Book-Keeping

I worked at my desk with a giant calculator looking like a cash register with many buttons and a large handle to turn, working with many others in the same open-plan place, clattering away during those mid-century days. So typical of offices then. No accounting for such humdrum existences.

There is an Early Netherlandish portrait (1434), an oil painting of the marriage of a couple on an oak panel, with a strange mirror behind them reflecting the scene in an oblique manner. And I often stared at it during my lunch-breaks away from calculators, with my having skirted, before arriving at the gallery, the Trafalgar Square and its imposing column with what appeared to be a sculptural depiction of a human being on top, but it was too far to see who it was. I won’t dwell on that for long, as you can already see where I am going with it, no doubt.

It’s the painting in the gallery I want to concentrate upon — and I certainly did during those early days of my career, the gorgeous green of the woman’s dress making her appear ‘with child’. The man in a black wide-brimmed hat and dark cape raises a hand in blessing, as if he is the priest exercising the necessary rituals to marry themselves! I won’t name them. No-one is to be named in these stories, for fear of unwanted truths being wrenched from the lips of too many people with more information than they need to know, especially when gentle persuasion turns into ugly torture. We’re heading in that general direction, I guess, in 2023!

I dreamt one night during the period of watching this painting, and as I found myself concentrating on the painting, its colours were now dripping muckily over its frame. Greens and blacks in some outer melting abstraction. I yearned to return to the office and to the ordinary people there who worked their lives away as clerks in mindless tasks and large paper ledgers. It seemed more comforting to be with them than in this dream. But when arriving at the exit/entrance to leave, I saw the gallery’s famous columns were now tall caryatids barring my way each with one vertical eye patched over.

I woke in a sweat. I feared it might become a recurring dream, one with serial potential beyond its original ending. I was thankfully moved from that office soon afterwards to a different one within the same firm, and it was near St Paul’s Cathedral. They called it a promotion to a customer-facing role rather than backroom handle-grinder and number-cruncher. The cathedral, when I visited it the first lunchtime, turned out to have many more columns than was good for it, radiating, as it did, nether regions or heavenly ones. And, in my head, with some creative accounting, I calculated who was eventually to be married there. I shall keep them nameless.