which he was yet to write a word, and clutched together the coloured pens. His mother came in. He rose and after a few exchanges did his duty of showing me to the door, but as if it were something he hoped he wouldn’t always have to do.
5
I had arrived without knowing how on the street where the Orst Museum was, and sat down, suddenly exhausted, on a bench opposite. The quiet out here was subtly different from the quiet of the middle of town, the little brick squares where for a full quarter of an hour no car would pass and nothing alter beyond the pulling-to of a shutter, or a dog trotting along with an intermittent sense of purpose. Here the stillness was as deep, the grand brick houses equally steeped in silence and discretion, their windows silver-black above the stumpy limes. But you felt a freshness, the nearness of a larger sky, to which the line of windmills at the street’s end blindly opened their arms. I watched a couple of tourists arrive at the Museum and recognised their mood of achievement, of having come out quite far, almost into the country.
In the Museum’s dark, polish-scented hall I paid my admission fee, and bought a booklet, vainly feeling that the girl student at the desk should know that at other times I came here free, with the director, long after she had gone home. I laid a claim to it, somehow, because of the unexpected understanding I believed existed between Paul Echevin and me. It would have been pleasant if he had suddenly come down the stairs and spotted me; but I slightly dreaded it too, in case the greeting was cool and the girl student more in his confidence than I was. She sat behind the modest display of postcards with the defiant air of an intelligent person wasting time for a good cause. What hours, weeks, of nothing must happen in this hall, as the autumn came on. As I turned away she picked up a fat paperback and continued to read.
The first room was long and half-panelled, with the sparse furnishing of a house no longer a home – a pair of roped-off chairs, a writing-desk with a dozen dusty pigeon-holes, a tall Dutch vase in the big black aperture of the fireplace. Cream cotton blinds were pulled half-down at the front, whilst at the far end the windows gave on to a sunless open porch and one of the city’s high-walled secret gardens. A handful of paintings by Orst – each preciously isolated – hung in gentle diagonals of light against a background of worn heroic tapestry. I walked round the room three or four times wondering if it was all a mistake, if I should leave at once, but I clung to it in the end, almost fearing to be out on the streets again, the lulled, senescent streets, when I was so pierced with relief and exhilaration and lust and a sense of failure. I sat on an absent guard’s folding stool as if stumbling to my corner, slugged by the boy’s beauty and too stunned to see the beating still to come.
I made a forced decision to read the little history Paul Echevin had written. I knew I knew nothing about this painter beyond a few details on book-jackets, a decadent poster or two perhaps at university – his famous Sphinx that ramps and bridles and circles Oedipus’ legs with its tawny tail; or the oddly appealing Purgatory where each gaunt figure stoops under the weight of its own Chimera, a domestic-looking hybrid like a mother’s thick fur stole with feet and long-toothed head still on. The refined asymmetry and social elegance of the portraits in this room – all of members of his family, it turned out – came as something of a surprise.
I learned that Orst had been born in this house in 1865, the son of an eminent civil lawyer. His childhood had been secluded, the family pious and old-fashioned but not uncultured, the house cluttered and
démodé
in its furnishings and rich in the patterned and storied Flemish fabrics that were to appear so often in Edgard’s pictures. We were to imagine him and his sister Delphine playing in the sequestered
5
I had arrived without knowing how on the street where the Orst Museum was, and sat down, suddenly exhausted, on a bench opposite. The quiet out here was subtly different from the quiet of the middle of town, the little brick squares where for a full quarter of an hour no car would pass and nothing alter beyond the pulling-to of a shutter, or a dog trotting along with an intermittent sense of purpose. Here the stillness was as deep, the grand brick houses equally steeped in silence and discretion, their windows silver-black above the stumpy limes. But you felt a freshness, the nearness of a larger sky, to which the line of windmills at the street’s end blindly opened their arms. I watched a couple of tourists arrive at the Museum and recognised their mood of achievement, of having come out quite far, almost into the country.
In the Museum’s dark, polish-scented hall I paid my admission fee, and bought a booklet, vainly feeling that the girl student at the desk should know that at other times I came here free, with the director, long after she had gone home. I laid a claim to it, somehow, because of the unexpected understanding I believed existed between Paul Echevin and me. It would have been pleasant if he had suddenly come down the stairs and spotted me; but I slightly dreaded it too, in case the greeting was cool and the girl student more in his confidence than I was. She sat behind the modest display of postcards with the defiant air of an intelligent person wasting time for a good cause. What hours, weeks, of nothing must happen in this hall, as the autumn came on. As I turned away she picked up a fat paperback and continued to read.
The first room was long and half-panelled, with the sparse furnishing of a house no longer a home – a pair of roped-off chairs, a writing-desk with a dozen dusty pigeon-holes, a tall Dutch vase in the big black aperture of the fireplace. Cream cotton blinds were pulled half-down at the front, whilst at the far end the windows gave on to a sunless open porch and one of the city’s high-walled secret gardens. A handful of paintings by Orst – each preciously isolated – hung in gentle diagonals of light against a background of worn heroic tapestry. I walked round the room three or four times wondering if it was all a mistake, if I should leave at once, but I clung to it in the end, almost fearing to be out on the streets again, the lulled, senescent streets, when I was so pierced with relief and exhilaration and lust and a sense of failure. I sat on an absent guard’s folding stool as if stumbling to my corner, slugged by the boy’s beauty and too stunned to see the beating still to come.
I made a forced decision to read the little history Paul Echevin had written. I knew I knew nothing about this painter beyond a few details on book-jackets, a decadent poster or two perhaps at university – his famous Sphinx that ramps and bridles and circles Oedipus’ legs with its tawny tail; or the oddly appealing Purgatory where each gaunt figure stoops under the weight of its own Chimera, a domestic-looking hybrid like a mother’s thick fur stole with feet and long-toothed head still on. The refined asymmetry and social elegance of the portraits in this room – all of members of his family, it turned out – came as something of a surprise.
I learned that Orst had been born in this house in 1865, the son of an eminent civil lawyer. His childhood had been secluded, the family pious and old-fashioned but not uncultured, the house cluttered and
démodé
in its furnishings and rich in the patterned and storied Flemish fabrics that were to appear so often in Edgard’s pictures. We were to imagine him and his sister Delphine playing in the sequestered
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