Saturday was Leif’s day for visiting the art gallery, but they had called in the morning from his mother’s nursing home, and he had been forced to spend the entire day waiting for her to die, another false alarm.
By the time he finally made it to the gallery on Sunday afternoon, he was impatient to enter. The staff on the door knew him, so there was no need to show his member’s pass, but he did so anyway, flashing it high as he sailed past the long line of tourists fumbling with their tickets.
It was a drizzly, miserable winter’s day, but as soon as he was inside, his damp trench coat safely stowed in the cloakroom, it might as well have been summer. The rooms were warm and softly lit, enveloping him like a comforting blanket. It was as though he were strolling through one of the gallery’s sun-drenched Golden Age paintings, along a dusty track towards a pleasant village.
Nodding at guards who stood at the entrances to the rooms, he began as he always did, not at the beginning, but with the nineteenth-century portraits in the furthest room on the second floor. With his hands clasped at his back, he walked, stopped, walked, stopped, taking in each of the familiar faces and scenes.
Before leaving the room, he tipped his imaginary hat at the portrait of the man he had always thought of as ‘the Duke’, a curly-haired nobleman on the edge of a merry group of revellers in a Mediterranean street. The women in their brightly coloured shawls, the beggar children, and the lights of the tavern up ahead offered plenty of distractions, yet the Duke alone stared out of the picture, directly at the gallery visitor. By some clever trick, his naked gaze appeared to follow you around.
Leif always skipped the sculpture rooms, finding the bronzes and marbles pointless when there was a whole building of Technicolor canvases in which to lose himself.
How stormy the seascapes looked, how bold and stirring. He sat, as he always did, for half an hour on the leather couch in front of an enormous painting depicting a sea battle. He admired the way the artist had hinted at the sunlight breaking through the smoke at the head of the fleet. When he closed his eyes, he thought he could hear it: the shouts from the men, the tumultuous waves, the cannons echoing between the great walls of the battleships. And was that not the finest web of sea spray on his face?
At four precisely, he took tea in the café beneath the stone arches in the basement, and if it were less busy than usual, he was oblivious, preoccupied by a particularly good almond pastry.
By half past four, he was back upstairs, striding out among the paintings of landscapes and domestic scenes. He always kept them till last.
The landscapes, mostly French and Dutch, were luminous and alive, not like paintings at all, but like windows onto a sunnier world.
He lost himself for a long while in a simple picnic scene under a leafy canopy by a river with a golden meadow in the background and, in the far distance, a mountain range with a road leading tantalisingly away. There was much to commend. The perfect composition of the three people in the scene. The coy demeanour and loose clothing of the ladies. The way the man looked away at the river, amused by something that would for ever remain a secret.
It must have been just before five that Leif felt the effects of the tea and got up reluctantly to head for the men’s room.
Had there been an announcement while he was in there? Perhaps when he used the noisy hand drier? Later he supposed there must have been, but all he remembered was the elation he felt upon coming out and finding the long gallery with the leather couch at its centre completely empty.
How satisfying a visit it was turning out to be, he thought, as he sat down and made himself comfortable. They had even dimmed the overhead lights, a very good idea, on which he would make sure to compliment the management at the next opportunity. He was happy to note from his wristwatch that he had almost a full hour left before he had to walk through the sodden, grey city to his empty apartment.
For a long time, he devoted himself entirely to his favourite painting in the gallery. It was always reassuring to find the woman still there, feeding geese from a stable door at dawn. How carefree she appeared, despite her obvious poverty, lost in inconsequential thought as one hand scattered the grain, and the other dug deep in her apron for more. A little distance away was a charming tumbledown cottage and, through the open door, you could just about glimpse a man fast asleep in an alcove bed. Leif guessed it must still be warm from the woman who had left it.
At ten minutes to six, thoroughly satisfied with his afternoon, he began the long walk through the gallery to the exit, meeting no one on his way.
At the cloakroom desk, he frowned on seeing that the girl who took his coat had left her station several minutes before the hour. He made a note to complain about this, already feeling a pleasant frisson at the prospect of standing up to speak in the wood-panelled room where members were treated twice a year to a glass of wine and a question-and-answer session with the gallery director himself.
It wasn’t till he reached the gift shop that Leif felt a stab of unease. The shop with its rows of postcards and trinkets was dark, and there was no one behind the till. He frowned at his watch. It was still not six. Why would they have closed the shop before the gallery?
By the exit he stood for a moment and scratched his head. The door was not in its usual place, or rather there was no door, merely a steel plate covering the entire opening where the door would have been. He pushed at it cautiously, to no avail. There was a red button to the side, but when he pressed it nothing happened, and he saw that it was operated by a key, and that the key was nowhere in sight.
A cold feeling came over him. He remembered now that the gallery closed an hour earlier on Sundays. He was trapped inside.
For a few seconds, a minute at most, Leif lost possession of himself. He hammered on the steel plate and screamed at the top of his voice: ‘Help! Someone open the door. Help me!’
He made a terrific racket. The noise echoed around the vast hall, but nothing happened and no one answered him.
He looked around for a telephone but saw none. He patted his pockets in vain, for he had left his mobile phone at home, not wishing to be disturbed by the staff at his mother’s nursing home for the few precious hours that he was going to spend at the gallery.
There was no alarm button, nothing that could be used in any way for communicating with the outside world.
It’s all right, he thought, trying to regain his composure. There will be a night guard, and he will let you out. In the meantime, you will not starve or die of thirst. There are plenty of shortbread biscuits and boiled sweets in the gift shop, and you can drink water from the tap in the men’s room.
He calmed down at the thought of how he would make his complaint at the members’ evening: stoically, but leaving no doubt as to the horror of his ordeal.
For an hour or more, he walked at pace through the dingy rooms, astonished at how different the gallery felt now.
He called out, trying to stop himself from breaking into a run. He barely noticed the paintings now, all pleasure from them gone. As he reached the portrait room, he sensed the Duke observing him mockingly but could not find it in himself to look.
Unless he and the night guard had persistently missed one another, it would appear that Leif was entirely alone in the gallery. There was nothing for it but to wait for someone to arrive in the morning.
He returned to the Dutch landscape paintings and sat down and stared at the simple woman feeding the geese till his heartbeat slowed. The room felt colder now. Perhaps they turned off the heating at night?
After a while, he lay down on the couch, and eventually managed to fall asleep, exhausted and hoarse from the shouting.
It felt like it had been no more than minutes when something woke him. There was a noxious smell. Turpentine, he thought, his nostrils wrinkling. He opened his eyes and blinked at the vast room, trying to make sense of it. Then he remembered where he was and sat bolt upright on the couch. He immediately recoiled. There was a man standing nearby, a man wearing a black suit, a white shirt and a slim black tie.
‘Thank God, you have come,’ Leif said. ‘Where were you? It was dreadful. They locked me in, and there was no alarm button and no telephone. I was unable to call for help. Of course, I shall have to file a complaint.’
He had got himself off the couch, somewhat creakily, brushed down his suit, which was terribly creased, and started to move off in the direction of the exit, but the night guard had not moved nor spoken at all.
‘Well, come on, man,’ Leif said. ‘Let me out.’
The words rang out between them, but the night guard did not move. Finally, the man cleared his throat and spoke in a tired and thin voice.
‘I can’t.’
‘The gallery gets locked at night. There is no way in or out. You have to wait until tomorrow morning.’
Leif looked at his watch. It was only just after midnight. There would be at least another eight hours to wait. He took a step closer to the night guard, assuming his full height.
‘Now listen to me. I am a member of this art gallery,’ he said. ‘In all my years of coming here, I have never known impertinence like this. I can assure you, my good man, that this is not the last you will hear of it. Now use your key and open the door at once, or you will be in even greater trouble than you are already.’
Still the night guard stood his ground.
‘I demand that you let me out this minute!’
But the guard shook his head, looked at his feet and smiled sadly. There was something familiar about him that Leif could not put his finger on. He noticed that the man had an untidy beard and long curly hair gathered in a ponytail. Obviously, the gallery did not feel it necessary to be strict on the grooming of its night-time personnel. Well, they were wrong about that.
Leif stepped a little closer to look for a name badge on the man’s jacket, but there was none. He noticed there were stains on the lapel, and on the man’s trousers and shoes.
‘Is that … paint?’ he asked, astounded.
He thought again of the smell of turpentine that had woken him. The night guard was standing rather close to the painting of the woman and the geese. Almost close enough to touch it.
Leif narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s going on here? Have you been messing with the paintings? Why that’s … that’s vandalism. It’s a criminal offence.’
The man shook his head with an exaggerated movement. ‘No, no, not vandalism, improvement.’
‘Improvement? I never heard anything so absurd.’
‘All the little people in these paintings, no one knows them,’ said the guard, nodding at the pictures in the gallery – the peasants, the lovers, the dead sailors and the townspeople.
Leif was losing his patience. ‘And what have they got to do with anything?’
‘I mean that no one knows them, except me.’
Leif stared at the man uncomprehendingly.
The guard smiled. ‘All the people that come to the gallery, I put their faces in the pictures. Only takes a little, the lightest of touches.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Leif said. ‘It’s preposterous. You could not have done such a thing without being discovered. People would know.’
The guard smiled again, as though Leif had paid him a compliment. Why was the man keeping his hands behind his back? What was he hiding?
Leif leapt forward, intending to snatch at the guard’s sleeve, but the younger man was faster, taking a few steps backwards and causing Leif to lose his footing. Then he turned and ran, but in his hurry dropped something on the floor.
Leif bent down. It was a paintbrush. The tip left a vermilion smear, like blood, across his palm.
For almost an hour, he looked for the guard. He searched the lavatories, the gift shop and the basement café. Once he thought he saw a glimpse of the man’s ponytail at the end of a gloomy corridor, but he was gone before Leif could catch up.
Around two in the morning, he wearied, returned to the leather couch and lay back, staring at the ceiling, to rehearse his complaint. Given the grave circumstances, he thought that, as well as a speech, a written report would be appropriate, delivered by hand to the gallery director.
The cleaners found him in the morning, wound into a tight coil, a streak of saliva staining the leather.
However warranted, it was difficult to assert one’s authority with day-old stubble, a crumpled suit and stale breath. Leif hadn’t thought of that.
The gallery director, who had been fetched to deal with the situation, was most apologetic, wringing his hands, and protesting that nothing like it had ever happened before. But Leif could tell that the man and his embarrassed entourage wanted rid of him.
Before he knew it, a taxi was parked outside the entrance waiting to take him home free of charge as a token of the director’s sincerest apologies, along with a life membership of the gallery, worth thousands of kroner.
‘Now,’ said the director, shepherding Leif towards the waiting car. ‘I’m sure that, as a friend of our gallery, you will not find it in the best interests of such a venerable institution to speak to anyone about this … unfortunate incident.’
‘Wait,’ said Leif, trying to remove the director’s firm hand from his shoulder.
The complaint was not at all turning out as he had intended; everything was coming out in the wrong order. ‘I insist that you sack that horrible man. Refused to let me out, or call for help. And as for that nonsense about putting faces into the paintings …’
‘What man?’ said the director.
He was so close that Leif could smell his aftershave and freshly laundered shirt. The man’s nostrils flared faintly.
‘Why, the night guard, of course,’ said Leif. ‘His uniform was stained, and his hair unkempt. Even at night, there ought to be standards.’
The director smiled overbearingly, the way Leif had seen the nurses at the home smile at his mother, who no longer knew her own name.
‘We don’t employ night guards any more. Not since we installed these modern security doors, digitally controlled, and one hundred per cent reliable. No one enters; no one leaves,’ the director said. ‘Now, you have obviously had a terrible shock, and I doubt you slept much. Let’s get you home. What did you say your address was again?’
There was nothing for it but to go home and forget it ever happened, Leif thought. No one here would believe him anyway. He was just a visitor, a nobody.
Remembering something, he twisted himself free of the director’s grip and ran back into the gallery.
‘Back in a moment,’ he shouted at the astonished director and his attendants. ‘I forgot something.’
He ran all the way to the furthest gallery on the second floor and the nineteenth-century portraits. No sooner was he through the door than he felt the Duke’s eyes on him, a little sad, almost apologetic. His curly hair was loose, the beard trimmed, but it was the night guard all right. The man had painted himself.
Henning could hear footsteps and voices approaching, but there was one more thing he had to do. He ran back downstairs and found the painting of the woman feeding the geese. He leant in close with his eyes next to the canvas and peered at the man sleeping inside the cottage with the door open. The face was no larger than the nail on his little finger, but Leif recognised himself instantly from the long nose, the white eyebrows and the slightly protruding forehead. He looked happy, at peace, as though nothing could ever worry him again.
‘Is there a problem?’ said the gallery director, who had finally reached him with his minions, panting from the exertion.
‘No,’ said Leif, turning and covering the painting with his back as best he could. ‘There’s no problem at all.’