The End of the Alphabet Read Online Free

conversation.
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    Lovely, she said.
    Sorry. What? Ambrose said.
    The Velázquez.
    Sorry? Yes.
    They had been married most of a year. Having coaxed Ambrose into taking her on one of his usually solitary visits to the National Gallery, Zipper had done some reading beforehand.
    Venus at Her Mirror , Zipper said.
    The Rockeby Venus, said Ambrose.
    The model was somebody’s mistress?
    The king of Spain. Philip, I think.
    Had a thing for black taffeta sheets.
    The king?
    The mistress. And didn’t a suffragette attack her with a knife?
    The mistress?
    The painting. Are you listening?
    Right. Yes.
    It’s the sheets, Zipper said. They highlight the form. Her form. And Velázquez painted her hazy reflection in the mirror on purpose. Forces the eye to the form. Sorry, her form. Critics said the reflection looked unfinished. The optics were wrong. We should be seeing her torso reflected in the mirror. How am I doing?
    Sorry. Yes. Lovely.
    What, precisely, is so lovely?
    Her. This. The Velázquez.
    Why?
    Because it is.
    That’s it?
    I think so. Yes.
    You’re impossible, Zipper said. All I know is what I’ve read. All I’d like to know is what you know. What you think.
    About what?
    About why , damn it. Why the sheets and the optics and the mistress and the unfinished reflection? Why love it so much? Why her?
    It is what it is, said Ambrose. Lovely.
    You’re exhausting.
    Fine. If you insist, it reminds me of you.
    Really. My backside is not nearly so lovely.
    I wasn’t looking at her backside.
    Really.
    I was looking at her front. The slope of the neck. Curve of the breasts, the smooth stomach. The gentle hollow around the navel. Her face.
    You’re imagining things.
    Isn’t that the point?
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    They thought better of visiting the Rijksmuseum together.
    Zipper said she wasn’t sure how she would spend the day. Ambrose did his best to reassure. There was, he said, no need to worry. They kissed and Ambrose set off to find a portrait he had seen before. But long ago and from very far away.
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    A younger Ambrose arrived behind his time, having spent most of the previous day in the pub with Freddie Wilkes.
    It was the oldest lecture theatre on campus: a cavernous circular space with graceful plaster-work, smelling of mould and varnish and nervous sweat. The few windows it had were small, painted forever shut, and set high behind tiers ofhard benches worn by a century or two of first-term buttocks.
    Ambrose found a seat in the back rows and consulted his schedule. The Place of the Portrait. Below him the professor paced the dais, a small man gesturing with a long pointer at his latest slide: a Rembrandt, late in the artist’s career. The reproduction was poor. The slide was scratched from years of projection, the contrast blown, the detail flattened to blobs.
    It was a group portrait. The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, announced the professor. Painted in 1642. You may, if you must, call it The Night Watch .
    Captain Cocq’s company—by the professor’s pointed count—consisted of thirty-five adults, two children, one chicken and one dog, as well as various lances, spears, pikes, walking canes, drums, flags and muskets.
    The professor rambled at length about dynamic magnetism and profound insight and asymmetric composition. NOTE IF YOU WILL, he kept yelling…the significance of this…symbolism of that…transcendence of genre…portrait of genius…
    Ambrose raised his thick head and stared at the projection. Not once had the professor mentioned a shadowed half-face, hardly visible behind the painted crowd, peeking back at Ambrose with a pair of bright and smiling eyes.
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    In a grand and old department store Zipper wandered from floor to floor. Here a blouse held to her chest and re-hung on its rack; there the silk of a scarf, fingered and left folded. She sampled a lipstick that matched, precisely,