Asunder Read Free

with disbelief, he stopped writing for a year, talking only about his ‘pacing dragon’, and how these two feet of his, pacing and dragging in close alliance, would spell the end of him.
     
    A few months after his disappointment at the National Gallery, Daniel was offered a similar job at Tate Britain. The paintings weren’t as magnificent, even the best of them, but he liked most of them too. The museum lay farther from home, now a bus and two Tube journeys rather than a simple bus ride, but he could use the time to read. And the building wasn’t as large or grand as our Gallery, but at least it too was classical in style, with a six-column portico and a central dome. A different kind of cathedral, less holy and with fewer pilgrims, yet my friend was determined to protect the paintings with the same degree of devotion.
    As for the other warders, they were of a different breed from those he was used to. He was amazed by how scarce they were and by how many rooms seemed to go without protection, but then realised there were fewer visitors as well. And unlike many of us at the Gallery, the guards at Tate Britain were mostly art students or aspiring artists who had no intention of spending their lives working in security.
    At first Daniel had a crisis over the presence of so much twentieth-century, even contemporary, art—how could it compare, how could it coexist, with that of the past? He couldn’t help feeling that by placing the centuries so close together they were stretching things, diluting the force of the greats, and it took him several weeks to stop feeling a jolt each time he turned from a room with Blakes or Turners into one containing less transcendent work.
    Yet to enter the room with Turner’s late paintings, he would say, was extraordinary, and made it all worthwhile, it was like entering a room of light, pure sunlight pouring forth from the walls, that was when the voltage surged, when the museum became a cathedral.
    In fact, early on in our friendship we had agreed, during one of our very first conversations, that we much preferred the old to the new. It was far better to watch over art that had withstood the test of time—why devote hours of your life guarding something that might be gathering dust or mould in a warehouse fifty years from now?
     
    ‘If the foreign couple hadn’t noticed Crooke in his chair I would’ve probably been the one to discover him,’ I reflected, ‘when I’d moved on to Room 23.’
    ‘We’re thin lines of defence,’ Daniel replied, tapping on his glass with two fingers.
    ‘That we are,’ I said, half relishing the thought.
    Over the decades the museum lore gathered, mainly things overheard rather than witnessed first-hand. Among these were the widely circulated stories that had become public domain, such as the heavily lipsticked woman who kissed a white painting in order to cheer it up, and the guard at the Louvre who went around carving Xs into paintings with his own set of keys. And of course Rembrandt’s
Night Watch
, attacked no less than three times in the past century. We came to hear about all sorts of museum pathologies, mostly involving people suffering from an identity crisis, paintings mistaken for mirrors as individuals caught sight of a troubling reflection.
    At work we had been taught to be good judges of character, programmed to pick up on the slightest stirrings of unrest, to read faces and gauge their intentions. After so many years at the job, I had become finely skilled in the interpretation of a clenched fist, a skittish glance, the roaming gaze of someone unharnessed. I would try to detect whether there was something in immediate need of release, on the verge of eruption, a dangerous failure to distinguish one’s personal life from that of a painting.
    Daniel knew many more stories than I did, and additional ones from overseas, such as the irritable old ladies at the Hermitage who despite seeming languid and inert were in possession of sharp