The Art School Dance Page 2

  ‘You’re not going out in that thing, are you?’ my mother asked, when she saw that I was wearing my father’s old army greatcoat. It was the only thing I'd kept of his after his death, a few sizes too big for me but just the right thing, distinctive, with a collar I could hide behind and so long it almost reached down to my feet. When I saw the tearful gleam in my mother’s eye I wasn't sure if it was because of the memories the coat occasioned or because of the extra shame I was going to cause her by dressing like a tramp.

  ‘It’s cold out tonight,’ I told her.

  ‘So? You’ve got a perfectly good coat in the wardrobe.’

  She meant the smart black Marks and Sparks number from the days when I dressed stylishly, a thing I wouldn’t be seen dead in once I became an art student. Becoming an art student had changed me, had helped me to realise that it was manners that made a person, not clothes; as an artist I was learning to look beyond the superficial, to look more deeply rather than accept things at face value.

  There was a time not too long ago when my mother would have argued, insisted, refused to let me out dressed so scruffily, but that was before my father died. Once we had buried him she seemed to tire quickly, she took to spending long spells in an armchair where previously she had been on the go all the time; she and Gran had come to look more like sisters than mother and daughter. To let her know that I wasn't deliberately trying to upset her I gave her a peck on the cheek, tell her I wouldn’t be late, behaved like a loving daughter was expected to behave. As I left the house, though, I wasn't sure quite how I felt towards my mother; perhaps it was because of her weary defeated attitude, which encouraged pity rather than love, or perhaps it was something more complicated. I was selfish, I knew that, selfish enough that any love for others should be affected by it; I never thought enough about other people, but then I believed that an artist had to be selfish, that an artist had to think about their work to the detriment of everything else. Maybe I was wrong, certainly there were people who would insist that I was, but whether right or wrong I didn’t think that I should regret being true to my beliefs.

  Once on the street, away from the gloom of the house, I began to feel cocky again, a burden seemed to lift from me and there was that jaunty spring in my step that I enjoyed, the smug smile on my face that it brought. I turned into the close where Stephen lived, a sort of courtyard with a small square of grass in the centre and maisonettes facing in on three of the four sides, stood beneath a lamp-post and waited, since Stephen’s folks weren’t too fond of me and I never went into the house when they were home. This was all because of what I was and the way I looked, of course. What else could be expected of people in a place like Sleepers Hill? It was ridiculous, but only a year or two earlier I had been their blue-eyed girl, an intelligent and respectable young girl who was just right for their son, future mating material, mother to their grandchildren. Then, when I became an art student, they started to regard me as if I was a cockroach scuttling across their precious snow-white hearth rug. If they met me on the street they pretended not to know me.

  After a while an upstairs curtain twitched, Stephen checking to see that I had arrived, there was something which might have been a wave or a gesture to stay under cover, and a minute or two later he came striding out to meet me, his leather-soled shoes echoing around the close, gave me a big kiss on the mouth and then hugged me to him as we walked along.

  ‘Did you have a good day?’ I asked him, feeling a tickle in my nose as I caught the scent of his aftershave..

  ‘Bloody,’ he said, not cursing, for he never had since he left school, since he started work at the council offices, and he disapproved if I ever did.

  He told me about his day at the office and it sounded so boring to me, a repetitive routine with not a spark of creativity involved. Stephen seemed to enjoy the work, though, despite the complaints he always had to make, and as I listened distractedly I thought that maybe it wasn't such a bad idea for a young girl living on a student loan to have a boyfriend who earned a wage. Not that money was the reason I’d stayed with Stephen for so long. No. We were still together because he had actually developed into a surprisingly nice young man, bright and cheery and not at all bad looking, maybe still a little too podgy about the cheeks but that was just the artist in me being a little too fussy.

  In town we went to the ‘Crofters’ for a drink, not the place I would have chosen, not the sort of pub I went to with the folk from the art school; it was too modern and flashy, gassy beer and noisy music and lights popping whichever way you looked. It had the young crowd’s atmosphere which Stephen preferred, though, so I humoured him, we sat at a copper-topped table which reflected so many lights that it dazzled, me with a half of lager and Stephen with a pint. It was hot and stuffy and Stephen took off his coat. He still wore his tie, though, his crisply ironed shirt staying buttoned to the neck. I knew he would have changed, before coming out with me, but he still looked as though he’d come directly from work. I smiled to think of how we used to be, me with my skirts so short that they were barely visible when I sat down, him with his hipster trousers and Ben Sherman shirts. Stephen had matured in a lot of ways, in the years since I first met him, but they were not always ways that I felt comfortable with.

  When the talk of his day has been exhausted I told him about mine, mentioned that it had been the day for the life class.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, which was his usual monosyllabic response to the subject of life drawing, hinting that he did not quite approve of it –especially on those rare occasions when the model was a man- but understood that it was necessary.

  ‘I did a pretty good drawing,’ I boasted, picturing it in my mind, the delicate line, the comfortable pose which described a woman at ease with herself.

  ‘Good,’ he said, but I knew that he would never want to see it. Some blokes would have been goggle-eyed keen to see a drawing of a naked woman, in the absence of an explicit photograph a competent sketch would suffice, but not Stephen.

  ‘At least I thought it was good until Ben came along,’ I continued. ‘You know what he’s like, he wasn’t so sure, said that Renoir knew a nude was finished when he felt he could caress the breasts and buttocks.’

  ‘Huh!’ he snorted, slightly disgusted.

  ‘Tits and bums, he called them, asked me if I felt the same way about my drawing.’

  Stephen frowned, took a quick drink of beer. ‘I hope you didn’t answer him.’

  ‘I told him it was charcoal, said the drawing would smudge if I touched it.’

  ‘Good,’ he said approvingly, not appreciating the joke, just glad that I hadn’t let Ben encourage me. ‘What did he have to say to that?’

  ‘He pulled me across to the model and told me to feel hers.’

  ‘He never!’

  ‘He did. Dragged me over there and slapped my hands on her breasts.’

  ‘No!’ Stephen was as horrified as my mother would have been, if she had learned of the episode, gulped quickly at his drink. ‘Well!’

  ‘So there I was, my hands full of her boobs while everyone watched.’ I saw the funny side, then, as I went over the story, but Stephen was not in the least amused; his expression was like stone, hard and chiselled but with none of the life of an accomplished piece of sculpture, just cold and vacant.

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more, Virginia,’ he said, and it was when he called me Virginia rather than Ginny that I knew he was peeved, that I’d better be quiet.

  I went to the bar for more drinks, quickly, before Stephen could protest that this is his duty. Though the room was warm I still had on my greatcoat, unbuttoned, and it billowed out behind me like a cape as I crossed the floor; one or two people stared, someone sniggered, but I didn’t care and I stood proudly at the bar, not as tall as Stephen but still tall enough to look imposing, proud that I was different, with no hint of shame or embarrassment. Returning with the drinks I sat close to Stephen, shoulder to shoulder, and I could smell his aftershave again, a delicate
fruity fragrance. I sneezed, blew my nose on a tissue, noticed him frown when he saw that it was stained with paint.

  He smelled more fragrant than I did, I realised, quickly tucking the tissue away, and thought I should have splashed some perfume on, but there was only my mother’s, a musty funereal fragrance, not used since Dad died. I said no more about the life class but the memory was still there, and with it came the faint recollection of Paula’s perfume, the vaguest hint of something expensive beneath the slight tang of sweat. Idly I wondered what it might have been. Something that would not be tickling the sinuses, I supposed. Something expensive.

  ‘So. What should we do?’ said Stephen, interrupting my thoughts, drawing me back to the present, to the noisy garish surroundings.

  When I looked at the clock over the bar I saw that it was just after eight, asked if his parents were going out that night, knowing that they usually did on Tuesdays.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’re going to the Labour Club about half eight.’

  ‘So,’ I sighed, looking around at the crowd, not really wanting to share their company any longer. ‘What should we do? The pictures?’

  But I knew this wasn’t what Stephen had planned, not what we usually did on Tuesday evenings, and I wasn't surprised when he said, ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘We could still catch the main film.’

  ‘You know I hate that, going in when the programme’s started.’

  ‘Well then- What?’

  ‘We could go back to my house,’ he casually offered, as if it was a novel idea.

  *

  As we walked from the pub, along the drab streets, yellow sodium lights spilled from the narrow cobbled alleys we passed, or splashed across the tediously tidy brickwork of newer estates, the redeveloped areas of our resurgent town. By that time in my life, eighteen years old, I was really getting to hate the place. I wanted somewhere new, a town with an art gallery, a city with a university and some entertainment other than the cinema, a place where there were cultured people. Stephen had never been cultured; he might have been nice in many ways, but by no stretch of the imagination could he ever be called cultured.

  I felt his body warm against mine and realised just how cool the night had become. He was warm in a way that a coal fire wasn’t, warm as only another person could be, and I thought, sometimes, that it was the warmth of people that I needed, rather than the people themselves. My father used to be warm, and my mother too, while he was still alive; they were strict but they were fair and in their warmest moments I had been able to feel their love burning like a flame. When my father died, though, his flame naturally went with him and my mother’s was dimmed at the same time.

  The one thing that was burning at that particular moment, however, as I walked home with Stephen, was the memory of the life class, and having him on my arm, his hip nudging mine, was like a bellows pumping the flame, making the coals glow brighter. When we turned into the close the first thing I did was check that the living room light was off, which it was, meaning that Stephen’s parents were out, enjoying their customary Tuesday evening of beer and Bingo. As cautious as ever, though, when Stephen inserted his key into the lock and opened the door he called out that he was home, and we waited for a reply; if there was none, which was usually the case, we entered, but on those occasions that there was a response the evening would end with a quick kiss and a sorry look before I was sent away.

  There was no answer, it was the usual Tuesday evening timetable which might be expected of a courting couple. Stephen closed the door and we climbed the stairs to the first floor living room, him following after me so he could get an eye-level view of my buttocks gyrating. There was a slight rasping noise as I moved, the underskirt and tights I wore for the feel of silk -or more accurately, nylon- against my skin. At that time I was fond of texture; there was a lot of it in my paintings.

  Stephen’s parents’ living room was much like any other that I knew, cramped, clean and tidy but rather too cluttered with possessions. There was really no room for a three piece suite, but one had been squeezed in, as obligatory an item of furniture in Sleepers Hill as the glass-fronted display cabinet which held the best china and one or two pieces of silver plate. There were framed family photographs on the fire surround and a shocking landscape -from Woolworths or Boots- hanging on one wall. Luckily this was behind the couch, so once I was seated I didn’t have to look at it.

  Before Stephen took off his coat he busied himself about the place, fussing around as if it was his alone, switching on the electric fire, filling the kettle, putting on music; the records he had were the ones we used to listen to when we first started going out together, soul music and the like, all the slow smoochy ones, the ones he might have said were evocative if the word had occurred to him. My tastes had changed since those early days together, I was into other styles and deeper meanings, but Stephen wasn’t one for change so it was usually me who had to suffer his tastes, me who had to smile and nod, at some point in the evening, when he said ‘Remember when-?’ It seemed that even then, not yet out of his teens, Stephen was looking to the past, was afflicted by a middle aged nostalgia while I was looking to the future. Certainly I didn’t know what the future held, and perhaps would have been content not to find out, but its promise posed a challenge and excited me.

  When Stephen had made the coffee and brought the cups through to the living room he finally took off his coat and sat beside me. It was only a matter of moments before he had his arm around me and I had my head on his shoulder. The coffee was then left to go cold and I found myself drawn into an act which had become as much a ritual for me as the Catholic mass I’d forsaken, with the moves of the Introit and the Offertory and the Communion so carefully choreographed.

  I enjoyed the mass as a young girl, when there were four services each morning and more on Sundays, benedictions and novenas and a whole riot of rituals. I could see, now, that it was the ritual which drew me, hearing the priest and the altar boys intoning the Latin so solemnly that few others could understand, having the smell of the incense and the click of the thurible, the delicate chime of the Offertory bells. It was when they took the magic from the service that I left, when they swapped the Latin for English and everyone was able to understand what was happening. The whole idea of ritual was that people should be kept in the dark and teased by promises; the congregation never wanted to understand, they just wanted to be tantalised and offered vague clues rather than certain explanations. It was then, when the magic left the faith, that the Church and I parted ways.

  But the magic on that night was in something less obviously spiritual. We moved from gentle caresses side by side to slobbering kisses on the horizontal, lying on the settee, and it was once more a case of moving from Introit to Offertory with the promise of the Communion to come.

  The first introduction of my body to Stephen’s was when his right hand grazed my cheek and his left hand clasped my fingers in his, his thumb gently stroking the tip of each; the offering of my body came when his kisses weakened me and I settled more deeply into the settee, one leg raising a little, like a drawbridge, to admit him

  The communion, well...

  His shirt was open, I had my hand on his stomach and his flesh felt almost like Paula’s had, soft and warm. What was different, though, was the contour of the landscape. What I had before me, beside me, was a softly undulating lowland, where previously there had been firm hillocks topped by hard cretaceous peaks. It was then that I started to want something more than the little Stephen offered. I ran my hand across his shoulders, trying to peel away his shirt, let my other slip lower to tug away his trousers, and he squirmed, pretending that he didn’t want it there, but I could tell that he liked it, could feel his response.

  So if he liked it then why didn’t he take off the shirt and the trousers -and his shoes and socks, for God’s sake!- why didn’t he strip us both naked and carry me off to his bed where we could both enjoy a little more freedom? The sensations I fel
t were nice, and there was no denying that I enjoyed them, but there was something lacking; I wanted more intimacy, wanted a body wholly naked, as naked as Paula’s had been.

  I had reached the stage where I was almost pleading with Stephen to take off his clothes, my hands were frantically tugging at his shirt and trousers, but the urgency of my movements had him too excited and he was in and out, spouting like a geyser and clutching me to him as if the only thing on his mind was making a baby.

  Making babies was a popular pastime in Sleepers Hill, the ultimate ambition for many of the population, and it dawned on me that Stephen, for all that he was a bloke, was no different than most. It was apparent that he could never be anything other than what he was; he had a career which would occupy him for a lifetime, he would earn promotions and better himself, and the points which marked his progress would include the house, the car, the wife and the child.

  Perhaps it was unkind of me to see his life in such blunt terms, but I was sure that it was an accurate prognostication of the way it would unfold, and I realised that it was not a life that I could share. Freedom was important for me, freedom to think what I liked, to do the work I liked, the freedom not to conform to what was expected of a person born in Sleepers Hill. Even wanting Stephen totally naked, as naked to the touch as Paula had been, was nothing more than a demonstration of this freedom which I craved; it was not the simple lust for physical pleasure that it might have seemed, but something more allegorical, a subconscious metaphor, if you like, in which the freedom of the naked body could be likened to the freedom from small town life. The escape from mundane reality which might come in the arms of a naked man could never be any more elating than my eventual escape from Sleepers Hill.

  *

  Stephen began to stir on the settee, where we were becoming cramped and uncomfortable, kissed me tenderly a time or two and then said, ‘Mum and Dad will be back soon.’

  ‘Yes,’ I understood. ‘I suppose I’d better be going.’