Extract from The Large Door

The painting itself was not large, but in its heavy frame it seemed so. The wood of the frame was the colour of old church pews, with thin grooves to it that caught and held the light in long vertical lines. It was not the only painting in the room – there was a miniature on the wall by the door to the landing, a floral composition of some kind – but this was the one that drew the eye. 

It was a Golden Age interior, the like of which you might see a dozen times in the Rijksmuseum, Jenny guessed, and once or twice in any gallery in Europe or America with a half-decent collection to its name. Its subject was simple, domestic: a woman and a man in a room, that might have been a parlour or reception room, a public-facing room in any event, rather than a bedroom or a kitchen. It seemed well-appointed, though far from showy. The most striking thing about it was the yellow and black tiled floor that spread in expanding diamonds towards the viewer. There were paintings on the walls of the room in the painting, and a mirror on the left wall, tilted so that it reflected the tiles in a flourish of perspective that doubtless the painter had been particularly pleased with. 

The woman in the painting had her back towards the viewer, and in her right hand she held a letter. She was looking towards the door in the back wall of the room, through which you could see the end of a simple wooden bed and the corner of a curtained and leaded window that let daylight in; a barred parallelogram of it stretched across the floor and into the main room, cutting across the diamond pattern of the tiles and making them shine. 

The woman’s face was shown in the merest profile, just the point of the nose and the crest of the cheek, such that you felt yourself impelled to move, or even just lean a little, so as to see her more clearly. She was holding herself as if about to take a step, as if she’d just heard someone in the next room; her centre of gravity was such that you felt she couldn’t not move, had committed herself to movement. Her left hand was resting on the shoulder of her companion, who was sitting on a chair. He, the man, sat looking straight out of the painting, meeting the viewer’s gaze with an expression of jovial inscrutability that couldn’t help also seeming insufferably smug, as if he knew he was in a painting and she didn’t, and this gave him some kind of advantage over her. 

Both of them were dressed in what seemed to Jenny the standard bourgeois garb of the age: for the woman, a grey full-length dress, cinched at the waist, and a white, shapeless bonnet covering the hair and ear, the dress with plain white collars, rather than lacework. You could see the toe of one shoe peeking out from underneath the hem at the bottom. 

He wore a black jacket with more flamboyant collar and cuffs, and black breeches with white stockings. The square metal buckles on his shoes flashed at the viewer. He had his wide-brimmed hat on his knee, and his black-grey locks – a wig? she never knew if these things were wigs or real hair – tumbled over his shoulders like some terrible rock star perm from the 1970s. The collar and cuffs and hat were the painting’s only visible marks of ostentation. There was a sideboard or dresser to one side, and something that might have been a bird cage hung up high on the wall, under the dark ceiling, but the wall was plainly painted plaster, with no hangings. The chair he was sitting on was austere – a simple kitchen chair – but he sat confidently, one arm hooked over the back, one leg languidly extended to show off the curve of the calf, the hat tipping decorously off the knee of the other. 

Jenny moved her gaze away from the painting. There, to its right, was the doorway to a further room, at the back of the house. Through the doorway you could see the corner of a bed. She caught and held her breath, not quite trusting her eyes, or her ability to process properly the information they gave her. There was a window through there too, with a curtain more or less the same colour and weight of that in the picture. 

She took a step back and looked again, and gasped out a laugh that, instinctively, she swallowed back. Yes, it was true. 

The painting was placed in the room such that the viewer stood not right in front of it, but a few yards back, in what she supposed was the natural viewing position, found herself in relation to it as the woman in the painting did to the room she was in. 

The mirror was there, in the room in the painting, as it was in the room she stood in: both of them tilted down at the same angle, one reflecting tiles, the other floorboards. There was the end of the sideboard, too, she now saw, in the left-hand corner of the painting, with its dark wood bowl, though presumably without bright plastic key fobs in it. She had a momentary jolt of panic that there might be, and the painting revealed as a foul meticulous fake, but of course there wasn’t. 

And yes, the dress. Hers, though shorter at the knee and more fitted in the bust, was of the same colour and even perhaps roughly the same material as the dress of the woman in the painting, even down to the collar. Her dress, bought last month in a Rockridge boutique, might have been inspired by the picture. She was glad, at least, of her boots; they proved her individuality. 

She looked round. Jaap was standing to the side and just behind her, looking with her at the painting – but his attention, she could tell, was on the painting only insofar as it was the focus of hers. Otherwise, his attention was all on her. Behind him, the spaniel, sitting patiently, tongue out, ears hanging. 

‘It’s a wonderful painting,’ she said.

‘It is.’

‘It’s done so nicely. It could so easily have been a gimmick. If they had replicated the tiles on the floor, for instance, your friend.’ 

‘It could.’

‘Or if there had been a dog in the painting.’ 

‘A dog.’

‘I’m joking.’ 

‘Thank you. Yes, a dog.’ 

‘The temptation to do that. The importance of not doing it. It makes me think of Dali, with his room made up to be Mae West’s face. So silly. Painters who insist on manhandling their viewers into a particular position with regards to their paintings. I don’t approve.’ She looked back at the picture. ‘Paintings aren’t movies, they’re rooms. You’re allowed to walk around them. Please don’t tell me anything about it, by the way. I’m enjoying not having the little card telling me everything I need to know about it. My eye keeps drifting down there. It’s an instinctive reaction.’ 

She raised her right hand and traced a movement in the air, a reading of the painting; starting with the letter in the woman’s hand, and moving in a tight spiral round to the right and down across the lower portion of her dress to her hand on the man’s shoulder, and then up past the indistinct picture on the wall – that took the place of the picture itself in the room, this room, their room – and up to the top corner of the doorway into the back room. 

She sketched a second, different arc in the other direction. There were lines real and implied cutting every which way across the painting, as if it were caught within the frames of more than one order of perspective, like one of those strange Escher worlds. 

‘You like it?’ he said, speaking carefully, quietly.

‘I love it.’

‘I love the way you can’t see her face. What is she thinking? You want to see her face.’

‘Is she beautiful.’

‘Yes. If you could see her face, you think, the mystery of the painting, what’s in the letter, would be solved.’ 

‘The question of contingency applies, you might say.’ 

‘You might say that. There is much to say about it.’

His voice, to be sure, was compelling, seductive even. His English had the usual American taint – a sort of rise or lift to the middle of the words – and then there was the Dutch slur, making him sound as though he had a mild speech impediment, or was slightly drunk. 

‘What I find so strange is that it’s unclear if we are dealing with allegory or realism. Is the scene general and emblematic, or specific and individual, with its own narrative peculiarity? Do we care about these two people? Do we judge them? Do we want to know what happens to them? Are they, in fact, characters, or merely figures?’ 

Jenny adjusted her pose so it more closely echoed that of the woman in the painting. Her left hand raised, the one that would be resting on the shoulder of the seated figure, the right out by her side, open, as if holding a letter. With her gaze directed towards the next room, the painting was now only visible in her peripheral vision; it burred there, like a premonition, as nearly in view as the woman’s face was in the painting itself. 

She allowed herself to settle into the moment. A room inside the room. 

She tried to perceive herself, in the room – the room she was in – and imagine how she looked, standing there. She felt like she was a key, a final piece to a puzzle that was waiting to be slotted in. 

If you took the logic of it seriously, the logic of whoever had put this painting here, and arranged the room around it, you would have to assume there was another person, someone else, behind her, not with them in the room, but entirely outside of its frame, outside its order of perspective, as this room was outside the frame of the room contained in the painting. And that person, in whatever extravagant exploded dimension it would take to turn the room she was in into a picture, or an object of aesthetic perception, would be looking at the room she herself was standing in, and looking at the back of her head, at the tip of her nose and the crest of her cheek – she adjusted her head so that was all that could be seen by them – and they would be wondering about her and her actions and intentions, trying to guess them from her not-quite-visible face, just as she was considering those of the bonneted woman. 

It took all of her will to not turn around and look for them, look them squarely in the face. She wanted to do it. 

She wanted to turn around and look at that person and address them, as she imagined the woman in the painting, if she were given the ability to do so, would want to turn and address her, anyone looking at her. She wanted to tell them, you don’t know what’s going on in my head. My thoughts and desires and intentions are not yours to know. They are barely mine to know myself, and I’m not going to let you near them.

This extract is taken from Gibbs's second novel, The Large Door, which was published in 2019 by Boiler House Press.