was Adam, a tiny, witch-faced historian with a tinny, nasal voice; Michelle, a chubby goth who smoked all the time and looked skywards when someone addressed her; and a gentle nervous Chinese boy called Wu, who was almost certainly gay and had, David learnt from the alumnus magazine, hanged himself three years ago. He tried not to think of that time in his life. It was all too ambiguous, shameful and strange. He’d been vengeful then and quick to take umbrage, had found refuge in books and movies, and as a general policy scorned the world. It was only since he’d begun teaching himself and had made his own students laugh that he’d realized misanthropy could be taken for wit, and had found some semblance of pleasure in anger and cynicism.
But he still remembered anyone who’d once been nice to him, and that morning had pulled two cardboard boxes out from under his bed. It was a blue file, its spine entitled From Easter Island to Henry Moore—Versions of the Human. On the inside flap he’d written: Ruth Marks, Visiting Artist—Introductory Module on Sculpture. As he flipped through it, what came to mind was the moment he’d first seen her. He had slid, a few minutes late, into the back row. In various dark layers, with a black headscarf over her blonde hair, the new lecturer was gripping each side of the podium as if she might fall. She had huge dark eyes, deepened with a ring of kohl, and spoke with excessive solemnity, trying to convince them that she was a serious proposition. The sobriety, though, couldn’t stay completely intact. Her voice would crack with emphasis, she’d accidentally enthuse. She had an ardour that came with practising the art, a passion the professional tutors had lost.
David’s own journey to art, or Art as he always thought of it, had been a wrong turning. He was never quite sure why he’d been accepted onto the foundation course in the first place. Even now he was embarrassed by the sight of a watercolour from his A-level year that still hung in his parents’ downstairs toilet: an acid-green sky against which a singular figure in black trekked over the crest of a mountain. All his work had featured a lone individual in a vast backdrop, and only recently had he realized the link with the image of the sage on the mountainside, of Jesus or Muhammad in the desert, of Buddha by himself beneath the Bodhi Tree. He too, David Pinner, had been looking for enlightenment. And it had come, after a fashion: at Goldsmiths he met real artists, those whose panicked relationship with their materials betrayed not a fear of mediocrity, of exposure, as his did, but a recurring, unanswerable compulsion.
He pretended for a while; then stopped pretending. After one of Ruth’s lectures, he decided to stay behind and tell her he was changing courses. The hall’s draughty windows were mirrorbacked by the darkness of the winter afternoon, and stirred with his reflection as he walked towards the front. His steps echoed. Her hair in two Teutonic plaits, Ruth rustled across the stage in a madeira hippy skirt with tassels and small round mirrors sewn into it. She was folding her notes, too tightly to use again, scrunching them into a paper bolt.
‘Ms Marks?’
She looked up, mustered a smile. ‘Ruth. Please.’
‘Ruth. Hi. I wanted to say firstly that I’m finding your course really fascinating—’
She gave a rueful little laugh; the tassels swished as she moved towards her bag. ‘Well, isn’t that kind. I wish they all felt like you do.’
Some of the students had left, noisily, during the lecture. Ruth sometimes got lost in her text and repeated herself. Other times she simply stopped and stared over their heads.
‘Oh, they just want to get home. It happens on Friday afternoons.’
‘Really?’
David nodded bravely, saddened by his fellow undergraduates’ priorities.
‘Still, today’s did not go well…’ A bell rang in the corridor outside and stopped. ‘If it’s the handout, I don’t have any more copies now but next week—’
‘Oh no, I got one of those. It was more of a general thing.’ Up close the long nose became a little sharp, though it contained all the intelligence and glamour of European Jewry and sat, to David’s untutored Old World eyes, a touch uncomfortably with the Aryan hair. ‘I just wanted to thank you for your lectures. They’ve made me think in ways about things…’
She smiled uncomfortably. He realized he was giving the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech and stopped. She waited for a few seconds, then swung her velvet bag up onto her shoulder and helped him out. ‘But you wanted to tell me you’re leaving the course?’
He was dropping art altogether and changing to English literature. They ended up sitting on the stage steps and talking for almost fifteen minutes. She asked David about himself and his family, and he found himself telling her. About being the only child of a philistine butcher and a woman fuelled by tension. He had never had any support. He needed the support. Why could they not have given him their support? When he’d begun to cry—for all frustrated artists, for all hampered ambition, for all the sensitive souls in the world—she’d dredged up a tissue stained with make-up from her bag, and had praised the bravery of his difficult decision. He often thought about how kind she’d been to him, and how attractive he’d found her own weird mix of confidence and fear. He’d kept that tissue in his pocket all evening, and the next day had been reluctant to bin it, although he had. Years later, in a second-hand book shop in the Elephant and Castle, when he came upon a glancing reference to her in A Guide to Contemporary American Art, he ran his fingertip along her name and bought the book.
David felt abashed on entering the National Gallery. When they climbed the great staircase, the awe of scale meant he was whispering, and by the time they came to the art, entering a room where portraits hung on thick gold chains against the crimson walls, and a cornice was piped like icing around the ceiling’s edge, both had fallen silent. Ruth stared at each picture and he followed, a masterpiece or two behind. David noticed he was walking in a formal, measured stride, much like the Duke of Edinburgh, and he’d even tucked his hands, rudder-like, behind his back.
When he joined her in front of a self-portrait by Murillo, brushing his duffel coat against her shoulder, she gave a raspy little sigh of satisfaction. It was a picture of a picture, with a frame within the frame, and the painter-subject, a lump-faced dignitary with a suspended moustache, reached out of his own portrait and rested his hand on the inner surround in a neat trompe l’oeil.
‘The fingers are very fine, aren’t they? It gives real space and depth, but it’s also Murillo saying’—she raked the air in front of the picture—‘look, I’m the only one who can decide the reality of the art, or the art of the reality.’
David nodded, not quite sure if her chiasmus made any sense. Nonetheless a statement was plainly called for: ‘It looks exactly like a hand.’
She stopped in reverent silence before a Michelangelo. The Entombment showed a naked Jesus being lifted up by John the Baptist and two others. To the front right of the picture was a blank in the shape of someone kneeling. The creases at the top of Christ’s thighs made the upper half of an X, marking the spot where his penis should be, but in its place there was only another blank, a cob-shaped void. I know how that feels, David thought. He put his hand in the pocket of his duffel and pressed it against his unresponsive crotch.
‘There’s something astonishingly modern about it,’ Ruth said at last, picking her words slowly, ‘and his mastery of the line’s incredible. It’s only through these contours’—she gestured again, spell-casting—‘that we experience the figure having volume and weight. It gives me a visceral reaction.’ She shivered, or pretended to shiver. David thought how pointless the phrase ‘visceral reaction’ was.
‘Who’s the missing person?’
‘The
