sanitised life, maybe even a family. Every now and then, I wonder.
Five
After so many years at the job I considered myself an expert in the sounds produced by different shoes on wooden floorboards. Clogs were the loudest but had gone out of fashion. So had most platforms and cowboy boots. Sandals with cork-filled soles made the least noise. Trainers too, nearly inaudible. Boots with traction produced a muffled crunch, like dog paws on snow. Heavy boots with metal buckles, usually on the feet of long-maned men from Scandinavia, sought an audience as much as the paintings. There must’ve been a shift in footwear over the years however, since the old-fashioned click clack so familiar in films had been generally replaced by less dramatic entrances.
Whenever I felt like detaching myself from what was around me, rather than listen for shoes I’d try to block out all sounds and focus on the reflections of visitors in the polished wooden floors. Every visitor at the Gallery has a double that wanders through the rooms with him, and in rooms where the wood is especially shiny the reflected double is nearly always more vivid and beautiful than the human above. As the afternoons wore on and the reflections diminished, my attention would then move to the shifts in light, and I would try to guess how long till closing time without checking my watch.
Shadows and reflections would’ve been different in my great-grandfather’s day, when Gallery illumination was an evolving theme. With the lanterns that were first used the pictures received too much light, he said, and visitors could see their reflections in the protective glass more than the pictures themselves. Skylights proved much better: light poured into the centre of the room, bringing the work to life.
In Ted’s day, too, there was no rotation, nor female warders. Heating came into existence rather slowly; certain draughty rooms lay in the dreaded pneumonia wing. Overcrowded London elbowed its way into the rooms of the Gallery. Warders had to rise from their chairs when spoken to, figures on standby that would go from L to l when addressed and from l to L when released, a constant movement between upper case and lower. Fog or darkness could cause the Gallery to close at short notice. Outside, horses would stand hitched to carriages for hours like thaumatropes at rest. All these details never ceased to have a hold on Ted and as they had a hold on Ted they had a hold on me.
Even in his twilight, when I would visit him in his two-room cottage in Yorkshire, my great-grandfather would return to the events of 10 March 1914. He had heard some of the commotion the suffragettes had been making, of their ardent campaign for the female vote, but had never imagined he would witness anything so dramatic firsthand. Mary Richardson provided Ted with the story of his life. Even the events of the Great War did not diminish the moment this young suffragette, drum major for the Women’s Social and Political Union’s Fife and Drum Marching Band, took a chopper to ‘his’ Venus; this story belonged to him, though it failed to make him a hero.
As a young girl I would listen on, fascinated yet pretending to be horrified, as he explained how the suffragettes were to blame for the collapse of society as he knew it, and how these national outrages, as he called them, were harbingers of the great European disorder to come. Even if he
had
caught her in time that day, it was too late. There was already disorder in the nation. Disorder in the Gallery. Disorder on the Continent. It was all linked, Ted would say, all linked. At the heart of everything lay grief and disorder, and swishing through this disorder was a phalanx of long, intransigent skirts.
His tone was so grave and prophetic, I rarely questioned anything he said, forgetting the cramp in my leg as he spoke about how in those years he was the first to admit that life as he knew it, meaning
his
England, would never be the same. It began with
Five
After so many years at the job I considered myself an expert in the sounds produced by different shoes on wooden floorboards. Clogs were the loudest but had gone out of fashion. So had most platforms and cowboy boots. Sandals with cork-filled soles made the least noise. Trainers too, nearly inaudible. Boots with traction produced a muffled crunch, like dog paws on snow. Heavy boots with metal buckles, usually on the feet of long-maned men from Scandinavia, sought an audience as much as the paintings. There must’ve been a shift in footwear over the years however, since the old-fashioned click clack so familiar in films had been generally replaced by less dramatic entrances.
Whenever I felt like detaching myself from what was around me, rather than listen for shoes I’d try to block out all sounds and focus on the reflections of visitors in the polished wooden floors. Every visitor at the Gallery has a double that wanders through the rooms with him, and in rooms where the wood is especially shiny the reflected double is nearly always more vivid and beautiful than the human above. As the afternoons wore on and the reflections diminished, my attention would then move to the shifts in light, and I would try to guess how long till closing time without checking my watch.
Shadows and reflections would’ve been different in my great-grandfather’s day, when Gallery illumination was an evolving theme. With the lanterns that were first used the pictures received too much light, he said, and visitors could see their reflections in the protective glass more than the pictures themselves. Skylights proved much better: light poured into the centre of the room, bringing the work to life.
In Ted’s day, too, there was no rotation, nor female warders. Heating came into existence rather slowly; certain draughty rooms lay in the dreaded pneumonia wing. Overcrowded London elbowed its way into the rooms of the Gallery. Warders had to rise from their chairs when spoken to, figures on standby that would go from L to l when addressed and from l to L when released, a constant movement between upper case and lower. Fog or darkness could cause the Gallery to close at short notice. Outside, horses would stand hitched to carriages for hours like thaumatropes at rest. All these details never ceased to have a hold on Ted and as they had a hold on Ted they had a hold on me.
Even in his twilight, when I would visit him in his two-room cottage in Yorkshire, my great-grandfather would return to the events of 10 March 1914. He had heard some of the commotion the suffragettes had been making, of their ardent campaign for the female vote, but had never imagined he would witness anything so dramatic firsthand. Mary Richardson provided Ted with the story of his life. Even the events of the Great War did not diminish the moment this young suffragette, drum major for the Women’s Social and Political Union’s Fife and Drum Marching Band, took a chopper to ‘his’ Venus; this story belonged to him, though it failed to make him a hero.
As a young girl I would listen on, fascinated yet pretending to be horrified, as he explained how the suffragettes were to blame for the collapse of society as he knew it, and how these national outrages, as he called them, were harbingers of the great European disorder to come. Even if he
had
caught her in time that day, it was too late. There was already disorder in the nation. Disorder in the Gallery. Disorder on the Continent. It was all linked, Ted would say, all linked. At the heart of everything lay grief and disorder, and swishing through this disorder was a phalanx of long, intransigent skirts.
His tone was so grave and prophetic, I rarely questioned anything he said, forgetting the cramp in my leg as he spoke about how in those years he was the first to admit that life as he knew it, meaning
his
England, would never be the same. It began with
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