The Art School Dance Read online

  ‘Caught you with your knickers down last night, didn’t I?’ she said. She wore a cloche hat with a veil and she raised the lace from her mouth to slip a spoonful of yoghurt into her mouth.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘At Fraser’s party. I was at the top of the stairs when I saw you along the landing, your drawers just about to drop down to your ankles.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  The grin broadened, the lips thin like the rest of her features, as she asked, ‘Good fuck, was he?’

  I had no reply to that.

  A heavily built Welshman asked if this is what’s known as the ‘art school dance’, said his mother warned him about such things and he was looking forward to joining in.

  ‘It’s more like a tart’s cool dance than an art school dance where Virginia’s amour is concerned,’ Rose laughed. ‘That guy bangs away like a shit-house door.’

  Indeed? And how did she know that?

  As the group broke up, left to our own resources for the rest of the day, I asked Rose what she planned to do.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the talk Mr Goode -Barney- gave us.’

  ‘Haven’t the faintest,’ she confessed. ‘Go for a drink I suppose. What do you say?’

  ‘Why not?’ I agreed.

  Rose led the way, from the college and along the street, to the bar where I had met my lover of the previous night, smiled at a young man we passed in the doorway but then shook her head.

  ‘No, celibacy’s got to be the thing for a spell,’ she promised herself, descending a dark flight of stairs to the bar. ‘At least until I get the devotion to art going and sort things out. It’s going to be fucking difficult, though, if the rest of the tutors are anything like Barney.’ She ordered drinks at the bar, looked around the room while she was waiting to be served. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s your stud of last night.’

  I looked, but only briefly, for I had also come to the same decision as Rose.

  ‘No, I’m for celibacy too.’

  ‘Good girl, Virginia.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘I know you’re in there, girl!’ Ron bellowed, standing erect at the far end of the studio, his knuckles white as his shaking hands tightly gripped his broom. Before him was my den, a construction of black polythene pinned to easels, to exhibition boards and discarded paintings. There were many other such constructions in the studio, jutting out from the walls at every angle to make cubicles in which people could work in privacy, but it was mine which was the largest, the length of the far wall and half the height of the studio. Ron had diligently steered his broom between all the other compartments, leaving a dusty rectangular border around each and smearing streaks of paint across the floor, but had now been brought to a halt by the large black bivouac. ‘I don’t know why you’re in there,’ he cried in exasperation, ‘but I know you’re there!’

  I was in the den because of the painting, thirty six square feet of cotton duck stretched over twenty four feet of two by one timber. The surface of the canvas vibrated with lines, shimmering when caught in the periphery of the eye’s range and shifting more slowly when gazed at directly, coming forward and then receding, pulsing gently like some living creature whose sole intention was to mesmerise and envelop. Up to twenty different vanishing points disguise the buildings which had originally been there and a simple enough landscape had been swept away in some futuristic mayhem, planes pulled askew and angles exaggerated to ridiculous degrees, as though the fabric of the structures had been ripped away and replaced by a fine elastic film. No colour could be applied, for the network of lines was too flimsy; to apply colour would be like painting a cobweb with a coat of gloss, or applying a layer of undercoat to a moth’s wing.

  The canvas was a complicated exercise in perspective, a response to Barney’s insistence that what was good in a painting had to be established, prompted by the premise that mastery of such disciplines as perspective would lead to said knowledge. Barney, though, had said that it was too Socratic an approach, that being Socratic it would necessarily involve balance and compromise. Such qualities were impossible with a concept like goodness, he insisted; a thing was either good or not good, there could be no degrees of goodness.

  There were arguments, I was sure, but for that moment they were elusive, like flitting insects coloured grey by my lethargy. I wondered aloud if it would always be like this, if all my proposals would be ridiculed and dismissed so easily, and the question brought a smile from Barney, together with a further glittering piece of reasoning. The merit of a theory, he told me, or of any proposition or proposal, lay in the very fact that it could be refuted, for if it could not be refuted by the facts which it sought to explain then its accuracy was no longer dependant on those facts, and therefore useless.

  This seemed nonsensical to me. ‘You mean to say that if the facts don’t turn about and deny a theory then the theory is useless, since it doesn’t relate to these facts?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But if the facts do deny the theory then the theory is again useless, since it doesn’t explain the facts as it set out to do.’

  Barney smiled and agreed that this was so, which left me so confused that I built the den and hid myself away inside it. It was an understandable reaction, but one which Ron lacked the imagination to appreciate.

  Looking about him, exasperation in his every movement, the cleaner saw Griff working nearby, said, ‘She’s in there, isn’t she?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Griff lied.

  ‘You’ll have to take it down! I've got to clean in there!’ Ron shouted, turning his attention back to the den. Then he repeated himself more softly for Griff’s benefit. ‘I’ve got to clean in there, see?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Come out!’ the cleaner cried, but there was not even the slightest ripple on the glossy black surface of the den. He pleaded with Griff. ‘Go on in there and get her out for me. Please.’

  ‘Sorry, Ron, but Virginia won’t listen to me. Besides, I couldn’t even find my way in there. It’s like a labyrinth.’

  A masterpiece of construction was how I had described it.

  ‘Please, Griff.’

  ‘Sorry, Ron.’

  ‘Then I'll have to see the Principal about this!’ Ron cried. And louder still, at the den: ‘I SAY I'LL HAVE TO SEE THE PRINCIPAL ABOUT THIS!’

  There was still no response so he turns and sadly shuffled away to sweep the saner areas of the studio, looking back over his shoulder every three or four steps as if in accordance with some vexed choreography. When he had passed through the door to the adjacent studio I finally crept out, blinking in the brighter light of day, and crossed to where Griff was working.

  *

  It had taken a term but, despite Barney’s complaints, all us first year students had begun to evolve our own styles, from Ceri, whose controlled expressionism involved making clinically exact copies of Jackson Pollock, to me, whose neo-conceptual confusion meant that I was not yet exactly sure what I was doing. Griff was into a Day-Glo mysticism, painting mandalas in vibrant colours against pastel puke backgrounds. His curls danced across his shoulders as he nodded to acknowledge my presence.

  ‘The den’s coming down, then?’ he asked.

  ‘No chance,’ I told him.

  ‘It really should, Virginia. It’s dangerous, having all that polythene around you.’

  Especially when the only light inside was a paraffin-fired hurricane lamp.

  But then Griff’s paintings were considered by some to be a hazard to health, prolonged exposure to which could cause such violent bouts of nausea that the canvasses had to be turned to the wall and all the windows opened to clear the air.

  It wasn’t necessary for me to remind Griff of this. I simply pretended to throw up as I walked away.

  ‘You’re crazy, you are,’ said Griff.

  ‘Am I?’ I wondered.

  It was becoming a favourite question of mine: Am I? And if I am, then who am I?

 
The words of some poet came to mind as I left the puke coloured paintings and took the lift to a lower floor -‘when we dream that we dream...’- but I was unable to complete the quotation. Nor could I remember who the poet was, or if the words were relevant to my present confusion.

  In the canteen I found Ceri, sat beside him and tried to describe this confusion, its doubt and uncertainty.

  ‘Sod theories. Who needs them?’ said Ceri, abstractedly picking at his nose. He rolled a tiny black pellet between finger and thumb and flicked it away; it stuck to the window beside him, unseen at first against the dusk outside, then appearing like a blackhead when I looked at my reflection in the darkening glass.

  ‘But it’s so easy, Ceri, so natural to doubt things, to question what they are. Or even if they are.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ Ceri spat out the word, not allowing me time to dwell on the blemish on my mirrored cheek. ‘You’re supposed to be an artist, Virginia. What you see, what you paint- that’s what is.’

  ‘But how can the senses be trusted when they’re so easily deceived?’ I wanted to know, and pointed to our reflections in the canteen window. ‘I mean, if those are illusions then why couldn’t we be, too?’

  Ceri snorted. He was too much the bullet-headed bigot to harbour such doubts and too much of a bruiser to let people challenge his views. He pounded his fist on the table, making cups and saucers jump to attention.

  ‘If I see this table, then it exists,’ he maintained. ‘If I’m not certain, then I touch it.’

  Or thump it, as he did again.

  My finger traced baroque patterns in the coffee which had spilled across the table. ‘But what about dreams?’ I ventured. ‘We believe in those for a time, then discard them in favour of so-called reality.’

  ‘You’re crazy, Virginia, or you will be if you carry on thinking like that,’ Ceri sneered, his eyebrows falling like hoods to darken his gaze. He kicked away his chair as he stood up. ‘Come on, enough of this metaphysical bullshit. Let’s go for a drink.’

  As I followed Ceri out of the college I envied the confident roll of the Welshman’s frame, so loaded down with conviction that it seemed to move with difficulty. For myself, I was so desperately lacking in the precious stuff that I could only allow myself to be led wherever he chose to take me.

  *

  Drinking with Ceri, the evening went by like a blurred photograph, a dozen frames of Muybridge photographs fuzzing into one, and as the images flowed into each other the drinks seemed to be consecutive sips from one single pot. Ceri, noting how well the beer was going down, suggested that we might move on to a party.

  ‘A party?’ I said.

  ‘At Fraser’s.’

  ‘Oh no, no parties, especially not at Fraser’s.’

  Fraser’s parties had already achieved a certain notoriety. He would give at least one a fortnight and they were infamous for their lack of food, lack of drink and lack of any music other than the static-riddled stuff crackling out from a cheap radio perched on top of the fireplace. Fraser himself would be absent for most of the evening, finally appearing, if he did at all, close to midnight, when he hoped the party would be in full swing and everyone having a good time despite his lack of effort.

  No, no parties.

  ‘It might be different tonight,’ Ceri said optimistically.

  ‘You really think so?’

  No, probably not, but we went along there all the same, and to our surprise what we found was an actual party, people enjoying themselves, rather than the funeral wake we would have predicted.

  ‘Obviously nothing to do with Fraser,’ I commented, and breathless words rushed along the hallway as Jean came to greet us.

  ‘No,’ she panted, her plump face bursting with a flushed enthusiasm where previously she had only ever been seen as pale and doughy. ‘It was my idea, actually, well, mine and Marie’s. We made pizza, lots of it, and got bread and cheese and stuff. Someone brought tapes. I mean, it’s time Fraser gave a proper party-’

  ‘Yes, Jean, well done,’ I congratulated her as I squeezed past.

  Accepting that it was a party, then, I picked up food and drink and made a tour of the house. It was actually crowded for a change, too crowded to confine itself to the usual single dismal room, and I bumped against dancers and stumble over reclining bodies, was chased from one room by profoundly heavy conversation, from another by cloying fumes of smoke as people sat in a circle beneath a dim orange light and passed around joints, soothing their charred throats with draughts of lime cordial. It was in the only quiet room in the house that I found an atmosphere in which I could relax, in the room with the surreal ashtray and the mutilated mannequin’s torso. Flickering candles were the only light there, the faint strains of acoustic guitar music the only sounds, and, always one for the anonymous quiet, I was drawn into the room.

  There was only one person there, on the settee, and I sat beside him, told him, after an awkward silence, that he was James McCready, that he was studying sculpture. It was an inane thing to say but he smiled pleasantly and agreed that I was right. The question of who I was -am I, and if I am, then who am I?- seemed to lose any importance for once, for he believed that I was Virginia, sometimes with the surname Plain, and that I was studying fine art.

  It was some time later that I said, ‘Most people seem to have left. Perhaps it’s time we did, too.’

  McCready -‘Forget the first name,' he said, 'I hate the James bit, it was my father’s name too so how unoriginal is that?’- got to his feet and offered to walk me home, at which I smiled, as a person might do who had already taken this courtesy for granted.

  The house I had moved into with Rose was a short walk away, a terrace in a suburban high street, the first after the shops and adjacent the launderette, a pub handy across the road.

  ‘I like it here, it’s convenient,’ I said, as I opened the door and entered the hall. I pointed to the first door. ‘That’s Rose's room. Mine is the next one. We have a sitting room upstairs. Come on.’

  I led the way up the staircase, directed McCready to the sitting room while I went along the landing to the kitchen to make coffee. When I eventually joined him before the unlit fire I sighed and rested my head back, looking up to a point where wall met ceiling though my focus was slowly drawn to somewhere infinitely more distant. Searching for something to say, feeling that I ought to speak, it seemed that all my words had been wasted on Barney, that there was nothing left.

  Ultimately it was McCready who broke the silence by saying, ‘Should we go downstairs?’

  To my bedroom? Was this really what I wanted? No, not really, but for the moment it seemed more preferable than anything else, so we went.

  *

  My bedroom was more compact than the sitting room, just a bed in one corner, a wardrobe opposite and a single chair in front of the fire. In what light was able to creep through from the hallway there could be made out various tints of browns and greens, shades of mother earth.

  ‘Matches?’ I asked, and McCready tossed me a box which I took to a low table by the bed, a piece of furniture hidden until now by the shadows. I struck a match, it flared, and slowly a warm glow radiates from an old oil lamp, filling the room with a soft light.

  McCready followed me into the room and looked more closely at the oil lamp. Its base was heavy brass, formed in the shape of tiger’s feet, and the pink of the fuel, held in a dimpled glass sphere, coloured the walls of the room. The light itself burned behind another glass sphere, this one etched with an intricate floral pattern.

  Noticing McCready’s interest, I told him that it was a present from a friend.

  ‘It’s nice,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ I agreed, and in the brief silence which followed I saw him look at the lamp as if it was more than functional, more than decorative.

  Or perhaps he thought that this was the way I regarded it, for he asked, ‘So what happened to him?’

  ‘Him?’ I echoed.

  ‘Sorry. I just as
sumed-’

  ‘Yes, well I haven’t been in touch with the person who gave me that for quite some while.’

  ‘Ah.’

  McCready then sat in the one chair before the fire, perhaps a little relieved that there was no one else to complicate the situation. For my part I was a little annoyed that what might be termed a ‘situation’ could have progressed to this stage. Months earlier I had slept with the one man I promised myself, that obligation had been fulfilled, and now there should be other things to occupy me. Still, I thought, for the moment I might as well go with the tide, with its ebb or flow according to how things developed. It was only one night, after all. Then, perversely, as if to add substance to any hopes which the libidinous side of McCready’s nature might have, I knelt on the floor beside him, rested my arms across his knees and my cheek against his thigh. As he stroked my hair, pale blonde but reflecting the pink lamplight, I imagined paintings I thought I might be able to do, paintings which danced before me as I stared mutely at the flickering shadows.

  This should have been enough for me, but finally I accepted the further possibility, said, ‘It looks like you’re staying the night. Let’s go to bed.’

  It was a simple suggestion, like an invitation made out of kindness, and the two of us moved to my bed. For some reason known only to myself, though, I chose to sleep in pyjamas. McCready went to the bathroom, to swill his mouth and freshen his face, and returned to find me covered from neck to ankle in fluffy pink cotton, smelling of childhood and nursery days. He was obviously puzzled, but to his credit was not repulsed, he stripped to his underpants and joined me, kissing and touching tentatively, as if unsure of what came next.

  And all that came next was sleep, warmth, dreams within dream, and the recollection that the words -‘When we dream that we dream... we are beginning to awaken’- came from Novalis.