, to a Manorexia concert being held at Union Chapel on Upper Street that Wednesday, to which he said yes without any hesitation, she said, and during ‘Armadillo Stance’, the third song performed, she’d reached for his hand and from then on there was no going back. Her tone was confessional, she halted at moments as if waiting to see my reaction, and more than once I had to reassure her that I didn’t mind, Lucian had been someone I’d yearned for long ago, and I was only too happy, it was no exaggeration, to have been of help, however unintentionally. All the same, at first she only brought him over occasionally and spent most weeknights at his. I almost got used to having the flat to myself but refused to do her washing up.

The next Sunday at one of our locals, the Warlock and Essex, Jane entered a raffle and won a weekend away to a scenic town in the north of England. It had its own medieval wall, the pamphlet read, most of it still standing, and an impressive cathedral. Lucian wasn’t fond of travel and had to remain in London for work. None of her close friends or colleagues were free. Jane turned to me.

As the train ribboned through the unframed landscape, Jane with her magazines and I bookless at the window, I wondered whether decades from now this scene would be replayed, two spinsters on our way to a small town somewhere to visit a provincial church and lay flowers on a grave.

According to the instructions, our B&B lay on the town’s periphery, not far from the train station. Large disused warehouses huddled round us, their broken windows and blackened frames sullen reminders of their former lives. Despite the hour, a quarter past four in the afternoon, the streets were unusually empty and I couldn’t help wondering whether the raffle committee was having a laugh, sending us two hours on a train to nowhere but an abandoned industrial town on the outer limits of existence.