Black Mirror by Gail Jones Page B

an upper-class English accent with diabolical precision.
    Yet her body recovered a kind of girlish mobility, and she strode through melting London, hot-housed and sizzling, intoxicated with the sweet remembrance of sweat. She thought of deserts, distances, entropicmirages. Of glimmering horizons, mirrors in the sky. She remembered salmon-coloured salt lakes and inverted trees, cradled in a precarious and unrealistic suspension. It was perhaps her only true adult moment of radical nostalgia.
    And then, astonishingly, in Trafalgar Square — and she can no longer remember why she was in the centre of the city — but in Trafalgar Square, among the giant and sombre statues of lions, the imperial columns, the wandering pigeons, appeared a woman whose head was a bunch of flowers. She wore a pale satin dress, elbow-length black gloves, and had a many-coloured bouquet upon her shoulders. A bunch of roses. Photographers were darting around her, mad for a picture. Click! Click! In the summertime square, bright with acrid sunshine, she was dazzlingly visible, a surplus, a monster. Victoria felt she had produced this spectacle from her own imagination. She moved towards the flower-woman, and a young man, tuxedoed, moustachioed and with the manners of a salesman, intercepted her rather rudely and offered her a handbill. The arcane word Surrealist rose up into vision.
    Exhibition. Surrealist. New Burlington Galleries.
    The bunch of roses walked away, trailing photographers. Pigeons uplifted. Overheated Englishmen glared and mumbled.
    Almost immediately Victoria found Jules and took him to the exhibition. It was the opening day, and the traffic was held up in Bond Street and Piccadillybecause of the crowds. Large groups had gathered to gawk and sneer: she had never before seen so many people attend an art gallery.
    She remembers this morning as a kind of physical sensation; it was as though, entering the gallery, a parachute — whoomph! — jerked open inside her chest. She felt both fallen and upheld, strung in the aerial logic of movement in the sky, tense and excited with something straining to stay open inside her. Max Ernst’s Two Children Menaced by A Nightingale. Meret Oppenheim’s cup and saucer covered with fur. Dali’s deliquescent clocks. Tanguy’s weird plasma shapes. Collages. Frottages. Impossibilities.
    Victoria recognised something: they had painted dreams.
    Jules bent to inquire: Are you all right?
    But she could not reply for all that was inside her. She was overwhelmed with a sense of providential culmination and the effect of the exhibition was less like a spectacle than a kind of syntax arranging itself, a new intelligibility.
    Jules tugged at Victoria like a child, begging to leave.
    It’s so hot in here, he whispered.
    He ran this index finger around the inside of his shirt collar, waved his neat hat and dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief.
    And this … he gestured around him, is all so … stupid!
    Bête! She still hears it, spat in her direction.
    When finally they left, Jules was in a state of peevishannoyance Victoria had always, perhaps meanly, associated with the French. They stood outside the New Burlington Galleries and for the first time fought. Jules’ face was flushed. Blown news paper spun around him, exemplifying his agitation.
    Incroyable! he said. Incroyable!
    Exactly! Victoria responded. Believing is seeing.
    She tried to seduce him with the deep sincerity of her impressions, but Jules was unmoved, exasperated, and turned on his heel to walk away up the street. He did not turn back, nor did he entreat. Victoria strode again into the gallery, back into the supernatural atmosphere of an entire counter-world.
    Representations of women seemed everywhere to confront her. There was Dali’s sketch, like a rape, of the faceless woman whose whole upper half was a chest of drawers. There was Roland Penrose’s objet , called Captain Cook’s Last Voyage