The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [73]
"Oh yes, that's right," said Nick, like a schoolteacher pleased by the mere fact of a child's interest, and leaving questions of taste for much later. "Well, for that you only have to go to St Paul's Cathedral."
Mrs Charles took this in. "You hear that now, Rosemary? You and me's going out to St Paul's Cathedral any day now to look at that with our own naked eyes." And Nick saw her, in shiny shoes and the small black hat like an air hostess's that was nesting on a chair in the corner, making her way there, with waits at a number of bus stops, and the nervous patience of a pilgrim—he saw her, as if from the air, climbing the steps and going into the stupendous church, which he felt he owned, all ironically and art-historically, more than her, a mere credulous Christian. "Or else, of course, you and me can go . . . eh?" she said to Nick, somehow shyly not using his name.
"I'd love to do that," Nick said quickly, taking the chance to be kind and likeable that had been denied him earlier on.
"We'll go together and have a good look at it," said Mrs Charles.
"Excellent!" said Nick, and caught the hint of mockery in Leo's eyes.
Mrs Charles said, cocking her head on one side, "You know, they always got something clever about them, these old pictures, don't they?"
"Often they do," Nick agreed.
"And you know the clever thing about this one now . . . " She gave him the tolerant but crafty look of someone who holds the answer to a trick question. To Nick the clever thing was perhaps the way that the Virgin, kneeling by the chest that holds the hoarded gifts of the Magi, and seeing the portent of the Crucifixion in her son's shadow cast on the rear wall of the room, has her face completely hidden from us, so that the painting's centre of consciousness, as Henry James might have thought of her, is effectively a blank; and that this was surely an anti-Catholic gesture. He said, "Well, the detail is amazing—those wood shavings look almost real, everything about it's so accurate . . ."
"No, no . . ." said Mrs Charles, with amiable scorn. "You see, the way the Lord Jesus is standing there, he's making a shadow on the wall that's just the exact same image of himself on the Cross!"
"Oh . . . yes," said Nick, "indeed . . . Isn't it called in fact —"
"And of course that all goes to show how the death of the Lord Jesus and his Resurrection is foretold in the Bible from ancient times."
Nick said, "Well, it certainly illustrates that view even if it doesn't prove it," in a perhaps misjudged tone of equable deliberation. Leo shot him a wincing glance and created a diversion.
"Yeah, I like the way he's got him yawning," he said; and he stretched his own arms out and up and tilted his head with a yawn that was just like the Lord Jesus except that he was holding an ice-cream-smeared dessert spoon in his left hand. It was the kind of camp you see sometimes in observant children—and Rosemary watched him with the smothered amazement and mocking anticipation of a good girl whose brother has been insolent and reckless. But she said,
"Mm, it makes me shiver when he does that."
Leo tutted and grinned, as his own shadow, in the room's less brilliant evening light, stretched and shrugged and faltered across the wall above his chair.
When the meal finished Leo was checking his bike and they were out in the street almost at once. Nick was relieved but ashamed—he made a joke of being dragged away in the middle of a sentence, as if Leo was a lively dog on the end of a leash. But Mrs Charles seemed not to mind. "Ah, you go on now," she said, as if she might be quite relieved herself. Or perhaps, he thought, as he hurried along in silence beside Leo, she had sensed his own relief, and been saddened by it for a second, and then had hardened herself against him . . . Her tone was nearly