by J M Gregson
‘Remember your age and don’t push your luck and your back, John Lambert. Just finish your brandy and then tell me you’ll join in that session on crime writing.’
‘No can do, I’m afraid. Not my scene, literary festivals.’
‘Why not? You’re surprisingly well read, for a copper. Probably more so than most of your audience will be.’
‘Shouldn’t that be “would be”? I’ve already said I’m not doing it.’ He hugged his brandy glass to his chest, like a child who feared that his treat might be removed.
She played her last card. ‘You can tell Marjorie Dooks then.’
‘No go again. It’s your committee. You can report back to it that you asked me to undertake the task as you said you would and I refused.’
‘Marjorie doesn’t accept no for an answer very easily. Everyone else on that committee seems to be achieving whatever is asked of them.’
She looked very downcast. She gazed at her feet and her head fell a little to one side. He was suddenly reminded of her as a nineteen-year-old, when some small disappointment had seemed for a moment like the end of her world. Before he knew the thought had formed itself in his head, he found himself saying, ‘I’ll ask Bert Hook about it. It might appeal to him, now that he’s an Open University B.A.’
Sometimes the instinctive reaction worked better than all the elaborate planning, Christine Lambert decided. Showing your disappointment always had more effect on men than women. Her daughters had always been able to sway this iron man of crime when they were cast down by some teenage setback. Perhaps men, even experienced men like John Lambert, were suckers after all.
Ros Barker looked at her subject critically, her head a little on one side, her eyes narrowing a little as she gazed intently at the naked woman who half-sat and half-lay on the chaise longue she had set up in her studio for this painting. ‘You need to look more relaxed. The last thing I want is someone who looks as if she’s struggling to hold a pose.’
‘Perhaps that’s because I’m struggling so hard to hold this pose,’ said Kate Merrick testily. ‘And if you don’t allow us to have a coffee soon the struggle might fail.’
For a few seconds, Ros appeared to ignore her completely, whilst she applied a few key brush strokes. It was the artist’s supreme moment of concentration, the instant of utter selfishness when nothing and no one else matters save the need to secure some effect that might otherwise escape forever. Then, with a relaxation of tension that she felt even in herself, she glanced at the little clock on the table to her right and said, ‘Is it really eleven o’clock? High time we had a coffee, I’d say.’
Kate eased herself gingerly into a sitting position, then stretched her legs gratefully. She stood up and moved with exaggerated stiffness to the kettle in the corner of the studio and extracted two beakers from the battered little cupboard on which it stood. She heard a delighted giggle at her robotic movements from behind her and was immediately pleased, despite her supposed resentment.
‘It’s getting warm in here now the sun’s climbing,’ said Ros, standing and looking at the world outside through the long window on the south wall of her studio.
‘Not if you’re a poor exploited model required to keep still for hours without a stitch on, it isn’t! Don’t you dream of putting that electric fire off, Madam Scrooge.’
Kate brought the two beakers of instant coffee across to the old sofa on the opposite side of the room from the chaise longue. Ros, after studying her painting keenly with her head tilted elaborately for a last moment, came and sat beside Kate, who had thrown her usual blanket around herself before she sat. Though they had moved only to the other side of the studio, work had been switched off for the moment, just as effectively as if they had moved from factory floor to works canteen.
‘Sometimes I think we should splash out on a professional model for you,’ Kate said presently. ‘You could then move her around as much as you liked, and I might escape pneumonia in the present and rheumatoid arthritis in later life.’
‘It’s the fate of the partner throughout the centuries. And the blessing too, of course. Rembrandt’s wife was immortalized because he couldn’t afford a professional model.’ Ros’s voice softened a little. ‘Or perhaps because he could convey his tenderness towards her in a way he could never have achieved with a professional model.’ She ran her hand lightly and affectionately down the slim thigh beneath the shabby blanket.
‘They weren’t called partners then, though. Wives or mistresses. I don’t know which ones were the luckier. Or the more exploited.’ Kate nibbled her ginger biscuit and took an appreciative sip of the hot coffee.
‘Yes. Exciting prospect for you, that. When I’m famous all over the planet, you could be one of the first partners to be immortalized in oils.’
‘I can hardly wait.’ A pause, during which Ros thought fondly of the curves beneath the blanket and the natural, unthinking grace with which Kate normally moved. Ros was long-limbed, and angular, with short-cut dark hair and a lean, strong-boned face. Attraction of opposites perhaps. Or simply coincidence: it didn’t do to analyse these things too thoroughly, when they were working so well.
Kate finished her coffee and gazed at the bottom of her beaker reflectively. ‘Do you want me to go away when Arthur Jackson comes here?’
‘Certainly not. I don’t go round proclaiming that we’re living together, because it’s no one’s business but our own. That doesn’t mean that I’m ashamed of it.’
Kate Merrick grinned, showing her sense of security, stretching deliciously beneath the blanket. ‘I didn’t say ashamed, stupid. That went out in the last century. I just thought you might not care to proclaim us to your mentor. He seems a very conventional man.’
‘He isn’t. It takes a lot of guts and a lot of cussedness to take a stand against the art establishment as he has. Most of the avant-garde still hate him. He won’t raise an eyebrow when he finds us together.’
‘Even when he finds his favourite protege is one of those bloody lesbians?’
That was a private joke between them, a phrase they had heard flung across a pub in their early days, before they’d decided they liked each other enough to live together and sleep together. Ros Barker smiled and said, ‘I’m sure I’m not his favourite protege. That’s probably some heterosexual girl who paints apples beautifully and smiles adoringly at him. He offered me some good advice and a little judicious support at an important stage of my life, that’s all. He might at some stage examine my paintings to see what effect a lasting sexual relationship has had upon them, but his interest will be purely aesthetic. That’s if he finds my work good enough to justify his interest in the future.’
‘His opinion is important to you, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it is, yes. I wouldn’t confess this to anyone else, but I suppose he’s the nearest thing I have to a father figure. My own father left us when I was four and I’ve only the vaguest memory of him. Just a man who shouted a lot — I can’t remember what about. Mum’s never pretended to have any interest in art, though she’s glad to see me scraping a living in it. She’s never had any success with her hetero relationships, but she claims not to understand what we feel for each other.’
‘She doesn’t like me.’
‘She doesn’t dislike you. She just doesn’t like to think of us sleeping together, or that’s what she says. She’ll accept the idea eventually, once she’s had time to get used to it. She’s a great one for getting used to things, is Mum.’
‘What about those dragons on the literature festival committee?’
‘They’re not dragons, most of them. They’re not what I expected at all, but I can hardly tell them that.’
‘Not even Mrs Dooks? After what I’d heard about her, I expected you to come home singed with fire and smelling of brimstone.’
‘I fear you probably heard most of it from me. I went to the first meeting in fear and trepidation, but after the third one I’m impressed. She’s a formidable lady, but I su
spect rather a sweetie underneath, though she’d hate you to say so. She knows how to run a committee. She doesn’t stand any nonsense from Peter Preston.’
Kate leant forward, clasping her blanket about her knees. ‘She cut Poncing Peter down to size? I must hear about this.’
Ros glanced at the little clock. ‘I suppose she did, really. He turned up his nose at detective novels and she said they’d already made the decisions about that — gave him chapter and verse about when and how. Then he had a set-to with young Sam Hilton, our local poet. I spoke up for Sam, but I wasn’t really needed. Marjorie Dooks sat firmly on Peter Preston again. It was all highly embarrassing and highly enjoyable at the same time.’
‘You do see life, don’t you, Ros? Whereas I’m just a humble and anonymous artist’s model, condemned to pose forever in a freezing garret.’ Kate pouted extravagantly and crossed her arms over her breasts modestly beneath the blanket.
‘In a well-heated modern studio, you mean! With someone who is stretching every nerve to make you immortal.’ Ros ran her hand through Kate’s hair, feeling the familiar wiry strength beneath the softness that she so relished. She felt the stirrings of desire as she caressed the nape of her partner’s neck, then said sternly, ‘Back to work, you idle serf. Get thee to the chaise longue and distribute thyself in the approved manner.’
Kate Merrick fled in her own simulation of abject terror, then without apparent effort set her limbs into the exact pose she had left twenty minutes earlier, with her left arm over the rise of the chaise longue, her back to the artist, and her eyes looking not directly at the easel but at the ceiling above her. Once there, she sighed extravagantly and said thoughtfully, ‘I should think Peter Preston could willingly murder your Mrs Dooks.’
FOUR
Sam Hilton would have been reassured to know that Ros Barker thought so kindly of him. However, the knowledge probably wouldn’t have affected the action he was now taking.
He heard the phone shrilling at the other end of the line and was surprised how his pulse quickened at the sound. Then the receiver was picked up and the authoritative voice he had expected said simply, ‘Marjorie Dooks.’
‘Er, good morning, Mrs Dooks. It’s — it’s Sam Hilton here. The poet. I’m on your literary festival committee.’
An indeterminate sound. Whether it was a stifled giggle or a grunt of exasperation or something else entirely, he couldn’t be certain. ‘Yes, Sam. I know who you are. What can I do for you?’
‘Well, nothing really. I just wanted to tell you something.’ Sam decided he hated phones, but held the small mobile more tightly against his ear.
‘And what would that something be, Sam?’
Marjorie was trying to be encouraging, but she came through to Sam as a woman near the edge of her patience. ‘I want to resign.’
There. He had blurted it out, when he had meant to give his reasons and emphasize how entirely logical the action was. The damned woman had this effect upon him, for some reason, when he should have just despised her and everything she stood for. He wanted to explain himself, when he should have just said, ‘I’m going. Peter bloody Preston and the rest of you can just piss off if you don’t like it.’ But they would like it, of course. They might bleat a bit about it for form’s sake, but secretly they’d be damned glad to see the back of him and everything he represented.
‘It would be a pity if you felt you had to leave us, Sam. Speaking personally and selfishly, it would make my job a lot more difficult.’
He tried to be aggressive. ‘I should have thought it would have made it a damned sight easier. You could plan what you want to do without having any awkward fucking youngsters to get in the way.’
‘But we need awkward fucking youngsters. And you’re the only one we’ve got, Sam.’
He’d tried to shock her and she’d come straight back at him with the word, as if she used it all the time. He had meant to throw her off balance and now he was thrown himself. He said desperately, ‘I’m twenty-two and I’m the only young bugger on that committee. Half the time I’m not even sure what you’re fucking talking about.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true, Sam. And Ros Barker’s only thirty, you know. That may seem old to you, but to people like Christine Lambert and me, she’s much more in your age-group than ours.’
‘Mrs Lambert taught me.’ Why had he said that? It had been out before he knew he was going to say it. It sounded like a confession of weakness. ‘It’s the first time I can remember enjoying a poem.’
‘That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. What age were you then, Sam?’
He wished she wouldn’t keep using his name. Even though he wanted to sneer at her, he knew that he couldn’t call her Marjorie. ‘I was about ten, I suppose. It was my last year in junior school.’
‘You owe her a lot, then. She helped to set you on the lonely road to becoming a poet.’
Despite himself, he liked that word ‘lonely’. It made her sound almost as though she knew what it was like to spend hours on your own wrestling with words, battering your mind to come up with the phrase that you and only you could produce. Before he could stop himself, he heard himself quoting,
‘“Quinquereme of Ninevah from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine.” I can’t remember what quinquereme is. Some sort of Roman galley, I think. I just liked the sound of the words. They’re from Cargoes by John Masefield. No one reads him now.’
‘More’s the pity if they don’t,’ said Marjorie staunchly. ‘“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.” That poem must have made an impression on me as well, Sam.’
‘You know it!’ He couldn’t keep the delight out of his voice, when delight was the last thing he had planned.
‘I haven’t thought about it for years. But we learned things by heart, in the prehistoric days when I went to school. Actually, that was out of date even then, but I went to an old-fashioned private prep school. I’ve been getting rid of lots of the stuff they taught me ever since, but I’m glad we learned a bit of poetry.’
‘It’s full of rhythm, you know, that poem. You have to have rhythm, whatever sort of verse you’re writing. Even free verse has to have some sort of rhythm.’ He was preaching at her, the way he preached at his poetry-reading gigs, when people asked him about verse and why what they tried to write didn’t satisfy them. She’d probably choke him off now, which would be a good thing. He could get on with resigning and telling her to piss off, if the damned woman would only behave as she was supposed to.
But the damned woman said, ‘That’s why we need you, Sam, you see. I don’t think there’s anyone else in the group who understands properly what poetry is all about.’
He said sullenly, ‘People round here don’t want to listen to people like me.’
She went on almost as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘We need you to hold your corner against all this cosy middle-class satisfaction and give us access to people like Bob Crompton. I’m sure he’ll be like a breath of fresh air for us. And stuffy old Oldford needs a breath of fresh air, don’t you think?’
‘I suppose so.’ He hoped he was just agreeing to the breath of fresh air and not to staying on her damned committee. He’d meant this to be short, sweet and vulgar, but the bloody woman seemed able to take all his shots and not even realize she was under fire. He said, ‘I’m no good at committees. I’ve never been on one before.’
‘And I’ve been on far too many. They’re a bore for a lot of the time, but they’re the only way of reaching decisions when you have a group of people with different backgrounds and different opinions. We want all of them to be represented — it’s one of the differences between fascism and democracy.’ Marjorie wondered if ‘fascism’ was still the all-embracing, demonizing word it had been in her youth. Sam Hilton would have been amazed as well as consoled if he had known how hard his ogress was struggling with her own end of the conversation.
‘Anyway, that’
s why I’ve decided that it’s not for me.’
‘I’d miss you if you did go, you know, Sam. Between you and me, I’m not sure I could hold out against the scorn of people like Peter Preston if you weren’t there to express a different point of view.’
‘I can’t fucking stand him.’ He was surprised how much relief it brought him to be able to speak with real venom.
‘Peter has his uses and his contacts. And, believe it or not, he has experience none of the rest of us has. There’ll be times when we need to listen to his opinions. All points of view should be represented, as I said. Including yours, Sam.’
She’d thrown that in when he had least expected it, like a boxing punch when you were coming out of a clinch. That was a simile he’d used in one of his earliest poems. Funny it should come back to him now. He made a last attempt to get rid of this for good. ‘I’m not much good to you on that committee. I don’t understand properly how these things work.’
‘Oh, I think you underestimate yourself, Sam. I’ve been pleased with your contributions thus far. The important thing is that you’ve spoken up when you felt it was needed.’
‘But you don’t need me. You were the one who told Poncey Pete to get stuffed.’
‘I couldn’t have done that if you and Ros Barker hadn’t spoken up. The chair has to be neutral. You know that much about committees, I’m sure.’
‘Has to pretend to be neutral, you mean!’
‘Yes! There you are, you see! You know far more about committees and the way they operate than you said you did. And who’s going to speak up for poetry if you’re not there?’
She had divined correctly that there was an evangelical streak in him when it came to poetry. He often surprised himself by speaking up for it and trying to explain how it worked in all kinds of unlikely places. Perhaps it was not really so surprising; when it was the most important thing you did, you needed to justify yourself. And now he’d kept himself on that bloody committee, when he’d been determined to have done with it. He said dolefully, ‘All right. I’ll give it a go for a bit longer. Just until you get someone else more suitable.’