The Last Supper Read Free Page B

where people are forming long migratory queues and a girl in a white uniform is clearing piles of smeared plates from the tables and the voice on the loudspeaker is bidding us farewell and a safe onward journey.
    *
    The road out of Dieppe winds round and round, round and round and round its empty green hinterland, as aimless and methodical as a geriatric waltz around a deserted dance floor.Beneath a sky the colour of smelted iron, raw patches of development stand out on the hills above the port: new supermarkets and warehouses, half-built roads, modern buildings standing in empty car parks, a double row of giant streetlights heading inexplicably off into a field. From a distance, the inharmonious spectacle of these creations, in which no one object relates to any other, gives it an appearance of almost human inwardness and alienation, like a crowd of total strangers caught in a random moment on a police security camera. We pass a building like a child’s drawing of a Swiss chalet and a building like a cardboard box and a building like a playground climbing frame painted in primary colours. We pass Gemo and Mr Bricolage and Decathlon. We pass a low, ranch-like building in a tundra of tarmac called Buffalo Grill, with a giant pair of white plastic cow’s horns attached to its tiled roof. The air-temperature gauge on the dashboard reads twelve degrees. The sky looks swollen and bruised. We revolve three times around a roundabout trying to identify the road to Rouen. The roundabout is planted with clumps of marigolds in forensic rows, like a cemetery. I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty, why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why our race should have fallen so totally out of sympathy with the earth. An hour out of Dieppe, a shout goes up from the back seat. We are running through sombre green countryside now, past meadows grazed by white Charolais cows, past flat affectless fields under low skies, past narrow little lanes that meander out of sight like unfinished sentences. The children have observed that the temperature gauge has risen by two full degrees. An hour later, on the other side of Rouen, they shout again.
    In the front seat we are discussing names. My husband has tired of his name: at forty-one, he wishes to change it. This is an unusual wish, but it does not surprise me. As a small child he was sent to boarding school, where his name was a graven fact on every sock and book and toothbrush in his possession, on the toy rabbit he hugged so hard over the years that it became crushed flat, on the metal trunk he dragged behind himalong the platform, beside the waiting train; inscribed on the polished plate trophies won by long-disbanded teams, on watches and pens and handkerchiefs, on yellowed monogrammed towels. He has an antique silver christening mug engraved with his initials – ACC – and there are portraits of his ancestors, frowning clerics, on his parents’ walls. It is almost as though his name, so concrete and indelible, preceded him in everything he did so that he was forever dogged by a sense of obligation. I do not know what this is like, only that it is the opposite of what the artist feels when he puts his name to a canvas. It is the opposite of self-expression. As a child my own name seemed strange to me, abstract, like a mathematical symbol whose representative function remained mysterious even once I’d grown accustomed to what it looked like. It was only when I began to write books and put my name to them that I understood its associative purpose. All the same, an artist might prefer a name less constricted by his mortal soul. The artists of the Renaissance often had such names: Veronese (‘the man from Verona’), il Tintoretto (‘the dyer’s son’), il Perugino (‘the bloke from Perugia’). A few years ago ACC discarded his profession, removed his name from the company letterhead and the ledger of good works. He began to take photographs, portraits of people whose