41.

The Lost Domain

These are the doors they walked through, but through which they will not walk any more. It is a late Victorian reflection for a late Victorian moment; a melancholy thought on a crisp winter’s day, the sun low in the sky and the shadows long across the street outside the park nearby through which she will stroll later to her tram stop. She had been sitting at her desk, getting on with her work. Then George had walked through the door, the very door that she had told herself only a few years ago that she would remember as the door they all walked through, that miraculous assembly of artists that has now scattered to various parts of the world. And as much as any one of them may well walk through that door again, it will not be the same them, nor the same city, for that matter. For the city has moved on.

George is sitting opposite Tess’s desk in the gallery. He’s come to interview her for the magazine he edits. He’s lost that undergraduate look, she remarks to herself, and is fuller in the face, which she attributes to family life, for George is married now, with a daughter. Even this becomes a measure of change, by which she really means loss. For there will always be a part of Tess that wanted, and continues to want, the impossible.

He’s come to interview her because her gallery is now famous, not just in this city but throughout the entire country. And it’s famous because of those war years when she brought together that assembly of artists. It is becoming, George tells her, a sort of institution. And it was his use of the word ‘institution’ that prompted that late Victorian response, one of those moments of Tennysonian longing to which she succumbs from time to time. For if her gallery is now seen as an institution or on the way to becoming one, so too is she. But George is unaware of this implication as he poses the first of his questions.

‘You must,’ he says, as he opens his notepad, ‘be feeling quite satisfied.’

She doesn’t reply at first. She looks about the gallery, abstracted, suggesting that she is giving the question deep consideration. In fact, she’s not thinking about the question at all. She’s still thinking about his use of the word ‘institution’. If her gallery is an institution, so too is she. And when did this happen? For if she is synonymous with the gallery and no longer simply thought of as Tess, what does that make her?

And it is then that the word ‘dame’ comes to mind, quickly followed by ‘grande’, then capitalised as ‘Grande Dame’, and she realises that this is her fate. That if she has not already become such a figure, she is on the way to becoming one. Or, at least, this must be the way people are beginning to see her. Like those Grandes Dames of the nineteenth century, with their salons and their followers, who launch careers the way royalty launches ships, and who are sought after not because they are themselves but because they have become institutions. Is this her fate? It’s a disturbing thought because she is too young to be an institution. In fact, she will always be too young to be an institution. Will always be too young to be old, even when she is. But, clearly, those who see her like this don’t think of her as too young. Or even as young or old. For an institution, by definition, is ageless. And what of friends? If you have acquired the capacity to launch careers the way royalty launches ships, then what of friends? Who are they? And this question is accompanied by the speculation that George, sitting opposite her and waiting patiently for an answer to his question may well be a friend of sorts. One of those who were there when she was just Tess and had not become synonymous with her gallery. For they meet regularly at functions and openings, and when they do, and they talk, there is an unstated but shared assumption of belonging to a separate society from those around them. The society of those who were there and who are now joined by that common experience. But outside of the small circle of her husband and daughter, who, she asks herself, do you look to when you become an institution?

More than this, that brief Tennysonian moment tells her that she is no longer the woman who fell in love in that last winter of the war only four years ago. Not in the eyes of those who would pronounce her an institution, for institutions are bloodless, their passions long extinguished. And would Sam see her like this now? Not just distant and removed, not just someone from the past, but formalised, transformed into something beyond past, present and future — and beyond earthly, everyday living. Sort of above it all. That’s what an institution is.

But she doesn’t say any of this, after the ten or so seconds it has taken to gaze about the gallery and contemplate not the question but the tolling bell of the word ‘institution’.

‘Yes,’ she finally answers, ‘there is satisfaction in this. But not complacency. We’ve got a long way to travel, as a country, I mean. It’s no wonder our artists leave as soon as they can. The wonder is that they ever come back.’ She says this knowing that it will look and sound good, for the emerging institution of Tess knows, and has always known, what is required of such questions. And, of course, there is satisfaction in all that has been accomplished. And she is, and always was, never one to be complacent. And so they pass the next hour, George posing questions and Tess finding answers that, if not quite right, are not wrong either.

And when the photographer arrives she is aware of adopting the attitudes and expressions of what is called a ‘public face’. Even as the private Tess dwells upon and contemplates the door and all the doors through which they will not walk again, that miraculous assembly, she inwardly remarks that she is wearing what they call a public face and that it is this face she is showing the camera, as though her fate is already determined and all the life will be drained from her and she will become the institution that society demands. Ageless and above earthly living. As she feels the weight of this inevitability slowly falling upon her, she knows that the struggle will be to retain the memory of that lost domain of the last winter of the war and the younger Tess who yearned for the impossible, before the impossible bowed to the inevitable.

As George departs the gallery with the photographer, his farewell is that of someone who was there. Someone in whose company she can recognise the shared society of the lost domain. But the photographer, a young woman (unusual, Tess remarks to herself, but confirmation that the war has changed everything) looks at Tess through the eyes of someone who was not there. Through the eyes of someone who has just photographed and who only sees the public face of her subject. And this, Tess concludes, as she watches them exit the gallery door, is the way institutions are not so much born as called into being.