Mr. Phillips

2.4

Mr Phillips moves past a couple who have positioned themselves almost blocking the entrance to the main gallery, each holding one end of a folded-out plan, like scheming generals. They are in comfortable, spreading middle age — the man’s shoulders, waist and hips slide downwards into each other as easily as Mr Phillips’s own — but are dressed like students in jeans and clumpy trainers.

‘I dunno,’ says the man. His accent is American but once had not been; he is from somewhere else, Ulster or Scotland perhaps. Hybridized accents are harder to unpick than neat ones, even for the English, every single one of whom has a top-of-the-range on-board computer calculating the exact geographical and social location of the speaker every time somebody opens his mouth. Grammar school-educated Mr Phillips’s accent is Received Pronunciation overlying a stratum of South London. Martin and Tom both speak with a mild South London rasp that they can, especially Martin, roughen up or tone down at will. Mrs Phillips speaks a beautifully neutral form of RP that Mr Phillips had once found sexy — it was part of the idea of having sex with someone posher than you were. Class makes sex more interesting for everybody. Karen’s accent, East London verging on Essex, is sexy too, but in a more straightforwardly sluttish way. And there is something about the limitless reserves of indifference she can express, the thrilling estuarine boredness of her ‘Yeah’.

The woman holding the map with the mystery-accent man is wearing jeans that reveal her waist size to be 36 and her inner leg to be 30. Truth in advertising.

‘The Pre-Raphaelites just don’t do it for me,’ she says.

‘They were fags,’ says the man.

‘Ruskin was definitely a fag.’

‘Watts sure paints like one.’

That seems to cover the subject.

*

Mr Phillips heads into a long narrow room with sculptures that runs down the centre of the building. As always when he goes to a museum his impetus runs out very quickly once he has got inside. He has a feeling that he is looking for something that is not there, and what is worse, that everyone else is too. Or that they know something which he doesn’t. Or that there are a set of feelings he is supposed to have in the presence of art but which in his case are simply absent. If he is honest with himself he would rather have been looking at photographs of naked women. If he is to look at things he would rather look at things that are forbidden.

Mr Phillips stands in front of a sculpted head by someone called Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The head is two different heads melted into one, or has two very different halves, with one eye higher than the other and a nose that points off to the left as you look at it. At the same time it has a streamlined quality. Also there is something Polynesian about it. Like all those modern things with different bits and projections it implies that people are different at different times and contain lots of aspects to themselves. We are all many. Seven out of ten.

Mr Phillips stands in front of Ophelia by Millais. She is lying there waiting to drown. Mr Phillips has never seen a dead woman. The field was limited: his grandmother had had a closed coffin and in any case he had only been seven years old. Mr Phillips’s mother went to live in Australia with his sister when his father died in 1981. When she dies he will go to the funeral; this grieving twenty-four hour plane trip, the longest and worst journey he will ever make, looms somewhere in the future.

Unless it is a side-effect of hearing the couple under the rotunda, this is one of the paintings that make you wonder about the sexual life of the painter. Had he liked the idea of doing it with a dead girl? Some men did. At his first employer, Grimshaw’s, Mr Phillips knew a man called Smilt whose sister had told him that her husband liked her to have a very cold bath before coming to bed and then lying absolutely still. What made it worse was that the man was an undertaker. Mr Phillips had filed that one under ‘It takes all sorts.’

Also, this painter obviously had a thing about hair. And people who had a thing about hair were supposed to be masochists. Or was that people who had a thing about feet? But that went oddly with liking dead girls; surely you couldn’t like the idea of having pain inflicted on you by a dead girl? No. And then there was the redhead aspect. This was a whole subject in itself. Mr Phillips had never been to bed with a redheaded girl and felt envious of anyone who had. But when you thought about it, Millais might well not be in that category.

Also, if she was mad surely she wouldn’t be calmly floating on her back like that? Six out of ten.

Mr Phillips stands in front of The Boyhood of Raleigh. A colourfully dressed man is sitting talking to two boys. He has an earring and a headkerchief. Nowadays this scene would probably be reported to the police and you could be fairly sure he was a pervert. Mr Phillips has virtually a whole album full of photographs which would now stand a decent chance of getting him and Mrs Phillips arrested, some busybody at Boots tipping off the police to raid them and take away pictures of Martin and Tom in various states of undress, in the bath, in bed, asleep and so on. It has to be admitted that the pirate-type man bullshitting away to the little boys does not look the opposite of a paedophile; there certainly is something over-eager about him, and if he does like little boys, the young Raleigh’s adorable frilly collar would presumably be like a ham sandwich spreading itself with mustard and lying down in front of a hungry man with a cry of ‘Eat me, eat me!’ And then of course sailors were notoriously keen on all that. Plus the idea of the picture was so stupid, as if you ended up doing what you did because someone had told you yarns as a child — as if his father had spun tales about the glamour and wonder of accounting, or he had dandled Martin on his knees and kept him spellbound by recounting the glorious annals of the recording industry. Five out of ten.

Mr Phillips stands in front of The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke by Richard Dadd. This is a picture he has been to look at on each of the four occasions he has gone to look around the Tate (early date with Mrs Phillips, when he was trying to seem cultured; two visits with his sister and her daughters when they came to London and were doing the sights; and this one). This is on the borderline for disqualification from being a true Londoner, since as all Londoners know, real Londoners never go to do or see anything in their own city. The exception is those unfortunates with small children, forever having to go to circuses and cartoons and pantomimes and adventure playgrounds and rare breed parks. But that doesn’t really count. In his fifty years in the city Mr Phillips has been to the Tower of London once, on a school trip; the British Museum twice, once on a school trip and once with his nieces while his sister and Mrs Phillips went shopping; Madame Tussaud’s once, with Martin and Thomas; once to the National Gallery for the same reason; once to the National Theatre with Martin; and that was more or less it, so that he had never once been to Kew Gardens or Hampton Court or the naval museum at Greenwich or Teddington Lock or the Royal Opera House or the Barbican or the Trooping of the Colour or the Changing of the Guards or the Last Night of the Proms or indeed the Proms (Mrs Phillips went enough for both of them) or the Motor Show or the Planetarium or the annual open day in Highgate Cemetery. Excluding annual visits to the Richmond pantomime between 1977 (after Martin’s sixth birthday) and 1989 (Tom’s tenth) he has been to the theatre five times, which is five times more than he would have gone if it had been left entirely to him.

In the old days one of the London activities Mr Phillips would probably have not done was go and look at the inhabitants of Bedlam on a Sunday afternoon. He knew about this because the first time he had been to the Tate a man with a posh voice was leading a party around and they had stood in front of The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke while Mr Phillips hung on the edge of earshot. The man who painted it had killed his father with an axe. He was called Richard Dadd, which was quite funny. He spent the rest of his life in the main loony bin, which for some reason was called Bethlehem (hence Bedlam). Mad Dadd killed his bad dad.

‘The elements of dementia in Dadd’s vision’, said the posh man, ‘speak for themselves.’ Every time he sees this picture Mr Phillips wonders what that meant. In his view either everything spoke for itself or nothing did. But the painting is small and very energetic and full of elves and goblins and things. Perhaps Dadd had thought he was the fairy feller himself, when he brought the axe down on his father’s head? It wasn’t the sort of thing you could do if you were aware of what you were doing. Eight out of ten, thinks Mr Phillips.

Mr Phillips stands in front of a double portrait by Stanley Spencer. It is a picture of the artist and his wife lying side by side with no clothes on in a room that looks untidy and probably cold. The woman has red hair and one of those cross redhead’s faces. Her breasts have curious tinges of green in them. If that was what naked women usually looked like pornography would never have caught on. The man looks like a swot but also randy and quite nice — you are on his side. At the foot of the painting lies a strangely expressive leg of mutton (Mr Phillips’s favourite meat) dressed for the oven.

Spencer has painted his own penis with lavish and loving care. It is quite big, too. Mr Phillips thinks about this for a moment. If you looked down at it it was supposed to be foreshortened, but of course you could always hold it out in front of you and/or use a ruler. Or you could position yourself in front of a mirror which is perhaps what Sir Stanley had done. If the mirror was leaning backwards slightly so that you could look down on it, and it was resting on the floor or at least below waist height, then it would certainly make it look bigger. That was elementary perspective. Plus it was towards the front of the picture and made to look bigger that way too. Of course if you were going to paint your own cock you would take steps to make it show to advantage. It stood to reason. Nine out of ten, Mr Phillips is thinking, as a woman’s voice behind him says,

‘Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.’

Mr Phillips turns around. A woman in a red coat and matching but very eccentric sort-of-beret is looking at the painting and nodding her head. One or two other people shift to other parts of the room as if, like dogs reacting to an ultrasonic whistle, they are responding to the way the woman’s madness is broadcasting on an extra-sensory frequency. Before Mr Phillips can look away she makes eye contact.

‘They didn’t used to do it, you know. It wasn’t that he couldn’t manage it. She wouldn’t let him.’

‘Do what?’

‘It — you know. Sex. He was a Christian, he was horny as a toad, and they never did it. You can see it in the picture if you look closely enough.’

Mr Phillips looks at the picture again. He has to admit that he can’t see it, unless it is in the fact that you wouldn’t bother painting yourself about-to-do-it or just-having-done-it when you could use the same energy to do it instead. Perhaps that is why double nude self-portraits are rare. The woman comes up beside Mr Phillips and says:

‘Brrrrrrr.’ Then, turning to him with a surprisingly sweet, sane smile she says, ‘It’s such a cold picture.’

Mr Phillips smiles politely and noncommittally back. He moves towards the Clore gallery where the Turners hang and then, like a man shaking off a tail in a thriller, dodges left towards British Surrealism 1900–1966. The woman unembarrassedly doubles back after him. He realizes that he has been adopted.

‘I’ve not seen you here before,’ she says as they stand in front of a John Craxton painting which features multicoloured cubist goats. ‘You’re not one of the regulars.’

‘Would you expect to know me if I was a regular?’ asks Mr Phillips.

‘Heavens yes,’ says the woman. ‘I come here every day. Mainly I come to heckle the tour guides. They talk the most fearful tripe and need much correcting. I used to pick them up on more or less everything they said but now I wait for errors of fact before I pounce. I think it helps them keep on their toes. Then once I’ve established a bridgehead I broaden out into more general interpretative points. I like to think that my perspective is broadly feminist though also unmistakably personal. And then sometimes, not often but every now and then, I like to spout any old mad rubbish just to see if they notice the difference and you know the shocking thing is they never seem to.’

‘Yes, that is disturbing’, says Mr Phillips.

‘This building used to be a prison, you know,’ the woman goes on as they walk further into the Surrealism room. ‘That’s why there are so few doors. You want to stop people getting in and out too easily. Just as you can’t walk in and out of a prison so you can’t walk in and out of an art gallery. Do you ever wonder why, of all the epochs of the world, now should be the most populous? Why so many souls should have chosen now of all times to be born?’

‘No.’

‘Nor do I. It seems perfectly obvious to me.’

They stopped as if by mutual consent in front of a painting of a man eating something, like a Dalí only even worse. Four out of ten.

‘It ought really to be like it was in the war,’ says the woman. ‘The National Gallery was sent into hiding and only one picture was taken out and put on show at any one time. The longing for art! The concentration, the hunger, with which people yearned for it! A great city should have no more than one picture on display. Let it change once a week, once a month. We would recapture our seriousness! The jewel in our crown!’

‘Does it matter?’ asks Mr Phillips.

‘Heavens yes. Why do you think all these people are here? What sort of behaviour do you think you are observing?’

Mr Phillips is thinking about that in a desultory way when with a surge of horror he sees, coming into the room from the opposite end, Mrs Palmer, wife to Mr Palmer, a.k.a. Norman the Noxious Neighbour. Mr Phillips can vaguely remember hearing something about an Open University course — it must be to do with that. At the moment she is looking down at a gallery plan but she is only about fifteen feet away and can’t fail to notice Mr Phillips when she looks up. That will lead her to start talking to him, which will make him have to explain what he is doing in the Tate Gallery at eleven o’clock on a Monday morning. She will then go home and ask her husband to guess who she bumped into and Mr Phillips’s quality of life at Wellesley Crescent will take a significant turn for the worse. He abruptly turns and heads back the way he came.

‘Aren’t we a wriggly one!’ says the woman, still at his heels. ‘But I’m not so easily left behind as all that!’

Mr Phillips feels a wave of tremendous fatigue, of a sort he doesn’t remember experiencing since the last time he was in the same building five years before. What is it about looking at pictures that makes you feel so knackered?

‘I think I’ve had enough,’ he says. ‘I don’t have much stamina for this sort of thing.’

‘Quite so. You’re very sensible. It is the emanations of spirit coming off the paintings which is so exhausting. The vibrations they might once have been called. If one thinks of it as spiritual exercise which drains and refreshes in the same way that physical exercise drains and refreshes, does that make it feel any better? No. Of course not.’ Another sweet, sane smile.

A tour party comes out of the next gallery at the end of the room, the man at the head of the party looking shifty as he walks past Mr Phillips and his new chum. Mr Phillips wonders if it is the same man with the posh voice who thought that the signs of dementia spoke for themselves. A light enters the woman’s eyes and she peels off to follow the group, squeezing Mr Phillips’s arm in abrupt farewell as she leaves.