The Art School Dance (7 page)

Eventually the
conversation got around to Christmas, when someone mentions that I
was earning a little extra cash in readiness for it. Chrissie asked
Ben what he was buying his young son, a cute little lad we’d seen
in college a few times, only six years old but looking very much
like Ben in miniature.

‘
A rope
ladder,’ Ben answered, and we all laughed.

‘
A rope
ladder?’ said Chrissie. ‘You’re having us on.’

‘
No I’m
not,’ Ben assured her, and his expression was solemn, as if he was
unable to understand the reason for our laughter. ‘What’s wrong
with a rope ladder? It’s a practical present, he’ll get plenty of
exercise with it and it’ll do him more good than some violent video
game or what have you. He’ll have a great time with it, you mark my
words.’

Yes, we
believed him, but we still laughed at his eccentricity, and he
smiled back with good humour, with not a hint of malice or
ill-feeling. Maggie, though, she had a wicked gleam in her eye as
she turned to me.

‘
What
about you, Ginny?’ she asked.

‘
What
about me?’

‘
What
are you getting for Christmas? More to the point, what are you
getting that dishy boyfriend of yours?’

‘
Well
it’s not going to be a portrait of him, is it?’ I said
bitterly.

‘
Aftershave, then? Something by Calvin Klein,
perhaps?’

‘
Perhaps, if I can get together enough cash. What’s it to
you, anyway?’

Maggie grinned
behind a veil of her foul tobacco smoke and turned away to strike
up a conversation with someone else. I felt a touch angry with her
and gulped down a mouthful of beer, hoping that Maggie hadn’t
mentioned to anyone else that I asked her to do a portrait of
Stephen; that could be embarrassing, especially if someone like Gus
found out. I set my glass on the table, stared silently at it for a
while, until I noticed Paula had shifted along a seat or two and
was now beside me.

‘
Take no
notice of her, Ginny,’ she said, glancing at Maggie. ‘She always
tends to start teasing people when she’s had a drink or
two.’

‘
I know
that,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind her.’

We both took a
sip of our drinks, then Paula asked me about the work I had lined
up for Christmas.

‘
Painting, is it?’

‘
Of a
sort,’ I said, and explained exactly what sort.

‘
Will
you make much out of it?’

‘
Not an
awful lot, but every little bit helps.’

With what I
took to be a secretive glance about her, at the rest of the
company, Paula brought her face closer. I coul smell her perfume, a
little stronger now that it wasn’t diluted by the sweat of the life
class, could feel the warmth of the woman’s breath on my cheek.

‘
If you
need to earn more cash I can get you a job on the post,’ she
whispered.

‘
You
can?’ I said, for I knew how difficult it was to get holiday work
with the Post Office; every student in town and every student home
on vacation was after a job over the Christmas holiday.

‘
Yes, no
problem at all. My father’s in personnel there. You could squeeze
in seven or eight days’ work, perhaps even more.’

‘
That
would be great.’

‘
Keep
quiet about it, though, keep it to yourself. I don’t want everyone
in college asking me.’

I promised. ‘I
won’t say a word to a soul.’

Chapter Five

With the
guarantee of a job at the Post Office I didn’t really need the work
in the market hall, but I had made my promises to Arthur and Mrs
Littlehales and I kept my word. Inevitably, working on their
‘commissions’ in the evenings and at weekends, I didn’t have an
awful lot of time to spare for Stephen, and it was some while
before I realised how little I actually missed his company.

My mother was
too distracted to notice Stephen’s absence, she was busy herself,
getting ready for the holiday with all her usual efficiency, but
Gran was as nosy and suspicious as ever.

‘
Have
you two fallen out?’ she asked me, over tea on Monday, after a
weekend and much of the previous week had passed without a single
visit from Stephen.

‘
No.’

‘
Then
why hasn’t he been around?’

‘
I’ve
been busy. He knows that, and so do you. I’ve had a lot of work to
do.’

The old woman
had that sour expression on her face when she looked up from her
plate, and I knew it wasn’t the fault of the food. ‘Your work’s
more important than seeing your boyfriend, is it?’

It would
have been imprudent to say
more
important, so I just said, ‘It’s important. Stephen
appreciates that.’

‘
But you
don’t appreciate him, he’s too good for you,’ Gran grumbled,
picking at her food again, using her fork to rearrange it on the
plate, her hand never still even while she was chewing.

‘
But
it’s him I’m doing the work for,’ I protested, though this wasn’t
exactly true; the commercial work was for the money to buy him a
present, yes, but basically all the work I did was for
myself.

Gran had her
head bowed over her plate, but she looked at me with hooded eyes,
distrustfully; her shallow sunken cheeks and the beak of a nose
reminded me of a gargoyle, sneering down from a great height on the
people below. I left the rest of my tea and took the plate through
to the kitchen, threw away the scraps and left it with the other
dirty dishes. My mother had all the cupboards emptied and was
washing down every surface there was, inside and out; this was the
start of her pre-Christmas routine, to clean throughout the house
just so that it could be littered again by Christmas itself.

‘
I wish
you wouldn’t upset Gran so much, Ginny,’ she said. ‘She’s old and
set in her ways, you should know you can’t argue with
her.’

‘
I don’t
argue.’

‘
You’re
doing it now,’ she pointed out, resorting to one of Gran’s own
ploys.

‘
I’ve
got my ways, just like Gran has.’

‘
They’re
not the ways you used to have, though. Art school’s changing
you.’

It was to be
hoped it was, but I didn’t say this, just excused my behaviour as a
sign that I was growing up. Remembering that I hadn’t been out much
for the past week or so, except for the booze-up after the ‘crit’,
I told my mother that I'd take a walk down the road for a drink. I
knew she wouldn’t mind this, me going to the local; she’d see it as
me keeping true to my roots, not being too snobbish to mix with the
folk we’ve known all our lives. I think this actually troubled my
mother more than the clothes I wore or the colour of my hair, the
danger that going to college might make me think that I was too
good for my old mates.

When I said I
going out, then, my mother was quite pleased, even gave me a couple
of pounds so she was sure I could buy a round of drinks if I had
to.

In the pub I
go to there was no animosity towards me, even though I wore the
leather jacket with my name on the back, no snide remarks about the
way I looked, not even from the older men, the hard men, the
ex-colliers. I suppose they’d seen things which were even harder to
comprehend, like world wars and general strikes. Anyway, they had
known me all my life, known all my family, knew us as a decent,
honest, hard working bunch.

I said hello
to one or two people at the bar, bought a half of lager, popped my
head around the door to the games room. It was only small, not much
of a games room at all; there were two old blokes playing dominoes,
a couple of younger lads playing darts, but no women. This was one
of the unspoken traditions of Sleepers Hill, that women avoided the
games room, for this was where the working men went to relax, to
spit and curse and argue. A woman in their company would only
inhibit their pleasures; a man might as well go to church as take a
woman into the games room of a pub or club, for all the pleasure
that would afford him.

I
resisted the impulse to enter, to play the rebel; now that
would
have set people talking about
me.

*

In the
‘lounge’, off to one side of the games room, I was drinking quietly
when two old school-friends entered. They had been in a less
academic set than me, had left school at sixteen and been working
since. This was one of the reasons I no longer saw much of them, it
had nothing to do with snobbery, they were working people and
behaved as such, putting on their finery and perfume at weekends,
spending money which I didn’t have, trying to impress the
prospective husband which I didn’t want. Quite a few of my old pals
were courting, as they called it, some even engaged or married, but
there could still be the occasional night or two when I could meet
them on more or less equal terms, no different from each other than
we had been as school-kids in gym-slips.

Tina was a
typist, Diane a bank clerk, and with my mother’s pounds added to
the money I already had I could afford to treat them to a drink. We
toasted each other and sat at the bar as people with money do. Tina
and Diane had changed since leaving school, work had given them a
self assurance and quickly made them older; in a way they seemed
more mature, they had taken on an aspect of their parents, talking
of careers and income tax and superannuation. In turn, though, I
believed that I had developed mentally and spiritually; though they
looked like young career women and had some of the preoccupations
of such, speaking of ‘earning a wage’ and ‘settling down’, at times
the schoolgirl mentality still showed through, as when Tina asked
how art school was going and grinned pruriently when she mentioned
the matter of drawing naked women.

‘
Art
school’s fine,’ I said. ‘And yes, I’m still drawing naked
women.’

‘
I don’t
know that I could cope with that,’ Diane frowned. ‘Blokes all
around me with drawing boards bouncing up and down in their laps
like nobody’s business.’

The schoolgirl
mentality, see? The drawing boards dislodged by the inevitable
erections. I laughed when they laughed, but I couldn’t help but
notice it.

‘
Don’t
you get embarrassed?’ Tina asked me.

‘
Perhaps
at first I did,’ I admitted. ‘You soon get used to it,
though.’

‘
Doesn’t
she
get
embarrassed? You know, the model?’

‘
Not at
all.’

‘
She
must be a bit brazen, then, a bit of a tart to take her clothes off
in front of people like that.’

‘
She
isn’t, not in the least,’ I said, rising to Paula’s defence. ‘I’ll
tell you what, Tina, if you saw her walking down the street I bet
you wouldn’t say that about her.’

‘
She’s a
good looking woman, is she?’

‘
Very
classy,’ I said.

We emptied our
glasses and Tina bought three more drinks, then asked what I was
going to do at the end of the course.

‘
Move on
somewhere else to do a degree. This is only a foundation course.
I’ve got three more years to do after this.’

‘
Another
three years? Jesus!’

‘
And
three more after that, if I’m lucky,’ I added hopefully. ‘If I’m
good enough I’ll go on to do a post graduate course, the Royal
College or the Slade, somewhere like that.’

‘
Seven
years at college?’ Diane gasped.

‘
If I’m
lucky,’ I repeated.

‘
The
first twenty odd years of your life spent at school?’

‘
Art
college isn’t like school,’ I pointed out.

‘
No,’
Tina agreed. ‘We didn’t have naked women to draw when I was at
school.’

‘
Just
plants and bottles and such,’ Diane remembered. ‘Now if there’d
been the chance of some nudes I might have tried a bit
harder.’

‘
What?
Someone like old Mrs Bolton posing for us?’

A couple of
drinks and the good humour of the evening went to my head, my
cheeks felt flushed; when my friends suggested moving on somewhere
else, though, I was reluctant. They probably guessed the reason,
that I couldn’t afford to, and they insisted, said it would be
their treat. We stopped at another pub or two, slowly moving closer
into town, and Tina and Diane took turns paying for the drinks out
of their wage packets; it seemed that everyone had a wage packet to
spend that night and the nearer the three of us got to town the
more crowded the pubs became.

*

In town itself
we found ourselves chatting to three young blokes; they were a
little loud, a little brash, but Tina and Diane accepted this and
played them along, it was just a little innocent entertainment
before the serious courting of the weekend. Jokes started as
risqué‚ and became cruder, the laughter of the young men became
more raucous and there were lurid descriptions of the things I got
up to at art school, invented by Tina and richly embellished by
Diane. The young bloke I was sat next to looked at me a little
uncertainly, not sure whether to believe their tales, not sure what
to think of the way I looked; I suppose it came as a surprise to
him that I spoke just like the rest of them, came from a similar
home and had been to a similar school; perhaps it even came as a
shock to him that an art student was not necessarily the alien
creature he had imagined.