The Art School Dance (2 page)

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

‘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?’