Smithereens
Excerpt from “Smithereens” published in Agni
“Weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they (have) much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy…pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.”—W.G. Sebald.
And after the charges the freckled eggs jostle in the bowl on top of the fridge, veining the shells, and inside the pantry the jars of bramble jelly would topple into the soft bulk of two-pound bags of sugar. A teaspoon clatters from a saucer onto the kitchen table. In the living room green balls of wool tumble from the crochet basket on the sofa’s armrest, the cushions and antimacassars stoic despite the china balloon seller and the clock having dashed together and leapt off the mantelpiece. Chestnuts roll along the windowsill. Beige corsets and support stockings dance on the balcony’s laundry line while the ceiling light pendulums in the hall. Dentures chatter inside a Pyrex glass on a bathroom stool. The tarnished mirror on the bedroom’s dressing-table seesaws, creaking, between its posts, next to a mahogany wardrobe with quartersawn side panels resembling meat carcasses hanging to cure, and on an inside shelf a sweetie tin rattles next to a mink fashioned into a stole; it lifts its nose, quivering. A framed postcard of a painting of a lady swings on a nail above the left-hand bedside table where the leather fringes of a bookmark protrude from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Good News Bible flaps off the right-hand table and lands agape on the faded Axminster. Silk tassels trimming the shade of an ugly majolica lamp spin like dervishes, slow to a swing, slow to a pause. Everything pauses. For a second everything is still. Then the walls begin to undulate like water and pour down after the floors, which have, by now, dropped away; everything plummets to black, then up floats a soft gray bloom of smoke, like an afterthought. The sky rushes in.
Ten
On the sixth of May 1853, when Christie’s of London auctioned an art collection formally housed in Louis Philippe’s Galerie Espagnol of the Louvre, among the bidders was William Stirling, flush with cash from the recent inheritance of his Scottish family’s estates at Keir and Cawder. “Neither size nor subject suit our creed, our climate, or our castles,” sniffed a contemporary critic of the Christie’s offering; historically the British had preferred the French and Italian Masters, and mistrusted the Spanish—illogically—because of their Catholicism. Such indifference, however, was on the wane, due in no small measure to Stirling, whose pioneering three volume study Annals of the Artists of Spain had appeared in 1848, the same year King Louis Philippe abdicated when revolution came again to France. Using the pseudonyms “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, Louis-Philippe and his Queen sneaked out of Paris and took refuge at Claremont House in Surrey, discretely supplied by Queen Victoria. Under the guise of the nondescript Count and Countess of Neuilly they kept their heads down for a further two years until Louis-Philippe’s death in 1850; by then, Stirling, a canny collector as well as a historian, was amassing the most comprehensive portfolio of Spanish art outside of Spain, including drawings, printed books, and works by Murillo, Goya, Zurbaran, and Velasquez, and at least eight El Greco’s (grouped with the Spanish in those days), two of which he purchased from the auction of Louis-Philippe’s collection. Portrait of a Man probably cost him little more than £10 (the going rate for the as-yet-to-be-feted Greek), though the Portrait of El Greco’s Daughter was a much pricier £133, her popularity having preceded her. As a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and a trustee for major English public art institutions, Stirling spent most of his life in London or overseas, not in Scotland, despite inheriting a third estate in Pollok in 1863 on the southern outskirts of the rapidly industrializing Glasgow, an inheritance which upgraded his title to Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. After his death, his lands and his art collection were divided between his two sons; the youngest, Archibald, received Keir and Cawder, though gossip infers neither Archie nor his offspring could pass a pub or a betting shop without going in, so over the years Archie’s half of the paintings were flogged piecemeal and scattered, but John, the older, more sensible son, eventually became the tenth Baronet and took a progressive role in politics, architecture, agriculture, archaeology, education, and philanthropy through his appointments as a Conservative MP, the chairman of the Forestry Commission, and co-founder of the National Trust for Scotland. He settled into the more valuable neo-Georgian Pollok House in Pollok Estate, building a new entrance hall, east and west wings, garden pavilions, ornamental parterres, and a library of three interlinked compartments and two fireplaces above which he hung the spoils of Louis-Philippe’s downfall: Portrait of a Man and Portrait of El Greco’s Daughter. Over the years art scholarship confirmed that a son had been born to El Greco but failed to uncover proof of any daughters, therefore the Portrait of El Greco’s Daughter became known as Lady in a Fur Wrap, a postcard of which my grandmother once framed and hung above her bedside table.
