The TV picture had turned again to news. Violence. Buildings had grown flames and black smoke. There were tanks. Where was it? Beirut? Syria or Iraq? Religions’ll fight among themselves till all’s no more. He didn’t want to turn up the sound and waken Stella. He’d seen his fair share of that kind of stuff. When he worked at the office in the Diamond in Derry, it was firebombed. Who or why was never found out. Maybe a couple of fourteen-year-old Savonarolas, egging each other on. He drained his drink, heard his teeth hit the glass as it upended. He resisted pouring himself another and tried to imagine how the petrol bombing could have happened. The Provos were prone to that kind of nonsense. They even tried to burn down the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. Before he realised it, he had poured himself another drink. Accidentally. Apologies. Since when did a fight for Irish freedom include the burning of books? The destruction of buildings. The IRA were disarchitects. Destroyers. Show me a building and I’ll turn it into a car park. A smashing of window glass followed by a whoosh as the contents of the bottle caught. How many houses are you getting to the gallon these days? He imagined it as cinema. The burning of a whole city of scale models. What fuel, what tinder. Plan chests. Rolls of trace, T-squares, set squares and protractors, templates and stencils. Cars the size of Dinky toys, trees as small as interdental brushes. Not only would there be the real fire but there would be the fire reflected in the cellophane windows. Tiny trees would hiss and disappear, leaving only blackened wire. Aflame the way Bombay Street had been aflame. From end to end. Catholics burned out by a Loyalist mob. Both men and women figurines melting. Like the chocolate on the biscuits in the Victoria biscuit tin they all gathered round at coffee time. The box bulges then bursts, flinging biscuits everywhere. The dry balsa wood catches instantly and there are streets and churches and schools and halls of residence roaring and sizzling because now the curtains have become hanging flames and the venetian blinds twist of their own accord. Models of architecture. Burt Chapel itself with its copper roof an inferno – apple-green flames leap. The labels scorch, then finally ignite. Steeples topple, bell towers collapse. The heat moves into drawers, the handles become red-hot, the trace drawings curl and brown, become millefeuille. Strata, layer upon layer of work. Hour upon hour, day after day. The architects, both Scandinavian and local, their inspiration and ideas, ruled plans and freehand work all reduced to ash. Cupboards full of pages of materials, of notes, of quantities, of measurements. Changed by flame to nothing. In the name of a struggle, in the name of religion. Creating an absence. Figurines are not important. They melt away. Like the fire’s perpetrators. When Stella heard, all she said was, ‘Nobody was killed, thank God.’ The next morning Gerry picked his steps through the devastation, seeking something to salvage. The blackened wood looking like alligator skin, the light shades draped like Dali watches on the desks, the venetian blinds – the ones which survived the melting – buckled and warped. Some biscuits at the toe of his shoe looked good enough to eat. A place of creation savaged. And the smell. Nothing like the smell of work wasted. It took weeks to leave his clothes. And even then he wasn’t sure whether it had gone or not.
‘Gerry, are you still on for the museum?’
Gerry pulled away his earphones. He’d nodded off, Stella was coming out of the bathroom. She straightened the coverlet the way one would smooth out a dog-eared page in a book. And pulled back the curtains.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. Why not?’
The Rijksmuseum was far enough away to travel by tram.
‘How do you pronounce it?’ said Gerry.
‘Like in Casablanca. Rick’s Café – Rick’s museum.’
Stella bought a strippen of tickets from a machine at the stop – enough to do a couple of days.
‘Maybe we won’t punch them, just hold onto them in case an inspector gets on. He’ll see our foreignness.’
Gerry paced about, trying to keep warm, looking down at the tracks and up at the overhead wires.
‘Remind me,’ said Stella, ‘to buy a Guardian for the crossword.’
‘Will that not cost you?’
‘Yes. But it’s my mental gym.’
A blue and grey tram pulled in with a rumbling rubber sound. It was crowded and people looked up at them when they got on. They had to stand. Stella made an extravagant gesture of looking around for the device that would stamp or validate their tickets. Finding none, she shrugged at Gerry. He shrugged back at her.
‘How terribly inconvenient,’ he said.
‘Would you look at that,’ Stella said. She nodded towards the front window of the tram. Two cyclists – a boy and a girl – sailing along in front of the tram, weaving in and out.
‘Like a couple of dolphins in front of a ship,’ she said. ‘They were holding hands a minute ago.’
‘We were being romantic, your honour.’
‘It is romantic,’ said Stella. Gerry hung on, steadying himself against the stops and starts of the tram. He shouldn’t have had the whiskey.
They took the lift to the top floor of the Rijksmuseum. Gerry’s technique was to work his way down through the galleries, moving always to his left, until each room was accomplished. In the beginning they walked together. But sometimes Gerry discarded whole walls of pictures at a glance and Stella wondered why as she walked behind him.
‘Self-satisfied burghers,’ he said. ‘Dutch still lifes – paintings of vegetables like faces . . .’
Many people wore earphones and carried audio controls but Gerry whizzed past and around them.
At other times he was much slower. He would linger in front of a painting that took his fancy, bend over and look at it more closely, right down to the very brushstrokes, while Stella stood and moved her weight from foot to foot. Occasionally his hand would go to his pocket and produce his glasses case and he would put on his glasses and read the painting’s label. Once he leaned close to her, ‘Every time I open my glasses case nowadays,’ he said. ‘I am pleasantly surprised to find my glasses.’
Sometimes he wanted to retrace their steps so he could show her some detail.
‘We don’t have the time,’ she’d say.
‘On our holidays?’
‘Or maybe the inclination.’
He succeeded in persuading her back to look at The Jewish Bride.
There was a crowd gathered around it. It was huge, big as a hoarding, a great slash of browns and yellows and reds. Two figures, a man and a woman on the edge of intimacy, or perhaps just after, about to coorie in to one another. Hands. Hands everywhere. A painting about touch. Stella joined the crowd and wormed her way to the front. Gerry watched her bite her lip as she gazed. She became aware of Gerry watching her. He excused himself and threaded his way to her side.
‘Well?’
‘There’s a great tenderness in him,’ she said. ‘You can see he cherishes her.’
‘Look at that hand of his,’ Gerry said. ‘And the sleeve. Like a big croissant. The way he’s put the paint on.’
‘And the faces,’ she said. ‘But she’s not so sure. Shy, yes. Sure, no. What sumptuous clothes.’ She pointed out the groom’s hand around the woman’s shoulder and his other hand resting on her breast. The bride’s touch of the groom’s hand.
‘She’s allowing him to have his hand there,’ she whispered. ‘And her other one’s protecting her stomach.’
‘Yes.’ Gerry nodded.
‘Somehow the hands seem too big.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘It’s the subject of the painting – the woman’s permission – and it’s in the hands,’ she said. ‘He can do what he likes with them, Rembrandt can.’
The next time she saw a vacancy on one of the centrally placed sofas she moved quickly to take it, slotting herself into a niche between strangers. It was a buttoned leather affair, firm but comfortable. Her feet ached.
She signalled to Gerry that she was having a rest. He indicated that he would come back for her and she nodded. She put her head back, closed her eyes and liste
ned to the floorboards creaking all around her.
Stella had noticed that the woman in The Jewish Bride wore pearls. Also earrings. Maybe that was why she looked so intimately self-assured. Stella hadn’t had her ears pierced until her sixtieth birthday. She’d been squeamish about it but thought the pain would be balanced by the confidence the look would give her. She would become – finally – a woman taking her own decisions, a woman with authority over herself. She felt herself drifting. To be caught snoozing in such a place. Especially after a nap at lunchtime. She opened her eyes. Opposite where she sat was an image of an old woman reading. From a distance she let her eyes roam the picture. She didn’t know who it was by. The old woman’s face was in shadow and the book large – so big that it appeared floppy and awkward. Her hand was on the page steadying it or keeping her place. Stella, without noticing, closed her eyes again. Reading was so important – it so enriched.
When she was a child her parents encouraged her even though they themselves read very little. She remembered waiting for the library to open. Stamping from one cold foot to the other. The village didn’t have a real library. But a volunteer, Mrs Brownlee, came on a Tuesday and Thursday evening, from six until eight, and opened the municipal hall. It was a place where people voted, a place where men in suits gathered for meetings, a place where children did their eleven-plus exams. Stella only knew it as the place where, after the war, she’d been sent to collect free orange juice. On winter evenings she’d shelter from the rain in the doorway, protecting a pile of books beneath her coat. Mrs Brownlee was a Protestant and she would drive up in her car and come walking quickly, her keys jingling. The building was empty and cold and full of echoes but everything changed when the light was switched on, the store cupboard opened and Mrs Brownlee dragged out the cardboard boxes of books. The pulling of the boxes was not always easy – they snagged sometimes on raised knots on the old wooden floorboards – and Mrs Brownlee would groan and tut-tut and ask Stella for help. There was a box for men – Zane Grey and cowboy stories and, for the women, love stories. And a box for boys and a box for girls. Stella liked to rummage in both. She read the Just William books because of Violet Elizabeth Bott. It was she who made her laugh, not William. And Enid Blyton – any of the Adventure Series. Or the Famous Five. Every so often a new shipment of books arrived. Those nights Stella dropped to her bare knees and was speechless, uncovering one new book after another. Sometimes she flicked a book open and read a line or two. The first words of every story tasted fresh. In each new book, at the front, was a white library insert and because it was blank she had the thrill of knowing she was the first to read that book. Like making prints in fresh snow. In old library books this insert page, stuck with Sellotape which had gone brown, was untidy with date stamps. They just put the return-by date anywhere, sometimes even upside down.
At home the only book they owned that was not to do with religion was Virtue’s Simplified Dictionary. It was American and no one could give an explanation as to how it had come into the house. It was fat and had along its fore-edge little indentations – twenty-six of them, each containing a letter of the alphabet. The book was grubby with use. It had illustrations, some tiny line drawings, some colour plates, one of flags of the world, one of the flowers of North America. It was a book which could be relied upon, a book she only later realised she loved. People talked of being in difficulty and of opening the Bible for an answer but Stella played the same game with the dictionary. Closing her eyes and randomly inserting her finger into the little cave index, choosing any word on the page. There were some words she couldn’t understand the explanation for because the words that did the explaining were unknown to her. So she had to look them up. Trace them back and cross-reference them. This had happened to her in her early teens with the word spermatozoon – God knows where she’d read it. She followed the trail until she had unravelled, more or less, what life was all about – although the dictionary was silent on the practical side of things. And she was left floundering in a pool which, according to the priest in confession, may have been of bad thoughts. An occasion of sin brought on by Virtue’s Simplified Dictionary ? When she looked up ‘occasion’ it turned out to be ‘a favourable chance or opportunity’. This did not sound appropriate.
In some ways it was unfortunate that it was an American dictionary and it spelled some words the American way. Her homework occasionally had a word with a red ink strike-through and the correct spelling written nearby in Master Ryan’s flamboyant but legible hand.
Stella opened her eyes and saw Gerry approaching across the gallery floor.
‘Is it time for a coffee?’ she asked. ‘Have we done enough to earn it?’
Gerry nodded. He tried to put away his glasses.
‘This bloody case is too small. My legs are hanging out of the bed, so to speak.’
* * *
After they visited the museum shop they drank good coffee in sensibly sized cups – none of those steam-heated ones so heavy you couldn’t lift them, so hot you daren’t touch them to your lips. Stella had Dutch pancakes, he biscotti.
‘The last time I was here,’ she said, ‘there was an exhibition of religious relics. “A Stairway to Heaven”, it was called. Lovely gold and silver stuff. But I saw people – mostly old people – who were awestruck, not by the art but by what it contained. Bits of bone, shreds of cloth, locks of hair. You could see it in their eyes – the possibility of a cure. Their very own miracle.’
‘Utter superstition,’ said Gerry. ‘I’m sure there were enough bits of the true cross to make another Forth Rail Bridge.’
She stared at him, not wanting to continue. Instead she rummaged in her bag and produced a postcard she’d bought in the museum shop. Old Woman Reading. It was not the painting she had seen but a different one. When she’d asked for the postcard the assistant had shrugged and said they were out of it. There are many old women reading, she said.
‘Isn’t that a wonderful state of affairs,’ said Stella.
The assistant had offered her another, even better, card. An old woman, cowled in some dark material, looking down at a book. It was so lovely – the concentration in the eyes, the luminescence of the ancient face reflected from the page, the interior light from reading whatever was printed there.
She unscrewed the cap of her pen and wrote a message on the back then handed the card to Gerry for his signature. He added ‘Love Granda’ and capped and returned her pen.
‘My feet are throbbing,’ said Stella.
‘Don’t tell me you’re chickening out. The best is yet to come.’
‘What?’
‘The Vermeers. There’s three of them.’
‘Aw no.’ Stella’s head dropped to her chest. ‘A whole family?’
‘No – three paintings.’
‘Thank God. I thought there was a room for each.’
‘I want to see what Vermeer’s sesame seeds look like up close.’
‘If you drank less at lunchtime, it might help.’
‘It has no effect on me,’ said Gerry.
‘That’s the danger. You have developed a tolerance.’
‘You’d rather I was intolerant?’
‘You think you’re not that too?’
Gerry smiled and dipped his biscotti. He leaned forward to bite off the softened end.
‘That place you went this morning, down the passageway – what’s going on there? What do you want to see this woman about?’
Stella looked at him. She sipped her coffee.
‘I’m tired. I’m tired of living the way we do.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There are important questions to be answered. How can we best live our lives? How can we live good lives?’
Gerry gave a slow shrug.
‘And there’s somebody in there with the answers?’
‘No. These are questions you have to answer for yourself.’
‘Do unto others?’
‘There’s a word you never hear n
owadays, a word from my childhood – devout – I want to live a more devout life.’
‘And how do you do that?’
‘I don’t think you’d understand. If you’re not a believer. It’s to do with charity, to do with prayer. I’m just exploring.’
‘And if you find what you’re looking for?’
‘It’ll be good.’ She shrugged. ‘But I know it’ll lead to other – more difficult – questions.’
‘And where does that leave me? Us?’
‘In different places.’
When they got back to the hotel room Gerry flung himself on the bed. Stella dropped the Guardian on the sideboard and it slithered off but she couldn’t be bothered to bend and pick it up. She sank into the armchair with her legs straight out in front of her and her head flung back. Both made little noises of expiration.
Midwinter Break Page 8
