The Private Side of Friendship, page 14
People tended to sit in the same seats at lectures, often with friends with whom they might conduct sotto voce conversations when they lost interest in what the lecturer was saying. Julie did not do this; although she knew most of her fellow students – there were slightly over a hundred of them on her course – she did not want to be distracted during the lecture. Now, sitting back in her seat, she paged through the notes she had taken the previous day. They were doing a segment of the course in which they looked at one particular painting in detail, chosen simply because it appealed to the lecturer. Dr Brock, who was running the course, was fond of narrative painting, with the result that he often chose subjects drawn from classical mythology. The previous day it had been a portrayal by a seventeenth-century neo-classical painter of the finding of the infant Paris. “Had that agreeable old goatherd not stumbled upon him,” he observed, “the history of the classical world would have been quite different. There would have been no Trojan War, because Paris would not have abducted Helen, and the Greek fleet would never have set sail.”
Julie wrote in her notes: “Brock suggests a category of counter-factual painting, expressing the world we would like to exist if things had been a little bit different.” She had jotted down a few examples, and then written, “But the point about mythical subjects is that they never existed anyway. Why speculate about things that had never happened in the first place and bore no relation to reality anyway? The imagination need not be constrained by historical laws.” Now, reading her notes again, she realised that she was not sure what she meant. She pencilled in a large question mark in the margin, and wrote, “Does this make sense?”
She looked up. More members of the class had arrived and were filling up the front rows of the theatre. In one of the seats immediately in front of her a young man she recognised but had never spoken to sat down. As he opened a large notebook and placed it on the desk in front of him, Julie ran her eyes over the jacket he was wearing. It was oatmeal in colour and was frayed at the cuffs. She noticed that there was a line of grease around the collar, and that the garment had about it the smell of stale sweat. It was the smell of an unwashed garment – that unmistakeable slightly rancid smell that was indistinguishable from the smell of an unwashed body. She moved back in her seat, instinctively, just as the young man turned slightly. He was still looking ahead, but she saw him now in profile and noticed his slightly retroussé nose and his untidy rug of hair. She saw one of his hands on the notebook, the nails bitten to the quick. She held her breath, momentarily disgusted. She wondered whether others noticed this – it was her sense of smell again, and she might be the only one. She was not always comfortable being able to tell who had washed and who had not.
She looked about her. In the seats in front of the young man, there were several members of the class whom she knew quite well. One of them turned and smiled at her, paying no attention to the young man. There was no wrinkling of the nose; no sign of distaste.
Dr Brock entered from a door behind the lecture podium. He was a man in his late thirties, with an aquiline nose and a patrician manner. He spoke in the careless drawl of an English public school – he had been at Harrow – overlaid with a layer of Oxford precision. He had been a research fellow at Christ Church, but had taken the post in Edinburgh, some said, because of a minor scandal involving a female undergraduate. If anything, that gave him a romantic rather than a grubby air. She had been Persian, people said, and was some relation of the Shah. Dr Brock lived in a New Town flat and gave good parties. His book on Modernism was widely quoted in the footnotes of other scholars. He had been a croquet player in Oxford, and had on two occasions played for England.
Now Dr Brock stood at the podium and brought up on the screen behind him a slide picture of the painting they were to discuss. Julie looked at it. It was a familiar image, and she had seen it many times before, although she had not paid it any particular attention.
Dr Brock began his lecture with a brief recital of facts. “Brueghel,” he said. “Pieter Breughel, a member of a family that gave us several painters. This Pieter is Brueghel the Elder, who also painted a memorable depiction of the Tower of Babel, which I imagine most of you will know.” He pointed to the screen, to the wide, Colosseum-like building that filled almost the entire canvas. “This painting, executed about 1560, only reappeared in public view in the 1930s, when it was bought by a Dutch collector, who kept it, we are told, above a stove on which he used to fry sausages. Great works of art have survived even more significant dangers, although their close shaves with damage or destruction always give us a frisson of retrospective anxiety.”
The young man sitting in front of Julie laughed. He turned in his seat, as if to share the joke. She caught his eye, and smiled weakly. She wrote in her notes: Brock says don’t keep Brueghels above frying pans. And crossed it out, feeling that it was childish. And yet she knew that she would remember the provenance of that painting because of the anecdote.
Dr Brock continued. “But enough of Babel, what I should like to talk about this morning is this painting here – also by the elder Brueghel, probably painted during the 1550s.”
The picture on the screen changed, and once again Julie recognised the image that came up. A ploughman, his back half-turned to the painter, holds his plough as it describes curved lines in the soil; to his right, the ground falls sharply to a shoreline grazed by sheep, and to a green sea, with islands. The ploughman treads lightly on the freshly cut earth – it seems that he is about to dance. The horse looks resigned, at least in its posture – we cannot see much of its head.
In the sea an elegant, three-masted ship, with only one sail unfurled, sails past a headland. The ship is in motion, but only just. Behind it is the main point of the picture, even if it occupies only a tiny part of the canvas: a naked, human leg, pointing up at the sky, upright above the surface, attached to a figure we do not see, as it has already splashed into the water.
“You will see,” said Dr Brock, “that there is a human leg disappearing beneath the surface of the sea, but still visible. Something has happened: somebody has dived down into the sea from above. That, of course, is Icarus, the son of Daedalus. He and his father have made wings for themselves to return home, but Icarus ignores his father’s advice about not flying too high. The wax that holds his feathers in place melts, and the boy falls to his death. If a painting sets out to underline a moral, it is usually pretty obvious: don’t fly too close to the sun. We all might heed that message, even if we have no immediate plans to make ourselves wings.”
The young man in front of Julie laughed quietly. Suddenly she felt sorry for him. She suspected that he might like to have friends about him to share his amusement. Things are funnier in company. But if he wanted friends, she thought, he would have to pay more attention to personal hygiene. Could she tell him that? It was said to be the one thing you couldn’t say, even to your best friend. You cannot tell people they smell. You simply can’t.
Dr Brock said, “Look at the leg. You will observe that Brueghel seems to ignore the rules of perspective here: the leg is far bigger than it should be when looked at against the size of the ship, which is only a short distance away. And I am not sure that the foreground – the ploughman and his horse – are in proportion to the middle ground, the shore and the ship. Yet the rules of perspective are there to be broken if otherwise an important element in the picture would be too small to see.
“But these are technicalities. The story of Icarus is only of moderate interest. It is a story that we all know very well, which means that a painting that simply tells it without adding much else is not going to be very memorable. This painting could be banal, but it is far from that, which makes us ask whether there is something else that the artist wants to say to us. This is the second degree meaning – the message beyond the narrative.
“And it is W. H. Auden who brings that to our attention in this case, in an ekphrastic poem that he wrote in December 1938. An ekphrastic poem is one that is inspired by another work of art – in this case, it is about a painting. ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ was written by Auden after he saw the painting in Brussels. Note the date. Europe was on the brink of war. The unspeakable was about to happen.”
The normal sounds of a lecture theatre – the faint rustle of papers, human sounds such as the clearing of throats – these all stopped. The silence, it seemed to Julie, was complete. She stared at the image on the screen – at the lithe ploughman in his inappropriate doublet; at the single human leg; at the sky, which was white and grey; at the green of the sea and of the land. She waited.
“Auden starts his poem with a bold generalisation. If you write a poem, I always think, begin it with a strong line that proposes something. About suffering, they were never wrong. That’s his first line. Who was never wrong? He goes on: The Old Masters; how well they understood/ Its human position . . .
“And that position is in the middle of ordinary things that are happening around it. Suffering, he says, takes place when people are leading their ordinary daily lives, getting on with their business. So, in this picture, Auden says, the ploughman may have heard the boy’s cry as he fell from the sky, but for him it was ‘not an important failure’. And the ‘expensive, delicate ship’ may have seen something amazing, but has somewhere to get to and sails calmly on.
“And there you have it: a profound and shocking message. Suffering is all about us. It happens under our noses, but we have somewhere to get to and we sail calmly on.”
He stopped. The silence persisted. Julie held her breath.
She leaned forward slightly, and reached out to touch the young man in front of her on the shoulder – a gentle touch, a passing tap. He looked round, surprised.
“Hi,” she said, smiling at him.
He looked puzzled.
“Just saying hello,” she said.
He grinned, and turned back to his notebook.
“Just think about it,” said Dr Brock.
After the lecture, Julie had a couple of hours to kill before a tutorial at twelve. There was an essay to write, and she should have gone to the library to work on that, but she felt unsettled. It was a fine morning, and the sky above the city was clear of cloud. If she were to walk down to the National Gallery of Scotland, that would take twenty minutes or so. She could then spend an hour looking at paintings, and return in time for the tutorial. It was putting off the essay, but there was time enough for that the following day, when she had no classes.
She thought of what had been said in the lecture. The Auden poem was absolutely right: the message about suffering was there, underneath the depiction of the pastoral scene, but she felt that she would have been unaware of it had it not been pointed out to her. That had happened to her so often – before she had learned how to read the references that painters used. She had been given a dictionary of subject and symbol in art, and that had changed everything.
She made her way towards George IV Bridge. Her thoughts turned now to the flat, and about how well the sharing arrangements were working. She and Georgia were closer now, and Angela seemed to have got over her initial reservations about Georgia. Both of the other young women seemed to get on well enough with Neil and Ian, and with James too, although they saw very little of him. She herself liked Ian, but felt that she was never likely to get particularly close to him. It was different with Neil. He was more outgoing and she found him rather intriguing. At times his manner was almost flirtatious, but she felt that this was misleading. There were some people who gave the impression they were interested when they were not. Sometimes it was just the way they talked, as was the case with some Glaswegians, who could sound as if they were about to start a fight or proposition you – one could take one’s pick of intentions. She grinned at the impermissible thought; she knew she should not even think such a thing.
She passed the entrance to Greyfriars Kirk. Scotland’s religious history was everywhere, she thought; Greyfriars kirkyard housed a monument to the Covenanters, who stood out against an attempt to compromise their strict reformation, and were prepared to die in the process. Scotland’s history was so bloody, with scheming and warring nobles and wild, unruly Highland clans. That had all been swept away by the passage of centuries, but she felt that some of the violence had not been entirely eradicated. It was still there, she thought, like a recalcitrant stain on an item of clothing; still there in the newspaper pictures of the picket lines of miners and police staring at one another – tinder that was only too ready to be ignited. She thought of suffering, and its curious banality; it persisted, surviving all our attempts to consign it to the past; closer to us than we imagined, the backdrop to our innocent activities, our lack of attention. Nobody would notice Icarus falling, even today; he would simply be another microlight casualty, nothing more than that. She thought for a moment of how the myth might be told today: Daedalus gives his son, Icarus, a hang-glider. He warns him that he should avoid flying too high, where strong winds might collapse the structure. Icarus is a daredevil, though, and ignores the advice. The hang-glider suffers structural failure and he falls into the sea. She smiled to herself. That was the beauty of Greek myths – their message being universal, they could very easily be adapted to any age and any setting.
She stopped. A short distance ahead of her, she saw James crossing the road. He was with someone – a young woman – and when he reached the pavement, he and his companion made their way into a large coffee bar, popular with students. For a few seconds, she wondered whether she had been mistaken, but she decided that it had definitely been James. The young woman with him was the girl Mrs Donald had sent to ask about the room, she thought. It was definitely her; it was the apprentice chef, Lizzie, from the North British Hotel – the woman who was seemingly so good at making mayonnaise. Julie was surprised; James had not been in the flat when Lizzie had come round to ask about the room, and she could not think of how the two of them might have met. Then she remembered that James had said something about taking mail round to Mrs Donald, and Lizzie, she knew, was employed there as an occasional cleaner.
Julie was suddenly curious. Were they on a date? They seemed an unlikely couple: the urbane New Yorker, with his expensive education, and this rather ordinary young Scotswoman with her apprenticeship and her mayonnaise. They came from two quite different worlds.
And yet, why else would they be going into the coffee bar together? She struggled: it was none of her business – she understood that – but at the same time it was perfectly natural to be curious about the people with whom one shared a flat. And there was no harm in satisfying her curiosity in a discreet fashion. They would not see her if she slipped into the coffee bar after them, and, even if they saw her, there would be nothing to explain: if what they were doing was none of Julie’s business, then what she for her part was doing was no concern of theirs.
The coffee bar, stretching the full depth of the solid tenement building, consisted of several large rooms, one of which, being L-shaped, made for a quite separate area at the back. It was busy, and as usual full of students, who were capable of spinning a single cup of coffee out over a period of two hours or more, while they read or wrote their essays at the café’s pine tables. It was noisy – full of the sound of a score of different conversations, each vying with one another to be heard.
While she ordered her coffee, Julie glanced over her shoulder to where the two of them were sitting, at the far end of the room. They had found a free table and had claimed it, their chairs drawn in close together.
She found a place at a table that was already occupied, but at which there were two spare seats. The current occupants made it clear that they did not mind her joining them. “This place gets too busy sometimes,” said one of them, a thin young man with scholarly round spectacles.
“And too noisy,” said his companion, a small, rather mousey young woman with a pedantic, slightly disapproving style of speaking.
Julie made a non-committal response. It was not that she did not want to join a conversation; her focus was on what was happening at a table on the other side of the room. James was sitting forward in his seat, talking to Lizzie with the intensity of one who has something important to say. Even had they not been holding hands across the table, it would have been impossible to form any impression other than that these two were lovers.
Julie brought her gaze back to her own table – to the cup of coffee steaming before her. She lifted it to her lips before stealing another quick glance at James and Lizzie. Why should she be surprised? Lizzie was an attractive young woman, whose occupation as an apprentice chef was rather different from what one expected of people in this part of town, who were mainly students. And for his part, James had the glamour of the exotic – a New Yorker, far from home, a philosopher, good-looking in a fairly conventional way.
She reflected that in the last few weeks she had seen very little of James. He seemed to keep different hours from everybody else in the flat, and when he was in he tended to sequester himself in his flat. He had a dissertation to write, of course – he had tried to explain to her what it was about but she had found it difficult to disentangle the technical terminology. He had sensed this, and had said, with a slightly mischievous smile, “It’s about philosophy, actually.” And she had returned the smile, and said, “I see.” Now she wondered why James had not said anything about seeing Lizzie. It occurred to her that he might be ashamed of her; they were a group of people who had at least one thing in common: they were all students. He might think that Lizzie was somehow beneath them intellectually; he might even imagine that their view would be that he was somehow taking advantage of this less worldly girl; that his interest would be in conquest, rather than in an equal relationship. She did not think it likely that he thought this, as he seemed a very straightforward, unpretentious person, who would not be concerned about his image or the way that others might think of him.
