Glover’s Mistake

She leant against the steel sink, peering out of the window, and David stood beside her and followed her gaze down to the lit squares of distant kitchens, the empty trays of pale grey garden.

‘If I lived here I’d spend all my time looking at this view.’

He helped her off with her yellow wool coat, and she was tiny inside it and dressed, as expected, in black. He felt he’d removed the protective cover of something and was inspecting the intricate machinery. There was something raw and breakable about her. Things had not, David knew, been going at all well. In New York someone called Paolo had broken her heart.

‘It’s great you could come round.’

‘Oh, I have vast amounts of free time. New city, no social life. And didn’t we have fun in Larry’s club?’

‘Do you remember that basement bar afterwards? With all the bikers?’

‘They sang “Happy Birthday” to the barmaid.’

Glover left to change out of his work clothes, and David felt a pang in case his flatmate missed something, some further evidence of how close they were. Yet when he looked back to Ruth he could think of nothing to say. He eased out the cork with a pristine cluck. It would take some time to remember how they fitted together. She was reading a poem on the door of the fridge, standing with her hands on her hips as if she might start stretching. Her hairstyle was shorter, blonder, straighter-edged, the clothes more fitted; it was as if the focus had been sharpened.

‘So what have they actually got you doing, then, as artist-in-residence?’

David had served up the pasta bake, cut the baguette, forked out the spinach and rocket salad, and now stood holding the back of a kitchen chair, rocking gently on the balls of his feet. He felt curiously passive and wanted to exert some dominion over the room.

‘Walter’s organized this great flat in the Barbican, and a studio ten minutes away. As a space it’s wonderful, this washed-out English light coming through the skylights—it’s an old factory of some type, though I’m not sure what it made.’ She frowned at the mystery of industry.

‘But what are you going to make?’ Glover said, pouring more wine. The confidence with which he addressed her struck David as slightly presumptuous. He wasn’t even supposed to be in tonight. He was meant to be at work.

‘Which reminds me,’ David said, ‘we should talk about our project at some point.’

‘I can’t think about that at the moment.’ She gave a little shiver of her shoulders, and David tried hard to keep smiling. ‘I’ve got a million things to do right now. Did I tell you they’re doing a retrospective here in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts? And yesterday I spent three hours talking to students, though that was actually kind of fun. I forgot about that.’ She threw David a wide-eyed glance, and he looked away. Each time his eyes met hers he felt a charge of something, a little rolling emotion that would gather, if he let it, to an avalanche.

‘I was very young, of course, when I taught David—not much older than him, really.’

You were twelve years older, a small, uncharitable part of him wanted to say, exactly the same as you are now.

‘David’s teacher. So it’s you we should blame.’ In his laughter, Glover’s eyes became two slits in his face, two scars.

‘Not all the blame, I hope.’

David felt an uncomfortable passivity again. The oven had made the kitchen hot and he hoisted up the steamy sash window behind the sink; immediately September began to cool the room.

‘You only taught me for a few months, and to be honest,’ he laughed—at what he wasn’t sure, ‘I think the damage was already done.’

They were christened that evening. After dinner they adjourned to the living room and Ruth’s phone rang. At the sound Ruth looked sulkily around her, then lifted her canvas bag from the foot of the sofa and began to go through it, extracting an overstuffed black leather wallet, two purple silk-bound notepads, a hardback of Chekhov minus its dust jacket, a small Maglite torch, a silver glasses case, and then a phone the size and shape of a silver glasses case.

‘Her mobile’s not very mobile.’

‘It must be twenty years old.’

Ruth ignored them, wincing at the screen before answering it.

‘Hi, Karen, hi…No, that was from earlier. I straightened it out. I just didn’t know which form they meant…Right…No, I’m with a friend…No, I’m at the boys’ flat…Yes, tomorrow’s fine…Okay, great.’ She plunged the phone back in her bag. David realized she’d hung up without saying goodbye.

‘The boys?’ he asked.

After broaching a bottle of Amaretto that Glover located under the sink, Ruth announced that she was going to the National Gallery the next afternoon.

‘Is there something in particular you have to do?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, not really. I want to drop in and take a look at a few pictures, and then go somewhere else and think about them.’

Glover slapped his hand loudly against his chest in the gesture of allegiance. ‘Well, I’ve got to work, but David’s free, aren’t you?’ There was a hint of laughter behind his voice; he didn’t even understand that David would want to go.

‘I could check online and see what exhibition’s showing.’ ‘Or we could let it surprise us,’ Ruth said. David thrilled a little at that us.

‘You should drop into the Bell afterwards, sit and have a proper think about those pictures.’

David thought Ruth might take offence, but Glover had judged it finely. Through it all he possessed a firm sense of what people wanted from him.

The evening was out of the ordinary. David felt good. Here was difference and it was fine. Ruth on his sofa. An artist. An American. A woman. When Glover rang her a cab before heading, finally, to bed, there were just the two of them at last. David half-hoped and half-feared that a further intimacy would develop—as if now they’d lean in close and start declaring the stark facts of their lives—but it turned out Glover’s absence bred a vague uneasiness. When he disappeared, the strain of carrying on a one-to-one took hold, and Ruth checked her watch, then leant her chin on her hand, spacing four fingers along her jaw. David imagined them on his fleshy back, indenting. They were waiting for the buzzer and when it eventually went, they both started slightly, relieved. A chaste kiss on her hot cheek and she vanished. In bed he noticed, for the very first time, how the galaxies of Artex on his ceiling all swirled clockwise.

With a capital A

Raining when he woke, and so dark he thought it must still be night. Footsteps scuffled on the stairs and the front door banged: Glover was leaving for work. It was already after ten. A sheet of A4 on the kitchen table:

D, Thanks for dinner. Did you like the way I set you up? I’m on till six if you want to pop in later. God Save The Queen, J

The sign-off was a rejoinder to Who Dares Wins, which David had used on a note about milk and toilet roll a few days ago. It had been proverbs until recently. Had he set him up? Did he mean he’d set up a date with Ruth for him? Or did he mean he’d tricked him into going? David didn’t know. He crumpled up the note and dropped it in the pedal bin.

They’d agreed to meet outside the National Gallery at two, and he arrived ten minutes early. The rain had eased but not stopped, and the vista from the portico was still uniquely uninspiring: London done by Whistler, arranged in black and grey. Ragged, pewter clouds turned on Nelson’s head, so that he alone was all that held the heavens up. Lutyens’s limestone fountains were blown to spray and rain danced on the surface of their pools in time to the Cocteau Twins’ ‘Iceblink Luck’. Everything today had kept rhythm with the tunes on his iPod: the shunting of his tube carriage through its rock-wall galleries had accompanied The Clash, his footsteps on the underpass at Charing Cross had syncopated perfectly with the Blind Boys of Alabama. And now not even the Great British weather could puncture his mood. He was thinking about Ruth.

He had not been a success at Goldsmiths. Too shy and self-conscious in groups, he had fastened to students who showed him kindness and then been peeled, not kindly, off. Slowly he found a few friends with corners, who like him were awkward, and whose expectations had been comparably reduced. There was Adam, a tiny, witch-faced historian with a tinny, nasal voice; Michelle, a chubby goth who smoked all the time and looked skywards when someone addressed her; and a gentle nervous Chinese boy called Wu, who was almost certainly gay and had, David learnt from the alumnus magazine, hanged himself three years ago. He tried not to think of that time in his life. It was all too ambiguous, shameful and strange. He’d been vengeful then and quick to take umbrage, had found refuge in books and movies, and as a general policy scorned the world. It was only since he’d begun teaching himself and had made his own students laugh that he’d realized misanthropy could be taken for wit, and had found some semblance of pleasure in anger and cynicism.

But he still remembered anyone who’d once been nice to him, and that morning had pulled two cardboard boxes out from under his bed. It was a blue file, its spine entitled From Easter Island to Henry Moore—Versions of the Human. On the inside flap he’d written: Ruth Marks, Visiting Artist—Introductory Module on Sculpture. As he flipped through it, what came to mind was the moment he’d first seen her. He had slid, a few minutes late, into the back row. In various dark layers, with a black headscarf over her blonde hair, the new lecturer was gripping each side of the podium as if she might fall. She had huge dark eyes, deepened with a ring of kohl, and spoke with excessive solemnity, trying to convince them that she was a serious proposition. The sobriety, though, couldn’t stay completely intact. Her voice would crack with emphasis, she’d accidentally enthuse. She had an ardour that came with practising the art, a passion the professional tutors had lost.

David’s own journey to art, or Art as he always thought of it, had been a wrong turning. He was never quite sure why he’d been accepted onto the foundation course in the first place. Even now he was embarrassed by the sight of a watercolour from his A-level year that still hung in his parents’ downstairs toilet: an acid-green sky against which a singular figure in black trekked over the crest of a mountain. All his work had featured a lone individual in a vast backdrop, and only recently had he realized the link with the image of the sage on the mountainside, of Jesus or Muhammad in the desert, of Buddha by himself beneath the Bodhi Tree. He too, David Pinner, had been looking for enlightenment. And it had come, after a fashion: at Goldsmiths he met real artists, those whose panicked relationship with their materials betrayed not a fear of mediocrity, of exposure, as his did, but a recurring, unanswerable compulsion.

He pretended for a while; then stopped pretending. After one of Ruth’s lectures, he decided to stay behind and tell her he was changing courses. The hall’s draughty windows were mirrorbacked by the darkness of the winter afternoon, and stirred with his reflection as he walked towards the front. His steps echoed. Her hair in two Teutonic plaits, Ruth rustled across the stage in a madeira hippy skirt with tassels and small round mirrors sewn into it. She was folding her notes, too tightly to use again, scrunching them into a paper bolt.

‘Ms Marks?’

She looked up, mustered a smile. ‘Ruth. Please.’

‘Ruth. Hi. I wanted to say firstly that I’m finding your course really fascinating—’

She gave a rueful little laugh; the tassels swished as she moved towards her bag. ‘Well, isn’t that kind. I wish they all felt like you do.’

Some of the students had left, noisily, during the lecture. Ruth sometimes got lost in her text and repeated herself. Other times she simply stopped and stared over their heads.

‘Oh, they just want to get home. It happens on Friday afternoons.’

‘Really?’

David nodded bravely, saddened by his fellow undergraduates’ priorities.

‘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 him.’

David, who had heard the story before, had seen Irene for himself. She’d had her pack of Dunhills propped open beside her and was filling in a puzzle book, pencil poised, one eye screwed shut against the thread of smoke unspooling from the fag clamped between her lips. The mouth itself was caved in and gummy like a tortoise’s. The smoke, and her thinness, had left the impression she might actually be evaporating. Helmeted with a lavender-grey perm, draped in a shapeless maroon cardigan, she had an untied lace on one of her child-sized Adidas trainers, and the loose, lank, trailing thing struck David as desperately sad. The thin gold wedding ring on her finger was not a symbol of devotion but a statement of loss: it said what you love you will lose, and for ever. When she’d shambled to the bar and bought some cheese and onion crisps, the whole effect was somewhat spoiled. According to Glover, Ray had been an absolute bastard: he said Tom had always called him Wifebeater No 1, which led David to presume there were others.

Ruth was meeting Larry at eight, so David walked her down to the cab office on Greek Street. As he kissed her goodbye he pressed his fingertips, ever so gently, against the small of her back. When he got home he googled disegno and wrote an entry about it on The Damp Review. It was the Italian word for drawing but meant, apparently, much more than that. As Michelangelo had perfected it, disegno was a sublime kind of problem-solving, and the work of art an ideal solution, reconciling the often conflicting demands of function, material, subject, verisimilitude, expressivity…David got bored with typing the list out, and cut and pasted the rest of it…formal beauty, unity and variety, freedom and restraint, invention and respect for tradition. He also posted a second entry prescribing a trip to the National Gallery for anyone bored with shopping, or Hollywood, or crappy weekend newspaper supplements.

Collective nouns

On The Damp Review David posted critiques of films mostly but also his thoughts about books, TV shows, plays, restaurants, takeaways, whatever took his fancy. Or didn’t. He found it easier to write on disappointments. Hatreds, easier still. And it was his: they might have the television, the newspapers, the books, but the internet was his. Democratic, public, anonymous—it was his country and he felt grateful to be born in the generation that inherited it. He didn’t tell his family or friends about his site. Not even Glover knew what he got up to in his bedroom.

He’d begun another little project recently, gathering information on all the people he’d lost touch with over the years. He didn’t contact anyone directly but followed the footprints they left on their strolls through the virtual world. His nemesis from primary school had become a scuba instructor in the Virgin Islands. He found some photos on Rory’s brother’s Flickr account that showed a burnished and shaggy dropout hoisting a tank of air, thick-skinned as a seal in his wetsuit. David and he had been love rivals for Elizabeth S——, who he also found, eventually, on Facebook. She had retained her tragic, android beauty, though she was now holding a kid of her own.

He’d joined Friends Reunited under the pretence of being another boy from his class, the only person he’d ever hit, now a leading banking litigator. David took his bio from the law firm’s website, where a photo showed him still to be the vulnerable and round-eyed, slope-shouldered boy he’d known. Then he searched MySpace for students at PMP, the private college where he taught, at the same time as checking Arts & Letters Daily, where he found an interesting article on the life of Chaucer. He printed out eight copies for his A-level group and was trying to staple the sheets together when he heard Glover come in from church.