Читать онлайн «The Virgin in the Garden»

She had invited Alexander, whether on the spur of the moment or with malice aforethought he did not know, to come and hear Flora Robson do Queen Elizabeth at the National Portrait Gallery. He had meant to say no, but had said yes, and now stood outside that building contemplating its sooty designation. She had also, for good measure, invited everyone else present at a very ill-assorted dinner party: only Daniel, beside himself, had accepted. There had been a young painter there who had declared that the words National and Portrait were in themselves enough to put him off, thanks. It was not, this decided person declared, his scene. It was Alexander’s scene, Frederica had firmly said, and Alexander had demurred, although he had always had a fondness for the place. Anyway, he had come.

He considered those words, once powerful, at present defunct, national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation. Both mattered, or had mattered, to Alexander.

On the way he had passed several recruiting posters for the First World War, pointing accusatory fingers at him, and a shop called “I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet”, full of reproduced bric-à-brac of the British Empire, backed not by bugles calling but by the universal clang and moan of amplified electric guitar. On a Shaftesbury Avenue hoarding he had seen a monstrous image of a rear view of a brawny worker, naked to the waist and from there enclosed in tight-buttoned red, white and blue breeches. “I’m Backing Britain” was scrawled across this person’s bulging backside.

Above him, on the steps of the National Gallery were the peripatetic folk with the new ancient faces. Jesus boots, kaftans, sporadic bursts of song or tinkling breaking a tranquillised hush.

Alexander went in. She was not there, as he might have known. The Gallery had changed since his last, not recent, visit. It had lost some of its buff and mahogany Victorian solidity and had acquired a stagey richness, darkly bright alcoves for Tudor icons on the stairway, not, he thought, unpleasing. He went up to look for the Darnley portrait, which had been removed for the performance, so he was left to sit on a bench contemplating an alternative Gloriana, raddled, white-leaded, bestriding the counties of England in thunderstorm and sun, painted an inch thick, horse-hair topped and hennaed, heavy with quilted silk, propped and constricted by whalebone.