The Art School Dance Read online

  The Art School Dance

  Title Page

  Book One: Ginny Da Vinci

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Book Two: Virginia Plain

  Prologue

  Book Three: Virginia Fair

  About the author

  THE ART SCHOOL DANCE

  Maria Blanca Alonso Published by Maria Blanca Alonso at Smashwords Copyright 2014 Maria Blanca Alonso Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ‘Things may come and things may go but the art school dance goes on forever’: Pete Brown and Piblokto

  Contents

  Book One: Ginny Da Vinci

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Book Two: Virginia Plain

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Book Three: Virginia Fair

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the author

  BOOK ONE

  GINNY DA VINCI

  a portrait of the artist as a young woman

  Chapter One

  On my way into college I paused to do a quick sketch of this old dear walking towards me. She was a hefty piece of flesh, buttocks sticking out at the back as a counter-balance for the weight she carried up front, skin falling like fleshy cataracts beneath her chin, bosoms swinging like udders, and I managed what I thought was quite a clever little caricature, very Gerald Scarfe or Ralph Steadman-ish if we’re looking for a modern influence, George Grosz or maybe Cruickshank if we think a little further back. As the woman reached me she went up on tiptoe to take a peek at the drawing, studied it for no more than a moment and then flared her nostrils, calling me a cheeky young madam.

  There were hairs hanging from her nose and they flapped like bunting as she snorted her anger.

  ‘Yes?’ I smiled politely. I had a slight grin on my face, impish, but nothing too offensive.

  ‘Give that here!’ the woman demanded, but I shook my head and easily held the sketchpad out of reach, a tantalising distance above her head. I was like a mother teasing a child and it really pissed her off, on account of our difference In age. ‘Well rub it out then!’ she huffed.

  ‘Sorry, love, but this is art, it’ll outlive the both of us.’ The poor dear was so peeved, now, her face was red and she was beginning to sweat, so out of sheer devilment I decided to upset her a little more. ‘In any case, the ink’s indelible,’ I added, with a condescending frown. ‘Yes, it’s a long word, I know, but basically it means that you can scrub and scrub as much as you like and it won’t go away. Clever, eh?’

  The old woman didn’t seem to think so.

  ‘You cheeky little cow!’ she said, and started her handbag swinging, coming from way behind her shoulder, so I scooted out of reach with a laugh.

  There were people looking, I knew that; there always were. The jacket was what caught the eye first, scuffed dull leather with the name on the back, ‘Ginny da Vinci’, in polished chromium studs; then they saw the hair, short as any bloke’s, bleached blonde and spiky, and they gave a giggle or grunted with disgust; last of all they noticed the jeans, not denim blue any more but faded and torn and caked with paint of all colours, some fresh, some pastel pale. This was when it clicked and they put a place to the face, if not a name, when they muttered to themselves ‘she’s one of them’, meaning an art student.

  I should have known it was going to be difficult, being an art student in a town like Sleepers Hill. I mean-! Sleepers Hill! What a name to conjure with! We’re not talking about an oil painting here, that much was for sure, not the sort of place that would’ve interested Canaletto. What we had was a dormitory of a town where the houses were as silent as sensory deprivation centres and no one ever woke up until a piece of scandal –mine?- roused them from their stinking pits. There had always been a lack of romance and sensitivity, in the place and in its people, you only needed to see the way the locals looked at me to understand this. Why, they wouldn’t recognise an artist if he threw a can of Dulux at their feet and said it was one of Pollock’s. ‘Pollocks?’, they’d mutter, and think it was another naughty name for the genitals.

  No, forget Sleepers Hill. Paris is where I should have started, and in an earlier time, with the tarts and the Tuileries and absinthe at tuppence a tot, the girls at the Folies Bergeres flashing their knickers and twanging their suspenders. The Sleepers Hill of my youth was a bit short on tarts, at least of the kind an artist could use, the ones of character who were as keen on being immortalised as they were on plying their trade. The women I grew up with were all bums and beehives, tights and twin-sets, and though there were probably suspenders they were never openly on show, not unless you fancied standing in front of the corset shop on the market square and have folk wonder what you were up to.

  It was hard, then, trying to be an artist in that desert of a place, so devoid of any cultural heritage. Sleepers Hill was not an environment where a Ginny da Vinci could blossom.

  At least that’s what I thought, until I got to know Paula.

  *

  It was on the same morning of my set-to with the old lady that I first really noticed Paula.

  Skipping out of the way of the old hag’s flailing bag, observed by many an onlooker, I went on my way with a step so jaunty you could almost sense the conceit in my stride. Ahead of me was the railway station, the station by which I would eventually leave that miserable town, just down the hill to the right; I turn left at that point, though, it was not quite time for me to leave yet, went downhill towards college. The building was old brick, Victorian, bright red in the autumn sun, and because it sat on a slope there were a couple of dozen steps to be climbed to get to the main entrance. ‘Sleepers Hill Mining and Technical College’ was its full title, though there wasn't that much mining studied there any more, not with most of the collieries closed and the industry in decline; mainly the place was full of plasterers and bricklayers, beefy lads who thought that the art that I did was for sluts and ponces, and with the art school being at the top of the building there were three floors of such boneheads to get past before I reached the studios. Going into college could be a risky business at times, especially for a person who stood out from the crowd, lik
e I did, with my distinctive jacket and my bleached hair cropped close.

  That morning I made it upstairs okay, though, because I was early or late or maybe all the semi-skilled got too drunk the night before to pay me any attention. Whatever the reason I made it safely into the studio, there was no one chasing me, but Ben was there with a hammer at the ready all the same, prepared to chase unwanted visitors.

  ‘All quiet with the craftsmen this morning?’ he asked, and laid down the hammer when I confirmed that it was. The head of that select school of art –there were never more than two dozen students each year- Ben looked like he’d been put together by one of the brickies downstairs, solid and large but with bits sticking out where there shouldn’t be; he claimed this was muscle but it looked more like bone, there was no muscle in the places he found it, certainly not developed to that extent.

  As I was about to take out the oils and brushes, get into the painting while the enthusiasm and the inspiration was still there, I saw that Ben was arranging a moth-eaten couch in the centre of the room. It was then that I remembered; Tuesday, life class day. Nothing I could do until everyone else arrived, then, so I sat down on a stool and smoked a cigarette, watch Ben drape the couch with curtains and odd bits of fabric. It was going to be a reclining pose, then, which I preferred; I found these easier than when the model was standing.

  Slowly people drifted into the studio –Gus, Jeff, Chrissie and others- and by the time the class was due to start there were about a dozen of us there. When we were all assembled Paula arrived, the model who also happened to be the college secretary, wished everyone a cheery ‘good morning’ and went into the changing room, a tiny cubicle in a corner of the studio, drawing the curtain after her; she was an attractive woman, blonde and very slim, and though all us students pretended to have the artist’s detached view to her naked body I don’t suppose that there was a single one amongst the blokes who hadn’t dreamt about her at some time or other, nor a single one of us girls who didn’t envy her figure.

  Alright, so I had noticed her before that particular Tuesday, it was very difficult not to notice a woman who sat stark naked in front of you for three hours at a stretch. That Tuesday it all started to change, though, it was... well, you’ll see what I mean.

  While Paula stripped in the privacy of her cubicle us students set our drawing boards on donkeys or easels, chatted, sharpened pencils, waited; she finally came out wearing a short robe, walked over to the couch, then let the robe slip to the floor.

  ‘How do you want me?’ she asked Ben, and someone –Gus, probably, I guess- gave a suggestive cough as she climbed onto the couch. Ben arranged her, an arm here, a leg like this, the head a little more that way, his big hands pawing her all over, and when he was happy with the pose he told us to get down to it, which we did, hunched over drawing boards, eyes constantly flicking back and forth between drawings and the model. Oggie Ogden, a bit of a weirdo, lit a joss stick and clipped it to his board, a cheap perfume which stank to high heaven; he was like some retro hippie, wanting to be different like we all did in those days, in that town, quite fanatical about it, even down to wearing beads around his neck, a rosary with the cross snipped off which had his Irish Catholic mother constantly praying for the redemption of his soul.

  Ben strolled around the studio looking at the drawings, sometimes content with making suggestions but more often than not making corrections. He was a nuisance that way, especially in the life class; if he thought there’s something wrong with a drawing he wouldn’t just rub out the bit that offended him and neatly show how it was done. Not Ben. No, he would scrub away with a spit-wet thumb, smudging all the careful work, and then scribble in how he thought it should be. Never mind that a student might have done a delicate drawing, with soft tones and fine lines, as lyrical as a poem and as fragile as a butterfly; Ben’s contribution would be like a scar gouged across the rolling landscape of Paula’s body.

  I was a little worried, then, when he looked over my shoulder and studied my drawing for a while, muttering softly to himself; I could smell the perspiration on his body and he was breathing heavily, as if the drawing excited him or angered him, but he made no move towards it, simply sauntered on to someone else, and I was as pleased as I was relieved, thinking that my work must be improving. My line grew freer and my strokes more sure as I relaxed.

  After we had been working for about three quarters of an hour Ben asked Paula if she needed a break and she nodded, got stiffly from the couch, flexed arms and legs to ease some feeling into her cramped limbs; her breasts were stretched this way and that, at one point so flat that they seemed almost boyish, until she covered them with her robe. Then, as Ben had done, she made a tour of the studio to see how well people had depicted her. At my side she bent so close that I could smell her perfume mingled with perspiration –there were electric fires on all sides of the couch- a cloying fragrance which made me shudder for some reason.

  ‘Very nice, Ginny,’ she said, resting a hand on my shoulder, and I felt the warmth of her touch through the thin fabric of my shirt. ‘I’ll look even better when I get a face.’

  ‘Ginny won’t give you one, though,’ Gus called over, knowing that I often had trouble with faces, and I mouthed a silent curse in his direction.

  Paula pouted, pretending to be disappointed, said that she'd always considered her face her finest feature, and Gus coughed suggestively again, then blamed the cough on Oggie Ogden’s joss stick when Ben frowned at him.

  We had time for a cigarette and then were at it again, through until lunchtime. With about a quarter of an hour to go I was satisfied with what I’d done and sat back, arms folded, admiring the drawing; I knew that the secret of a successful piece of work lay mainly in knowing when to stop.

  ‘Finished?’ Ben asked me, noting my inactivity from across the studio.

  ‘I reckon so,’ I said, and he came over, stood beside me and studied the drawing intently.

  ‘Renoir,’ he finally said, with a gruff authority, ‘believed that a nude was finished when he felt that he could caress the breasts and buttocks. That’s what it’s all about, Ginny, breasts and buttocks. Tits and bums to you lot,’ he added more loudly, for the benefit of the class in general, and then gestured towards my drawing. ‘Now do you feel that you could caress those breasts and buttocks?’

  ‘It’s charcoal,’ I told him with a grin. ‘It would smudge if I did.’

  He smiled at the slight joke without being distracted by it, flashing a chipped front tooth. ‘But do you imagine that you could? Would you be able to feel their roundness, their weight, the sheer sensuality of the flesh?’

  His hands moulded breasts and buttocks in the air as he spoke, and I was none too happy with such talk, I just wanted a drawing that would be fairly realistic, not one that might feature on the pages of a men’s magazine. I shrugged, grumbled, say, ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ said Ben impatiently, and grabbed me by the wrist.

  ‘Come on where?’ I asked, as he pulled me to my feet; I tried to resist, but he was too strong for me and started to tug me across the floor.

  ‘Come feel Paula’s breasts and buttocks, see if you’ve got the same sensuality in your drawing.’

  ‘Give over!’ I told him, and looked anxiously towards Paula, but she just gave a slight heave of the shoulders, as if to say that she didn’t mind, that it’s all in a day’s work.

  By now Ben had me at the couch and he brought my hands to the model’s breasts, told me to feel, gently. Him telling me to be gentle, when his hands gripped mine like vices!

  ‘Well, can you feel?’

  Yes, I could feel, but could see very little. I was too embarrassed to look at Paula so I kept my gaze fixed on the ceiling, studying the skylights, looking at the clouds above and wondering if it might rain or if we’d have snow that winter, while my hands fumbled blindly about, as if in a bran tub. Paula’s breasts were warm and soft, also slightly damp with perspiration, like my hands; when my palms rested on
the nipples they seemed to harden, like crisps, or like popcorn without the sticky coating.

  ‘Now, is there that same sensation in the breasts you’ve drawn?’ Ben demanded of me. There were smiles all around the studio but he didn’t notice, and wouldn’t have understood them if he had.

  ‘I’ll, er, go back and work on it some more,’ I said, and heard Gus clear his throat.

  Ben released his grip and I returned, red-faced and trembling, to my drawing.

  ‘Thank you, Paula,’ he said.

  ‘My pleasure,’ she replied, and I promised that if Gus coughed again I’d throttle him.

  *

  Predictably there were jibes, later, over what happened with Paula, and it was these which served to fix the episode in my mind. Gus asked me if I'd enjoyed myself. I said no, I hadn’t, and called him a voyeur when he grinned, said he’d probably been more excited watching than I’d been touching, indulging himself in some lesbian fantasy. He laughed, a loud laugh which caused people to turn their heads and look, and when people looked they saw his broad white toothy grin and wide-eyed expression which seemed brighter and more brilliant behind the glasses he wore; when Gus laughed it was as though he did so as much out of wonder as out of amusement, almost as if he could see a little more than the rest of us.

  There were plenty of people in the college canteen that day, to turn their heads when he laughed. A trio of girls from the catering course stared at our group as if offended by the laughter, stared at me especially since I seemed to be the cause of it all, so I gave them a disdainful look and a toss of the head, turning away like some haughty young woman who was spurning a man’s advances. And maybe they were more offended by this than by the laughter; it might account for their later attitude towards me.

  Chapter Two