On Beauty Read online

  Howard pulled a baseball cap on to his head and hurried downstairs, Murdoch struggling behind him. In the kitchen, his children were hooking their various bags and knapsacks round their shoulders.

  ‘Wait –’ said Howard, padding his hand around the empty sideboard. ‘Where’re my car keys?’

  ‘No idea, Howard,’ said Zora callously.

  ‘Jerome? Car keys!’

  ‘Calm down.’

  ‘I’m not going to calm down – no one’s leaving until I find them.’

  In this way, Howard made everybody late. It’s strange how children, even grown children, will accept the instruction of a parent. Obediently they tore up the kitchen hunting for what Howard needed. They looked everywhere likely and then in stupid unlikely places because Howard went ballistic if anyone, for a moment, appeared to have ceased looking. The keys were nowhere.

  ‘Aw, man, I’m done with this, it’s too hot – I’m out,’ cried Levi, and left the house. A minute later he returned, having found Howard’s car keys in the door of his car.

  ‘Genius!’ cried Howard. ‘OK, come on, come on, everybody out – alarm on, everyone get keys, come on, people.’

  Out on the scorching street, Howard opened the door of his baking car by wrapping the corner of his shirt round his hand. The leather interior was so hot he had to sit on his own bag.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ said Zora, protecting her eyes from the sun with her hand. ‘Just in case you thought I was. I didn’t want to change my shift.’

  Howard smiled charitably at his daughter. It was in her nature to come across a high horse and ride it for as long as it would carry her. She was certainly riding high at the moment, for she had recast herself as the angel of mercy. It had been in her power, after all, to get both Monty and Howard fired. To Howard she had strongly suggested a sabbatical, which reprieve he had taken, gratefully. Zora had two years left at Wellington, and, the way she saw it, the college was no longer big enough for the both of them. Monty had been allowed to keep his job but not his principles. He did not contest the discretionaries and the discretionaries stayed, although Zora herself dropped out of the poetry class. These epic acts of unselfishness had lent Zora a genuinely unassailable moral superiority that she was enjoying immensely. The only cloud on her conscience was Carl. She had left the class so that he might stay, but in fact he never returned. He disappeared from Wellington altogether. By the time Zora felt brave enough to ring his cell it was out of order. She enlisted Claire’s help in trying to find him; they got his home address from the payment records, but letters sent there received no reply. When Zora dared a visit, Carl’s mother said only that he had moved out; she would say no more. She wouldn’t let Zora past the doorstep, and talked to her guardedly, apparently convinced that this light-skinned woman who spoke so properly must be a social worker or a police officer, somebody who could cause the Thomas family trouble. Five months later Zora continued to see Carl’s many doppelgängers in the street, day after day – the hoodie, the baggy jeans, the box-fresh sneakers, the big black earphones – and each time she spotted a twin she felt his name soar from her chest to her throat. Sometimes she let it out. But the boy always walked on.

  ‘Anybody for a lift into town?’ asked Howard. ‘I’m happy to drop everybody where they need to go.’

  Two minutes later Howard rolled down the passenger window and beeped his horn at his three half-naked children walking down the hill. All of them gave him the finger.

  Howard drove through Wellington and out of Wellington. He watched the blistering day undulate outside his windshield; he heard the crickets’ string section. He listened, on his car stereo, to the Lacrimosa and, like a teenager, turned it up high and kept his windows down. Swish dah dah, swish dah dah. As the music slowed, he slowed, entering Boston and meeting up with the Big Dig. He sat in its maze of unmoving cars for forty minutes. After finally emerging from a tunnel as long as life itself, Howard’s phone rang.

  ‘Howard? Smith. Gosh, it’s great you finally went and got yourself a phone. How you gittin’ on there, buddy?’

  It was Smith’s artificial voice of calm. In the past it had always worked, but recently Howard had grown better at attuning himself to the reality of his own situation.

  ‘I’m late, Smith. I’m now very late.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not rilly that bad. You’ve got time. Pah-point’s all set up there ready for you. Where you at exactly?’

  Howard gave his coordinates. A suspicious silence followed.

  ‘You know what ah’ll do?’ said Smith. ‘Just make a little announcement. And if you can get here in about twenty minutes or under, that would be just fine.’

  Thirty minutes after that call, the Big Dig spat an apoplectic Howard out into the city. Huge flowers of sweat bloomed beneath each armpit on his dark blue shirt. Panicking, Howard decided to avoid the one-way system by parking five blocks from where he needed to be. He slammed the door of the car and began to run, locking it remotely over his shoulder. He could feel sweat dribbling between his buttocks and slooshing in his sandals, readying his instep for the two water blisters that would surely have formed by the time he reached the gallery. He had given up smoking soon after Kiki walked out, but now he cursed that decision – his lungs were in no way better at coping with this exertion than they would have been five months ago. He had also put on twenty-three pounds.

  ‘The loneliness of the long-distance runner!’ called Smith, upon spotting him staggering round the corner. ‘You did it, you did it – it’s OK. Take a moment, you can take a moment.’

  Howard leaned against Smith, unable to speak.

  ‘You’re OK,’ said Smith convincingly. ‘You’re just fine.’

  ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘No, no, Howard. That is the very last thing you’re gonna do. Come on now, let’s git in.’

  They walked into the kind of air-conditioning that freezes sweat on contact. Smith led Howard by the elbow down one hallway, and then another. He stationed his charge just by a door that was slightly ajar. Through the gap Howard could see the thin slice of a podium, a table, and a jug of water with two lemon slices floating in it.

  ‘Now, to make the pah-point work, you just click the red button – it’ll be right by your hand on the podium. Each time you press that button, a new painting will appear, in the order that they’re mentioned in the lecture.’

  ‘Everybody in there?’ asked Howard.

  ‘Everybody who’s anybody,’ replied Smith and pushed open the door.

  Howard entered. Polite but fatigued applause greeted him. He stood behind the podium and apologized for his lateness. He spotted at once half a dozen people from the Art History Department, as well as Claire, Erskine, Christian and Veronica, and several of his students past and present. Jack French had brought his wife and children. Howard was touched by this support. They didn’t need to come here. In Wellington terms, he was already a dead man walking, with no book coming any time soon, surely heading for a messy divorce and on a sabbatical that looked suspiciously like the first step towards retirement. But they had come. He apologized again for his tardiness and spoke self-deprecatingly of his inexperience and inability with the technology he was about to use.

  It was halfway through this preliminary speech that Howard visualized with perfect clarity the yellow folder that remained where he had left it, on the back seat of his car, five blocks from here. Abruptly he stopped speaking and remained silent for a minute. He could hear people moving in their seats. He could smell the tang of himself strongly. What did he look like to these people? He pressed the red button. The lights began to go down, very slowly, on a dimmer, as if Howard were trying to romance his audience. He looked out across the crowd to find the man responsible for this special effect and found instead Kiki, sixth row, far right, looking up with interest at the image behind him, which was beginning to refine itself in the coming darkness. She wore a scarlet ribbon threaded through her plait, and her shoulders were bare and glea
ming.

  Howard pressed the red button again. A picture came up. He waited a minute and then pressed it once more. Another picture. He kept pressing. People appeared: angels and staalmeesters and merchants and surgeons and students and writers and peasants and kings and the artist himself. And the artist himself. And the artist himself. The man from Pomona began to nod appreciatively. Howard pressed the red button. He could hear Jack French saying to his eldest son, in his characteristically loud whisper: You see, Ralph, the order is meaningful. Howard pressed the red button. Nothing happened. He had come to the end of the line. He looked out and spotted Kiki, smiling into her lap. The rest of his audience were faintly frowning at the back wall. Howard turned his head and looked at the picture behind him.

  ‘Hendrickje Bathing, 1654,’ croaked Howard and said no more.

  On the wall, a pretty, blousy Dutch woman in a simple white smock paddled in water up to her calves. Howard’s audience looked at her and then at Howard and then at the woman once more, awaiting elucidation. The woman, for her part, looked away, coyly, into the water. She seemed to be considering whether to wade deeper. The surface of the water was dark, reflective – a cautious bather could not be certain of what lurked beneath. Howard looked at Kiki. In her face, his life. Kiki looked up suddenly at Howard – not, he thought, unkindly. Howard said nothing. Another silent minute passed. The audience began to mutter perplexedly. Howard made the picture larger on the wall, as Smith had explained to him how to do. The woman’s fleshiness filled the wall. He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt’s love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, paint heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety – chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come.

  author’s note

  Thank you to Saja Music Co. and Sony/A TV Music Publishing Ltd for permission to quote from ‘I Get Around’ by Tupac Shakur. Thank you to Faber and Faber for permission to quote from the poems ‘Imperial’ and ‘The Last Saturday in Ulster’, and also for allowing the poem ‘On Beauty’ to be reprinted in its entirety. All three poems are from the collection To a Fault by Nick Laird. Thank you to Nick himself for allowing the last poem to be Claire’s. Thank you to my brother Doc Brown for some of Carl Thomas’s imaginary lyrics.

  There are a number of real Rembrandts described in this novel, most of them on public display. (Claire is right about The Shipbuilder Jan Rijksen and His Wife Griet Jans, 1633. If you want to see that, you have to ask the Queen.) The two portraits that lead to trouble between Monty and Howard are Self-Portrait with Lace Collar, 1629, Mauritshuis, The Hague, and Self-Portrait, 1629, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. They are not as alike as the author suggests. The painting that Howard uses for his first class of the semester is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, Mauritshuis, The Hague. The painting that Katie Armstrong examines is Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1658, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; the etching is Woman on a Mound, c. 1631, Museum het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam. Howard is stared at by The Sampling Officials of the Drapers’ Guild, 1662, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. It is from Simon Schama’s detailed account of the Staalmeesters’ hermeneutic history that I draw my own sketched account. Howard has nothing at all to say about Hendrickje Bathing, 1654, National Gallery, London.

  Carlene’s Jean Hyppolite painting is also a real one and can be seen in the Centre d’Art, Haiti. The painting Kiki imagines walking down is Edward Hopper’s Road in Maine, 1914, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Howard thinks that Carl looks like Rubens’s Study of African Heads, c. 1617, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. I don’t agree.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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