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24. Hendryk Not Quite Himself

Thursday night I spent at my flat, alone. I got a fair amount of whisky down my neck to ease the pain of Serafina’s absence and hoped that it would make me sleepy but it only sharpened the pain and made me wakeful; I found that there was no side of me that was the right side to fall asleep on. At first there was too much noise from the street — cars starting up or parking and people chattering loudly; then there came a silence that seethed in a sinister way; then a dream in which Hendryk kept trying to tell me something but I couldn’t hear him. ‘What, Hendryk?’ I kept saying until I heard myself and woke up and it was Friday.

In due course I stepped out into a harshly sunlit day, went to the tube station and headed for the National Gallery. As always, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery steps, and the rooms inside were dense with tourists and clamorous with foreign tongues. With scarcely a glance at the masterworks of centuries, I went directly to Room 18. As if by special dispensation it was empty.

I looked through the peep-hole in the near end of van Hoogstraten’s perspective box and there was the skeleton of Hendryk looking at me. ‘Jesus!’ I said. I blinked, and when I looked again I saw nothing but blackness. ‘Give me a break!’ I said. I kept my eye to the peep-hole but there was nothing to see and the room was full of people waiting to peep. ‘I have to go now, Hendryk,’ I said to the blackness. ‘I’ll get back to you.’ The Japanese couple behind me looked at me quizzically and I realised I’d been speaking aloud.

In Trafalgar Square there was no rain to ease the sharpness of the day; the sunlight was coming down like splinters of glass on Nelson and the lions, on the fountains and the tourists and the pigeons, on the pavements choked with people and the cars that choked the road. I hurried to the darkness of the underground and went home.