Pat Barker: Double Vision

Get on with it, she told herself. There must be something she could do. The solution to all the doubts was to get her hands on the wire, the pliers, above all the plaster, that first blessed gloop of white goo. She realized she was moving her hands, the way a starving bird will sometimes make pecking motions with its beak or snap the air at imaginary flies.

‘Bugger it,’ she said aloud, thinking she might as well swear while she still could.

A discreet cough. Turning to look behind her — she couldn’t move her head without swivelling her whole body — she saw that Peter had come in and was standing by the door, a tall, thin, dark figure starkly elongated against the white wall. she’d given him the combination of the lock so he wouldn’t be left waiting outside if she were late back from one of her physiotherapy sessions, but it meant he was always surprising her. She never heard him come in.

He came further into the room, chafing his hands together. His nose was red with cold.

‘Have a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘Get warm.’

They stood over the wood stove together, and she had a second cup, and he stared around him. He was obviously fascinated by the plaster figures that lined the walls. No, don’t look, she wanted to say, they’re not finished. They were part of a sequence she’d started after 9/11, not based on Ben’s photographs, or anybody else’s for that matter, because nobody had been there to photograph what chiefly compelled her imagination: the young men at the controls who’d seized aeroplanes full of people and flown them into the sides of buildings. There they were, lean, predatory, equally ready to kill or die. She thought they might be rather good in the end. They certainly frightened her.

Peter started on the wire, cutting and shaping under her direction. She went back to her drawings, rolled them out and pinned the curling edges down with chisels and mallets. Because her hands were not touching the material, she felt doubtful about ideas that had once seemed persuasive. She knew she was being uncharacteristically tentative. The grave cloths were a problem. All her instincts had been for a nude figure — There’s no logical reason why the Risen Christ should go on wearing the dress of a first-century Palestinian Jew for the rest of eternity, and even less reason for him to have got stuck in the robes of a medieval English king, and yet she knew that a naked Christ would cause uproar. A lively faith in the Incarnation often goes with a marked disinclination to have the anatomical consequences staring one in the face. She’d compromised by having him tearing off grave cloths vigorously, but not so vigorously as to uncover those parts that would occasion letters to The Times if they were to be revealed. She was becoming middle aged. Once she might have fought for the purity of her original conception. These days she just didn’t think cocks were worth the bother.

If only she had been able to do the work herself, she’d have known immediately which ideas worked and which didn’t. She felt frustrated, and was trying desperately hard not to show it, because, in all fairness, Peter couldn’t have been any more tactful. He had such a talent for blending into the background that once or twice she’d actually managed to forget he was there.

Twelve weeks to go, and here she was still cutting wire. She fought the panic down and reached for the next bale.

Eight days later she had a complete figure. She wasn’t sure about the torso, and she knew she was going to have to rethink the head, but the legs were all right. Everything depended on the legs. Once, in a television interview, dazzled by the lights, her face weighed down by more make-up than she’d ever worn in her life — she felt like a geisha — she’d heard herself say, ‘You see, the thing is, you’ve got to make sure it doesn’t fall over.’

She’d buried her head in her hands and groaned aloud when she watched the video. Profound, or what? Oh, well, yes, thank you, Ms Frobisher, that’s really got the direction of twentieth-century sculpture sorted out. But yes, she thought, looking up at the chicken-wire figure, actually that is the thing. It mustn’t fall over.

This was stable enough, though the proportions were all wrong. Cautiously, she craned her head back, trying, despite the pain in her neck, to decide what changes needed to be made. ‘There’s a spotlight over there. Would you mind putting it on?’

She walked round the floodlit figure. The head was the problem. People would be looking up — well, obviously — from the foot of the plinth, and that meant the head had to be considerably larger than was anatomically accurate. She reckoned about a third larger. But the plinth itself stood on a small hill to the right of the path that led to the west door, and it was from this vantage point that the majority of people would see it — still looking upwards, but at a greater distance and from a much less acute angle. The problem was simple: the distortion that worked from the foot of the plinth might well look grotesque from the path. Simple to formulate. By no means simple to solve.

‘It’s a wonderful site, isn’t it?’ the dean had enthused, white hair blowing in the wind, when he took her outside to see it. Meaning, she supposed, that it was prominent. It was that all right. She’d stared at him in complete astonishment. Wonderful? she’d wanted to say. It’s a bloody nightmare . It wasn’t just the technical problems of the position, it was the fact that the statue was going to stand next to one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe. A wonderful site if you didn’t mind making a total prat of yourself.

‘Peter, would you mind standing there?’

He’d been hovering behind her, silent as always, waiting for her to tell him what to do next. He went and stood where she indicated, beside the figure.

Self-conscious but determined, she lay down on the floor at his feet and looked up at him.

‘No, don’t look at me. Look straight ahead.’

When he looked down, his eyes almost vanished. Even staring straight ahead they were difficult to see.

‘Can you take your specs off?’

He did as she asked, reaching behind him to put them on the table. His eyes still made no impact, and yet they were larger than most. The eyes on the Christ were going to have to be enormous, and she’d underestimated how big the head had to be. She looked from Peter’s head to the ball of wire on top of the figure, memorizing the changes that would have to be made before she could start on the plaster. She felt Peter tense up under her gaze.

‘It’s all right, don’t worry,’ she said, laughing a little with embarrassment as she tried to stand up. ‘It’s not turning into a portrait.’

He didn’t help her to her feet, though she struggled on her knees for several seconds because her back had gone into spasm. He never touched her. When he handed tools up to her, his fingertips never brushed hers. Once or twice she’d seen him reach out a hand as if to steady her on the scaffolding, but he never actually did. He was elaborately formal, impersonal.

‘Ouch,’ she said, pressing one hand into the small of her back, laughing.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine. I just needed to get the size of the head right.’

‘Does it need to come off?’

‘Yeah, but it’s a bit late now. We’ll start on it tomorrow.’

She was smiling as she took off her gloves and put the pliers down. But trying not to sound disconsolate was one of the burdens of the situation. Her moods, the ebb and flow of hope and conviction, were supposed to be private. Her work, what she chose to show, became public at the moment when somebody pulled off the sheet and not one second before.