The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift

Author:Charmian Clift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2024-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

a Rembrandt in the kitchen

The oriental merchant, a man past middle age and grown gross with good living, stands confidently in his brocade tunic and furlined cloak. His breeches are tied with ribands beneath his strong knees, his fur cap is decorated with a plume, and there is a jewel riding high on the hugely complacent curve of his stomach. The tall cane that rests lightly against his stubby but balletic foot is a fashionable accessory to his costume, not a necessity; there is no suggestion in his posture that he is leaning on it.

His face is furrowed with thought as well as years as he considers something observed across his right shoulder, something outside the tiny rectangle of paper – 3½ inches by 4½ inches – that contains him.

He has been considering now for 310 years. I suppose in all that time his surroundings have changed so much and frequently that there has always been something over his right shoulder worthy of his deliberations. In the thirteen or fourteen years that he has been my house guest I have sometimes tried with glittering objects that might be of interest to a merchant to tempt him to turn his head and look out at the world directly, but although occasionally I have detected a definite change in his expression his attitude has remained consistently oblique: besides, someone caught me at this prank once and I felt so silly that I gave it up.

I owe the permanent presence of the oriental gentleman to a fortunate conjunction of circumstances – an imminent birthday, a transient period of affluence, the discovery, one day in black Bloomsbury, of the print shop of Barnard and Crouch, and the fact that this particular pull of the Rembrandt drypoint, although in a good state, had been nicked on the plate-mark at some stage and was therefore worthless to a collector.

Since I am just as prone to snobbishness as anybody else it has given me pleasure and satisfaction to keep my Rembrandt in the kitchen. I can’t here, on account of all the built-ins, but for many years my opulent and exotic guest occupied a space on a whitewashed wall mid-way between a plaited rope of garlic and an old copper ladle. So contrary is human nature that I was perversely gratified by the fact that of all the people who ate and drank and talked and laughed in that kitchen not more than half a dozen recognized my oriental gentleman for what he was, or indeed even noticed him at all.

One of these half-dozen, at the time preparing prickly pear leaves (or plates?) for a culinary speciality of his own which proved to be inedible, remarked that he thought it was pretty high camp to keep a Rembrandt in the kitchen (considering, he did not add but only inferred, the tat displayed on the living-room walls: he had a poor opinion of modern art, and now I come to think of it a great many of our paintings were hung for sentimental or cowardly reasons or merely to camouflage bad plastering).

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