An extract from Teach Us to Sit Still

My brother lives in America and I in Italy, but we sometimes
get together for a few days in London after the New
Year. John is a painter and likes to take me to whatever art
shows are on in town. He enjoys expressing provocative
opinions in a highly audible voice and I enjoy listening to
someone who sees and knows so much more than I do.
On the second day, between one museum and another, we
stopped at Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington’s home, to
look, among other things, at Velázquez’s Waterseller of Seville.

In exactly the kind of chiaroscuro you get under a portico
in summer, an old man in a tattered cloak, the waterseller,
passes a brimming glass with a black fig in the bottom to a
smartly dressed young boy. It’s a painting I’ve seen half a
dozen times and always felt drawn to, but today I was almost
shocked by its impact. Those two faces, staring so intently,
but neither at each other nor at the water, their two hands,
one old, one young, meeting on the stem of the glass, the
light in the transparent liquid above the dark fullness of the
near invisible fig, they seemed to hold some obscure message
for me.

I asked my brother if there was a story behind the painting.
Who was the third guy in the shadow behind the seller
and the boy? ‘Just a street scene,’ John said, ‘just a moment
in Seville.’ He drew my attention to the water dribbling down
the jug in the foreground and began to talk about the kind
of paints Velázquez used. There were two other versions of
the Waterseller, he said, one in the Uffizi and one in the States
somewhere. Gazing at the painting as he spoke, the precious
fullness of the glass and its precarious passage between
those two hands made me excited and anxious; leaving the
museum, it was as if I had had an important dream and
needed someone to tell me what it meant.
On the last day we took a long bus ride out to Finchley
where our father had been a clergyman through the 1960s
and ’70s. The grand old vicarage we lived in has long since
been demolished and replaced with nondescript flats, but the
ugly neo-Gothic church is still there. John was enthusiastic,
talking a great deal about the past. He seemed at once nostalgic
and scandalised. When he was four he had had polio,
been close to dying. He has always walked with a heavy limp.
Mum and Dad, he said, had never wanted to face up to the
enormity of this. They went on singing ‘count your blessings’
as if nothing had happened.

Teach Us to Sit Still is published by Harvill Secker on 1st July.

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