Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I had agreed to look after the gallery for a week. Pierre, called south by some client or other, had phoned, asking whether I’d mind looking after the place. I said yes straight away. Being really very pregnant by then, I wasn’t working and had time on my hands: spending it amongst beautiful, unknown things suited me down to the ground. The work wouldn’t be burdensome, he said. Apparently the gallery attracted very few clients.

Pierre and I hadn’t seen each other for a while, communication progressively diminishing to e-mails and the odd phone call. We were still on ‘good terms’ as it were, it was simply that contact had become strained – as though for each of us the other had developed angles that no longer fitted comfortably. We’d never discussed this change openly, both hoping, I suppose, that things would smooth out of their own accord. I retained a vague memory of his gallery, having been present for the opening five months ago, though I hadn’t had any reason or real inclination to go back since. The event wasn’t spectacular in any way – simply reuniting a few old acquaintances with a few rather ill-matching antiques playing the part of extras – but the shadowy, high-ceilinged room had an old, noble feeling to it, and unusual acoustics that polished, somehow, the most banal utterances.

The night before Pierre’s departure he dropped round to give me the keys and a list of instructions concerning lights, security codes and so on. It’s true that we hadn’t met face to face for some time, but not long enough to explain the change I sensed in him. My first impression was that he was simply odder than ever. But it wasn’t quite that. His old eccentricities remained: his way of lighting on any malleable object within reach and folding or moulding it (depending on its substance) until it achieved edges or corners; his tendency to finish sentences very precisely, but with his gaze fixed on some far-distant object; his clothes, always well cut but never ironed… No, there was something else. Something seemed to be affecting him from without, as it were. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and, aware of my tendency to get stuck in endless conjectures – a habit that seemed accentuated by my physical state at the time – I decided to put the question to one side. I didn’t have much to work on anyway; Pierre was in such a rush that he left after twenty minutes. That would have to be that for the moment.

I arrived early on Monday – that is, before ten, Pierre’s usual opening time. I was strangely excited, as though I was about to sit an exam or something. How ridiculous, I said to myself, surely you’re past all that now. The entrance door to the gallery was surprisingly heavy. Flustered, I giggled nervously as I almost fell headlong into the room, having tripped over the doormat. The door swung back behind me. The gallery was dark. Ah, yes, the shutter. I turned back towards the door and fumbled across the wall in search of the ‘protuberant oblong switch’ I had to turn to lift it. Ah, got it. Turn to the left, he’d noted. A grating sound started up, making me jump. Light began to filter in; not direct light – the gallery was on the wrong side of the street for that – but light all the same, and gradually what had been glints and variegated patches of shadow became individual objects. The grating sound stopped. I released the switch and checked that the door was shut behind me.

Having turned on the lights, and worked out the heating system, I paused in the doorway that opened onto the gallery from the back room which served as kitchen, storeroom and so on. The silence was total, broken only by my breathing and the occasional glug of the boiler. Despite the spotlights, the room remained soft and shadowy. They were positioned so high that the objects they targeted were bathed in a yellowy, diffused light that spread beyond them, drawing others into their soft-edged circles.

“Do rearrange things, if you can,” Pierre had said, rather oddly I thought, the ‘if you can’ – though pronounced just as ‘if you like’ would have been – carrying something quite different with it. What could I move… I leant back against the doorframe and considered the space. The little Georgian side table. Surely it should be pulled out a bit, rather than being left in a corner, almost completely obscured by that great desk. It was such a delicate, crooked thing. I walked over and picked up the limestone lamp stand sitting on top of it. To my surprise, the smooth, sculpted surface was warm to the touch. There was no heater near by, and anyway the system was only just starting up. Were my hands that cold? I put the stand on the step that led up to the shop front. With daylight coming from behind, the stone’s greenish glow intensified – sharpening to become almost acidic. I bent down to turn it to the left and bring the embossed flowers at the head of a twisting vine to face me. The stone was now ice-cold. How peculiar, I thought, hurriedly standing up again. Well, back to the table. I pulled it out a good thirty centimetres or so, admiring the slight irregularity of its eight sides, and the way it rocked slightly on it’s one polished leg. There, now it was visible at least, and much better lit. I stepped back to check the effect of my alteration from other angles. No, that wouldn’t do at all. Something about the light now reflected off the tabletop rendered the surface coarse and granular, as though the varnish had been mixed with sand or concrete dust. What was more, the desk to the left of the table and the painting to the right appeared to have been pushed back into the walls; to have shrunk beneath a veil of shadow. I walked over and pushed the side table back. Something was missing. Ah yes, the lamp stand. I picked it up, paying particular attention to the temperature of the stone. Yes, it was still ice-cold. As I lifted it and turned back towards the table however, it warmed. Not just because of my touch: I’m sure of it – from within.

It may seem peculiar to spend so long describing not only a simple, but failed manoeuvre, but the event was more significant than I first imagined. Over the next two days I tried again and again to effectuate such slight changes in the gallery, and each time something checked me; something not aesthetic, as such – often the changes I attempted would have occurred to anyone with the slightest sense of proportion – but other; something inexplicable and yet necessary, bound to an order beyond my comprehension.

I couldn’t quite explain why, but the bits of furniture, paintings, candle holders and so on – though dating from diverse periods – seemed strangely homogenous, bound together like the organs of some enormous and resolutely inorganic being. It was as if the slightest modification of the spatial position of one object affected all the others, irremediably disrupting something integral to the collection as it was. Having studied Pierre’s lists of all objects bought and of those presented for sale on the part of someone else, I had soon realized that those on display in the gallery all came from the same place, the Château du Puits, in the Languedoc region. The seller’s name, however, was absent, the only indication given being a capitalized ‘M’. I couldn’t help but be curious concerning this unidentifiable seller, but search as I might I found no further information concerning him, not even a mention of the castle on the internet which usually throws something up. What was it – or perhaps, what had it been – about this man that had impregnated each object he possessed with such a particular feel? Did the castle still exist? Did he have no family desirous of inheriting his eclectic collection? The underlying question, however, was the following: why devote the gallery to him? It wasn’t that Pierre had nothing else to sell – the backroom was crammed full of paintings, chairs, chandeliers and so on – indeed it was amazing the way he’d managed to fit them all into such a small space.

I spent quite a while in the back room studying these objects, many of which were strikingly beautiful, although as a group you had to admit that they were ill-assorted (typical of Pierre, I thought). I was particularly drawn to a couple of white marble statues – two busts, one male, one female – that seemed to form a pair, and I tried to introduce them into the gallery, positioning them side by side on a glass art-deco side table, just in front of a great gilt mirror that reflected light back through them, bringing out each vein, each irregularity in the stone. What attracted me about them was that they didn’t seem joined in any way other than that of form. Sculpted as they were, their gazes could never meet. But positioned there, they became both terribly fragile and terribly dangerous, the weight of the almost transparent stone seeming to bear down into the glass to such an extent that I expected, at any moment, to see it crack. I soon returned them to the back room.

Was the peculiarly static nature of the presented collection responsible for Pierre’s failure to sell anything? What would happen, I wondered, if one object was removed? Would the others crumble, turn to dust, or just retract into themselves to such an extent that they became completely closed, devoid of interest, even to the most penetrating eye? I tried to call Pierre, to find out more about the provenance of the collection, intending to pose subtler questions concerning their existence in the gallery, but in vain. He simply didn’t answer. I wished that I’d been concerned less with his mannerisms and more with what he’d said concerning his destination. I couldn’t even recall the name of a town or village, let alone that of a hotel.

On the fourth day, the first visitor appeared. I say visitor, because the word ‘client’ didn’t seem to suit him, to the point of seeming inappropriate. To be honest, I wasn’t sure about letting him in at all to start off with, but despite the odd combination of his jerky facial expressions and the supple slowness of his bodily movements, he was terribly well dressed, and rang the doorbell in a way that suggested that he had been to the gallery before. He didn’t seem particularly perturbed by the fact that I’d replaced Pierre as host, and after a brief, wordless greeting, expressed more by his eyebrows than by his eyes, he made his way directly to a high-legged cupboard, situated towards the back of the gallery.

“Still here…” he murmured, opening one of the cupboard doors, and pausing to contemplate the row of tiny, intricately painted drawers his hand had exposed. Not sure whether he was addressing me or the cupboard, I kept quiet. He peered in, and removed one of the lower, deeper drawers – so slowly that I wondered if it had got stuck – revealing the door of a hidden compartment at the back. His left hand reached towards it, but his undulating, almost knuckle-less fingers hesitated before the worn red velvet. It was as though he was contemplating the lid of his own tomb, I thought to myself. As his hand hovered, I wondered if that impression held a more general truth: isn’t the desire to find the perfect form; the receptacle best suited to the shape of their soul, the desire of every true collector? Or can it happen, as in the case of the collection here in the gallery, that objects sometimes, when united by a hand distinctive enough, bind to such an extent that the ‘form’ exists between them? The visitor turned his head with astonishing speed. “Well, any developments…?”

I was a little perplexed. “Oh, it hasn’t been sold,” I said, confusedly.

He drew himself up, replacing the drawer without even looking at the cupboard. “Madam,” he said, “that wasn’t quite my point.” His eyebrows were now moving at such speed that I was finding him increasingly hard to follow. My efforts were pointless, anyway, because shortly he drew his coat round him, gave the cupboard one last piercing glance, and left. Almost. Before the door shut he doubled back, a looming exaggeration of the doorframe. “Do let me know.”

I had to sit down, after that.

I suppose I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, the light had dropped quite dramatically. I blinked a couple of times, and switched on the desk light. The objects in the gallery seemed to have gained weight during my ‘absence’. So had I: perhaps it was the baby. Or was it just that the air had thickened? I’d had enough of this. I was going to break this bizarre, macabre spell that hung over the gallery. I drew myself up with some difficulty. Right, what could I do. My gaze wandered over the objects in front of me. They remained as blank as ever, locked into their private communication and I began to despair of ever finding the key necessary to break into it. Then my eyes lit on a black stone relief representing a man cut off at the waist in what appeared to be a sculptor’s studio. His face was proud – arrogant even – and his eyes were lowered, directed to some point on the little Georgian table I had paid so much attention to on the day of my arrival. I had been strangely repelled by this object from the first, and now, feeling somewhat strained, I imagined that the man’s lips had twitched up, mockingly.

Right, I thought, here we go. I hardly knew what I was doing, but I drew myself up and proceeded instinctively into the back room, where I dusted the female bust, kissed its cold forehead, carried it back into the gallery, and placed it just where the embossed figure’s gaze landed. Their eyes met.

Now I just had to wait. I went back to the desk and filed some bills that had piled up in one of the drawers. It may just have been my own nervousness, but the atmosphere in the room seemed increasingly tense. Seven o’clock. It was a relief to get outside. I activated the alarm, locked the door and set off home, breathing deeply and soaking up the last bit of sun. No chance of getting any sleep that night though. I tossed and turned, incapable of finding a comfortable position, finally giving up altogether and heading for the kitchen to drink tea, read magazines and doze. It was about six in the morning when the phone rang. The police. The gallery. What? An alarm had gone off? Was it a burglary? They couldn’t be sure, but I’d better get down there as quickly as possible. I pulled on the clothes I’d been wearing the day before and hurried out.

The sun wasn’t yet up, but the sky was paling, the air so thin it seemed barely breathable. The silence too, was glass-like, its surface untouched, untouchable. It was only when I reached the gallery that a bit of pink became visible, drawn over the horizon by the strengthening bird-song.

A policeman was standing in the doorway, contemplating the street. “Well, Madam, you’d better come in and have a look. See if anything’s missing.” “There are no signs of a break in?” I asked. “No, Madam, not that we’ve come across yet. Looks like there’s been a bit of a breakage, though.”

I crossed the threshold. The shutters had already been opened. I turned instinctively to the black stone relief. It had cracked in two. Horizontally. Right through the man’s eyes. The lower section had fallen, smashing an enormous Chinese jardinière. The piece of stone now propped against the wall had remained intact; it wasn’t even chipped. Forehead-less, the man’s body seemed quite different, his chest swollen somehow. His hands… had they always been held up in that supplicating way?

I became aware of the policeman who was coughing discretely at my side.

“So sorry,” I mumbled, adding “no, nothing missing, just a breakage”, having glanced briefly around the room.

“Sign here please,” was the next thing I heard, and then, still standing, with what I presumed to be a document for the insurance company in one hand, I realized I was alone. I leant back against the desk. The bust. Are you sure? No, it hadn’t moved. It seemed most definitely whiter though. Was I seeing things? The only thing to do was to check: I’d try putting the other one next to it. I went and fished it out from amongst the jumble in the back room. Side by side, there was no doubt about it, the marble in which the female figure had been cut seemed to have been bleached. With strain? I wondered, and shook my head. Suddenly I wasn’t even sure that they’d been the same colour to start off with. Time for some cleaning, I thought, feeling completely muddle-headed.

I swept up the broken porcelain, which took me hours, the fragments had been scattered so far, and shifted the broken bit of black stone into the back room, slotting it behind the sink. I then unhooked the slim top section of stone still hanging, and, having considered the matter for a while, decided to store it somewhere else, that somewhere else having to be the loo.

With these objects removed, the gallery seemed completely bare. It had lost that heavy, strained feeling I had grown so accustomed to over the last few days. Having removed the busts, I pulled the little Georgian table into the position previously occupied by the jardinière. Then I put them back on top. Suddenly I was exhausted. I collapsed into the great armchair behind the desk. What a week.

It was then that I noticed something I knew I could not be mistaken about. The eyes of the two busts now met, their gazes held taut somewhere in the projected octagonal of the rickety table. I shut my eyes.

The next thing I heard was the sound of the doorbell. “Pierre!” Rather red in the face, I ran to open the door. He looked exhausted too. “Back early!” he said, stepping inside. Suddenly he stopped and looked around.

“My God, you’ve done it,” he exclaimed.

We shut the gallery and went to have a coffee – which we both needed pretty badly – at a table at the café next door.

Having heard my rather confused and probably fantastical-sounding account of the last few days, Pierre told me about his own trip. His main objective had been to pick up a set of extremely rare Louis XIV chairs, but as the whole process had taken much less time than expected, he decided to call on the person behind the unexplained ‘M’ in his books in order to discuss the difficulties he was having selling the collection. This person was the middle-aged daughter of the deceased M. The most startling of this man’s apparently numerous oddities was the formal reduction of his name to that letter of the alphabet, hence the notation adopted in the notebook. Pierre had never met him, and only one portrait of him existed, the only object associated with him retained by the daughter. This portrayed him at around seventy, shortly before he died, sitting before an open window with his back to the light, holding in his right hand the first object of his collection: a jade box. The daughter had been very welcoming, despite the preparations for her move (she’d recently married a wealthy Italian and was off the next morning, having disposed of her past, to join him in Florence) and although she categorically refused to retrieve the objects deposited for sale with Pierre, she offered him a room for the night before his long drive back to Paris. Very early the following morning, Pierre was woken by a piercing ‘my God!’ from below. He dressed as quickly as he could and ran downstairs. The daughter was standing, white as a sheet, before the portrait of her father. The small jade box had simply disappeared. Not completely, Pierre added, careful to be precise – a vague, ghostlike form did remain – but it was as though the object had been rubbed out. What was more, according to the daughter the old man’s expression had changed; softened somehow; he no longer, in her words, appeared to be ‘peering out’ from behind it. Pierre drew his breath.

“Impossible!” We both burst out laughing.

Sunk back deep in my chair, I watched Pierre as he laughed, his eyebrows whisking up as though about to take off. His face, too, had softened. The father of my child. Would the baby laugh like that? My eyes dropped to the clinking table which was rocking dangerously due to the uncontrolled jerks of Pierre’s knees. There were his hands. I remembered the silky smoothness of the scar on his left wrist. There was something hovering between his thumbs and index fingers as usual. But – my goodness – it was round!