It is always a question, in the Victoria and Albert museum, of deciding not just where one is, but also when. One minute we're in medieval Flanders with a load of brown pots, the next peering at David Bowie's trousers. Finding myself amid a display of 1930s Hollywood costumes, I almost wish I could try them on. It is a way of dealing with all the slippage – between one time and another, between real life and the museum. I'm not alone in this. The attendants here are on constant alert, to stop people jumping on the Great Bed of Ware.
Strolling along one of those dim corridors the V&A is riddled with, I took a turn and accidentally found myself in a spacious private apartment. Could this be the V&A director's secret pied-à-terre? Sumptuous rugs on the floor, a jacket on a door handle, a bunch of flowers left casually on an antique whatnot, a bunch of keys thrown in a dish of small change with a receipt from a New York bar. The place looks lived-in, but there's no one home. I feel like Loyd Grossman in Through the Keyhole.
Popping into the next room, I find a schoolboy lurking in the empty fireplace. Miserable and afraid, the cowering child doesn't move an inch. Maybe he came on a school trip and lost his way. His portrait hangs above the mantelpiece. Perhaps he is a ghost.
Time has stopped in this apartment. The newspapers lying around (an Evening Standard, the Daily Telegraph) are all dated August 2011, the week of the Worst Scenes Since The Blitz, as the headlines described the riots after the shooting of Mark Duggan by armed police on 4 August. It was a Thursday. I know where I was that week and it wasn't here.
Yet here I am. The place gives me the creeps. Maybe it's the stultifying decor, the air of neglect kept just at bay. The plaster moulders where there's been a leak. Water drips into a bucket, marking its own time. A monstrous sculpted head sits on a plinth, and in the nearby ashtray a cigar, half-smoked. The rooms go on and on.
I pad about, at once a creeping connoisseur of the things these rooms contain and a prying snoop. There are lots of unpaid bills, all addressed to Norman Swann. I eye up the armagnac on the drinks trolley, roam the glass-fronted bookcases and rifle through the drawers, having a good rummage. Looking for secrets, if there are any. There's always something.
Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset installations at the V & A
Elmgreen and Dragset's installation at the V&A. Photograph: V&A
Everywhere there are clues – photographs, letters, souvenirs – but to what? A framed poster for the Whitechapel Art Gallery's 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition hangs in a corner. Elsewhere there are dodgy antique paintings, fine engravings, and paintings and drawings of young men posing casually. The table is set for dinner, but something seismic happened here, leaving a crack running right through the tabletop, through the chairs, and even the plates that lie in its path, like a fault line opening up.
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Valuable antiques are strung out along the top of a bookcase. Those candlesticks look like they might be worth a bit. There's a delicious green art nouveau ceramic pot displayed among the books, and a cheap tin teapot. The place is a hodgepodge of tastes. A guess: whoever lives here carries the baggage of inherited wealth, displays an anxious striving to be modern and distinguish himself, and is burdened with a repressive finickiness that borders on the fastidious. Our Mr Swann is also given to florid outbursts of baroque vulgarity. Witness the bedroom down the corridor, which has a shiny, polished metal vulture looming on the bedpost, beyond which lie the rumpled sheets of his unmade bed.
I had made it to the bedroom in haste, hearing the shower running behind a closed door on the way. The maid loitering in the corridor didn't move. I don't think she's any more real than that schoolboy.
This, I finally surmise, is the home of an architect, though it doesn't look as if he's been very active recently. His old Mac Classic computer is defunct. Who uses floppy disks nowadays? In his cluttered office, models of modernist buildings teeter on shelves or piles of magazines. Another vulture perches beside his desk. But, it seems, he's moving out. Cardboard boxes stuffed with bric-a-brac sit about the floor. Someone's just installed a swanky new kitchen and had a go at painting the wall. Swann is bankrupt, old, and on his uppers. He has more life behind him than in front. The For Sale sign goes up next week, beside the entrance to the V&A.
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There's more, much more, and I could spend hours here. The rooms reminds me of those dreams where you suddenly find yourself on stage in a play, with all the actors looking at you expectantly, waiting for you to speak lines you haven't learned. But there is a script, after all, found in a pile of little books beside the door. Tomorrow, it's called, "Scenes from an unrealised film by Elmgreen and Dragset". This entire suite of rooms and