Angelica's Grotto

9 All At Sea

Feeling a powerful hunger for Willem van de Velde the Younger, Klein entubed at Fulham Broadway, emerged at Charing Cross, and made his way to the National Gallery.

Trafalgar Square, hugging a greyness to itself, had nothing to say to him. Nelson on his column turned a blind eye to mortal concerns. The stairs and porch of the National Gallery bore with stony indifference the shuffling feet of visitors from everywhere, each pair of feet terminating in a head that required to be filled with images of beauty, history, war and peace, sacred and profane love and various states of mythical, real, royal and common domesticity. Once inside, the visitors walked purposefully, dawdled randomly, collapsed on to benches, consulted floorplans, guides, maps, gallery staff and one another, and stood in front of paintings.

Klein went to the information desk, had his floorplan marked by the woman there, climbed the stairs, turned left through Rooms 29, 28 and 15, turned right through Room 22, went down the stairs, and arrived at Lower Gallery A, Screen 24 and a goodly array of the paintings of Willem van de Velde the Younger: seventeenth-century Dutch ships and boats of various kinds in fair weather and under stormy skies, in calms and in stiff breezes.

‘Quite a remarkable thing,’ he said, ‘to miniaturise the sky and the sea and the ships to a size and perspective convenient to the eye and readily absorbed on dry land by land-lubbers.’ He particularly admired the paintings in which small craft met with strong winds and rough seas. One of these, No. 876, A Small Dutch Vessel Close-hauled in a Strong Breeze, about 1672, showed a gaff-rigged boat, a galjoot, on a larboard tack under a dark and threatening sky, pointing as close into the wind as possible, her weather vang bar-taut, the leech of the mainsail fluttering, the spray rising high over her bows as the seas swept her fore-deck. Klein could feel the spray, smell the salt, hear the wind in the rigging and the poom! as she rose and fell with the chop. The man at the tiller was pointing to larboard, probably shouting something to the rest of the crew, only one of whom was visible in the spray. Some way ahead a man-of-war on the same tack streamed its pennant.

‘Dirty weather,’ said Klein, ‘but they’re not afraid, they’re used to this sort of thing, they’re born to the sea and they know what to do.’ The sea continued in his mind as he left Lower Gallery A, went up the stairs, through Rooms 22, 15, 28 and 29 without looking at anything but a few Rubens bottoms, down the stairs, out to the porch, and down to the street, the grey October afternoon, and the Underground. All the way home he heard the boom of the sea and the wind in the rigging as the bows of the Wimbledon train rose and fell with the chop.