He remembered her hand holding, her quick grip. But
never here.
Inside the main gallery, she pulled him towards the far wall.
“The Ulysses!” she said. “The storm clouds, the Sirens, all
the fleshy bodies on the boat. I still love it. Don’t you too?”
He felt for his watch and rubbed at the strap.
“I don’t remember ever loving it,” he said. “I don’t remember it.”
“But you must. How can you forget something so vast?”
He didn’t answer straightaway.
“I remember the long afternoons in the Museum Gardens,
sipping cider,” he said. “And HMV. We flicked through records
at HMV.”
“Yes. True, true,” she said. “But we came and stood here in
front of this painting too. And we loved it.”
She touched his hand. He looked across the wild waves in
the painting, the Sirens and the scattered skeletons of sailors.
“Did we?” he said.
“Mmmhmm. Loved it.”
She tapped her foot on the steel wire strung tight in front of
the paintings.
“Maybe you just don’t know how to look back,” she said. She
tilted her head and picked at her lips. “Or maybe you just don’t
know how to look.”
In the smallest room in the gallery, in the room called The
Void, there were Georgian paintings of dining rooms and living rooms, of tables laid for dinner, high backed armchairs,
mantelpieces lined with china birds and figurines. There were
watercolour portraits too. He liked that you had to lean in and
look closely to see the details. They were all neatly signed by
Mary Ellen Best.
“A painting is a painting,” said Rose.
“Is it?” he said. “A painting is a painting?”
She hadn’t said that in front of the huge fleshy Ettys and
those dark, dark, horizons.